Took the plunge

[Pericles]

I'm in the process of moving and while checking out my new town, I found the FLGS and it is really top notch. While looking through all the gaming goodness, they had the CODA system Star Trek books and they had a used ICON core rule book, so I took the plunge and picked up both sets of rules to add to my vast FASA Star Trek collection. I haven't had much time to read though the new, at least new to me, stuff and it will be nice to finally to be able to follow more of the threads here at TrekRPGNet.
My reasons for making this post, which I'm certain will open a can of worms, but is there any real difference between the two systems? At first glance of the books and going by what I have gleaned from reading threads here, the two systems seem very similar, so the question is, what are the differences?

[C5]

There are rather substancial differences between CODA and ICON, even though they can look similar.
Here's a very quick and dirty shortlist :

- Skill tests are done differently. While the basics are the same (roll dices, add skill, add positive or negative modifiers, try to beat a difficulty score), the details change a lot, and the probabilities are much different. I'd say it's easier in CODA to perform an extraordinary success for a medium difficulty task (the downside being that sometimes ordinary tasks can become too easy for an experienced character).
- Character creation and evolution is more streamlined in CODA than ICON, and a bit easier.
- Staship combat is vastly different in CODA and much better than ICON.
- A personal gripe of mine is that character combat is on the other hand a bit less detailed in CODA than ICON (but basically they are similar).

There are other differences, but those are the major ones I can think of right now.

[Owen E Oulton]

The systems are similar in background and style, since they were written by essentially the same group of people.

They are very, very different in game mechanics - ICON is a skill-based system with die-pool statistics. CODA is a class-based system.

[Ergi]

... CODA is a class-based system.

No it's not, ... Really.
Basically in both systems you have defining attributes and skills. (CODA also has something like saves from D&D.) In both systems you progress in skill, not in level. CODA has professions, which might look like classes to the casual observer, but which are very different from the class concept of e.g. D&D.
Yes, CODA uses "levels", but only to track a character's overall experience. You don't have a 3rd level merchant/5th level officer, you have a 8th level character with appropriate skills and one or more professions.
I regard professions as a kind of special advantage. It allows you to advance in certain skills easier than in others and gives you access to the professional abilities tree (more advantages to choose from) of the selected profession.
In character creation you receive a basic set of skills appropriate and necessary for your profession, which already can be customized to a small degree. After that, how you use additional experience is totally up to you.

[Tobian]

Coda and Icon are quite different but they are not so different that you can't intergrate one into another with a little tweaking. Both are essentially skill based, and neither is 'level' dependent (despite what Owen says.. sometimes I wonder if he has read Coda :P).

Coda is probably a bit easier for someone used to any D20 products to make characters and use them but it is different! The main difference is the difficulty numbers, but they are similar enough you can assign one to another 3,6,9,12,15 etc to 5,10,15,20,25 etc. Both have a system for 'luck' where characters can get special bonuses to rolls in the form of drama dice etc, which can mean a roll can succeed where it seems impossible.

I have to say Icon has to be tweaked a little out of the box, otherwise characters are rather unfairly unballanced at start, and specialities and skill costs still give me nightmares (ask Owen as he's probably a better expert on that). Personally I prefer Coda to Icon because I didn't like how Icon worked, found it confusing to run and character generation was a nightmare. it does however have the lions share of suplemental material (if you can still find them). I tend to use many ICON books in my Coda games because of the source materials.. the stats are pretty easy to ajust on the fly.