Hypothetically...

There's a new "Star Trek" RPG coming out. I'm probably going to skip it, for various reasons, not least that I'm kinda hoping to play, rather than run. However, hypothetically speaking, if I were to run a "Star Trek" campaign, what would I do?

Era of Play

I'd set the campaign in the era of the Original Series movies. In fact, to be more specific, I'd set it in 2295 - two years after the first section of "Generations", and so two years after the end of that movies series.

The Ship and the Crew

The reason for that specific year is that it would allow me to set the campaign aboard the Enterprise-B without also being laden down with lots of fixed lore to work around - that ship only has two (or three) named crew-members, any of whom could have been re-assigned in the meantime, but it also has the famous name.

The players would be free to create pretty much any suitable character for the campaign. In the event that they chose to play the captain or helmsman, then the characters from "Generations" would be re-assigned; if not, those characters would remain as NPCs. (In general, my preference for a ST-style game would indeed be for the captain to be an NPC, with the bulk of his/her decisions made by the consensus of the players, thus allowing the players to drive the campaign without having a pesky chain of command to worry about.)

Campaign Structure

The campaign would see the Enterprise out in deep space on another Five Year Mission, at least initially. In keeping with the series, it would be mostly episodic, maybe with some arcs being added to the campaign later. (Indeed, there's an argument for using the game as another "open tabletop", with many players each bringing their own crew-member to the table, and with the selection of players determining which characters are in focus in the session.)

Perhaps importantly, because the ship will be "out there", they'll be in a position where (1) they can't rely on the might of the Federation for backup but will have to deal with problems themselves, but also (2) they won't necessarily be constrained by the Federation's rules all the time - sure, there's the Prime Directive, but if they break it, who's to know?

Other Stuff

Star Trek has always been fairly optimistic, and when it has gone wrong that has tended to be when it has gone too dark. Even when facing off against world-ending threats, the feeling has tended to be quite upbeat. Heck, even "Voyager", where the crew faced the prospect of living their entire lives on the ship, remained optimistic. So I'd certainly intend to maintain that feeling in the campaign.

Equally, though, Star Trek has tended to draw quite heavily from the zeitgeist - in particular, an awful lot of the Federation/Klingon interaction in TOS was a parallel for the Cold War. Of course, that tension largely came to an end in "The Undiscovered Country". Consequently, I'd be inclined to draw from the spirit of our times, where the main threats tend to be smaller-scale and also not really amenable to being solved with big guns. Plus, I'd be inclined to have the Federation (and the crew of the Enterprise) face some measure of existentialist angst - they're in the most advanced ship in the fleet, a heavily-armed warship... and now the threat that the ship was designed to counter has been largely removed. They find themselves on a scientific and exploration mission that the Excelsior-class isn't really designed for. So, what are they for?

Oh, and of course the powers-that-be will have insisted on installing a plaque in deflector control, which has turned out to be a spectacular mis-step. Especially since everyone wears red shirts in the movie universe...

Lessons for My Younger Self

Earlier this week, I was asked what I would advise my younger self to do differently, if I had the chance to go back and make changes. Of course, the problem with this is the Butterfly Effect - change one thing, and everything else changes around it, and you can't know what would result.

But, as a thought experiment, and in the field of RPGs only...

#1: Books

Right, you see all these books? These are the wrong books - not only will they not improve your game, they'll actually make it worse. What's even worse, you won't recognise that - you'll think they're making it better for a long, long time. And the effect is that they'll warp your thinking about what makes for a good or a bad game.

Instead, you might want to consider some of these books instead: one setting (not little bits of six), some few adventures from across the level range, and maybe those lovely "Green Cover" historical books. Oh, and get a subscription to Dungeon magazine and read it cover to cover... even if you never run even a single adventure from the magazine.

(And while we're at it, don't buy lots of little bits of several different games, either. If you're going to run it, fine, and if you're going to play in a campaign buy the Core Rulebook(s). But if you don't have immediate plans to do one or the other, let it pass you by.)

