A middling dive into my favourite fiction and its most recent TTRPG adaptation
My old joke is that I design games not for GMs at their best—a good GM on a good night can run a paper bag well—but for GMs on the early morning game of the Sunday of a con, hungover, unsure of what their name is, let alone orphan rules. The point of a system, to me, was always to offer encouraging guardrails to keep everyone on-task and in-genre, and incentives to offer maybe something the GM wouldn’t think of, guidelines that take the game in exciting, but still relevant directions. Ultimately, a good system should mechanically reinforce its own themes and genre conventions—assuming it's a genre game.
It’s Always a Genre Game
When I was doing radio, the stupidest question to ask the band you’re interviewing was, “What genre are you?” It did not matter how squarely they were positioned for marketing, they always said the same thing, that their music defied and transcended genre. TTRPG developers often suffer the same twee delusion about their own work. Your game almost always adheres to a genre, and by and large it’s fantasy heartbreaker. Even those games that actually defy and transcend genre still adhere to cross-media themes, and those themes will need to be upheld with the confines of the system just as rigidly if you want to have an experience that “feels” like intended.
A game tells you what it is by its rules, showing you its assumptions by what it expects you to do. But just as rules can reinforce genre and theme they can also fail them. If death and dying is part of what you want to explore—go for it. If you want a teen romance game, however, maybe you don’t need HP and wound categories and various charts for dismemberment.
Adaptations of Dungeons & Dragons to other genres are perhaps the most obvious and egregious examples of systems not supporting its themes, but when you have a licence—perhaps, in my opinion, the greatest licence in the world—you would want to make every opportunity in the rules structure to reinforce those wonderful themes, right?
The Final Frontier of TTRPGs
I’m a big Star Trek fan, of a certain age. I have a TNG command uniform in my closet that I break out every Halloween. I’ve gone to conventions and chatted with Klingons in full battle armour as they smoke cigarettes. I am one of those people who know episode titles. So, Modiphius’ Star Trek should be the ideal TTRPG for me.
I was just finishing up a long running campaign of Modiphius’ Dune when the second edition of Star Trek Adventures was coming out just one stardate ago. Once I learned the thing streamlined the rules to make it a little closer to Dune, I was sold. Specifically the removal of the action dice appealed to me, because I really felt like they got in the way when running Modiphius’ John Carter, and I found the system easier and breezier without them when running Dune. So, I ordered the book and eagerly wrote 20 “episodes” to take my players through (overkill, perhaps) and started a re-watched marathon in preparation.
Before I start complaining, let me be clear, Modiphius’ Star Trek Adventures is the best Star Trek roleplaying game. There have been many Star Trek TTRPGs, and I have played (usually run) them all. As much as I loved pouring over the tables and ship stats in the FASA system, Modiphius did it better for actually running something. I notice the lifepath character creation system is directly inspired by FASA’s own, and that was probably the best part of that system.
I’m now five “episodes” in running a campaign of Modiphius’ Star Trek Adventures TTRPG, and I have opinions. Does this system do what I thought? Yes. It...works. But it makes me wonder. As a developer myself, these are my frustrations.
Why You Want System
A good GM can run a paper bag as a system and make it fun, sure, so what use is system? For the lens of the day, I’d say that what you want out of the system is a way to provoke exciting behaviour that is unanticipated, but not wholly unprecedented, even when you’re not “on fire”. You want the system to be smarter than you.
Modiphius’ base 2d20 system has a great way of making rolling the dice fun. Failure is uncommon, we’re usually just talking about degrees of success—which works well with the setting—and any roll could lead to Complications, which are the juicy bit for a GM. That structure is solid.
Where STA has a problem is with reinforcing themes and pushing play towards Star Trek conventions the way it should. Let me give you some examples.
Rank Rankles
Roleplayers are sometimes more apt to have their PCs burn down the orphanage and flee town than they are to obey the chain of command. Rank matters in Star Trek. It should matter more in Star Trek Adventures, but I’m suspicious the developers were perhaps overly aware of the above orphanage-burning tendencies of players. Development should lean into play tendencies, but it sacrificed too much—without a reinforcing structure for rank, it feels less like Star Trek.
There is no play inventive to command. Well, there is a minor one—there is a trick where you can give your Turn to someone of lesser rank, but here’s where we run into another player tendency, they do not typically want to give up their ability to play the game, by and large. There is also no play incentive for being of lesser rank, you just—by narrative permission, not any mechanical influence—should presumably be doing what other, higher ranking people tell you. Or don’t. Which is a problem.
I don’t want to paint a picture of my play group as a bunch of jerks. They’re just a lot closer to a Lower Decks crew than a TNG one, to put it charitably. I know that disobeying orders can be hand-waved sometimes even within Star Trek canon, but, in practice when playing STA, one PC or another should probably be court marshalled every damn game. I don’t blame the players, they’re just having fun. Burning down orphanages. I do look to the STA and long that it had some support for rank that would incentivize adhering to a chain of command.
This aspect harms the Star Trek feel of STA, leaning it close to a Red Dwarf experience, which is fun in its own right...but not to-theme.
Stunned by Phasers and Decisions
There is another problem, that is perhaps a problem in Star Trek itself, and what comes from trying to handle it in the medium of roleplaying.
