Lack of Star Trek in Veeky Forums

>because there's not lts of fighting in ST, and even less ground forces
But Star Trek basically invented its own style of martial arts...

>reverse the quantum field to power the dylithium crystal
That never happened in classic Trek and didn't happen in TNG nearly as much as you might think. Stop watching Voyager.

>stop watching the show that would work best for a tabletop game

...

Rodenberry pls.

You know damn well what they did with your baby.

What, you don't think that it'd be the only way for players to get away with all the murderhobo shit they'll do?

Fasa also made a ship to ship combat game. Two of them in one package, actually. One's a little more in-depth and has bigger numbers and the other one is a little simpler and divides the numbers roughly by 3 or 4.

>implying the Finnegan fight didn't have great choreography

I think the only thing that would make it better than classic Trek is how inconsistent it is, but you could always just do classic Trek inconsistently.

Dude, Kirk-fu is awesome (though I will admit to detesting Shore Leave).

Nobody may actually play Star Fleet Battles, but everybody's heard of it.

There's the recent Star Trek: Attack Wing, which is literally a licensed Trek version of X-Wing done by WizKids, and there have been Trek ship miniatures games before that, like Star Fleet Battles.

I play the hell out of STAW with some buddies of mine.

And there have been Trek RPGs. They were never very popular, but they do exist. I have the ST:DS9 RPG books.

Probably because Star Trek features ranks and strict hierarchy.

>I'm going to shoot this guy
>Belay that Lieutenant, I'm the commanding officer and you'll do as I say if you don't want to get a court martial.
>Sorry... Commander.

There are ways around it.
There's really only one rule in Star Fleet that they really won't let you get away with, and that's the Prime Directive. And even then, you might be able to get away with it if you have friends in high places or a really, really, REALLY good reason for it.
Just about everything else, including insubordination, can be justified away with the right quoting of regulations.

>ST:DS9 RPG
How did I not know this

>Why aren't there any Star Trek RPGs or wargames that people actually play?

They've all been bad. Alternatively there hasn't been any great ones.

The problem with all licensed games is they're expensive and the IP holders always meddle with the product being put out, which adds significant hurdles to the process.

It is kinda funny that a lot of the stuff that was made up in the FASA RPG so they'd have a base to actually run an RPG on was actually added to the show(s) later.

Aren't there star fleet battles threads every couple of weeks?

>Time to bite!
Space fantasy is far more fun to play in to a popular audience. Even within niche hobbies, what's popular is what 'people actually play'.

The games exist, and they aren't as popular as Star Wars or 40k. There's no "best" setting, it's just the setting that people have the most fun with and want to play. The threads and sales show more people want to play Star Wars or 40k, so that's where the money is.

Yo.

Star Terk is hard because it's usually not actually about just full retard shooting from the hip and derping around.
Also 40kids and similar folks find it hard to get into a social/sciecen/politics style game if they can't just shoot or kill their way through it.

Case and point. This poster assumes that Trek follows a very strict procedure when in fact it goes from space hippes/space buddy cops/space wars and exploration and everything in between.

Just look at The Sisko. He's primary a Commander, Prophet, Father, and Diplomat. I think most roleplayers from Veeky Forums would be pretty hard pressed to make a similar character and would probably just start screaming "MARY SUE" while their regular rpg chracters kill hundreds of people without issue or recourse.

YO.

There are lot of reasons.

Part of it is that the people who own Star Treks IP have been really lazy and irresponsible with it's preservation and development.

They let companies like WizKids half-ass licensed products.

There have been a few gems.
They don't seem to get very well marketed.

I'd rather play something in DS9 during the Dominion invasion. Combat potential and intrigue abound.

At least "you all start in Quark's" is a shitton better than starting in a regular tavern.

>you all start in Quark's
No matter what game I run next in any universe, this will be my opening line.

I'm pretty sure most combat during the Dominion invasion is "You get stomped by a Dominion ship" or "You stomp them because you're the Dominion and they aren't."
At least in the TOS era there are actual fights that can go either way.

I'd be fine with it. Reminds me of that episode Little Green Men, the guy has jumped through time and space and it's well established that he cares less for the implications if he can turn around and make money selling dumb shit to gullible idiots. Cue adventurers.

There's actually a ton of opportunity for skirmishing.

