Celestial Jaunt [PL stay out]

[virgil]

I'm wanting to make a Trek-style RPG, along the veins of TOS & TNG. I'm less interested in the high action of more modern Trek, which I feel the current system by Mophidius better supports. Currently, I'm choosing to use the Burning Wheel engine, which includes Torchbearer & Mouse Guard systems as part of my design inspiration.

Dice Resolution Dice pool system, using d6s, every 4+ is a hit. Your dice pool is typically going to be either your skill rank, your Will, or your Health; depending on the circumstances. Modifiers can adjust this pool, in the format of +/-1D.

Conditions These are usually not effects applied as an attack, but effects a PC accrues as a cost to overcome an obstacle, ultimately serving as a form of narrative HP. Standard conditions are as follows: angry, afraid, exhausted, injured, ill-equipped, sick. Sick also handles situations like mental duress. Ill-equipped covers the circumstances where either your equipment is unavailable or unable to handle the situation, and can be recovered through technobabble - in many ways, it's going to serve the same mechanical role as [hungry & thirsty] does in Torchbearer as far as how it's recovered.

Character Creation
Ethics A snapshot of your PC's beliefs or ethical stance.
Goal An imperative objective, achievable w/in the session.
Instinct Triggered, ingrained action, allowing a free roll
Rank This isn't quite level, but it's close. No party can have more than one Commander and Captain each.

• Deputy - Starting Will 2, Starting Health 6, 12 skill points, 1 knowledge skill point, 1 bonus trait
• Inspector - Starting Will 3, Starting Health 5, 13 skill points, 2 knowledge skill points
• Lieutenant - Starting Will 4, Starting Health 4, 15 skill points, 3 knowledge skill points
• Commander - Starting Will 5, Starting Health 3, 17 skill points, 4 knowledge skill points, 1 bonus trait
• Captain- Starting Will 6, Starting Health 2, 21 skill points, 6 knowledge skill points, 1 bonus trait

Skills There will be a kind of lifepath system, so skill points will be spent on available items from different lists (homeworld gives you a choice of one out of a list of 3, for example). Your final skill rank is equal to one higher than the total number of points you put toward it (no +1 if you didn't put points in it). Below is the master list, organized by category:

• General Athletics. Domestic. Artistics. Performance. Rustic.
• Academy Tricorder. Phaser. Hand-to-Hand. Repairs. Survival.
• Command & Operations Diplomacy. Piloting. Command. Regulations.
• Science & Medicine Medicine. Biology. Planetary. Quantum-Mech. Computers. Astrophysics.
• Engineering & Security Communications. Propulsions. Shields. Ship-Fundamentals. Security.
• Questionable & Criminal Blackmarket. Espionage. Torture. Brainwashing. Guile.

Species Each will have various qualities, including a stat called Nature.
Traits Start with ~4; 1 from homeworld, ~2 from species, & 1 from department (Engineering, Science, etc). There are three categories of traits

• Character Handles stuff like RP tags.
• Dice Grants +1D to certain actions or unlocks access to certain skills.
• Special Grants special actions, allow checks to be made that normally can't, etc.

What's Next?
I need to decide on specific lists for traits, species (and their qualities), equipment, etc.

This is going to be a ripoffhomage to Star Trek, which means the setting is going to be different. The core premise of the game is for the party to be members of ship on a mission of exploration ("to boldly go"...). The practice of high-ranking officers going on away missions will still be present, which I don't know how to adequately justify within the narrative while keeping the premise of a crewed ship, as I don't want a Millennium Falcon scenario where the party makes up the entire ship; fortunately, Star Trek has laid the ground for this, so that this should be a familiar break from reality. While there's a semi-military structure, it will be well understood that areas of expertise trump rank ("A Sergeant in motion outranks a Lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on."). Additionally, if nobody's a Commander or Captain, then executive decisions will be made by the party with the Captain acting as an NPC-mouthpiece (and these will be the situations where the Captain doesn't go on away missions); whether this should include mechanics or just a page of describing the social contract is undecided.

Ships will have strong autonomy, which means communication with the gov't won't be reasonable while exploring (no subspace ansible that can reach HQ). My current thought is that STL will be gravitics & FTL will use an Alcubierre Drive. There won't be transporters.

Probably the biggest question is rewards for making decisions on what areas of space they explore; choosing to focus on prospecting style goals rather than first contact should have mechanical differences beyond the type of adventures the party's asking for. My first thought is to give the ship/PCs awards from Starfleet - generally a kind of [Plaque of Being Cool] with a neat description, grant fame within certain social circles (because you donated it to an orphanage), trophies, or even big projects like investing in personal ships/housing/property.

