I’ve forwarded this picture every time I’ve received it in a social media stream, and I’ll continue to do so in the future even if you tell me that you’re sick of seeing it. I find this fascinating and decided to post it here to give it some sense of permanency for myself, as well as to further the current discussion surrounding the Curiosity’s landing on Mars.
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A friend had a birthday party yesterday, and although it was a board-game friendly event, I prepared a short, self-authored adventure for a game of FASA Star Trek RPG just in case anyone was interested in playing. The issue never even came up. Instead, I played 7 Wonders (came in a close 2nd my first time playing the game) and Circvs Maximus (my character was killed in a chariot race), but I digress . . . .
By now any reader of this blog or my Loremaster blog should know that I’ve been revisiting the FASA Star Trek RPG recently, having run it once at TerpCon in College Park, MD. The adventure I ran, Anything but Routine, took place in the Outback area of the FASA Star Trek universe, which is where Federation space borders both Gorn and Romulan space. The Romulans were always my favorite Star Trek villain, and the Gorn were oddly underused. I remember once opining online that one of the later series or movies should revisit the Gorn as velociraptor-like enemies, perhaps representing a subspecies of Gorn. Again, I digress . . . .
For this adventure, I kept the same crew of the Chandley class Frigate, the USS Fife (lifted from the FASA adventure, A Doomsday Like Any Other). It was intended to be only two hours long in light of the fact that it was written for a board-game audience, but it can be fit rather nicely into the story I started with Anything but Routine, either before or after that adventure. In other words, I might have the start of an entire FASA Star Trek RPG campaign.
Now, if I can just find a table of players for it . . . .
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As some of you know, I published an article entitled, How to Build a 4th Edition Dungeon Crawl for Heroic and Paragon Tiers, which sprang from my conversion of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules into 4th edition adventures. The “standard” system of encounter design (i.e., the one presented in the 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide) didn’t work. As I pointed out in the article, I could suspend my disbelief in fighting dragons, devils, and slaadi, but the “15-minute” adventuring day was too much for me to accept as applicable to a dungeon crawl or a trek across the wilderness. That is, if the PCs were in an underground dungeon consisting of 100 rooms, it was unrealistic on so many levels to think the PCs could go through those rooms at a rate of 3-5 per day (i.e., the standard system assumes an extended rest every 3-5 encounters). Every 30 minutes, they should expect their rest interrupted unless the DM provided some ridiculous deus ex machina to justify 6-8 hours of peace and quiet. Obviously, another system of encounter design was needed. My conversions started with C1: The Hidden Shrine of Tomachan (before Wizards of the Coast announced they were doing one), C2: The Ghost Tower of Inverness (which I adapted as an LFR MyRealms adventure), L1: The Secret of Bone Hill, S2: White Plume Mountain (available here), and G1-2-3: Against the Giants (again, before WotC announced their conversion). Not being a professional game designer, I didn’t have the luxury of extensive playtests, instead relying on my Loremaster blog to supplement the article as I continued to refine it. As I progressed, I realized that what I had written was really appropriate only for levels 1-15. Once the PCs reach 16th level, some new math was required, which would eventually lead to the proper math at epic level (necessary for the next phase of the adventure, the conversion of the Drow series D1-2-3 and Q1). One of my home groups started G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King last night. It’s my first attempt at the new math. The results were remarkably good considering they were the result of my rough estimates as to what the new numbers should be.
What Am I Talking About?
Let’s start with some context. For those that haven’t read the article, read it dammit! Oops . . . . Sorry. For those that haven’t read it, the basic premise of the Dungeon Crawl system is that each individual encounter creates less of a drain on party resources while maintaining the threat level on the party. Moreover, through the use of “thematic encounter templates” (TETs), the system can be adjusted very easily on the fly for the varying number of players that shows up on any given night (much more accurately than, for example, the encounter adjustment rules provided by the Living Forgotten Realms campaign). The consequences are two-fold. First, for parties of 4-6 PCs, the party can address 10-15 encounters before having to take an extended rest. Second, for parties of only 3 PCs, the encounters create the same threat and resource drain as you find using the standard system, which means you don’t have to cancel your session because only three players show up on a given night.
