Remembering STAR TREK Roleplaying Games

TrippyHippy said:

Speaking of Traveller, there has been a longstanding plan to have a Star Fleet Battles setting for the Mongoose Traveller rpg in a similar manner to the d20 and GURPS versions. Mongoose and ADB made a deal for miniatures/rpg ages ago but they’ve yet to get round to the RPG.

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From what I understand, the main holdup seems to be adapting the massive scale of SFB ships and combat to a workable Traveller system. In the other iterations of Prime Directive, they didn't really bother trying to adapt d20 and GURPS vehicle/ship rules in any meaningful fashion. Instead they offered a sort of crude system of adapting PC crew roles to either SFB or Federation Commander to resolve combat, or basically suggested the GM hand wave the whole thing.

TrippyHippy said:

The first Star Trek game I encountered was Star Trek: The Next Generation which came out in the late 1990s and had a credit list that was something of a Who’s Who list in game design terms. They were all snatched up by WotC when the d20 craze hit, then sacked shortly after before they were then recruited by Decipher for a new game.

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I believe you are talking about the Last Unicorn Games version.

Which for them, the rumor I heard was they got bought by WotC, who also held the Star Wars license, and that was a big no-no for Paramount and Lucasfilm to co-exist, so they axed the product.

Decipher got started (possibly by some of the now laid of LUG guys) and got the trek license.

Morrus said:

We came up with a weird little mechanic for the command authority issue. Essentially, the captain was a group NPC. Anything a player decided to do, it can be assumed that the captain ordered him to do so, or that he had authority to do so on his own. So the lpayers essentially jointly made the comamnd decisions just by acting. It kinda retrofits the orders.

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I used an NPC captain in my LUG TNG campaign (set on an Ambassador class ship, post battle of wolf 359).

I used the captain like you might use an authority figure in a fantasy campaign, I gave the crew missions (so the captain stayed on the ship). During ship combats/events, the captain would ask the bridge crew for options, and do one of those.


For the adventures, I had taken a cue from an old english teacher who talked about TNG story structure being 2 stories in one episode. the challenge to the ship, and the challenge to a specific crew member. I wrote up random tables to generate episode plots, and ran them. It worked alright.

Janx said:

I believe you are talking about the Last Unicorn Games version.

Which for them, the rumor I heard was they got bought by WotC, who also held the Star Wars license, and that was a big no-no for Paramount and Lucasfilm to co-exist, so they axed the product.

Decipher got started (possibly by some of the now laid of LUG guys) and got the trek license.

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I was actually at a public presentation when Ryan Dancy, Lisa Stevens and Gary Gygax were launching d20 and announcing that they had the Star Wars licence and had bought LUG (with the Star Trek license). There was a lot of excitement, but a number of people wondered whether it could last. Nobody knows for sure what was said behind closed doors, but Paramount pulled the Trek license very shortly after, and most of the LUG staff were let go (both picked up by Decipher) shortly after. My interest, at the time, was actually more with the Dune: Chronicles of the Imperium RPG, but it all looked a little bit like hubris from WotC that they could hold all these very lucrative licenses in one place. They also had licenses for Marvel and Call of Cthulhu at the same time!

CarlZog said:

From what I understand, the main holdup seems to be adapting the massive scale of SFB ships and combat to a workable Traveller system. In the other iterations of Prime Directive, they didn't really bother trying to adapt d20 and GURPS vehicle/ship rules in any meaningful fashion. Instead they offered a sort of crude system of adapting PC crew roles to either SFB or Federation Commander to resolve combat, or basically suggested the GM hand wave the whole thing.

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That's interesting. Mongoose are currently only really supporting the Third Imperium and 2300AD settings (with Judge Dredd more focussed on miniature gaming these days). A new Trek setting would go down well with the community as well as a wider audience I feel.

TrippyHippy said:

That's interesting. Mongoose are currently only really supporting the Third Imperium and 2300AD settings (with Judge Dredd more focussed on miniature gaming these days). A new Trek setting would go down well with the community as well as a wider audience I feel.

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Development responsibility for PD Traveller seems to be pretty solely in the hands of ADB.

FASA Star Trek was one of my first RPGs in high school.

Janx said:

Which for them, the rumor I heard was they got bought by WotC, who also held the Star Wars license, and that was a big no-no for Paramount and Lucasfilm to co-exist, so they axed the product.

Decipher got started (possibly by some of the now laid of LUG guys) and got the trek license.

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It wasn't really, Decipher had the ST:CCG and the SW:CCG at the same time. I don't remember anyone from LUG working at Decipher later, but then my memory for names is pretty bad and I only got to know those Decipher folks coming to the Essen Game fair (I used to work at the Decipher boot).

Lwaxy said:

It wasn't really, Decipher had the ST:CCG and the SW:CCG at the same time. I don't remember anyone from LUG working at Decipher later, but then my memory for names is pretty bad and I only got to know those Decipher folks coming to the Essen Game fair (I used to work at the Decipher boot).

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From what I heard, the annoyance that Paramount had was that WotC had bought LUG, lock stock and barrel, including all their licenses without consulting the companies they had licences with. Paramount felt that the Star Trek license had been obtained by the back door, so to speak. They were also concerned with the general sharkish nature of WotC seemingly attempting to monopolise all big brands under their ownership - and decided to break it up when they had the chance.

At the time, Wizards had claimed they were mainly buying LUG just for the design team, although the fact that they let them all go shortly after losing the Star Trek license doesn’t really support this claim.

The line developer for Decipher’s Star Trek game was, I think, Jess Heinig (who had previously had a less than enjoyable ride with the Mage: The Ascension Revised line - and presided over a period of bitter flame wars), but a number of the former LUG team were involved too. The LUG game’s authors were pretty high profile: Christian Moore, Ross Isaacs, Kenneth Hite, Steven S. Long. The Decipher’ Trek game’s authors were pretty much the same plus some others: Matthew Colville, Kenneth Hite, Ross S. Isaacs, Steven S. Long, Don Mappin, Christian Moore & Owen Seyler.

Oh, and it is worth noting that the Star Wars CCG license was then lost by Decipher to WotC (which was partially owned by Lucasfilm via Hasbro) some time later also. Presumably when the license period was up for renewal.

The whole SW:CCG thing had different backgrounds, basically they wanted too much influence over the cards and rules and the frequency they came out. There were, if I remember right, a lot of negotiations but eventually Decipher gave up.

Loss for Lucasfilm, really, as the weird game WotC made after the switch was doomed to fail.