[Dean]

Star Trek has a very unique flavor to its adventures so I think the lions share of the work you'll need to do is on automating adventure creation. How robust your character creation is will be meaningless if you don't provide detailed guidance on how a Star Trek adventure is to be made and what it will look like. If you don't have information on what "Transporting Refugees" or "Diplomatic jostling over quadrant ownership" or "Contacting Xenophobic Alien Species" looks like then it is the equivalent of not having a Monster Manual for D&D. The abilities the players possess have no meaning in a vacuum. Star Trek adventures do not have their heroes fight monsters (much), so a literal monster manual isn't that important. A "Dilemma Manual" or some other form of pregenerated adventure pieces that give the DM information on what obstacles the players must triumph over and what skills and abilities can defeat the dilemma will be important.

A Star Trek adventure can be generated by combining a Sci Fi concept (A Technology, Crazy alien race, great scientific Undertaking) and a Social Issue. Examples: Teleportation and Rights of the Individual (Tuvix), Cloaking and Transparent Government (Who Watches the Watchers), Utopian Societies and Fair Courts (that one where if you fall in the flowers you're killed), Mass Migration and Racism (every episode where they're transporting a bunch of refugees). You could rig up a couple d20 lists of Sci Fi stuff on the left and social issues on the right to make a Star Trek adventure concept generator. Working how the two things you rolled could play off each other. Then the DM can grab appropriate Dilemmas from your Dilemma Manual and make a Star Trek adventure without a team of TNG writers. If you don't provide that you won't get Star Trek adventures no matter how many skills or stats you make because Star Trek adventures are much more complex than D&D adventures by default. Without adventure creation guidance your Star Trek heroes WILL be told to go kill space rats in the basement of space casinos then everything else is a failure no matter what. If you don't provide guidance on how to make Star Trek adventures (which are adventures that combine sci-fi themes with contemporary social issues to highlight the complexity of creating a truly humane society) then your heroes WILL end up shooting space rats in space basements and it will feel bad.

My suggestion is to work on an adventure creator. So the DM can roll CLONING and WEALTH INEQUALITY and decide it's about a planet that uses cloning to extend the lives of the super wealthy and powerful. So their leaders are practically immortal but average people's access to medicine is really terrible, particularly elder care, cause their super elites just get new bodies when they get old. So maybe we introduce a mean alien leader and a nice but sick old alien lady to represent the planets issues on a personal scale. The DM decides solving this planets issues might involve the dilemmas: "Tense Formal Dinner" with the leader, an "Attempt to Cure Alien Diseases", and a "Court Battle for Humane Rights". Each of those dilemmas might advantage certain skillsets and that's where it matters if your characters have Diplomacy, Medicine, Biology, Law, or Performance.

[deaddmwalking]

Keep in mind that a lot of solutions involve techno-babble. If we invert the injection coupling in the port nacelle, we can flush thoramatic particles through the Ionic Decoupler, creating a plasma reaction which should blind everyone in there long enough for a rescue team to beam directly to the hostages.

There's no chance your players would know that you could do that, because it never came up before and it'll never come up again. You'd need some jargon generator where if they succeed on some tech check you, as the GM, can tell them how it can be done. I don't know if there's a way you can make giving an answer to an unsolvable riddle to your players SATISFYING - while it does rely on their character investments it seems to me like you'd need something like a combat challenge for an engineer to get enough clues to put together a theory that can then make the larger dilemma solvable.

[Dean]

I think the techno babble is just what you do as the player when you succeed at a science check. Doing it might even give you an extra +1d6 to the roll or something if you want to go "exalted stunt" style. But the techno babble is definitely player side. You roll your Science check and if you fail you say "I'm trying to invert the quantum field but it's not working!" and if you succeed you say "I'll flush particles through the Ionic Decoupler, it might give us enough time to get the teleport through". You definitely should include a little generator, that's fun.

[Lord Charlemagne]

Agreeing with Dean that your next step is very much to create an outline for how you imagine an adventure to go. I can see how one could be structured, but you are going to need strong guidelines in order to make it so the GM can crank out a new adventure every week & convey the premise & potential solutions to the players easily. For this game, you are going to want players to pull out random solutions from the show &/or clever ideas from their pocket to help set the Star Trek mood, but you still need clear and visible lines of action to ensure George, who has never watched Star Trek, can still take important and helpful actions under his own volition.

Also, you need to dump that Rank garbage. You have big letters say, "One or two players in the party will be mechanically enforced to have a high social position & a better set of skills than the other players" and that is simply unacceptable as a sales pitch in a dicepool skill based game that anybody who runs it will have to sales pitch the entire system. It is fine if an adventure module or expansion material does something like that, but having it in your core rules will kill interest in the game super fast. "Sorry Dennis, I know you are interested in what Commander has to offer, but since you miss every 3rd meeting, we won't let you be this role &/or level up."