>While the Allies suffered repeated defeats in large fleet actions, Starfleet and Klingon ships had greater success in raiding operations and in combating small patrols of Jem'Hadar ships. Such operations included the destruction of the Dominion's primary ketracel-white storage facility in the Alpha Quadrant, and the destruction of a massive Dominion sensor array in the Argolis Cluster.

Which culminates in larger battles;
>With no word having arrived from the Klingons, and only two-thirds of the Starfleet force assembled, Vice Admiral William Ross authorised Benjamin Sisko to lead the 627 ships assembled in an effort to prevent the Dominion from removing the mines. In response, Dukat pulled 1,254 warships from the front lines to intercept the Federation fleet, stalling Dominion advances into Allied territory.

That's at the height of the invasion.

Barring the few times the Dominion was successfully stopped in military action, that would make them more like a force to avoid while fighting what you can when you must -until you can work up to their level somehow.

Sort of like the Reapers in ME or Terminators or Agents in the Matrix. It just establishes a cat and mouse dynamic for the first two acts, making that third act more rewarding. Variations up the writer and what the players want, obviously.

To be fair, if Star Fleet wasn't coasting on the Miranda and Excelsior classes, they would probably have kicked the Dominion's face in, since their multipurpose exploration ships routinely measure up to the dedicated warships of every other power.

>the party has spent a long, complex high fantasy quest saving the kingdom from the evil lich
>finally, at long last, they confront the BBEG
>weapons are drawn, monologues are spoken
>moments before the first blow is struck, Quark barges into the throne room and demands the players either buy another time slot or get out of his holosuit

The Cardassians say the Defiant is one of the most heavily armed warships in the quadrant so I believe it.

Hell a fleet of Defiants would have laid waste but building just the first one was a pretty huge deal at the time.

Glorious.

Fund it.

>Star Wars has somehow remained popular
I think you are correct that Star Trek is "more cerebral", which partly explains it. But I think there's even a bigger trend here: Star Wars is basically fantasy, when Star Trek is strictly scifi. And fantasy will always appeal to more people than scifi.

Wouldn't really work well for a standard rpg, mechanically, because really there are two categories of enemies in star trek: things that you can kill with one shot from a phaser, or things you can't kill.

Absolutely, and that's just a small escort. Imagine a full scale Battleship built by Starfleet.

"Borg Cube! 1v1 me!"

>two categories of enemies in star trek
>things that you can kill with one shot from a phaser, or things you can't kill.
>The 40kid line of reasoning where other things are only in the game to die.
This is why Star Trek games generally don't work. Roleplayers are anti-social autists who don't understand diplomacy and negotiations.

Pic related; when you overcome the evil empire you don't kill them all. Well adjusted people write treaties and make concessions.

Joking aside I am genuinely considering using this in a one-shot fantasy game.

If by roleplayers you mean people who play videogames, then yes.

Besides, I'm sure Star Trek could cater to those players as well, especially in a more campy TOS era game. You could hunt tribbles and stuff.

No, that's just how long it takes to play one game.

>Noblebright
>objectively better
But that's not Grimdark, at all

Base it on TOS then. In the pilot, the captain defeats an alien race trying to control his mind by holding pure hatred for them in his heart, then leaves them on their planet to die out with basically no consolation whatsoever. Kirk hits people in the face fairly often too.

It's worked out just fine for my group.
But that's because the GM is intentionally trying to make each session or two roll up like an episode of the show.

One of the reasons I liked that series is because, for the majority of it, the evil empire fought and was fought using every weapon in the arsenal: diplomacy, commerce, espionage, culture -manipulating religious conceptions and public opinion, in addition to shooting all the dakka.

The Dominion didn't fuck around. They undermined your intelligence network, attacked morale, turned allies against you, devalued your currency, starved you of supplies, stole your March Madness bracket picks, and took a hot shit on your favorite rug. Meanwhile they're striving to appear to your people as a better option than you. They came to divide and conquer, not pointlessly destroy.

The problem with Star Trek is that it's not a setting where violence really happens, and most people would be rather firing rockets from their asshole and slicing aliens apart with their chainsword in something like 40k or doing superhero shit on D&D

There are successful story-driven RPGs but they're mostly GRIMDAAARK stuff like WoD, and most people don't have the imagination to make a essentially Utopian setting like Star Trek work

You could go pretty hard in a setting based on TOS. Literally the only stipulation is that you just knock out people unless they seriously harm or actively try to kill you.

