I've been on a bit of a Star Trek kick of late, and was curious if the old FASA rules were worth looking up? Is there a retro-clone of them?

I was never quite fond of Decipher's CODA system and their treatment of Star Trek (and weirdly, like the Black Unicorn predecessor more) - though this might be some unreserved hate for the Decipher crew and the nonsense they pulled in the Star Trek and LotR card games.

Decipher got reamed for their starting unlicense CCG use of Star Trek, IIRC. Then I never followed the game much thereafter. Somethjng about Q Tents being required cards and general shenanigans. Their ST rpgs looked like they were competing with Hero or 3e DnD in page count or splats. Never knew what was going on there...

As for FASA, one of the few FASA games my college gamer buddies were not into and memorized wholesale. Wonder why that is...? Bigger Star Wars WEG fans, I guess? I noticed SW and ST fans are a bit like oil and water, and oddly enough mech fetish (Robotech, Gundam, etc.) coincided more with SW fans. I am sure someone could do a master's thesis on the deeper reasons why...

I got rid of my FASA Star Trek rulebooks years ago.  I remember making up lots of characters.  It had a kind of neat lifepath character generation system for the time.  It was heavily inspired by Traveller's chargen.  Sadly, those characters really never got used.  My game group and I made a few sporadic attempts to play it, and things simply never came together into even so much as a single meaningful game.

The system was a decidedly old school percentile system.  It had an action point based combat system which seemed extremely overcomplicated to all of us at the time (mid 80s).  Plus, the rules were written to require squaregrid and counter based personal combat.

We did play a lot of the starship combat game, which was called Star Trek III: Starship Combat Roleplaying game at that time (and later changed to Star Trek: Tactical Combat Simulator).  Play really didn't resemble Star Trek at all.  We all prefered to play Star Fleet Battles which felt much more like we felt starship combat should work.  However, the FASA offering played much more quickly and it had all those pretty starship porn drawings to suck us in, so even though we didn't particularly like the game, we played for the graphical flavor.  Not to mention we used the starship design rules to make a whole lot of photon boats.

I think either the LUG or Decipher RPGs are superior to the FASA offering.  The main strength the FASA offering has is the tons of published support for it.  Plus FASA's game existed in the TOS movie era, so it's really the only offering to focus on that era, because the LUG and Decipher games are firmly late TNG era and it seems all other Star Trek games are TOS TV era.

I've been thinking recently about picking up the three corebooks again.  I've been looking on ebay and... shit those books are far more expensive than I think they should be.  People act like they're printed on gold or something.  I've seen a couple of decent prices, but nothing to make me want to pull the trigger yet.

As a complete side note, I was looking at the Cubicle 7 Doctor Who game the other day and thinking about how it would work for Star Trek.  Maybe the initiative system would have to change to encourage fisticuffs and ripped shirts, but it seems like it would already encourage the monologuing common in Trek.  Plus, lethality of phasers is analogous to the letahality of most alien weapons in Who.  And I feel Trek would benefit from fairly broad and vague mechanics instead of hyper-detailed skill selections as the FASA game more or less went for.

Quote from: Coffee Zombie;909278I've been on a bit of a Star Trek kick of late, and was curious if the old FASA rules were worth looking up? Is there a retro-clone of them?

I was never quite fond of Decipher's CODA system and their treatment of Star Trek (and weirdly, like the Black Unicorn predecessor more) - though this might be some unreserved hate for the Decipher crew and the nonsense they pulled in the Star Trek and LotR card games.

I played a lot of FASA Star Trek back in the day.

Some highlights

Character generation uses a lifepath system that generates a service history for the characters. It works well for the genre.

The mechanics are percentage based.

Combat is a bit too much like a wargame as it uses action point system to regulate the action. It was neither good or bad.

The starship combat system was the real gem in my opinion. While  Star Fleet Battles was the better Star Trek WARGAME, the FASA take was better for roleplaying. Each of the main bridge officers (including communications which ran damage control) got a little control panel. The whole thing was setup that the players had to cooperate in order to fight the GM control opponent. It felt very Star Trek once the players got the hang of it. And the skill mechanics that applied to each station made sense.

The FASA supplements are hit or miss. The best one in my opinion was the Tricoder supplement which eliminated having the science officer player parroting the GM. The heart of it was a set of cardboard code wheels. The GM told the player, using a easy to use cheat sheet, what codes to look up. The player then read the result. Very effective in making the science officer player feel like he was playing the science officer.

