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I recently reacquired some FASA Star Trek RPG stuff.

I had kept some of my old FASA stuff (the starship combat game, a couple of supplements), but discarded the core RPG rules years ago.  I always thought the game was clunky and not terribly interesting.  However, in retrospect, character creation was kind of fun.  I made a lot of characters back in the day.

Anyway, I had just reacquired the FASA Star Trek 2nd edition game with the three blue books.  I also had recently received the brand new Star Trek Adventures RPG.  And I also have the Last Unicorn Games and Decipher versions.

And something that struck me was how all the other non-FASA official versions of the game feel very much the same.  The Last Unicorn Games, Decipher, and Modiphius versions all have that same...feel.  I don't want to say cookie cutter or sanitized, because those have connotations I don't really mean, but I can't think of other terms to use.  Processed?  Whatever term I think of, it has a very negative connotation I'm not trying to imply.

I guess... the others feel very... Next Generationy?

But FASA just has a distinctly different feel.  The core focuses on TOS, but nearly all the supplements and adventures focus on movie era (because that was the main franchise of the time).  It's the only one of any of the official RPGs to give any serious attention to TOS movie era.  It also treats TOS seriously instead of as camp (LUG) or tongue in cheek (the others).  

Anyone else with FASA Trek thoughts, or just Trek RPG thoughts?

Only thing that comes to mind is, that I couldn't find an official ST RPG that captured the right feel. Nowadays I would go straight to Mini Six and use the FASA books as inspiration.

I had great fun playing it. I don't know if the system is all that great, but TOS has always been my favorite era so I enjoyed playing a Doctor who had his own Still. :D

Quote from: Gabriel2;1043355I recently reacquired some FASA Star Trek RPG stuff.

I had kept some of my old FASA stuff (the starship combat game, a couple of supplements), but discarded the core RPG rules years ago.  I always thought the game was clunky and not terribly interesting.  However, in retrospect, character creation was kind of fun.  I made a lot of characters back in the day.

Anyway, I had just reacquired the FASA Star Trek 2nd edition game with the three blue books.  I also had recently received the brand new Star Trek Adventures RPG.  And I also have the Last Unicorn Games and Decipher versions.

And something that struck me was how all the other non-FASA official versions of the game feel very much the same.  The Last Unicorn Games, Decipher, and Modiphius versions all have that same...feel.  I don't want to say cookie cutter or sanitized, because those have connotations I don't really mean, but I can't think of other terms to use.  Processed?  Whatever term I think of, it has a very negative connotation I'm not trying to imply.

I guess... the others feel very... Next Generationy?

But FASA just has a distinctly different feel.  The core focuses on TOS, but nearly all the supplements and adventures focus on movie era (because that was the main franchise of the time).  It's the only one of any of the official RPGs to give any serious attention to TOS movie era.  It also treats TOS seriously instead of as camp (LUG) or tongue in cheek (the others).  

Anyone else with FASA Trek thoughts, or just Trek RPG thoughts?

I have a vague recollection that the FASA Trek rules for hand phasers meant you could dial 'em up to 100 and one-shot anybody/thing. It was a percentile skill game system mostly, right?

LUG and Decipher feeling the same is no surprise, since they were done by mostly the same people and within only a few years of each other.

The FASA game is awesome and we had a lot of fun.

One thing that is necessary is that all players (including the ref) have to have a fairly congruent vision of what ST is.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1043384One thing that is necessary is that all players (including the ref) have to have a fairly congruent vision of what ST is.

All the players, plus ref? I don't think any two fans of ST have the same vision regarding what it is. Heck, get 3-4 fans in the room and you get 5-6 mutually incompatible visions of the IP. :p

I played in a decently long FASA campaign when I was in high school; I remember specifically getting 48 bonus points (50 is the max I believe...maybe it was 99/100, been a while) and having a character that could rival Scotty for engineering ability. All the players were bridge officers, and the captain was a Kirk clone, right down to the poon hound behaviors. Played pretty much exactly like you think it would.

The advantage the FASA system over any other has is the excellent combat simulator. It was a great change of pace from SFB.

I have the LUG and Decipher versions, never played them, but I agree they definitely have a TNG feel; the books themselves look TNG.

