Game that would handle a Starship Bridge - i dont mean with tactical combat with ship minis, i mean rules that help give the feel of being on a bridge with the helmsman, tactical officer, captain etc. all doing their part.
Heh. A friend saw this post and asked me to repost my setup on our old FASA Star Trek Game...
Keep in mind this was well over 20 years ago (yes I am old). We were using the FASA rules, so circa 1983. We gamed in my friend's basement in Michigan, so we could more or less leave things set up as we needed them.
We had chairs set up around tables so as to approximate the bridge stations on the Enterprise...I mean Excaliber. Each week we would bring our computers to the game and hook them up beforehand.
As I mentioned, I ran the Science Officer. The Science Station on the Excaliber was run by a Commodore 64, rigged with a database program containing everything I needed for the week's game. Whenever I (as GM ) needed to alert the captain to a fact, I punched it up on my screen and showed it to him, or read it as Science Officer. I was into programming a bit, so I would include charts and graphs, making it look as Star-Trek as I could.
The Engineering Station was also run on a Commodore 64. Primarily used in combat, it had a nice Bar Chart for each station. In the FASA Game an Engineer's job was to allocate the ship's available power to each station to power weapons, shields, etc. Each station was also represented as bar graph. The little program we designed would (a the Engineer's command) allocate whatever power points he desired, then deduct it from the Total Power Bar. In the game, the Engineer could make a Engineering Skill Roll to squeeze a little more power from the Engines. The program also performed this role.
The Navigator was in charge of the Shields. I believe he ran a Vic-20, but all it had to do was show a simple diagram of the ship, with the power each shield had allocated to it. If the ship was hit, he deducted the amount from the shield. It also made his Skill Roll for Shield Efficiency.
Communications did not have a computer, but a tape recorder. The Communications Officer was an NPC, so I would operate the tape for incoming messages.
But Helm...ah the Helm Station was a marvel. My friend had a TI-994A...an old Texas Instruments computer that actually had some pretty good graphics capabilities. My friend (even geekier than ME) programmed several enemy ship silhouettes that would appear on the TV screen we used as the Main Viewscreen. During battle, he had his Helmsmen Skill rolls programmed into the computer, so when ever the Captain ordered the phasers fired, little beams would actually streak towards the ship on the screen. If he made his programmed roll, the screen would flash red. If he missed...nothing. He did the same thing for photon torpedoes.
As I said earlier, we I only ran the game for a summer. Due to family.job constraints, we had to choose between that game and my D&D game I also ran for them. We all chose the D&D game, and put away the PC's.
As a side note, I ran D&D for that group of guys for 25 years before I moved from Michigan to North Carolina. I have a great group now, but you just couldn't beat those guys.
TGryph