Boldly going where we maybe shouldn't

-
Good gravy, it's been forever since I made a blog post about gaming.

So, I'm currently playing in a Star Trek RPG using the Last Unicorn Games iteration (my friend Adam's favorite).  I'm not sure if the game has hit its stride yet, mostly because there are a whole slew of pitfalls, and we seem to be stumbling into a lot of them.



  • Complex narratives and sporadic attendance.  Sometimes OSR people have the right idea when it comes to dungeon crawling campaigns.  A complicated multi-session storyline is a bear to maintain when different people show up for each session.  I missed a big one and hadn't a clue what was going on the last time we played.
  • Psionics.  I seem to remember there being a TNG episode about the ethical murkiness of someone using a Betazed as an interrogator, but I could be wrong.  We have two Betazed PC's--mine and someone else's, and it is hard not to ask the GM if the NPC is lying or not every time we talk to someone.  I've yet to play an RPG where telepathy didn't ruin everything.
  • Superpseudoscience.  I will confess to this pitfall myself.  I nearly wrecked most of the plot by suggesting a ridiculous pseudoscience option.  We are trying to help negotiate a deal with a planetary authority to get dilithium for the Federation.  It wasn't going well, and I posed the question of whether a Galaxy-class starship could, using the ST:TNG-level technology, made the planet's supply of dilithium worthless.  The panicked look on the GM's face told me a lot.
In the meantime, I need to get serious about my own game, which mostly involves me picking something and making a commitment to it, which is always difficult for me.  I'm always looking for that perfect game that will suit me and my legion of players, be easy to learn but complex enough to keep intelligence people engaged, with just the right level of crunch and flexibility.  

Which is ridiculous, but it keeps me from making the decision between options like Dungeons & Dragons, Blood and Treasure, and Shadow of the Demon Lord, all of which offer essentially the same genre using different rules.

Comments

  1. Adam DicksteinDecember 5, 2017 at 7:11 PM

    I came to the conclusion long ago that epic, multi-part plots played out over a number of sessions is not the best way to run Star Trek.

    Much like the most popular of the Star Trek TV series, episodic, done-in-one adventures, with occasional plot threads carrying over, is the best format for Star Trek gaming in my opinion. There is a reason the original series, and TNG worked so much better than Enterprise, with it's numerous unsatisfactory story arcs. DS9 is the exception, yet beyond being a good show, it wasn't as commercially successful as many of the others.

    Orville works well for this same reason. Like an RPG, the characters are the constants, and they develop over time, but the episodes do not directly relate to each other beyond the ship and its crew.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Adam DicksteinDecember 5, 2017 at 7:12 PM

    Can you elaborate on the Superpseudoscience issue? I'm not sure I get the problem.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I moved ages ago, but forgot to tell anyone

-
 I decided to get my own domain name: strangevistas.org and have been posting there for over a year.  When Adam at Barking Alien mentioned that he wanted me to start blogging again, I realized that he might not know, and that likely others didn't as well. So, now you do.  See you soon!
Read more

RPG Review: Far Trek

-
Image
So, as I mentioned recently, I've got a lot of sentimentality for Star Trek RPG's, and Star Trek in general.  Three actual honest-to-God licensed ones exist in history: FASA's, Last Unicorn Games, and Decipher's.  I own the first two and have heard mixed things about the third. But there are also a lot of non-licensed Star Trek RPG's out there, and recently I saw that one of them, Far Trek , was offering a hard copy for a couple of bucks on Lulu.  Never one to let a deal go by I picked it up and thought I'd give you, gentle readers, my thoughts. Far Trek is a light-hearted, even breezy take on the Star Trek universe, almost exclusively the original series.  There rules incorporate stats, skills, and talents.  There are four stats: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma, with the stats ranging from about a -2 to a +2, reflecting their modifier on the die roll.  I actually like this mechanic, which I first encountered in True20.  It does...
Read more

Heroes Against Darkness review

-
Image
For my birthday I picked up a print copy of Heroes Against Darkness  by Justin Halliday .  Why, might you ask, would I spent hard currency on a book that is offered as a .pdf for free? First, I like real books.  I read them better, and can do so in places other than in front of a computer monitor. Second, it's worth it.  Beats me if Halliday makes any money off the sale or not, but I hope he did, because offering this game for free was a very generous gift to the gaming world. Heroes Against Darkness is worth owning. (At least if you are me.  Your mileage may vary.) Heroes Against Darkness  is, by its own admission, a "fantasy heartbreaker," which is the usually derogatory term used by someone's homegrown version of Dungeons & Dragons.  If I had to summarize HAD's genetic heritage, I'd call it an early edition of D&D done using Fourth Edition mechanics.  If that early edition had 11 character classes. HAD has the standard D...
Read more