Any game that feels episodic has to wrap up its major arcs within the session. Adding to that, many Star Trek episodes (especially if you’re chasing that TNG feel, because Star Trek has many faces) come down to a single moral quandary. All the tension and mystery and funnels to a single pivot point: is it better to allow the warrior alien ship to fly into their sun, or to save them? Do you administer the medicine to the pre-warp civilization for the plague carried by your own equipment in a routine survey mission? What are your obligations to the Prime Directive versus your obligation to your humanity? Good, heady stuff, but your game just ground to an absolute halt.
Suddenly all the fool PCs who have been ignoring the rank structure the whole time point their fingers at the Captain PC and say: “You sort out this moral dilemma!” OooooooOOooooOoooh, now rank matters, eh? And that’s how you find yourself running rock battles in 10-forward to end war on an alien planet.
This all could have been a part of the rules. Perhaps that should have been the great ability of the Starfleet Captain PC, to make the call on the great story apex and do a speech about the founding principles of Starfleet and the human spirit?
Please, please, give me rules that fulfil the promise of Star Trek. I’m not going to get into all my nitpicks about STA, so instead I’ll approach this from a different star system.
What I Would Have Done
As a TTRPG developer I have a ratio of about one to five—for every TTRPG published there’s about five more that never worked out, or haven’t yet. Part of that is I swing for the fences in design. I always try to seek out new mechanics and new systems of thought, to boldly go into the weirder design territory. Star Trek has an ethos, and so provides a very interesting opportunity to design mechanics to reinforce that ethos. For years I’ve been trying to do my own Star Trek adjacent game, and made a list of what I’d want to see that would make it feel Star Trek. I had hoped STA would satisfy these, but alas. Let’s run these down.
Initiative Based on Station. Watching Star Trek and imagining them as PCs, it always seems like there’s a tight turn order on the bridge. This is especially true of TNG and VOY. I’m convinced a format can be crafted to bring out those dramatic beats in a follow-the-list way that feels organic and relevant.
Troop Play. I believe a Star Trek game is a prime candidate for stepping outside just the bridge crew as a roster of PCs. One player could handle a whole department, like engineering. If done effectively this could really build up the crew as named characters, help separate the bridge crew from away teams, fill out the lower decks, and make the ship feel lived-in. STA wants to do troop play, but functionally they did the same thing slightly better in Dune. There is no good shorthand for “redshirts” and there’s no clear way of delegation, and no incentive to do so, when your PC can do it better themselves. It leads players to think of their characters as individuals, when they should be working within a larger community. I feel like all of this could be solved if the rules were designed around it.
Episodic Structure. DS9 often gets lauded for defying traditional episodic format and embracing longer format storytelling, but go back and watch it again. Meta-narratives carry forward throughout episodes, but even the most in-between-things episodes have good structure within their runtimes. I think this is a smart model for a Star Trek TTRPG to emulate, but it needs a bit of rules structure to happen smoothly. STA has nothing for this. It does have some random tables that are fun but unlikely to see use, like a techno-babble table. Neat! But...I’m not going to kill the momentum of play to look it up and tell players that their resolution of getting out of the collapsing reverse-warp bubble comes down to a fill-in-the-blank non-science. I’d rather have them make it up, and feel empowered in their creativity. If STA likes tables so much, they could have used them to start off an episode. I love Star Trek, but there’s actually a very limited number of premise-starters. Is it a distress beacon? An alien probe? A routine survey mission gone awry? Transporting an alien ambassador? This should have been part of the game. This also could have helped smooth the pivot point of the moral dilemma that gets faced in maybe half of all episodes, to help players come to consistent conclusions and make it a little easier to run than a paper bag.
Rank As Extension of That: Flat out, there needs to be some reason for rank. You can’t avoid it in the setting, so what is it doing? If troop play and delegation were more important, rank could easily influence that structure. Your engineer has stronger repair teams, your chief science officer more...undergrads trying to get support for their thesis, I don’t know. The point is—efforts needed to be made to make the relationships between people matter, mechanically. Rank could have been part of that.
Mechanics That Bend Play Incentives to Star Trek Themes. Character’s abilities should shamelessly milk the setting, but Talents in 2d20 largely boil down to “in these circumstances you can re-roll some dice” or “in this circumstance your difficulty is lowered by one”, neither of which frame a situation into being as much as I’d like it to. There are exceptions. We’re four “episodes” in and our Science officer has gotten a lot out of their Skill in “jury rigging”, but by and large there’s less of a sense of participation being brought out by the dictates of the system than I’d like to see. They should have dialled this up to 11 and used it as a way to keep everyone on track with the setting.
Longing for the Stars
Someday, I’d like to be able to lean into the setting ignorantly, and have it fulfil the Star Trek promise even if it’s the Sunday morning of a con and all my players feel dead inside. Star Trek Adventures is not that. I suspect this is a problem stemming from using a house system rather than tailor making a system to a property. You can only adapt it yay much. I can only hack it yay much. But, this is what we’re left with.
2d20 is an easy enough paper bag to run, so I’m going to keep rolling with it through my “season” of episodes, but someday I will satisfy my design dreams of Star Trek with what currently sits on my shelf. Someday, when the stars are right, someday, we'll see what's out there.
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