Also have Prime Directive, three versions: GURPS, d20, and the TFG system. Never played any of these, but the TFG version is pretty much SFB universe. To be honest, I greatly prefer the direction SFB went vs. canon TNG (I dislike all the DS9/Cardassian stuff), so I'd probably play this over the newest game now.

FASA's Star Trek is a great game. Just takes some getting used to the system.

Another good ST game is Starships & Spacemen 1978 by FGU. Combine it with Star Explorer and you have a pretty good Star Trek game with the serial numbers barely filed off.

Star Frontiers can be retooled to play a ST setting as well.

There was also a Star Trek RPG with a solo mode I think. Also by Fasa?

Quote from: Gabriel2;1043355The core focuses on TOS, but nearly all the supplements and adventures focus on movie era (because that was the main franchise of the time).

I think that this is a critical point in your post. Once TNG (and other series) came out, I think that Star Trek was looked at through a very different lens. Early days of Trek role playing focused on TOS and the big arguments were "do we include stuff from the animated series?" or "should the movie material be canon?" but either way the bulk of the source material came from three seasons of TOS, a Technical Manual and blueprints, and a handful of paperbacks. When I ran OD&D-based Star Trek games for my friends in the 1970's it was all off-the-cuff "make up weapon damage and alien hit dice and play" stuff because there really wasn't much source material to go from. Even games like Star Fleet Battles and Federation Space had that "wild frontier" feeling that TOS had.

Once TNG came into the picture I feel like the focus of Trek was lost and so much material got created in such a short amount of time (since the 21 seasons of TNG, DS9, and Voyager became 6x or 7x the amount of material from TOS). RPGs at that point seemed to want to encompass all of Star Trek, which I think is really impossible since the power scale of the ships in TNG is way different from that of TOS, the overall feel of TNG is way different from TOS, and the Venn diagram including TNG-era and TOS-era has almost no intersection. If I was to write a Star Trek RPG I think I would try to focus on one core rulebook for each era and not try to use everything in one rulebook.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1043378LUG and Decipher feeling the same is no surprise, since they were done by mostly the same people and within only a few years of each other.

Exactly. I had actually gotten the LUG version and a few months later, the Decipher license was announced, and actually shipped rather quickly. I lost interest at that point.

FASATrek remains my all-time favorite alt.Trek setting. Game mechanics? I formed my opinion of FASA's inability to design and publish a decent set of RPG mechanics based on their Star Trek, and none of their subsequent RPG products changed my mind in the slightest.

(FASA created awesome settings, though. FASATrek. Battletech. Shadowrun. Renegade Legion. And here comes my Mekton Zeta fetish, but I could use MZ for any of those settings* much easier than I could use the original FASA RPG rules.)

*Although I don't think they ever did a Renegade Legion RPG.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1043388All the players, plus ref? I don't think any two fans of ST have the same vision regarding what it is. Heck, get 3-4 fans in the room and you get 5-6 mutually incompatible visions of the IP. :p

Then the Reff is the final authority on the universe - just like any other RPG.

- Ed

FASA Trek character creation was a bit slow for my 13 year old self but the starship combat simulator was fun.

Now I'd probably just run it with BRP and narrate ship to ship stuff based on skill rolls, just lazy I guess, I've been working on some Trek material for Galaxies in Shadow forever.

I'm afraid GURPS Prime Directive annoyed me a bit with it's DR 8 velour uniforms and phasers that can't just disintegrate people.

Quote from: RandyB;1043426FASATrek remains my all-time favorite alt.Trek setting. Game mechanics? I formed my opinion of FASA's inability to design and publish a decent set of RPG mechanics based on their Star Trek, and none of their subsequent RPG products changed my mind in the slightest.

You think that's bad, you should try Doctor Who. I don't recall Mechwarrior being that great either, but those games were still fun to play.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1043375I have a vague recollection that the FASA Trek rules for hand phasers meant you could dial 'em up to 100 and one-shot anybody/thing. It was a percentile skill game system mostly, right?

Pretty much.  I think ICON and Coda were the systems with the full on dial-a-phaser.  It looks like FASA just has standard settings.  Disintegrate just flat out disintegrates.  Disrupt (Kill) does 150 damage in a game where a mega badass like Khan has about 110 HP.