How It Played out
So, now that everyone’s up to speed on what the system is, let’s talk about last night. I had only three players, so it was “game on,” but the encounters should feel like they would in the standard system. We had a ranger, a paladin, and a warlord, all level 17. There was a lot of role-play and a clever avoidance of combat by the PCs, which means there were only two combat encounters. For those encounters, looking at daily attack powers, daily powers associated with weapons, and healing surges, the PCs went through 30-40% of their resources. Considering they went through 40% of the number of encounters they should expect to face before an extended rest, and things will get harder, this seems to be about right. I have only two data points, but the numbers worked out ideally, and it felt right, so I’m very optimistic that, at the very least, I’m on the right track. Give me a few more weeks, and I’ll be writing the second edition of the article, which will include support all the way up to level 30, though not in the way you might expect. 🙂
I still haven’t seen this.
This is a re-blog of my post on Loremaster.org, “Remembering FASA’s StarTrek RPG.” For my thoughts on adopting the composite skill system for your Dungeons & Dragons game, see my last article, Composite Skill Bonuses in the d20 System.
I played D&D Sunday night [10/23/2011], and something came up that I thought I’d share with everyone. I was fondly remembering FASA’s Star Trek game from my high school years. I left [Dungeons & Dragons] in 1981 (not returning until 2005), but for a brief time in high school (1982 or 1983), I bought up materials from the FASA Star Trek game and played it a couple of times. I really miss that game and would like to do a 1-shot or 2-shot game. In 2007, I played the Demand of Honor adventure, which involved the Gorn, but online play was very “unsocial” and lacked the feel of true RPGing.
Can I Cook or What?
I’ve been very lucky to have founded a group that’s open to trying other systems. We’re currently in the midst of a Savage Worlds: Weird Wars campaign because we tried out that system one night (in the Deadlands setting). We’ve also played some Dragon Age RPG but have done nothing more than create some characters and run through a single sample encounter. Tonight, Hal Mangold of Green Ronin Publishing gave me two sourcebooks for DC Adventures, the Hero’s Handbook and Heroes and Villains Vol. I, and although I’ve never been a comic book fan, I played a demo at GenCon run by its creator, Steve Kenson, and so it remains a candidate for our next experiment.
Still, FASA’s Star Trek would be my first choice for doing something different. As the one who’d be pushing the system, I probably wouldn’t get to be a player, but I love GMing as much as I do playing, so I can live with that.
What’s the Big Deal?
Of all the systems I’ve played (admittedly, not many), none immersed me as much into the setting as the bridge combat system. The hand-to-hand combat system was good, but when dealing with inter-ship battles, I felt like I was on the bridge of a starship. It was so good that they sold the system as a separate product. It could stand on its own.
Visualize the bridge of an Original Series starship. You have the science officer at one workstation, the helmsman at another, the communications officer at yet another, and so on for navigation, engineering, weapons control (for the Original Series movies), and of course the captain’s chair. Other than the captain, this is what the gaming table looks like. Everyone has their spot around a common center. The only difference is that, in a game, everyone always looks towards the center rather than occasionally.
Each of these work stations would necessarily have a different control panel on it. The science officer had a goofy sensor viewing thingy, the helm had it’s own in the Original Series, navigation had a star chart, weapons control had targeting systems and what amounted to “triggers” for the weapons, and so on. For the game, each of the players had their own control panel on paper tailor-made for their handling their responsibilities and tracking the resources for which they were responsible, roughly simulating a bridge workstation. The captain would make decisions on how to proceed, then ask the relevant character to carry out the order. This would usually necessitate a skill roll on the d100 system, and not surprisingly the character was built to contribute in ways appropriate for his position on a star ship.
