Steve: The Final Frontier

[virgil]

How would one do a mystery in a setting like Star Trek? I'm reminded of one of the inherent problems with it

It is important also to note that Star Trek is a completely unplayable game world and is in fact a classic example of what not to do when designing a cooperative storytelling game. Imagine: you're on a ship and weird green things are appearing in the hallways and causing energy conduits to explode. Oh noes! What do you do?

Seriously, what the heck do you do? It's Star Trek, what the characters do is wander around running diagnostics until theyfigure out what radiation emissions from the crystal aliens are making their shit explode and then they throw some super physics at the problem to either shut out the harmful rays, solve the deeper environmental problem causing those rays to happen in the first place, or just frickin leave and hope the problem doesn't follow. But what the heck does a player do? The characters are just making extended science tests until they win the adventure, the player has seemingly no input whatsoever.

There's no game there, it's just a narrative. The viewer has literally no basis on which to anticipate what the next group of forehead aliens are or do, and has no idea how to solve any particular problem. Everything that happens is the equivalent of Game Master Exposition.

People will want to game in settings like Harry Potter, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and others. Not everyone will want to have their game be about punching strange things, and there will be a desire for a mystery akin to Call of Cthulhu (with less death, of course).

Rather than just shake your head and deny, what kind of mechanics could one use to overcome the difficulties in such a goal?

My own personal ideas include a combination of the GUMSHOE system with FATE points or checks to 'create' facts within a comparatively narrow field when used.

[fectin]

Don't make your mysteries science problems?

For serious, you can just say, "your diagnostics tell you nothing".

[Doom]

And then you'll also have to make your mysteries things that a Vulcan mind meld can't solve.

[Endovior]

If you want mystery-type adventures in Star Trek, a couple of things that come to mind immediately is either stuff like Star Trek VI (the whole murdered diplomat thing, and trying to track down who was responsible before things escalate to a full-blown war), or at a lower-scales thing, maybe that TNG episode with the inquest into Wesley's training accident (people are lying to cover ass, and the facts about what really happened need to come out).

[Blade]

A simple solution is to offer more common challenges (a simple whodunit, for example) but set in that universe, and taking into account the possibilities it offers (for example : god intervention, magic, time travel, etc.).

Another is to setup the usefuls facts: subtly introduce the elements the players will need to know in a scene near the beginning of the adventure (or in a previous adventure) so that the players will be aware of that fact when they need it. This is harder to pull off, but also more rewarding for the players.

A third solution is to let the PC try things as long as the player offer a consistent explanation. For example, if there are harmful radiation from the crystal aliens, the scientist PC can tell you "I think that if we remove the shielding from the medical scanner and route the engine's power there, we could get it to send a radiation pulse that will counter the crystal alien just long enough to get them off the wires were they draw power". If the GM agrees and the player rolls well enough on the following "Science" test, the plan might work. Of course, the GM can also play this game ("you can do that, but the radiation pulse will stun all humans on board").
Just make sure that reversing polarity can only be done once, and only as the last resort.

[hogarth]

Maybe you could make it work in a kitschy Silver Age kind of way by saying that no solution can ever be mentioned again. E.g. if you solve a problem by inventing a superspeed formula, then no subsequent problem can be solved by inventing a potion, or if you use the Vulcan mind meld once, you conveniently forget about it in future "episodes".

[Stubbazubba]

I think there's a GUMSHOE game where mutants were a predominant feature of the setting. Kinda ran into the same problem, but the mutant powers weren't random like in X-Men, they were well categorized and attached to certain other qualities. So, with the game came a big chart showing you all the connections, so that you could follow a clue to its origin, even if it was complete pseudo-science made up by the authors. You could do the same with the Star Trek universe, just make a diagram of 'science.' Then, when that Science check comes back and tells you it functions like a wave of Tachyon particles, you can resort to your Starfleet Officer's Field Guide to figure out what your options are to deal with that.

You'd need to make getting the diagnostic a little more interesting, though. For instance, the ship's scanners can't just look at it and tell what it is, either because the ship's scanners aren't that good, or because the phantom menace has specifically disabled the scanners to protect itself. So Worf, Geordi, and a red shirt have to sneak in, Worf will distract it while Geordi and the red shirt collect a sample or set up a short-wave scanner or something, the thing finds out, the red shirt dies, but they collect what they need and everyone gets safely back out. Then it'll take some time for the computer to process the results, where something else happens. Then you check the diagram to see what you can do with Tachyon stuff, and either sneak in and set up a disruptive blast, make an Engineering check which requires you to be in the same room as the entity, or whatever else.