Player awards should default to being cool technology or important social contacts, both of which are on a recharge timer of when you can use them. One to two players should get a tech or social contact at the end of each meeting, which every few meetings they can use for an effect at a later meeting. This way, players slowly get more options as the campaign goes along and the stories can get grander and more personally interactive as they slowly grow their "spell list" without having a really hard level system, since Star Trek adventures aren't really level based but people will probably want some advancement.

[merxa]

I agree being a commander shouldn't make someone necessarily mechanically higher level with more and better abilities -- presumably Kirk didn't delevel when he deranked himself from admiral back to captain. Instead rank should represent who has the organizational authority and final say, so when the group shows up to planet of the week with some internecine civil war, everyone can have their [ethics] moment to persuade the captain on what the correct course of action is, or the moment of an away mission with a limited crew the ranking lieutenant takes charge and must navigate between competing opinions on courses of action. You could try cribbing the burning wheel's social combat system for this or simplifying it so multiple party members can all interact with it at once.

Leveling should be separate, and if you're not using burning wheels complex leveling system, a simpler gain 1-3 points per session which accrue to purchase skill advancements should suffice. You could have various ranks have various requirements, so someone can't qualify as a commander or captain until they a high enough x and y, that could let you have a dynamic where 'level 1' groups start out as the red shirts, scrubs, assistants, and level themselves up to the bridge crew (and there's no reason why the character creation default doesn't assume everyone's already made it to bridge crew), but it also means player characters aren't mechanically punished for not vying for captain, the captain instead becomes the character that needs to synthesize everyone's [ethics] output while taking responsibility with fleet command on the ultimate outcome.

[Dean]

How's this or a pitch on the Captain/Commander. It is not a class like Paladin or Wizard it is instead a role that one person on each crew must adopt. It's more like a template. The Commander can be a diplomat, scientist, tactician, or whatever else historically, but they are the Commander of this ship now so they have certain abilities. It would even be possible for someone to be made the Commander instantly because the old Commander died or was turned into a Borg, and that could happen at any moment.

Ok so what does being a Commander mean? Well what we want is for everyone to run ideas by the Commander and for the Commander to consider their suggestions, not be sure themselves of what to do, and to eventually be the one who makes large decisions about what happens. How do we make that happen in a cooperative game? Here's my pitch: The Commander can access the most powerful abilities but using them puts them personally at stake. Being a Commander is about being able to make big calls, but your ass being on the line if you're wrong.

Being the Commander gives you access to grander and more powerful abilities than anyone else has. Example: The Commander can call for military support. The Commander calling a warship to their location as soon as possible completely outclasses any military aid the Tactical Officer can give. The difference is if the Commander called a warship on a false alarm then the Commander will have HELL to pay. The Commander alone risks demotion and having their rank stripped for failed missions. Everyone else is assumed to be doing their best. Failing missions rather than death has always been the Boogeyman of Star Trek, so this is in genre.

So the Commander can gain huge tactical advantages, make huge Diplomatic gestures, gain access to huge technological support but they WANT to use none of those abilities. The Commander has ACCESS to the biggest abilities but their goal is to use none of them. So the Commander is incentivized to listen to everyone's idea of what kinda of mission it is and decide when and if they should push their big red buttons. The tactical officer can't call in a warship, the Commander can, so the Commander needs to listen to the Tactical Officer on assessing when they are in a situation the Tactical Officer alone can't handle. And the Tactical Officer knows this cause they know their own character abilities the best and are the best judge of when something is too big for them and when the Tactical Officer says they need a warship they try to convince the Commander to make it so. The Commander in turn would want to be sure that's true, cause it's the Commander's ass if it's not.

So the Commanders have big abilities but are on the hook for using them. Failing a mission is bad, and if that happens the Commander would be blamed for not using the abilities they had to make it succeed. Likewise succeeding at an average mission but using "Order Fleet Suppport" "Order Diplomatic Exceptions for Planet" and "Order Access of Experimental Scientific Facility" to do so would also be considered an enormous waste of resources that the Commander would be blamed for.

You could frame it as the Commander having a reserve of "Orders", perhaps gaining 1 per mission by default that acts as their "credit" with the Federation. A Commander with a large reserve would be thought of highly, maybe even rise in rank. It means they've gone on lots of missions and only used the diplomacy, cleverness, and scientific ingenuity of their crew to succeed. It would mean playing a Commander is about having to lean on your crew to get the most out of their abilities you possibly could and being reserved about making big calls, exactly like a Picard should.