FASA Star Trek in the 80s was a bit of an odd duck in that even without the internet there were a ton of resources to look up all things Star Trek. Most of us knew the show backwards and forwards, and those that didn't knew the broad strokes at least. Outside of Starship combat, and character creation, we didn't dive into the system all that much. Roll your percentage for the skill test. Maybe look up some range or situational modifiers was pretty much it.

In my area at least most FASA Star Trek fans were big into building deck plans. Thanks to photocopiers and miniature (15mm) scale deckplans from FASA we could readily make ones that look nice and were of use in actual play. I still have one that I made of a smaller ship called the USS Amundsen.

Finally as you can tell I am a big fan of the system and one reason is because the best roleplaying session I ever ran for any system was done using FASA Star Trek.

From my blog

Even though it was designed by wargamers the fact it was Star Trek meant a lot of role-playing came along for the ride. Some of the best campaigns I ever refereed was using FASA's ST:RPG.

The best adventure I ever ran involved the players starting out on a milk run dropping navigation warning buoys around the time-space distortion that nailed the USS Defiant and nearly got the USS Enterprise. The ship, the USS Challenger, was refitted with a emergency anti-matter injector that could give a short burst of Warp 9. It was done in case there was a problem with the ship falling into the distortion.

I went all out for my Star Trek games. I used what computer tech I had at the time and creative photocopies to create orders, manifests, and other in-game documents for my players.

When they were halfway done, the distortion starting grew unexpectedly and caught the Challenger. The Engineer made his skill roll and injector worked pulling them out. When sensors came back on-line the Science Officer reported a Klingon D-7 bearing down on the Challenger with shields up. The players had a tough fight but the lone D-7 was no match for a Consitution Class Starship and it fled.

During the course of doing Damage Control after the battle, Comm Officer reported the Subspace Network was down. The Science Officer, Engineering and Comm Officer worked together to determine what was going on. The Challenger equipment was OK but the Subspace Network was simply gone. Even nodes near the Federation's Core were not on-line. However when they started searching for the other races they began to pick up a unknown network centered on Andoria. They found the nearest node and warped to it.

When they got there several weeks later they found a Starbase of unknown design. When they made first contact they discovered it was a Starbase on the frontier of the Andorian Star Empire! By now it was obvious they were thrown in some parallel timeline.

The players were able to find out that the Andorians had no record of Humans or Earth. The only record was that they found a dead world destroyed by nuclear weapons. As a consequence the Federation never developed and the Andorian Star Empire now dominates this region of space contending with the Klingons and Romulans for power.

They were able to secure permission to proceed to Earth. When the players got there they beamed down and started combing through the ruins for any records of what happened. They were surprised by Klingons and a firefight ensued. Meanwhile in orbit the Challenger was attacked by a D7 hiding behind Earth's Moon. It was a tough fight but the players won both on the ground and on land. The D7 was destroyed in the aftermath.

The players were able to determine that the nuclear war occurred around October 1962. Apparently in this timeline the Cuban Missile Crisis exploded into World War III engulfing the entire planet in nuclear war leaving on the cockroach as the highest lifeform.

From the wreckage of the D7 they were able to find out that the D7 was sent to the time-space anomaly that the Challenger was mapping and was able to use it to go back into time. They launched a nuclear missile at the US Fleet blockading Cuba. Both sides blamed the other and the crisis spiraled out of control into full scale war.

A smart player checked and it turned out the Challenger had the data on-board to execute a time warp via a slingshot around the Sun. What followed was some of the best roleplaying I ever seen as the players debated among themselves whether it was ethical to go back and restore the time line. This debate elevated a pretty good session into a game that emulated it's source material perfectly. Both sides had strong points in favor of the arguments. Both arguing with the passion that only college age fans could bring. In the game billions of lives were at stake on the decision. The player of the Captain actually started sweating at having to make this decision.

In the end the decision was to restore the timeline. The Challenger slingshotted back to 1962 and hide behind Earth's Moon. When the Klingon D7 warped into Earth orbit the Challenger surprised it and was able to destroy it before it launched the missle the ignited World War III. Then it warped back to the 23rd Century back into a future where the Federation existed.

I really like FASA Trek too. I played a lot of it in the 80s and early 90s. While we stuck with the character generation, skill system and starship combat rules, we used a more freeform personal combat system with range bands instead of the rigid squares and action points system (which is a lot like the Traveller boardgames Azhanti High Lightning and Snapshot).  

