MinTrek - Old School Trek by Alex

[Alex]

MinTrek - The world's most popular Science Fiction setting in one page.

Announcing the location of my Old School Trek RPG. I'm still relatively inexperienced with Google Groups, but it seems like it should work as a repository for my game files. At a later time I'll upload my other RPGs (there are a lot more than I thought) and accept members. For now, you can reach me here for discussion of MinTrek and maybe if Falconer likes me there will be a forum/subforum just for it.

MinTrek

Yes, that's right. It is a one page RPG!

[Falconer]

Hey, Alex-- it looks good. It kind of speaks for itself unless you are looking for feedback to continue to develop or advance it.

Can you tell us a little bit about your inspiration to do a "one page RPG"? Do you intend this to be fully sufficient as a stand-alone RPG, or do you imagine people using the Star Fleet Technical Manual and/or published RPG material along with it? How did you decide what to put in (all six classic ability scores) and what not (race/class/alignment)? Do you think you could cram any more on the sheet?

One thought I had is that I would keep my character's 3d6 score AND the modifier, rather than just toss the former and retain the latter. Even if it doesn't formally affect any game mechanics, I like the 3-18 number as an indicator of relative strengths and weaknesses at a glance.

[slortar]

That's pretty cool. I particularly like the tours thing in lieu of actual experience.

You know, if you don't mind losing some compatibility with d20, I think you could probably do away with the D&D style stats in favor of more TOS-like qualities, like "Knowledge" or "Seduce The Ladies". Wisdom, in a Trek game for some reason kinda loses me.

[Alex]

I plan to include full stats for the example characters. I didn't get around to doing the ability scores, just the tours based on bio info from memory alpha.

I fully intend for this to be the entire RPG. At the time I wrote it (December), I was thinking again about all my RPGs and how BD&D is still my preference but how unsuited it seemed for Trek. So I brainstormed on how to get a meaningful, Old School feeling mechanic without resorting to a skill-based system. I don't like playing skill-based systems, but for Trek they seemed like the only way to go. When I came up with a mechanic something like TSR's combat mechanic (and later d20's universal mechanic) that was much simplified, I knew I had gaming gold. So I wrote down the mechanic, kept the BD&D ability scores (always been my favorite game, so that's my homage to TSR), and wrote down some combat examples. A couple days later I realized there was no form of advancement, which would probably turn off almost everybody. So I again brainstormed and came to the door of Classic Traveller, also an Old School hero among games. I devised the tour of duty idea and wrote some examples. After I typed it up I noticed it was under 3 pages (sides), so I decided it would be ultra cool to format it pretty and make it a one-page (sheet) RPG!

That's it, the entire game. I don't think anything else is needed. To me Trek is a ROLE playing game, not a ROLL playing game, so the mechanics should be minimal. Play by the seat of your pants: the GM decides the difficulty rating, you stick to the simple numbers of the ratings, and ROLE play anything that doesn't have mechanics or make up an arbitrary difficulty just to keep the game moving. I'm sad to report I've never PLAYED any Trek RPGs, so I envision this being for one-shots mainly, but I see no reason a fast-n-loose group couldn't use this in a campaign. The lack of advancement isn't a problem, it's accurate: watch the shows and you don't see the characters developing skills much over a few years, you see them developing CHARACTER. Until you get to the late Treks like Voy where they do the D&D 3E thing: level 1 to 20 in a year. So I don't plan to add much more, maybe race modifiers, but I'm sure I can keep it a one-page RPG by reducing the font. Right now I'm using 12pt for the text, 16pt for the headers, and the default margins. I can squeeze a lot more in by cheating in the formatting dept.

As for materials, the GM can use anything he wants. The players just need imagination. I pictured the game using only the TV episodes as materials. Basically watch an episode as a group before running a related scenario (like reading the mission logs before revisiting a world the Enterprise went to). My planned missions were all spin-offs and continuations of aired episodes.

BTW, this is my 3rd Trek RPG. I plan to post my other two, but they will likely not interest the crowd here. The 2nd one I wrote was an evolution of someone else's Narrativist game and features conflict resolution rather than task resolution. It's weird, but it's also full of artwork (by me!) so it's prettier. The 1st one was a generic d20 Sci-Fi that had rules and hints to adapt it to Star Trek among many others (Stargate and Star Wars and Babylon 5 and ...). That's a skill/feat system and is really crunchy but I've actually run several one-shots with it for my Star Wars/Star Frontiers cross-over universe. I'll start threads for those in a few days when I have a chance to post them to my group.

[Alex]

Jan 7, 2010 15:21:03 GMT -5 slortar said:

Wisdom, in a Trek game for some reason kinda loses me.

I don't know why. To me Wisdom is the definition of the Captain. Yes, if you want to go the humorous route, he could have a Seduce the Ladies stat. But if you want a serious Trek game, the Captain is defined by trusting his intuition and going with his what his guts tell him. If Intelligence is knowledge and logic then Wisdom is Kirk's gut and intuition that always surprised Spock as being reliable and the advantage of humans as a race.

You could use the same system with any set of ability scores. Star Wars used Strength, Dexterity, Knowledge, Perception, Mechanical, Technical. Feel free to use those, or any other game's. My point is not to recreate all the work of deciding the correct set of descriptors for a character. I think the D&D stats do a really good job of covering a generic character in a variety of genres. I didn't go with Star Wars' attributes because they don't feel as "right" to me. I have no allegiance to d20.

[finarvyn]

My favorite Trek games make use of all six OD&D stats, including Wisdom. I agree that a good officer should have a solid wisdom score, but perhaps a great one succeeds in spite of having a low one. (cough, Kirk, cough) :-)

[finarvyn]

Major snippage to create this quote...

Jan 13, 2010 13:42:32 GMT -5 Alex said:

Kirk's gut ... always surprised Spock

...but Kirk's gut was usally more of a factor late in the season when Shatner had to wear a girdle because he couldn't work out much while filming.

I'm just sayin'.... ;D

[Alex]

Now that my thread has been moved to Original Dungeons & Dragons forum, I must at least make clear that my game was not written as a D&D conversion or D&D-based game. I did take things from D&D (ability scores and hit points) but also from Traveller (tours of duty and no real in-game advancement) and d20 SRD (mechanic of d20 + ability modifier >= DC). I don't mind being in the D&D forum. I'm in good company here. But just making new visitors clear this isn't truly D&D Trek like finnarvyn's game.

[Falconer]

No problem, Alex. I can move it back if you prefer, but I think it fits this board pretty well. You did mention it as being partially an homage to BD&D.

[finarvyn]

Jan 7, 2010 17:12:48 GMT -5 Alex said:

The 2nd one I wrote was an evolution of someone else's Narrativist game and features conflict resolution rather than task resolution. It's weird, but it's also full of artwork (by me!) so it's prettier.

Just wanted to point out that a love for OD&D doesn't mean we can't have enthusiasm for a Narrativist game. My group sometimes plays Amber Diceless and Sorcerer, both of which are very non-OD&D-like.