FASA phasers were from an era of Trek were phasers were not popguns like they were in TNG.  If a phaser on Kill hit something (and it wasn't a godling or monster of the week), then they were toast.  It wasn't like TNG where a hit from a phaser set on kill could be shrugged off like a light punch.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1043378LUG and Decipher feeling the same is no surprise, since they were done by mostly the same people and within only a few years of each other.

True enough.  I knew the same people were responsible.  I actually like Icon Trek.  I've actually run that one.  Never got to play it, but I ran a several month long campaign right before the turn of the millennium.

Coda... I can't get it straight in my head.  That also applies to the tone of the book.  It's generally late Voyager era, but it feels like it can't really decide what it wants to be.

Quote from: Brad;1043393The advantage the FASA system over any other has is the excellent combat simulator. It was a great change of pace from SFB.

..snip...

Also have Prime Directive, three versions: GURPS, d20, and the TFG system. Never played any of these, but the TFG version is pretty much SFB universe. To be honest, I greatly prefer the direction SFB went vs. canon TNG (I dislike all the DS9/Cardassian stuff), so I'd probably play this over the newest game now.

I was playing the Star Trek: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator this past weekend.  

Back in the day I had the Star Trek III: Starship Combat Roleplaying Game.  My crew and I played it a few times, but we didn't much like it.  We were fans of SFB and thought the FASA offering was too simplistic.  We didn't think the FASA game replicated the kind of starship combat we wanted in our imaginations.  We also thought that the STCS was the exact same rules repackaged with no changes.  

I found out we were wrong.  It's mostly the same, but there are a lot of subtle changes that really alter the game.  Plus, when we played this past weekend, we played where internal hits were allocated in blocks of 5 points instead of all to one location.  It made the game feel a lot better.  I had a great time and am looking forward to another game.

I just need to print out some Master Control forms.  I had tons of forms from the ST3 version of the game, but the STCS ones are different and have some pretty critical stuff on them due to alterations in the rules.

Quote from: Omega;1043396FASA's Star Trek is a great game. Just takes some getting used to the system.

Another good ST game is Starships & Spacemen 1978 by FGU. Combine it with Star Explorer and you have a pretty good Star Trek game with the serial numbers barely filed off.

Star Frontiers can be retooled to play a ST setting as well.

There was also a Star Trek RPG with a solo mode I think. Also by Fasa?

I also have Starships & Spacemen 2e and Far Trek.  I think I have a PDF of Where No Man Has Gone Before on my harddrive somewhere.

By "solo mode" do you mean like a programmed GM-less adventure book for one player or a Star Trek RPG intended for one GM and one player?

I'll briefly toot my horn that I think Star Trek is one of those things that should have a section focusing on single player play where the lone player is captain of a starship.  The other bridge crew should be like henchmen which can each be summarized on an index card, and maybe improved with XP the captain earns.

Quote from: finarvyn;1043415I think that this is a critical point in your post. Once TNG (and other series) came out, I think that Star Trek was looked at through a very different lens.

I understand that TNG/DS9/Voy/TNG Movies comprise the vast majority of the franchise.  I also understand from a cultural touchstone POV that TOS is always going to trump the movies.  There's also not much to work with in terms of source material for the TOS Movies.

Still, I'm consistently amazed how the TOS movie era doesn't just seem low priority, but actively ignored and shoved away.  Maybe I'm over sensitive to that.

You know how Doctor Who fans have iterations of the Doctor they call their Doctor?  TOS Movie era is my Trek.  So, having that era dropped at the end of the FASA days and never touched again kind of peeves me.

Quote from: RandyB;1043426FASATrek remains my all-time favorite alt.Trek setting. Game mechanics? I formed my opinion of FASA's inability to design and publish a decent set of RPG mechanics based on their Star Trek, and none of their subsequent RPG products changed my mind in the slightest.

(FASA created awesome settings, though. FASATrek. Battletech. Shadowrun. Renegade Legion. And here comes my Mekton Zeta fetish, but I could use MZ for any of those settings* much easier than I could use the original FASA RPG rules.)

*Although I don't think they ever did a Renegade Legion RPG.