In other words, there was a chain of command, but it was still a cooperative game, just like 4e [Dungeons & Dragons]. Although it’s certainly possible to play a 4e game without a leader, it helps if you have a healer. The same was true of Star Trek. Yeah, the captain’s in charge but can’t do it all. The time for the captain’s hands to get dirty was when it was time to make contact with others, and captains certainly were built to be good at that.
The game also addressed technology thoroughly, from starship weaponry, to sidearms, to medical and science equipment. All of the major races were addressed, including the Caitian from the animated series. In fact, at DDXP last year, I got to play one. My Gamma World GM created pre-gens for his game, and one of them was a Catian lieutenant from the Star Trek universe who had been stranded here by the Big Mistake. (At the time, he was playing in a FASA Star Trek home game.)
The game even had an ingenious explanation for why Original Series Klingons looked so different from the movie Klingons: The ones from the Original Series were “human fusion” Klingons, genetically combined with humans to make a Klingon better suited to deal with humans. The game took this to the next logical step, introducing Romulan-fusion Klingons as well. The Imperial Klingons (from the movies) existed, but they weren’t the first choice for dealing with humans, so you never saw them on the TV screen. Taking this level of detail even one step further, the game provided a ton of words from the Romulan language. This attention to detail is exactly the sort of thing a fan of the Original Series, like me, would love.
Finally, because everything was handled via the skill system, it wasn’t a burden to have a long list of skills for each character. This allowed each player to customize their character. Kirk liked to ride horses, Picard had a strong background in archaeology, and Riker played the trombone. Your character had plenty of skill points to spend. If you were an optimizer, you could certainly max out your engineering, but you didn’t have to do so. In fact, the game was basically built assuming some characters would be optimizers and others actors (i.e., role-players). Any character could be played by any player type, but because there was always a need for both role-playing and roll-playing, both player types could find a home somewhere on the bridge. Making sure everyone at the table is happy is a goal I’ve set for myself with organized play, but FASA Star Trek makes it easier.
Oh, and FASA Star Trek called them opportunity actions long before D&D had them. 🙂
What If This Isn’t for Me?
Obviously, feeling immersed in the setting isn’t important if the setting doesn’t matter to you. I’ll ask my group if they’re interested, but I won’t beg them to do it. “Play what you like,” implies, “Don’t play what you don’t like.” This might prevent me from every playing the game again, as I might have to find a table of players willing to do so and the time to play outside my group, but there’s always hope.
So Much to Do, So Little Time
Of course, there just isn’t enough time to do all the things I want to do. I’m currently having trouble focusing on a few projects for the Gamers’ Syndicate, and I’m essentially in a job hunt. Once successful in my job hunt, my time might become even more precious. We can’t have everything we want, and I can accept that, but there’s so much out there to do, I don’t see how I could ever get bored.
Either way, consider (re)visiting this game if you enjoyed watching Star Trek. You shouldn’t be disappointed.
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I’ve never seen this show, but this has me thinking I should. But then the author reminds me that it starred Kevin Sorbo, so I’m still on the fence. 🙂
The Dark Knight Rises (“TDKR”) was good, but it wasn’t very good, and certainly not great. Despite the hype around it, including claims of a possible Oscar nomination for Best Picture, it certainly wasn’t great. To give you some perspective before reading this author’s opinion, you should know a few things:
I’m going to try to minimize spoilers, but at this point, I’m guessing most people that might find their way to this blog have already seen it. For those that haven’t, if you have any capacity for deductive reasoning, you’re going to be able to deduce what I’m saying, and that’s as good as me just saying it outright. Ergo, you’re being warned:
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
Damn, for an Action Movie, It Sure Did Drag at Times
I really appreciate that filmmakers are making longer movies. We’re paying increasingly higher rates for movie tickets, so they all should feel burdened to give us our money’s worth. Instead of a 90-minute movie, the entire story should be told by adding 30-60 minutes of movie. I don’t want to fault the film for adding an extra 60 minutes, but filling in those 60 minutes with more setup material (for a subplot) is not what I had in mind. There’s enough setup required for the primary plot. I don’t need another round of it partway through the movie. Some of it is necessary, as subplots themselves are important to a film with any significant depth, and we need to understand what’s going on in the characters’ heads. TDKR took it too far, though. I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for things to get interesting again, and eventually they did, but if the extra 60 minutes is boring filler, we’re better off with a 90 minute movie after all. (Note: Not all of the 60 minutes was unimportant, so in this case, I would have cut out about 30 minutes of the movie. That’s just a guess, though. I’d have to see the movie again to be sure, so come back here after the movie hits HBO. I’m not going to see it in the theater again.)
