Game up at Decipher?

[mythusmage]

What about this 'Prime Directive' RPG being advertised at EN World? Who is doing that, and is it an Exclusive license?

The company is the Amarillo Design Bureau, the Star Fleet Battles people. The founder was a huge Star Trek fan back when it all started, and he approached Gene Roddenberry about doing a game. Gene agreed, and gave the new company what amounts to a perpetual license. The SFB universe is based on the original series, and the animated series, making no reference to subsequent life action series. Thus the universe contains races such as the Gorn and Kzinti, but no Bajorans or Ferengi. Paramount and (later) Viacom tried to have the license suspended, but ADB proved tougher than they had expected, so they decided to leave well enough alone and accept the license payments.

Obviously the PD history diverged from official Star Trek history a long time ago, and there are some who insist the Prime Directive timeline isn't real Star Trek. Then there are those who insist the Prime Directive timeline is what Roddenberry would have gone with without the unfortunate interruption caused by the original series' cancellation, and so is the true Star Trek. It's a lot like the disagreement over the two versions of Greyhawk.

BTW, Prime Directive comes in three wersions; d20, GURPS, and d6.

 

[Orius]

I can't really say I'm all that sorry about Decipher tanking if that's the case. To be honest, I can't believe they managed to ride the CCG fad this long. How their Star Trek CCG managed to survive is the biggest question. I know that many people who bought were collectors rather than players (because let's face it, gameplay, at least in the early game, sucked ass) but I find it hard to belive collectors are still shelling money into the game (but strange things do happen). I've heard the game really started to improve once they expanded it beyond TNG, but I remember how the game was fairly boring when it first came out, and how legal problems with Paramount tied up the earliest expansions. Star Wars was a better game, but I stopped buying it around the time they were releasing material based on Jedi, because I finally manage to break that nasty CCG habit. Both however suffered from having cards that were rare to appeal to collectors. This was worse in Star Trek, were most of the time you ended up playing with mooks no one cared about. Star Wars did have common versions of some of the main characters, but most of them were pretty weak.