Star Trek Adventures: Now that the full rules are out, what do you think?

Pauln6 said:

Well, I have the rules, I've skimmed through them and I must say there is a lot of though and flavour in the the book is laid out, even if I've struggled to dip into it. I've never played this kind of system before so it will take several reads to get to grips with the mechanics.

I'm keen to quick stat Kirk's crew and it's obvious that everyone below Scotty is a supporting character. I thought I'd go for their experienced versions around Star trek the motion picture. Following the rules, it's actually quite hard to work out which combinations best reflect the characters. I feel that Uhura comes across as smart and controlled but she's not really a great engineer and yet the system feels like that's where I'm guided.

Rand and Chapel were pretty useless at everything but I feel I should try to build something viable without stripping out the inherent characters. Similarly, Rand ends up being a good engineer.

Also I should probably advance them a bit. I could do one advancement for every key episode?

Any tips?

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oneshot said:

Well, if you're interested to see how other folks have done it, several people have done various write-ups of the characters over on the Modiphius boards. A couple of general suggestions based on your remarks:

(1) Actually, languages and communication fall more under command than engineering, so I'd tend to give Uhura a larger command rating, with appropriate focuses and talents. For example, I'd give Uhura "Diffuse the Tension" for one of her talents, and focuses in xenolinguistics, diplomacy, communication systems, and persuasion, for starters.

(2) I would recommend that you worry less about the ratings of the specific disciplines themselves, as the disciplines are fairly broad (by design!), which means regardless of how you design them, the characters will have competencies that were not shown on screen. The true essences of the characters will come out in their values and focuses. There's also some specialization with talents, but the list of talents in the core book is too small to have a ton of differentiation.

(3) The game isn't really designed to have characters who are useless, as Starfleet is filed with the best and brightest. I'm not sure you could design a character that is useless at everything. I'd think you'd need to make those two supporting characters, however.

(4) Although, re: Rand, not sure why you'd give her a strong engineering rating. She was the captain's assistant, and so she would be good at things like managing Starfleet bureaucracy, knowing regulations and starship operations, etc. I would give her high scores in Command and Conn, and probably only a 1 in Engineering.

(5) If you have the time, it would certainly be an interesting exercise to go through each episode (and then maybe the movies as well) in order and assign milestones, spotlight milestones, and arc milestones to the different characters as appropriate. I, for one, would be very interested in seeing what you do with that, if you go through and do it, in particular seeing how your versions of characters develop over the course of the series.

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