>There's really only one rule in Star Fleet that they really won't let you get away with, and that's the Prime Directive.
>Every Captain proceeds to give fuck all about the Prime Directive every other episode.
Kek. The Prime Directive is only there to be broken.

Read one sentence further.

I'm about halfway into TOS, and I'd like to try a Trek RPG. But I can barely imagine what it'd look like.
Probably a series of relatively short and self-contained adventures. Little progression between them because PCs are either highly competent officers already or expendable redshirts. Not even ship upgrades if you're playing as the Starfleet (and I haven't seen any private ships introduced yet).
Maintaining a command structure is fine, so long as the group is competent enough to agree on roles.
Now that I think about it, it'll probably call for a more narrative-focused game, especially if you go for a main characters/officers angle.

I know. It's fucking sickening that the pansy faggot liberals in charge of Starfleet never built an actual Military-Oriented vessel despite having been in dozens of wars: Dominion, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian, Blue guys with antennae, a bunch of other fish people.

no

>He doesn't play Star Trek Attack Wing

Nobody needs warships when they have plot armor, m8

Neither does anyone else.
You know why.

There are too many pacifist planets in the Federation for them to fund something like that. Hell, sometimes they have trouble getting taxes out of some planets just because they *might* end up going into an armed ship. That's why they have "heavy research vessels" that are better armed and armored than most other military warships in the setting.

Because all the media of it is focused on three or so vessels and the crews and sometimes conflict with other civilizations, rather than a world that is explored much more in the main series.
Basically, someone who watches a Star Wars movie has a lot more room to work with than someone that watches a Star Trek movie

who's this celestial slut?

Somebody in jail now for exposing herself to kids on her lawn or some shit.

So you play a redshirt.

I like the idea of being a named officer for roleplaying and politicking on the ship but playing Engisn Ricky redshirts when it comes time to beam down on away missions.

Alternatively, every PC officer beams down with a few redshirts in tow that act as 'hitpoints', dying instead of you when you do stupid shit until only you remain to fight the Gorn all Kirk-style.

But user, there are.

More like you have redshirts with you and take cover.
A phaser does 75 stun damage, a human starfleet officer has 40+4d10 endurance.

Right, I had the redshirts-as-resources idea, too. Makes sense for an officer to have a group of subordinates, as well. I guess it really turns into more of a strategy as you manage them to solve the episode's mystery.

>who's this celestial slut?

Kes. From the first few seasons of Voyager.

i have played it. and, it is the epitome of CHUNK rules and hex n' chit madness.

to be squarely honest, Star Trek was literally at it's best in the original Series to DS9. to break down what made star trek good: you had the ability to fight, but each episode had typically a puzzle and a moral quandry. add ancient space aliens and pseudo science....maybe even a what-if scenaro.
....boom, StarTrek.

ST would make a great RPG,
an Ok card game
and a shit wargame.

it got all three, w 2 different iterations of the RPG.

honest truth.

It just seems an appropriate level of genre savvy for a lighthearted type of Star Trek game. It could be a strategy aspect of minion management but I prefer them as a more tongue in cheek representation of health. Maybe you can 'spend' them to advance the plot somehow?

Hell, I might sit down and make a system of it for a sort of casual beer-and-pretzels game.

It may not be in the usual spirit of Star Trek, but I find the idea of a skirmish wargame set during the Eugenics Wars very appealing.

Star Fleet: A Call to Arms was pretty good.

More detailed and tactical than the current X-Wing clone, but nowhere near the massive tome that Star Fleet Battles was.

The big think that killed SF: ACTA before it could even take off was production delays.

Mongoose Publishing and Amarillo Design Bureau really shit the bed on that one...

It was a good game. People here on Veeky Forums were excited for it. The rules were short, but solid, and it felt like a naval combat game, much like Firestorm Armada or Dystopian Wars, only set in a not-quite Trek setting.

I think Trek is fundamentally serious, cerebral (that's the word they use, right?) sci-fi, even when it's being silly. Of course, that was fifty years ago, so now it's really easy to make fun of. And a game specifically making fun of it can be pretty great.