One thing I liked about the system was the variety of possible campaign styles you could choose - it's possible to play the officers of a big starship like the Enterprise, a smaller more party-operated vessel, or a merchant vessel. You could also play a Klingon, Romulan, Orion or Federation superspy campaign. The Klingon campaign sourcebook is really well done and there were some fine adventures specifically for those different kinds of campaigns. Generally all of them are plot-based scenarios with a lot of possible outcomes. My favorite is Termination 1456. The players are a group of Klingons sent to investigate and assassinate a rogue Klingon Admiral in his homebase.    

The timeline nowadays kind of strikes younger Star Trek fans as odd. The game came along in that period when the Star Trek movies were being made (The Motion Picture, Wrath of Khan, etc.) but before The New Generation. The FASA materials generally assumed you would be playing either in the Classic Trek era or the STI-IV era. At the time there wasn't really a lot of canon beyond the original series and the first films and the 'official Berman/Braga' canon hadn't been invented. So, some FASA Trek things, particularly the portrayal of Klingons, Romulans and Federation history are now considered wildly divergent non-canon. IMO, that's a good thing and offers roleplayers a lot of freedom to go where no gamers have one before - just ignore everything said about Trek from TNG onwards.

And if you're going to play FASA Trek, you have to use the roleplaying starship combat rules - each player will have a specific job to do while the captain character gives orders. It's really pretty fun, and really adds drama to the game - just like in a great Trek episode or movie.

Wow, sounds like some serious love for the FASA version. Is the lack of a retro clone due to the innately "licensed" characteristic of the game, or is there just no enough demand and critical mass to make one surface? On the subject of tracking down copies... yikes. Yeah, while looking for the Classic Doctor Who RPG (out of curiosity, I like the DWAITS well enough) I stumbled across the FASA game, which is what got me thinking about this in the first place - and yikes, those sets and books are way overpriced.

It's a great game.

My only caution is make sure everybody has the same idea of what "Star Trek" means.  If one person wants to explore strange new worlds and the other wants to kill Klingons and take their stuff, it may not work well.  But that's a people issue, not a game issue.

Quote from: Coffee Zombie;909295Wow, sounds like some serious love for the FASA version. Is the lack of a retro clone due to the innately "licensed" characteristic of the game, or is there just no enough demand and critical mass to make one surface?

A bit of both. Remember Star Trek for the interested has been intensely mined for information for decades. It not that hard to run a Star Trek campaign with a given sci-fi RPG. Not going to be as a good mechanic wise as a Star Trek RPG but good enough for most.

However there is a Star Trek Retro-clone out there Starships and Spaceman. http://www.goblinoidgames.com/spacemen.html

It not a FASA retro-clone but rather adapting D&D mechanics to a Star Trek game.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;909298My only caution is make sure everybody has the same idea of what "Star Trek" means.  If one person wants to explore strange new worlds and the other wants to kill Klingons and take their stuff, it may not work well.  But that's a people issue, not a game issue.

A Star Trek Campaign is definitely one where you want everybody to sit down beforehand to hash out who doing what and why. The Captain player can make or break the campaign if it revolves around a bridge crew like the various series.

Quote from: Kellri;909291The Klingon campaign sourcebook is really well done

John M. Ford was involved and made the first really consistent view of who the Klingons are. The TOS Klingons were explained as a genetic subspecies to allow the Empire to deal with humans better. There were Klingon-Romulan Fusions as well. The baseline Klingon were the movie klingons with the ridged foreheads. There was also a book that Ford wrote as part of the paperback Star Trek series. The Final Reflection.

I was bummed when the Next Generation went the whole honorable Klingon route. Although I appreciated Enterprise's explanation of how the TOS Klingons came to be.

I liked the FASA Star Trek rules. It was one of the few campaigns where I got to be a player most of the time which was a fun change. The campaign was a semi-continuation of a previous Star Trek campaign run by a different GM which actually worked out nicely by allowing our GM to bring in old PCs (hers and others') as interesting NPCs, which gave the campaign a feeling of substance and history beyond the TV shows. And the GM was great using old PCs, she was completely immune to turning the old PCs/NPCs into show stealers. She introduced her own starship captain PC to us by having Star Fleet order us to arrest her. So rather than having her old PC save the day or save our bacon, we had to get her PC out of trouble by finding out the truth and disproving the basis for the arrest.

