Star Trek RPG Release Schedule

[Don Mappin]

Originally posted by Capt Daniel Hunter
And if you dislike LUG Trek so much (as you've repeatedly pointed out) I doubt you'll like Decipher's game, since it's largely the same game designers that wrote LUG's ICON Trek.

Quite true. As Ross as said, Coda could be considered an extension of Icon--they fit together pretty well. With that said, it isn't the same stuff all over again. But, if you didn't like some of the fundamental concepts behind Icon/LUG, then you probably won't like Coda. [shrug]

I think Jedi is just yapping to have something to complain about until his medication kicks in. Personal opinion, mind you.

[Cochrane]

What happened to the series sourcebooks?

[jedimuldoon]

The only reason I didn't like LUG was the fact that all the info was SPREAD out

Decipher West isn't doing that

I was talking about the Academy Diploma

I've gone to the ADB Prime Directive webpage

I've been tempted by the Dark Side and have returned.

[Capt Daniel Hunter]

Originally posted by Don Mappin

I think Jedi is just yapping to have something to complain about until his medication kicks in. Personal opinion, mind you.

Well I'm sure some IM haloperidol would do wonders

Though I have to say, Jedi does have a point when talking about the spread-out style of ICON. It always irked me a bit that I had to buy a separate rulebook for each series setting. That was annoying. Though to be fair, was made up for by the high quality of those books, and the correction of rules problems from previous versions. So I can't complain too much.

Now I'm just looking forward to CODA. I'm on nights next week, then I've a week off (well more like 9 days off). So I'm hoping the PG might be available and in my hands before my days off finish.

Hey, you never know

[Jabara Eris]

My only real beef with the LUG system was the use of the drama die. Too many times in our games a roll came down to whether or not the player got a six on their drama die. If they got a six on their drama die, then they most likely succeeded at the action. If they didn't get a six on their drama die, then they simply didn't succeed.

Think about it. How many times has the difficulty level in your games been set at somewhere above a 10? Someone with a skill level of six in a trait could make a 12 if they also rolled a six on one of their dice. But who has a skill level of six in everything? So usually it came down to somebody with a skill level of three or four trying something, then rolling a few die and getting at most a nine or 10 total. Most of the time, a difficulty 13 roll was totally impossible to make -- unless somebody rolled a six on their drama dice, and then making the roll was often a piece of cake.

You get the idea. More than anything that rule irked both me and my players so much that we tried creating a few house rules to get around it. One variation we tried was not having a drama die, and instead saying that every "six" after the first added one point to the total. Rolling four die and getting two sixes results in a total of "seven," which you would then add to your skill factor. The problem there was that it shifted the emphasis to the number of dice rolled. We never did find a perfect solution.

Except for the drama die rule, I liked LUG a lot.

So, does anybody have any idea if and how the drama die rule will be modified for CODA?

[Capt Daniel Hunter]

Originally posted by Jabara Eris
My only real beef with the LUG system was the use of the drama die. Too many times in our games a roll came down to whether or not the player got a six on their drama die. If they got a six on their drama die, then they most likely succeeded at the action. If they didn't get a six on their drama die, then they simply didn't succeed.

Personally I never saw this as a problem, since I merely tailored task difficulties to be within the capabilities of the characters in play (which, IMHO is one of the the GMs jobs). And I never used the drama die rule anyway, so it didn't bother me

So, does anybody have any idea if and how the drama die rule will be modified for CODA?

Good question. I'd like to know the answer to this as well....

[Don Mappin]

“Forgive me, Steve, for I have sinned.”

I don’t like the Drama Die either. Longtime visitors from the Grimjack listserv will remember my frequent rants on that subject. Suffice it to say that I called it the “No-Drama Die” for precisely the reasons that Jabara mentioned above. (Being something of a statistic nut, the 1-in-6 chance of doing everything—frequently the only way to get something done—drove me nuts.)

I remember the first time I met Steve Long. He said something to the effect of, “Oh, you’re the guy that keeps complaining about the Drama Die.” You gotta love Steve!

Coda is built around a 2d6 mechanic. This doesn’t create a dispersion curve—more of a triangle—but it’s less linear than that of rolling just one d6. On a roll of 12 you take and roll and additional d6, adding it to your roll of 12 (this is open-ended; you keep rolling this additional die until you get something other than a six). Then you add in your skill/attribute bonus, circumstances, etc, to see if you met or beat your TN (Target Number). However, just meeting your TN isn’t always enough. There are a variety of effects for beating the TN by a certain amount.