There is a Renegade Legion RPG.  It's called Legionnaire.  I know nothing about it beyond it existing.  I used to want it back in the day, but I had gotten over that by the time it came within reach.

My opinion is that FASA RPG systems before Shadowrun were just kind of bland.  Mechwarrior and Trek were just basic task resolution systems.  Mechwarrior had a pretty average point build chargen system while Trek had a lifepath Traveller inspired chargen.  Doctor Who...  

Quote from: Krimson;1043433You think that's bad, you should try Doctor Who. I don't recall Mechwarrior being that great either, but those games were still fun to play.

I still can't quite figure out what they were smoking when they did Doctor Who.  It's basically the same as Star Trek, but it's like it's got an overlay on top of it to obfuscate everything.

Quote from: Gabriel2;1043528I still can't quite figure out what they were smoking when they did Doctor Who.  It's basically the same as Star Trek, but it's like it's got an overlay on top of it to obfuscate everything.

Just remember to use a shotgun for everything. :D

The FASA Starship Combat Simulator is a great game.

I played in one of one of their first convention games.  The Feds had 3 Starships, the Klingons had a Bird of Prey frigate, 2 D-7s, and two destroyers.

The game played to a decisive conclusion in 2 1/2 hours, including explaining the rules to eight people who had never played before.

Forrest Brown of FASA said that was a major part of their design objective; to create a game that played quickly, as a direct counter to SFB.

Quote from: Gabriel2;1043528Still, I'm consistently amazed how the TOS movie era doesn't just seem low priority, but actively ignored and shoved away.  Maybe I'm over sensitive to that.

You know how Doctor Who fans have iterations of the Doctor they call their Doctor?  TOS Movie era is my Trek.  So, having that era dropped at the end of the FASA days and never touched again kind of peeves me.

  LUG had a TOS movie sourcebook in the works, it just got scrapped when Paramount pulled the license out from under them after WotC assimilated them. Fragments of it could be found online in the past.

I never liked the FASA rules. Way too complex.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1043870I never liked the FASA rules. Way too complex.

When I was playing it, there weren't exactly much in the way of other options. :D

Ages ago I read somewhere that most people effectively chucked the whole man to man action point combat system out the window and played with a simple Move/Attack engine.  This was basically the only complicated thing about the system.  Once that is ripped away, it becomes a very basic percentile system.  

Starship combat is fairly simple, especially when gauged against other 80s games.  Last weekend we were up and running and having a Constitution versus K'Tinga dogfight within a few minutes after not having played the game for decades.  It wasn't without some rule searching, but it was not terribly complex.  I guess I'd say it was a notch in complexity above a game of X-Wing.  Is it good for RPGs?  Well, that's certainly debatable.

Completely off topic, years ago I read that work was being done on a port of Star Fleet Battles to Silent Death rules.  Now THAT would be awesome!  Silent Death kicks ass!  It's a shame that the project seems to have fallen into the same black hole as D6 Prime Directive did.

Quote from: RandyB;1043426FASATrek remains my all-time favorite alt.Trek setting. Game mechanics? I formed my opinion of FASA's inability to design and publish a decent set of RPG mechanics based on their Star Trek, and none of their subsequent RPG products changed my mind in the slightest.

(FASA created awesome settings, though. FASATrek. Battletech. Shadowrun. Renegade Legion. And here comes my Mekton Zeta fetish, but I could use MZ for any of those settings* much easier than I could use the original FASA RPG rules.)

*Although I don't think they ever did a Renegade Legion RPG.

I wish they had, the Renegade Legion setting was my favorite. I still have my Centurion boxed set!

Quote from: RandyB;1043426FASATrek remains my all-time favorite alt.Trek setting. Game mechanics? I formed my opinion of FASA's inability to design and publish a decent set of RPG mechanics based on their Star Trek, and none of their subsequent RPG products changed my mind in the slightest.

(FASA created awesome settings, though. FASATrek. Battletech. Shadowrun. Renegade Legion. And here comes my Mekton Zeta fetish, but I could use MZ for any of those settings* much easier than I could use the original FASA RPG rules.)

*Although I don't think they ever did a Renegade Legion RPG.

Quote from: AaronBrown99;1044296I wish they had, the Renegade Legion setting was my favorite. I still have my Centurion boxed set!