But I'd like to see if the original spirit can be recreated at all today. It'd be a bunch of gay spacemen dealing with a few recently assimilated planets while discussing ethics in holodeck simulation design, isn't it.

Fasa's Starship Tactical Combat Simulator works really well for space battles between two or more ships. It's what we've been using for our space battles.
You get to allocate power to the different subsystems and then blow some fuckers away with torpedoes and phasers. What's not to love about it?

Yes, it would be more of a concept poking fun at hokey Star Trek narrative convention and that of older sci-fi in general.

If "sacrifice a redshirt to advance the plot" is a legitimate game action to take then yeah, it doesn't take itself too seriously. I might try my hand at it and posting it up for Veeky Forums if I'm happy with what I have.

Wiz kids went "fuck it" to game balance and as a result power creep in later additions got so out-of-control as to render the game unplayable.

The addition of the Borg faction ships was the benchmark for where the downward spiral began.

at least as I saw it, I still keep my Attack Wing stuff, hoping, in vain, to perhaps one day to be able to play it once again.

I hope you get your wish, user.

Gentlemen...

The the start of TNG the Federation had gone through a long period of no major wars. The conflict with the Cardassians was referred to as "boarder wars" implying it was limited in scope. Besides that there hadn't been much going on militarily since Kirk's time.

The Klingons were allies. The Romulans were going through a period of isolationism. The Borg and Dominion hadn't been encountered yet. The "blue guys with antenna" are Andorians. They're part of the Federation.

Later they do start building dedicated warships in response to the Borg and Dominion threats. Like the Defiant-class and Prometheus-class.

*At the start

At this point I'm actually kinda hoping Wizkids looses the license soon. So someone else can take a shot at making a modern Star Trek wargame.

The Flight Path System can be a lot of fun, but X-Wing does it better. It doesn't really suit Star Trek very well anyway. Most Trek ships aren't limited to a forward firing arc.

Beep beep. Best ship coming through.

Cause all the star trek games made suck which is sad to say

I've always been fond of the old D7's.

>Star Wars is basically fantasy, when Star Trek is strictly scifi.
I don't really understand the delineation. Half the shit Spock did was pretty out there and every other episode there was a super-powerful energy being.

I really have to agree with this...huge multipurpose ships... bigger then a galaxy class, better armed, just a lil slower then a galaxy class. + Cloaking Device... The Romulans did not fuck around when it came to warbirds.

The Romulans really where the most interesting race that never really got a good amount of screen time in any of the shows.

Picture unrelated.

Why do you feel energybeing violate some rule here?

But yeah, I guess "strictly" was a bit of an overstatement. I understand if others don't agree with me,

Still I feel that the destiction between Star Wars and Star Trek is pretty clear.

>Why aren't there any Star Trek RPGs
There have been at least three official Star Trek RPGs, but no one ever holds onto the license for very long.

FASA - 1982 to 1989
Last Unicorn Games - 1998 to 1999
Decipher - 2002 to 2005

The only Trek RPG that seemed feasible to me (though not super feasible) was ADB's Prime Directive (set in the Star Fleet Universe), where players weren't members of a normal ship crew, but a specialized team of highly skilled, cross trained Scientist/Commando/Diplomats who went around solving various problems and putting out fires. Instead of a bigass cruiser they typically tooled around in a highly advanced, but still rather limited cutter, something like an oversized DS9 style runabout (pic related, but not from ADB/Prime Directive).

Its got the advantage of being the TOS era, which means the federation frontier was less explored, communications were slower, and the technology/technobable less bullshitable. It also means the players can't solve problems by orbital phaser strikes, throwing waves of redshirts at the problem, or whatever else the resources of a full capital ship might provide.

I've heard it said by a lot of people.

>Why do you feel energybeing violate some rule here?
Maybe you could portray them in a believable (if highly speculative) way, but that's really not how they were done. And if we want to look at TNG, Q is all sorts of ridiculous.

Number of successful military engagements attributable to Romulan warbirds: 0

I love how Garak was always pissing on the Romulans while spooging over muh Cardassia. Romulans would shit all over your fuckboy pseudo-Nazi Union.

A personal favorite.

that game is baller

>One solid shot and you're done.
Isn't this accurate to Star Trek? Phasers set to kill kill in one shot. Disruptors kill in one shot.