Fast and Simple Starship Combat by Alex

[Alex]

Yes, he's at it again. Uploading links to all the Trek goodies he's created. I wrote this in early 2009 I think, to fill a void. My D&D group had allowed me to run FASA's STSCRPG and we had fun but I had my complaints. We tried Federation and Empire, Full Thrust, and B5 Wars. But my group and I always came back to my game. It's just so fast and simple!

The game plays best at squad level: 4-6 ships per player, 2-4 players. I think the currently uploaded copy of the rules may have an older version of the Ship listing. It's an early conversion of the FASA ships, with the Paramount names filed off I've been having trouble locating my most recent version. We're setting up to run a galactic conquest campaign and I'm so frustrated that I can't find my notes on that!

Fast and Simple Starship Combat

[finarvyn]

This looks interesting, Alex. How smoothly did it play? Did it address all of your complaints about the FASA system, or would you say that it's still evolving?

[Alex]

It played great. We've played at least 3 times as a group, and I've also played twice with my wife (she's interested in games but not Trek) and twice solo. It plays very fast. It plays very differently from SFB and FASA. Positioning is very important due to firing arcs, rounds go very fast since you only ready one weapon and fire one weapon per ship, and numbers of ships is far more important than size of ships (in FASA I find that a strong enough ship can't be beaten by any number of small ships). The part I like best is that one person can handle 5 or 6 ships with ease. I ran a few 6-on-6 battles (I actually scaled from 1-on-1 which didn't work well, up to 6-on-6) and even a three-way battle, and with a dozen ships in play the longest session I ran lasted 45 minutes. The average game was 30 minutes for 2-4 ships per side with 2 or 3 sides.