Apparently I was mistaken...

Quote from: Gabriel2;1043528There is a Renegade Legion RPG.  It's called Legionnaire.  I know nothing about it beyond it existing.  I used to want it back in the day, but I had gotten over that by the time it came within reach.

FASA Star Trek was one of my earlier skill driven games.  I wasn't familiar with representing difficulty of different types of tasks in any other way than a die roll modifier.

So, when I started reading the skill section it was very interesting.  I definitely hadn't grokked it back in the day.  Reading it now makes me feel that I far underestimated the game and it was a bit ahead of its time.

Difficulty could certainly be handled by die roll modifiers, but different situations required resolving skill checks in different ways.

A routine task in non-critical conditions was resolved by rolling 1d10 equal to or less than the character's skill.  This meant that experienced characters never had to worry about this, but it provided some granularity for those at the bottom of the skill scale.

A non-critical task was basically the type of situation we'd recognize now as something where the player would "Take 10" in a d20 system game.  In this case the player would subtract their skill from 40 and the result would be their percentage chance of failing the task.  So, if the character's skill was 40 or above there was no problem with tasks like this.

A critical task was something rushed and requiring high skill.  It was stuff like combat checks or repairing the warp drive while engineering was on fire and the ship is about to explode in 45 seconds.  This was the more conventional full percentile roll against the skill percentage, with possible modifiers applied.

Of course, none of it is phrased exactly like this, but looking back at it now it's clearly recognizable as a modern difficulty tier system.  It's a little strange, but I find myself impressed by it.

In all honesty, as I flip through the old FASA game, it seems a lot more streamlined than I ever gave it credit for.

I was quite into SFB for a while. We ran a giant SFB campaign for a few years, but with near-zero roleplaying.

The FASA game didn't look very interesting coming from SFB, to us.

When TNG came out, I made it half-way through the pilot episode and stopped trying to like it.

I have considered running some Star Trek RPG using GURPS and SFB, but I didn't particularly like what SFB did when it got "extended" into things like Prime Directive - I might use some of Prime Directive but ignore some parts, such as the aforementioned DR 8 spandex and wimpy phasers. Phasers should be utterly deadly.

Quote from: Skarg;1044495I was quite into SFB for a while. We ran a giant SFB campaign for a few years, but with near-zero roleplaying.

The FASA game didn't look very interesting coming from SFB, to us.

When TNG came out, I made it half-way through the pilot episode and stopped trying to like it.

I have considered running some Star Trek RPG using GURPS and SFB, but I didn't particularly like what SFB did when it got "extended" into things like Prime Directive - I might use some of Prime Directive but ignore some parts, such as the aforementioned DR 8 spandex and wimpy phasers. Phasers should be utterly deadly.

I think I mentioned earlier in the thread how my group was about the same when it came to SFB versus FASA Trek Starship Combat.  We completely dismissed it.  It's funny that now years later the exact same qualities that relegated it to the bin of unplayed games are the qualities that make it attractive to play.  SFB requires a dedication I can't give to a game anymore.  

I watched Encounter at Farpoint again for the first time in many years.  I don't quite recall what my complete reaction to it was back in the day.  I was just happy for more Star Trek, I think.  Still, the first two episodes don't age well at all.  They have some incredibly stilted and forced dialogue.  It's definitely a pilot episode desperately throwing hooks everywhere and hoping one lands.

Quote from: Skarg;1044495The FASA game didn't look very interesting coming from SFB, to us.

For me SFB was the better starship combat game, but the FASA version was brilliant at how it made the players work together during a tabletop roleplaying session. While I could have replicated the same setup with SFB it would have no been as approachable as FASA's take.

They also had this gem, the interactive Tricoder/Ship Sensor display. It brilliantly eliminate the parrot problem with relaying the result of a successful scan check.

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mFjy4EWzmtg/ShyhXMpoe1I/AAAAAAAAAWY/xXJxOCDhqsg/s1600/RSC+002.JPG)

Quote from: Gabriel2;1043528Back in the day I had the Star Trek III: Starship Combat Roleplaying Game.  

We played those to death. Really fun.