[Username17]

For games in which the players genuinely do not know how the in-game physics work, you have two main choices:

• Exposition Theater
  You run things like Harry Potter. So one adventure you just up and decide that there are super powerful artifacts that are super important and that some of the random crap that people were using to no apparent effect earlier in the story actually are these artifacts. Also you have a whole thing about wands being Pokemon that naturally belong to whoever beat the living fuck out of their nominal owner last. There is absolutely no lead-up to that in previous adventures or the setting, because you just made it up right now for this adventure.
  
  What you give the players access to is defined ways that they can get exposition. That is: you go "mess with the sensors" or "read old tomes" or some shit, and you make a roll and if you succeed the MC gives you an info dump about whatever the fuck is going on. Then, having gained information that Deathly Hollows are important for some reason, the players are empowered to go do shit about it. This method suffers pretty severely from "Mother May I" and "Guess the MC's preferred solution" syndromes, as you might expect.
  
  Shared Setting Description
  In this version, the player simply announces how magic or super science or whatever works for the moment. There is in this model essentially no "mystery" in the classic sense, because the important plot points are basically given to a vote. The players presumably have some sort of limit to how and when they are allowed to take control of the setting: maybe they have a certain ammount of NI (Narrative Imperative) that refreshes at some point. Or maybe they get to grab the story stick and start ranting whenever their character would make a discovery in-game.
  
  In this model, it is Harry's Player who announces that he is retconning his invisibility cloak to be vastly more powerful and important than other invisibility cloaks in the setting. And when Hermoine's player points out that they already used wards that make people unable to detect their whole fucking campsite he just glares at her and says "I have the story stick right now, and I say my cloak is the only super bestest invisibility cloak in the whole world". Obviously, this scenario is prone to derailment, especially if one of the players is like Harry's player and just starts making dickish pronouncements that don't make sense and hog spotlight time. And of course: the MC may have to radically alter the parameters of the ongoing mystery on the fly if one of the players makes an explanation for one of the clues that the MC was not expecting.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Sounds like it's impossible to have a consistently satisfying gaming experience under those paradigms, Frank. Was that backhanded snark?

[Username17]

Sounds like it's impossible to have a consistently satisfying gaming experience under those paradigms, Frank. Was that backhanded snark?

Well, you can't consistently have anything. You're playing without a social contract. Whoever you entrust with introducing new setting elements may decide that other players think are "awesome" or "interesting" - but they might equally decide to introduce things that the other players think are "retarded" or "offensive".



Seriously: if you don't know how the magic system works, and one player thought they were doing a Friendship is Magic thing and another player thought they were doing a Grimdark thing, how do you expect that to not end in tears and acrimony?

-Username17

[hogarth]

Sounds like it's impossible to have a consistently satisfying gaming experience under those paradigms, Frank. Was that backhanded snark?

That sort of thing works well enough for a goofy, light-hearted game, IMO (e.g. Toon).

[fectin]

So, let me try this again: there are a number of mysteries that happened on Star Trek that didn't require selective amnesia. There was the first episode where the opponent was essentially a Deus Deceptor, there was the one where they were quarantined on the planet with the plague children who stole their communicators, there was the one with the escaped prisoner, there was the one where the woman was secretly an alien/android/whatever, there were all the ones where they received stupid orders, there was the one where Spock betrays them, etc.

There are a whole bunch of different specifics, but they basically have four themes: unseen antagonists (you don't know they're bad, so you never scan them to find out why they're bad), trapped away from technology (given that they beam down to places, this is super easy), equivalent opponents/betrayal, and deus ex machina (aka DM dickery: "your science can't comprehend Q!"). Of these, the first three all make perfectly fine mysteries.

You can run "Why do the Romulans want this planet" ("because their cookie recipe is literally addictive", or whatever) all day, especially if the Romulans don't show up to be mind melded.

[Chamomile]

Use a small, pre-determined number of forehead aliens, and give the players a chance to interact with them before they're forced to deduce mysteries about them (in a sandbox-style game, which Star Trek, being exploration-themed, lends itself to, this can just be leaving the forehead aliens lying around the sector). For example, let's pretend you just invented the Ferengi and threw them at the Enterprise-D. If you run some Science tests on the Ferengi, you can determine some potentially useful facts about their anatomy and culture and such, depending on your success.

For example, you might learn that they're immune to telepathy. Thus, when you find yourself being stalked by a killer whose mind can't be read, you might suspect it's a Ferengi. On the other hand, there might be some telepathy-repelling mineral on some planet somewhere that could be doing the same thing. So long as the players have access to this information in advance, they can solve the mystery.