As other have said, the life path system was nice. It did a good job of generating characters with the appropriate skills at reasonable percentages for their rank and position. After a year or so of play we sent a few characters off to specialty schools e.g. Command School which allowed them to gain new skills or improve existing skills and to go up a rank. Essentially that was the only character improvement we did throughout the entire campaign. Which seemed pretty true to the TV Shows. It's not like we see Captains Kirk or Picard learn important new skills or get significantly better at skills they already have.

We used a troupe style of play. We each started with (I think) 3 characters. One bridge officer, one security officer, and one medical or science officer. That allowed us to select a character who fit the mission or for the GM to tailor a particular session towards a particular PC. Over the 2-3 years we played we each added on more characters. We even had a few lower decks style sessions where we focused attention on the young ensign characters instead of the experienced Lt Cmdr, Cmdr, or Captain. Once really nice thing for our group was that we had sketch pictures of all our PCs. The original GM was a sketch artist in his day job and graciously consented to do sketches of our characters. I'd never had a group where we did that and it had a significant impact on my gaming since. Now we always get (draw, have drawn, or find somewhere) pictures of our PCs and significant NPCs.

Quote from: estar;909284Combat is a bit too much like a wargame as it uses action point system to regulate the action. It was neither good or bad.

Our GM used an extremely simplified combat system. It was not much more complicated than rolling percentile dice and either comparing to your skill or comparing rolls + skill between two opposed characters.

QuoteThe starship combat system was the real gem in my opinion.

While we used more of the ship combat, this too we simplified. Though we kept the different activities for different bridge and engineering crew members. And I agree with estar's comparison between Star Fleet Battles and FASA Star Trek.

QuoteThe FASA supplements are hit or miss.

Our GM used the Triangle Sector supplement as background for the region we most warped around. The supplement seemed good and locating it where the territories of the Federation, Klingon, and another race (I think it was Orion) made for a good setting with diplomacy, cold war style confrontations, a bit of espionage, along with planet hopping and the occasional alien menace.

QuoteMost of us knew the show backwards and forwards, and those that didn't knew the broad strokes at least.

This was one of the greatest strengths. Both the main GM and I each used Star Trek to introduce roleplay to novices. When doing that, we would make the novices play the captain and senior officers while any old hands took on the role of more junior crew. This worked great as it pulled the newbies immediately into having their character do something. And because it was like the TV shows, anyone who watched the shows regularly had a pretty good idea of a halfway reasonable response.

QuoteOutside of Starship combat, and character creation, we didn't dive into the system all that much. Roll your percentage for the skill test. Maybe look up some range or situational modifiers was pretty much it.

Pretty much how we ran combat.

QuoteIn my area at least most FASA Star Trek fans were big into building deck plans.

We didn't do much deck planning. We (especially me) did build a lot of new ships. In part that was a function of the campaign legacy and history. The time period was set between TOS and TNG. This meant that the old show ships (except for types like the Excelsior class from the films) were outdated and the ships from TNG were not yet built (except for the Star Gazer type. I believe the timing worked out so that those were around all shiny and new.

QuoteFinally as you can tell I am a big fan of the system and one reason is because the best roleplaying session I ever ran for any system was done using FASA Star Trek.

Yes, I would echo that.

Quote from: Opaopajr;909280I noticed SW and ST fans are a bit like oil and water...

There is a lot of that, though not everyone plays that game. In our group, we followed the Star Trek campaign with an even longer running Star Wars campaign that my friend and I co-GMed.

Quote from: Coffee Zombie;909278I've been on a bit of a Star Trek kick of late

You might find this interesting...

Quote from: estar;909313John M. Ford was involved and made the first really consistent view of who the Klingons are. The TOS Klingons were explained as a genetic subspecies to allow the Empire to deal with humans better. There were Klingon-Romulan Fusions as well. The baseline Klingon were the movie klingons with the ridged foreheads. There was also a book that Ford wrote as part of the paperback Star Trek series. The Final Reflection.

I was bummed when the Next Generation went the whole honorable Klingon route. Although I appreciated Enterprise's explanation of how the TOS Klingons came to be.

I much preferred The Final Reflection's Klingons to the Gagh-Chomping, Bloodwine-swilling, Opera-singing Space Vikings of TNG.

Me too.

FWIW, Ford's influence on FASA Trek was one of the best things about their setting. Years ago I did a netbook that compiled all of the Trek timeline material published by FASA and discovered in the process that it was pretty much all based on a similar timeline written by John M. Ford for his novels. Unlike the 'official' timeline, it actually makes sense. That kind of ruined the Enterprise show for me.