Would you like an example of where we could have used some boring filler that would actually make the story more cohesive? Well, then . . .
The Hidden Enemy
Even with a movie where I must suspend my disbelief to enjoy it, it seems a bit much to expect me to believe that a character would spend his or her entire life becoming one of the rich and powerful in a sinister plot . . . to bring down the rich and powerful. Huh? How do you think people get rich and powerful? The lottery? Usually, no. Inheritance. Yeah, sometimes, but all of the rich were targeted simply because they did the things that are required to become rich and powerful. If you believe those things to be so unfair to the less fortunate that terrorism is justified, you’re not likely to do those things yourselves. Sure, it’s a twist that makes you say, “Oh, I didn’t see that coming,” but if you make the mistake of thinking about it for just a second, you then say, “But how? Why? That makes no sense! It’s a twist for its own sake!” Without a better explanation, you’re left expecting a sequel or prequel to explain it all, and that’s not an option.
For comic book geeks, there’s probably plenty of explanation over the decades of writing, but I (and many other filmgoers) are left hanging, struggling to justify what the movie did. It’s Nolan’s job to write the story, not mine. I don’t mind having to make some logical leaps – in fact, I like that movies require that – but this was central to the story and raises serious logical inconsistencies.
Bill Gates is not in the midst of a secret plot to take down the rich.
Casting
I heard a rumor that one of the characters introduced in this movie would be – I can’t say this without a spoiler – Batman’s successor. I went into this movie saying that if this were true, it would ruin the film for me considering the actor that’s playing that character. Well, it turned out to be true, but fortunately I was exaggerating. While the film wasn’t ruined, it certainly hurt. Ultimately, though, it was a good way to end the trilogy, and it made sense that the character was the successor. My issue is with the casting only. I know you all like him as an actor, but he isn’t suited to play that role.
Edit: The Evening Star
One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen was the Evening Star, which was the sequel to Terms of Endearment. (I had a subscription to HBO. I was already paying for it, so I figured I’d watch it. If it makes you feel any better, my life is less valuable because it’s stained with the memory of that movie.) One of many problems with that movie was that it was about tying up loose ends. The movie itself had no meaning outside the scope of its prequel, which is to say the movie itself was worthless. At times, the Dark Knight Rises fell into the same trap. Much of the movie that was dedicated to setup wasn’t even setting up the story but rather wrapping up the prior stories from the first two movies. Yes, it’s a trilogy, but it has to stand on its own. The parts that wrap up the past must do so by representing a step forward so that what’s happening now has actual value. Interestingly enough, the movie did that in one sense — ‘you must fear your own death to reach your full potential’ — but fell short enough to annoy me. I wanted the current story to be the focus, and it wasn’t.
Most Importantly, the Hype
The hype concerns me the most. I’ve never been one to raise my expectations too high going into a movie. It would seem out of character for me to be unfairly harsh on TDKR simply because people were saying it might get nominated for Best Picture. Still, it’s a possibility I have to accept, and I’m sure something many people will assume. Take all of this with a grain of salt. The bottom line is that it wasn’t a waste of the $5.00 I paid for the movie ticket. (Yeah, you read that right. I paid only $5.00.) The popcorn, however, wasn’t worth half what I paid for it, but that’s my fault.
Again, I reiterate, this was a good action movie. It could have been a great action movie. The Dark Knight was a great action movie. Inception was a great movie. Nolan has it in him. A shame he didn’t end the series on as strong as a note as I came to expect of him.
Or maybe I’m just getting old. Get off my lawn, you brats.
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