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Ho hum.
I'm a little interested in how you as narrators deal with the whole "if we/they (reffering to the series) can do that there, why can't we do it here" problem?
Do you just say "no"? Do you keep technology more predictable so that everyone knows what to expect?
//KJB
You mean like when they start in with "...yeah but there was that time that Scotty re-directed the plasma flow from the Heisenberg compensator into the warp core so they could fire the ship's phasers at 6x the normal intensity....why can't I?"Quote:
Originally posted by Profit
Ho hum.
I'm a little interested in how you as narrators deal with the whole "if we/they (reffering to the series) can do that there, why can't we do it here" problem?
Do you just say "no"? Do you keep technology more predictable so that everyone knows what to expect?
//KJB
There are a couple of ways to solve that...
1. "No f-ing way...you're not doing that...don't care how many courage points you spend."
2. "You don't have enough courage points combined to pull it off..."
3.Let them do it...with a high (not impossible) TN, if they fail...hand them the grim consequences.4.Tell them it's going to take them a long time to actually make it happen.
5. Ask them to lay out thier actual plans for you. "Chris will handle the plasma injectors. Joe's going to prepare the Heisenberg compensator and the warp core. Steve will take the phasers off line and prep them for the power surge...and Charlie will go get us coffee."
There are other ways, but these are the ones I've used in the past. Sarcastic laughter is also a good trick.
Another way to say "no way!" is to tell them that it is not possible with the current configuration. For instance : "yeah, it worked on the Constitution class, but this is a Miranda and this won't work" or "of course Dax recalibrated her tricorder to scan the subspace high gravimetric frequency sub particles, but here you're dealing with a low frequency neutronic field and it won't work".
I laid down rules ahead of time. Not being a big trek fan, other than a few episodes and movies I really liked, part of my deal for reff'ing a Trek game was: 1) tech consistency -- not rewiring crap into whatever you can think of. The application has to fit the piece of equipment you're using (so maybe using the transporter as a replicator, or the deflector dish as a tractor beam...); 2) canon's what I say it is -- I ignore the dumb stuf, most of TOS, STIV & V, much of the first few seasons of TNG, Voyager. For me, also, the utopian rhetoric is nice, but there's a reality behind it: Starfleet should have more of a military feel, there's real politics behind the UFP that aren't as shiny and humanitarian as portrayed...
So...set rules up front. Other than that, let them play.
Qerlin, with all due respect, why do you even play Star Trek if you are not a fan and ignore most of it?
Why not make your own universe that fits your bill exactly?
Not criticizing, just curious.
It's what the players want to play. I don't dislike the universe, but no...I'm not a fan.
Actually this is an aspect I find fairly heavily disliked on this board, the utopian nature of UFP society and not-so-military take on Starfleet.
Personally, those are two reasons I really LIKE Trek.
The technobabble, the "hard sci-fi" aspects, these are of less interest to me.
As someone who watched the original series as it came out, I always saw ST more as a series of morality plays tarted up with a bit of tech than a true sci-fi show. To me sci-fi was Arthur C. Clark (at the time; nowadays it is more like David Brin or Vernon Vinge) while ST was more about The Human Condition.
So I guess in the end there is a lot of ST canon that I, too, ignore. I just try to preserve what I saw as the spirit, the hopefulness.
Just one person's take, of course. :)
I've found that a lot of what is "non-cannon" according to Decipher (this not a shot at Decipher) actually works/fits in. For example "The Eugenics Wars" and some of the stuff from FASA. True cannon depends on the gaming group and the GM. I've slowly been dropping B5 stuff into my Trek game...ok, so Jump-gates aren't even Star Trek...but they don't un-balance my game. The Decipher "engine" lends itself nicely to that sort of stuff.
Again, this is just my opinion...and bad spelling....:)
I am glad to see someone else noticed the potential of CODA as a Babylon 5 engine (given how bad Chameleon Eclectic's Babylon Project turned out). Now if only we could make it a reality...Quote:
Originally posted by Darth Sarcastic
I've slowly been dropping B5 stuff into my Trek game... The Decipher "engine" lends itself nicely to that sort of stuff.
Yes, "cannon" with a double N is rather different than "canon" without. :)Quote:
Again, this is just my opinion...and bad spelling.
Some technological comments:
Tractor beams: In TNG Wesley had to do a lot of work to turn the tractor into a repulsor beam. In TOS it was standard enough that Chekov just had to flip a switch. I go with the TOS version.
Weapons: Many of my aliens still use guns, as in with bullets, usually hypervelocity though. It gives enemy medical staff more work than a phaser since bleeding must be stopped, bullet removed, etc.
Holodoctor: No matter how smart it gets it is still a tool to me reprogrammed, formatted, and deleted as needed.
On other matters
Politics: I've had one Federation council member plot the assasination of another member.
Mars: Martians have a distinct culture, and mistaking one for a Terran is a bad thing. They also have their own language, evolved from those spoken by the various colonist.
Simple, when you start your game up, let all the players know the two rules-
1) Just because it worked, ONCE, on the show does not mean it will work a second time for you, and I love the drama die as much as it loves me.
(Some people have, however, really impressed me with die rolls..."OK you have a 6 on the drama, a 6 on the next, and two more 6's on top of that...hell what didn't you just do..." that was the exact roll the player of the ships pilot rolled to make a RAPID excape from a standard orbit...in her words "I punch it up to warp 9, do a few rolls, and spin around the planet headed back for the Starbase" I said OK, any thing else?)
2) Your characters DO NOT have a contract with me, if you do something stupid and get yourself (or others) killed- your (they) not going to come back by the end of the night.
But after that, as long as everyone has had fun by the end of the night, it's all good.
'Tarted up' eh? Is that a Freudian slip regarding the captain of the Enterprise?Quote:
As someone who watched the original series as it came out, I always saw ST more as a series of morality plays tarted up with a bit of tech
Teasing aside, I generally prefer Trek RPGs to others because of the emphasis on CHARACTER generation, rather than body counts.
More to the point of the original thread, I can usually out technobabble any of my players head-to-head, and I like my technology clean and consistent. OF course, were I playing.......