#2: About the Rules

While I'm at it, read the damn rules of the game you're playing, and actually use those rules in play. Seriously, kid, you got away with soooo much crap that it's not funny. But when you get to university, you're going to have your eyes opened.

Besides, the game is better if people don't have to play variants on the same three character types because none of the others can actually use their powers because you don't know how they work.

#3: Wasted Time

Every time you've ever sat down to write your own game system, or some heavily-modified version of an existing system, you've been wasting your time. Every. Time. (Yes, including the work I did on "Nutshell" on this blog.) Either you get bogged down in the work, lose interest, and abandon the project or, in the one case you actually finished it, you promptly abandoned it and went back to the 'real thing'. Just stop.

Likewise, you don't need a dozen settings all doing much the same thing. There actually is a place for having multiple settings - but only if they're significantly distinct. There's a place for Ravenloft and Dark Sun and Spelljammer and Planescape, but Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance are too similar for all to be worthwhile. (NB: those weren't my settings, but if I named those then the names wouldn't mean anything to anyone who reads this!)

What you should be spending time on is adventures, and characters, and storylines. Those serve the dual purpose of being things you'll probably actually use and also making you better at writing adventures, characters, and stories.

#4: Reading Material

You're going to hate me for saying this, but your English teacher is right - the fantasy books you're reading are crap. It's not even that they're fantasy that's the problem. There's some good fantasy out there; it's just that you've somehow missed all of those and picked out some of the worst of the worst.

For fantasy, go read some David Gemmell, the first few Lankhmar books by Frizt Lieber (but only the first few!), RE Howard's Conan novels, and the first few Elric stories (again, only the first few). Plus, you can stick with the Terry Pratchett and Tolkien books - those are good stuff. (But when you're in Smiths in Glasgow and there's a signing by Terry Pratchett, go and buy the new book and get it signed. You damn fool.)

Oh, yes, and skip "Wheel of Time" completely... and don't bother with "A Song of Ice and Fire" either - thanks to some interminable waits, you'll be better off just watching the TV series.

But you really should branch out beyond fantasy. Get and read some good horror, some better sci-fi... and you'll want to be tackling other genres too. Something to watch out for, though: you'll want to start small, because trying to dive straight to a thousand-page novel is a real quick way to avoid the classics for a decade or more.

#5: Got That? Good. Now...

Forget everything I've just told you. Because here's the thing: there's no one true way to have fun. And just as what seemed good at twelve no longer seems appropriate at forty, so too does the advice of forty-year-old me have little bearing on what twelve-year-old me should do. We're so separated in time as to be, essentially, completely different people.

Besides, it's not like I won't have time to fix some of the mistakes you'll make. When I'm not busy making plenty of mistakes of my own...

Picking Up the Pieces

In the last session, I had a strong impression that we were heading for a TPK - the party had got themselves in way over their heads, and it strongly looked like they were on their way out.

Instead, we suffered what may be the only thing that's worse: two PCs died but the rest escaped to fight another day. This fell just short of my "let's call it a day" threshold, while leaving two players without a PC with the rest of the group in a location where bringing a new guy in would be difficult.

Fortunately, there's a way around this: we're going to advance time a little from the end of the last session to the start of this one, gloss over the exact details of the party's flight through Ashtakala, and have them return to Sharn ready to set out again.

My projected Four Acts for tonight's game, then...

1. The party returns to Sharn. Not everything is well at the station - the Spider-Eye Goblins have made an incursion. The PCs are introduced to their new allies.
2. The party investigate the "Ebon Flame", the curse that surrounds it, and may get some help from an unexpected quarter...
3. A new course is plotted. But an old enemy makes a reappearance (and ties off an obselete plot thread).
4. The party arrives in... Greywall? Fairhaven?

Of course, it's entirely like that things won't go quite according to plan...