There are three levels of failure (increments of five) and three levels of success (also in increments of five). So if two characters need a 15 on their sensor test and one gets a 17 and the other a 25 due to the dice coming up with sixes, the second character has achieved extraordinary success and gets more data. Where this differs from LUG/Icon is that we provide guidance on these game effects, rather than just leaving them to Narrator fiat.

Now’s a good time to mention Courage. Courage is spent just like Icon. You have a certain amount of Courage Points and, after the dice have been rolled, you can elect to spend up to four CPs to raise your test result. Each CP spend raises your test result by 3. (So, yes, by spending 4 CP for a bonus of +12, you could, in an appropriately desperate situation, succeed at any one test—once.) This could mean the difference between success and failure, or success and complete/extraordinary success.

Regarding the other comments I think you’ll find that more material is compressed into fewer books, requiring you to search a lot less. As Ross has stated, Coda has a more tool-oriented approach than found in Icon.

[C5]

Yeepee!!! A system with success levels!!! That was one thing I loved in the James Bond RPG ('twas my first one *nostalgic look in the eyes* ) : the levels of success (and failure, here, the more the better ), with some description for them. Oh, I had such a house rule for LUG as well (basically sucess with a 0 to 3 margin was simple success, 4 to 5 margin was a good success, and 6 and above critical, and the same for failures), but it's always nice to have some rules to back it up.

And courage points are much more useful that way - my players always complained that they were not that powerful in LUG.

I'm beginning to like CODA more and more... I'll switch to it as soon as... er... it's out and ...er... it reaches France (that may take muuuuch more time ). Maybe this'll buy me enought time to hammer into my players' head that "Advancements are *NOT* levels".

Thanks for the info Don

[Capt Daniel Hunter]

Originally posted by Don Mappin

There are three levels of failure (increments of five) and three levels of success (also in increments of five). So if two characters need a 15 on their sensor test and one gets a 17 and the other a 25 due to the dice coming up with sixes, the second character has achieved extraordinary success and gets more data. Where this differs from LUG/Icon is that we provide guidance on these game effects, rather than just leaving them to Narrator fiat.

Now’s a good time to mention Courage. Courage is spent just like Icon. You have a certain amount of Courage Points and, after the dice have been rolled, you can elect to spend up to four CPs to raise your test result. Each CP spend raises your test result by 3. (So, yes, by spending 4 CP for a bonus of +12, you could, in an appropriately desperate situation, succeed at any one test—once.) This could mean the difference between success and failure, or success and complete/extraordinary success.

Hey this does sound pretty good.

Re: courage points.... OK, that's kind of ironic, since we use a +3 bonuse for courage points as a house rule for ICON (but only allow one to be used per test).

[Don Mappin]

Originally posted by C5
And courage points are much more useful that way - my players always complained that they were not that powerful in LUG.

Consideration went into “beefing up” the utility of CPs. My experience has always been that CPs are ‘saved’ for the end of the adventure and then, rarely, used. Usually for my players to spend CPs I have to goad them into doing so.

Coda CPs give you a bit more bang for the buck; roughly 1.5 times more powerful since the TN scale has been raised to accommodate the higher die totals. Playtesting showed them (CPs) being used more frequently, which is A Good Thing™.

[Lt. Dade]

I've had a fair number of players ignore Courage in my LUG games, too. In my current group, though, they have a tendency to use them quickly and recklessly.

I think the system of success levels (in addition to being very Trek-ish) will better motivate the use of Courage, since even successful characters may have something better to aspire to. Players get so optimistic in Trek games, so comfortable that technology and story elements will save them, that they seldom see a situation as being so bad that they want to spend their Courage.

This can even illustrate the recurring Trek themes of age, drive and skill. Riker feels like he's getting cautious, maybe even boring, because he's usually hitting respectable TNs without spending Courage and accepting the results.

Now here comes Shelby, full of energy, spending Courage to reach the highest TNs she can. What's the moral of this story for Narrators?

Be sure to have Courage points reflected in your storytelling, have them felt by the characters beyond beating higher TNs. Characters should only use Courage when they're charged, excited or scared. Use of Courage should be evident to other characters in the area, not as a kind of superpower, but through roleplaying. Don't let Courage become another statistic.

An optional rule I try to use in my games:

<b>Courage can only be used during hands-on tests.</b> This motivates characters to "get to Engineering" or beam down to the planet surface early ("Best of Both Worlds") or do whatever Kirk was doing on the Enterprise-B. In CODA, where Courage is more powerful, I would change this so that maximum Courage can only be used during hands-on tests, as an incentive to get the characters in motion.