If you're doing the sandbox thing, you also need to give players the ability to escape from opponents they don't yet have the information to defeat. So when a telepathy-proof assassin shows up on Planetopolis V, the players need to be able to leave and zoom around the sector some more in order to find out about the Ferengi's mind blank ability and the Anti-Thinkium over on the Planet of the Miner Hats.

[echoVanguard]

It's also worth pointing out that in a lot of Star Trek episodes, the protagonists run up against things they quantifiably fail to analyze exhaustively. Much of the alien phenomena they encounter is either intractably foreign (and analysis without a Rosetta Stone yields nothing regardless of effort) or totally beyond their reach (out of phase with known EM wavelengths, immune to phasers, utilizing an unknown scientific principle, etc).

There are also a significant number of scenarios where a particular course of action is possible but also wildly inappropriate where going outside the bounds of acceptable action can have tremendously negative consequences, an idea distressingly foreign to most modern TTRPG players. Example: in one episode, two teams of diplomats from warring planets attack and kill each other repeatedly on board the ship, but when confronted insist that nothing has happened. While a Vulcan could conceivably mind-meld with one of the diplomats to learn the truth, that would also be an inexcusable violation of the diplomats' sovereignty which could lead to breakdown of relations, open war, and almost certainly the court-martial and discharge of the Vulcan player (effectively killing their character). Players would need to operate within the confines of reasonable, politically-correct behavior to solve the mystery of who is really attacking whom.

Honestly, I don't really see what the problem is with setting mysteries in the Star Trek universe. As technology increases, the technology to oppose it increases also - something as simple as a locked-room murder can be done in Star Trek when the murderer shoves the bloody knife into a disposal hatch where it is disintegrated. Now all five of the suspects have absolutely no physical evidence incriminating them, and the computer says that the whereabouts of all five were accounted for at the time of the murder.

Where do you go from here? Potential actions:
- Interview the suspects to find holes in their stories. (Social checks)
- Search for other physical clues the murderer may have missed (Search checks)
- Investigate whether the computer has been tampered with (Computer checks)
- Search for a hidden person who isn't one of the five original suspects (declarative movement and searching)

The encounters aren't just investigative in nature, either - one of the characters who separates from the others could be attacked by an unrecognizable figure who tries to stop them from gathering a critical piece of evidence, or an unknown person could trigger a radiation leak that will kill several of the investigators unless someone makes an extended athletics check to reach the shut-off valve in time while the others make Computer checks to reroute the radiation and extend the deadline. None of these things are inconsistent with either the themes or the established mechanics of the Star Trek universe.

echo

[hyzmarca]

Getting into a phaser fight with renegade Klingons should work, too. It isn't necessary for everything to be a mystery. Sometimes you do have an obvious enemy whom you need to blow up.

[echoVanguard]

Getting into a phaser fight with renegade Klingons should work, too. It isn't necessary for everything to be a mystery. Sometimes you do have an obvious enemy whom you need to blow up.

While that is true, the entire point of the thread was how to do mysteries specifically in Star Trek and similar settings.

echo

[K]

Star Trek uses social combats almost exclusively.

So when people are trying to repair the ship before the warp core explodes because they ran into a stellar penis, the "combat" is all the social combat that happens to get people to work together and do their damn job. Getting to make techno-babble checks is the result of successful social combat.

It's the same when Star Trek guys run into god-like aliens. They do a lot of combat using the social combat system and the alien slinks away after being beaten and lets them go.

This is why so many Star Trek episodes are negotiations, detentes, or mysteries. These are all the areas where a social combat system shines.

The space combat and hand-to-hand with giant lizard men is just to break up the monotony of social combat. Basically, Star Trek is the opposite of DnD because it requires a horribly complex social combat system and a really simple melee and starship combat system.

[virgil]

So until we reach that holy grail of a good social combat system, Star Trek will be a bad idea?

[K]

So until we reach that holy grail of a good social combat system, Star Trek will be a bad idea?

Not a "bad idea" so much, but definitely not true to the source material.

I mean, if you aren't making grand speeches about human dignity and have that actually mean something mechanical in-game, then you aren't making a set of rules that let people replicate the vast majority of Star Trek plots that they are familiar with.

[Username17]

If you just want to do forehead alien sci-fi (or magic-is-mysterious fantasy), then you need a way to generate new "rules" for the problems and solutions in the middle of play. But if you specifically want to do Star Trek, you need a social combat system that is most of your game.

-Username17

[fectin]

Alternity or hacked up Danger Patrol might work.