As for the "sameyness" you can thank Paramount. They were the most stringent of licensors. From what I've heard, they really killed FASA, dragging out the production times (and costs) of the ST products as they hemmed and hawed over little details to make sure things conformed to The Vision. I think the fighty-fighty nature was also becoming problematic in the ST:TNG era, requiring more re-writes, etc., with Paramount basically making the license untenable for FASA.

I think Paramount had also figured out by that point that little hobby games require a lot of reading/research by their own IP people to approve in return for very little profit. Most "big sellers" in boardgame and RPG land are rounding errors for media companies. A boardgame company I worked with in the 90s approached Paramount regarding licensing ST for a card game got rebuffed with "you can't afford it" without even a discussion - it just wasn't even worth their time.

Quote from: darthfozzywig;1044539As for the "sameyness" you can thank Paramount. They were the most stringent of licensors. From what I've heard, they really killed FASA, dragging out the production times (and costs) of the ST products as they hemmed and hawed over little details to make sure things conformed to The Vision. I think the fighty-fighty nature was also becoming problematic in the ST:TNG era, requiring more re-writes, etc., with Paramount basically making the license untenable for FASA.

The end of FASA Trek was bewildering from my perspective at the time.  Here was a well supported game that seemed to be growing in popularity (well, more like finally getting attention) because of the movies and new TV series.  There were plenty of announced products coming.  Then...  it was done.  Everything was cancelled.  FASA no longer had the license.

The story I heard for a long time was the Gene Roddenberry heard about Operation Armageddon and the license got pulled because of that game.  There were these whispers back then that a small number of copies of Operation Armageddon had been printed and sold, maybe 50 to 100.  Of course, in reality the game was never anything more than a concept and a placeholder image in a catalog.

I really wanted Operation Armageddon back then.  I imagined it as Federation & Empire, only playable.

Quote from: darthfozzywig;1044539I think the fighty-fighty nature was also becoming problematic in the ST:TNG era, requiring more re-writes, etc., with Paramount basically making the license untenable for FASA.

I may be mistaken but I recall that there was some issue if the FASA license from Paramount extended to TNG, even as they shipped their first supporting book for it.

Does anyone know if the Prime Directive / Traveller materials are dead in the water?

Given the ranking system and branches in TOS, this seemed to me like a winning combination.

Quote from: Gabriel2;1044540The end of FASA Trek was bewildering from my perspective at the time.  Here was a well supported game that seemed to be growing in popularity (well, more like finally getting attention) because of the movies and new TV series.  There were plenty of announced products coming.  Then...  it was done.  Everything was cancelled.  FASA no longer had the license.

The story I heard for a long time was the Gene Roddenberry..........

I happen to know the real story, and you are only 50% accurate about a Roddenberry involvement.
Send me a private message and I might tell the story.

Sometimes, it is surprising which industry insiders stop by a game store on a slow day - then conversations happen....

- Ed C.

Yeah, that is a very cool tricorder prop!

Hmm, actually there's an idea for a mobile app that could be interesting to use in an RPG: turns your players' mobile devices into their PCs' equipment for a sci fi game....

The thing that gets me about starship RPGs is that there seems to be a hard tension between having a unbiased and interesting space combat system, and not having at least some PCs tend to be fairly sidelined, irrelevant, and/or at risk of sudden death due to being on (part of) a ship that is getting blown to itty bitty pieces. Since my tastes run towards not wanting to sacrifice the interesting and unbiased space combat system, players would need to have several characters and/or not mind being inactive or arbitrarily killed sometimes.

Quote from: Skarg;1044576Yeah, that is a very cool tricorder prop!

Hmm, actually there's an idea for a mobile app that could be interesting to use in an RPG: turns your players' mobile devices into their PCs' equipment for a sci fi game....

The thing that gets me about starship RPGs is that there seems to be a hard tension between having a unbiased and interesting space combat system, and not having at least some PCs tend to be fairly sidelined, irrelevant, and/or at risk of sudden death due to being on (part of) a ship that is getting blown to itty bitty pieces. Since my tastes run towards not wanting to sacrifice the interesting and unbiased space combat system, players would need to have several characters and/or not mind being inactive or arbitrarily killed sometimes.

Hmmm a mobile app. I'd totally play Star Trek Go. Maybe. Unless they kill it with microtransactions.

The tricorder is hilarious.