Hey Don, is the difficulty/TN scale still labelled with descriptors a la LUG? This was something I liked, since it was easy to give players an idea of the TN using simple language. It made it easy to send messages to the Narrator while speaking in-character. I like that stuff.

word,
will

EDIT: added "as being" to a sentence above.

[Don Mappin]

Originally posted by Lt. Dade
Hey Don, is the difficulty/TN scale still labelled with descriptors a la LUG? This was something I liked, since it was easy to give players an idea of the TN using simple language. It made it easy to send messages to the Narrator while speaking in-character. I like that stuff.

Yup. They are:

TN 05 - Simple
TN 10 - Routine
TN 15 - Challenging
TN 20 - Difficult
TN 25 - Virtually Impossible

Every skill description also provides guidelines on what, say, a Difficult Gymnastics test would allow one to do. (Exception are skills which are always opposed, such as Stealth.)

[RIsaacs]

Hello all!

I'm here in DC and I just got a phone line, so I can actually participate in the discussion.

I know it can be a little hard to grasp all the implications of what I mean when I say "we took a more tools-oriented approach." Don has mentioned some of the big changes to the Coda System, so I'll elaborate on the design decisions.

Owen Seyler and I identified some areas of the Icon System we weren't happy with and worked to avoid those mistakes in Coda.

The difficulty scale goes up in multiples of 5. We made modifiers more integral to the process to get you to those numbers in between. So, for example a TN 10 could be modified by +2 for darkness, giving you a total of 12. We stripped out from the skill examples those things that changed the conditions of the example—"balancing on a beam," "balancing on a beam with wind," "balancing on a beam with wind and rain...." Those led to a lot of high TN assignments, as Narrators applied them accordingly. Now, wind and rain are modifiers, so you can set your TN based on—say—the beam's width.

Generally, conditions controlled by the Narrator (lighting, weather, etc.) result in modifiers to the target number. Things dependent on your character (edges, flaws, professional abiltilies) result in modifiers to your tests.

Skills that are used only against another character, like Persuade or Energy Weapon, do not have TNs or difficulty level descriptions.

Courage was something we weren't happy with. A +1 just didn't affect the mechanics enough. It didn't give you enough "oomph." So Courage now gives you a +3 for each one spent. And, you can use them any time, like for initiative. =)

Owen really came up with a terrific system for codifying the skills. Skills are either physical, academic, social, or psionic. The modifiers are divided up into these four groups. Physical tests are affected by physical modifiers, for example. Here's my favorate part, however. Say you have a physical skill like Demolitions (because you're setting and difusing bombs), but you want to know the best place to set your explosive... you can use Demolitions academically (applying the bonus from your Int instead of Agl); in short, skill classifications are NOT restrictive.

Renown bothered me like a Rigellian rash. Aspects, negative numbers, and no clear instructions on why it even matters. All changed. One number, no aspects (those were actually moved to an edge and a flaw). No negative numbers. And if someone successfully recognizes you, you get a bonus to some skill tests. So that intimidation attempt works better if the Ferengi recognize you as the great Captain Mappin.

Gone are certain useless skills, like Personal Equipment. Tricorders (and let's face it, this was the only specialty people ever used) provide a static bonus to any test you can think of.

The specialty rules have been altered. First, we got rid of the awkward "specialization." Second, specialties provide a static bonus to tests.

But the biggest, most sweeping change to the game is that we ruthlessly stamped out all instances of the phrase "Narrator's discretion." The Coda System tells you how to use it. We don't leave you hanging this time.

So, as you can see, one general principle resulted in sweeping changes that make for a better game system. They reach into almost every corner of the game, from skills included to the core mechanic.

[Sho-sa Kurita]

First thing's first -- Welcome back Ross! How's DC?

Second thing -- thanks for the above post. You packed quite a bit of good info in there.

-- Daniel

[C5]

Welcome back, Ross!! Hope everything went well for you

And thank for the info. I'm getting more and more convinced I'll switch to CODA.

Just one question : you said Renown aspects disappeared... that was one thing I loved, since I used them to reward (or punish) the players' behaviour (the one who had more ideas had got more Initiative Renown, the one who made lots of critical failures got negative Skill Renown, and so on).
Since nothing's left now "to the Narrator discretion" (happy lazy Narrator me ), are there now such rules to sanction the players' behaviour (other than altering XP awards); like, for instance, how can the Narrator sanction a Vulcan acting emotional, a Klingon letting not minding being insulted, a StarFleet officer who'll shoot first and ask questions later, or on the contrary, how to award a Science Officer who'll never carry weapons when not needed, a officer who'll always consult his captain before acting, etc ?