FASA Star Trek

[Capt Daniel Hunter]

I loved the tone of the old FASA game, but I was never much of a fan of the rules, and as others have said, they lost the plot entirely with their TNG stuff.

But, they produced some of the best Star Trek adventure modules ever, IMHO. It was also the first RPG I ever played, back when I first went to college back in 1988.

ICON probably had the best Trek character generation, with FASA coming in second.

[Capt. K. Vaughn]

I loved pretty much everything about this game except for APs and the Starship Combat. The Starship Combat was fun but it did not have the feel of the shows in my opinion.

I loved a number of their adventures and have recycled many of them over the years, one of the most frequent being "The Strider Incident".

In fact, the only reason I switched to ICON was because the mechanics were simpler to teach complete newbies to gaming. I tend to get alot of those. Beyond that, the FASA history still forms the dominant background for my campaign's universe. With a few major events to allow for certain events that I thought were cool in the LUG timeline.

Icon is just above the FASA system and if we had not moved into the TNG era I probably would still be using FASA-trek but we'd been playing post-movie into the TNG era for years so the switch was made to use the new material. A switch that I do not regret given the number of Trek Fans that ICON has helped me bring to gaming. Though I can see me pulling out the FASA game and running an episode or three at some point in the future.

I doubt FASA or LUG will ever truly be dead for me. CODA I will use for potential background and Fluff.

Regards,
CKV.

[General Chang]

I jump in glee as I find a fully intact Second Edition FASA Star Trek RPG, complete with Tactical Starship Combat Simulator and all counters. I have it on hold at an undisclosed Hobby shop and will pick it up ASAP! WOO HOOOOOOO!!!




Ahem.

Respectfully,
General Chang


woo hoo

[General Chang]

Here's something I bet you never hear of every day: (sarcastic)

A friend and I used to play the FASA Tactical Starship Combat Simulator over the phone. LOL! It was the poor man's online deathmatch.

There were quite a few times when we could not get together at the other's house to play TSCS. The cool thing was...both of us had the Second Edition kit. So what we would do is call each other up, have our maps laid out in front of us, inform each other of the necessary set ups (ship type, Combat Efficiency limit, etc.)

Then we would play. We would set up the appropriate counters and have the appropriate display panels ready. Since the star map was numbered, it was easy to convey where you and your opponent(s) were. We would have to describe the type of movement, (forward, backward, sideslip, how many hexes, etc.) This also made cloak ships a lot more interesting to play.

The super cool thing was...the honor system. We both respected each other as fellow gamers , and took each other's word for what we were doing. It really worked out well when we could not get together to play the combat game. Sometimes you're the Klingon, sometimes you're the Toilet Paper.


Another fond memory of FASA Trek was the 18 ship, three sided starship battle we ran one night. (Six players, with three ships each) It took eight hours to resolve. And hard as it may be to believe, I came out of the battle with only a few dings to my ship. In one fell swoop, I had destroyed a Klingon Great Bird, and a Romulan Battleship. (Gotta love those starship explosion rules.) I was a Federation Battleship (Kirk-class) called the USS Lethality. (I know, not very Federation like....but I constructed this thing from the FASA Starship Construction manual.)

At one point, my friend whom I had played TSCS over the phone with, and I also had Construction Manuals (well, I photocopied the manual for him) We had constructed Torpedo cruisers.....ships which were mostly photon torpedo armed, maybe one or two phaser banks. The reason was obvious enough.....power to damage ratio. 1 point of power to arm a photon torpedo...20 points damage from an FP-10, or Klingon Equivalent. However, our battles did not last more than two or three rounds.....since our ships were dealing on the order of 200-400 pts damage in one volley. So we therefore made a ruling that future ships constructed could have NO MORE than 40% of its total armament consisting of missile weapons. These ships were also subject to approval by the other player as well.

Anyhoo, just thought I would share fond memories of FASA Trek with you all. And I soooooo cannot wait to get a hold of that Second Edition box set I saw at that store. I know it'll be rough finding FASA players, but I actually have grander schemes in mind.

My plan is to combine the FASA and LUG Trek rules (as I am unfamiliar with CODA's system).

How's this for ingenuity?:

Remember in the FASA Second Edition system, which came with the Starship Combat Simulator, that it had hexagonal counters to represent ships? Well...of course, there were no Next Gen ships made. HA! Problem solved!

I have Activision's Bridge Commander for the PC. I was able to take screenshots of a top-down view of each of the ships in the game...all of which were Next Gen. Any other Next Gen ships I could not find in the game were taken off the internet. Now, I have made Hexagonal templates of those ships as well. As soon as I can find some gamers of Trek in the area I have moved to, I will be able to make the counters, and get some serious Starship Combat happening.

Long Live the memory of FASA Star Trek.

Respectfully, with head bowed in reverence
General Chang

[Sho-sa Kurita]

A friend and I used to play the FASA Tactical Starship Combat Simulator over the phone. LOL! It was the poor man's online deathmatch.

Several years ago I was working a night guard job at Lockheed. I worked the lobby, and a buddy worked the docks. We had multi-line speaker phones, so in between checking people and trucks in, and taking other calls, we would have battles the same way. (I had made miniaturized maps that would fit on clipboards). After a couple games, it's just about as fast as playing face-to-face, and it definitely made stealth/cloaking a lot easier.

-- Daniel

[General Chang]

Rock On, Shosa!

That was cool that you could do that at work. Wow. You must've miniaturized the maps. Would love to know what you did with the counters?

Playing it over intercoms must've made it seem even more Trek like. Hailing frequencies...LOL!

Way too cool.

Respectfully,
General Chang

[Snake_Plissken]

Haaa the FASA shtuff... we played the SCTS to death. My original copy is extremely worn-out. I really loved the Excelsior MkII; besides the later TNG sourcebook designs it was, by far, the most powerful ship. We had fun using a MkII and taking on whole Klingon task forces.

The game was a lot of fun; you constantly had to outguess your opponents at many different levels. Where would their ships move, how they allocated the power units, would they fire or not during that phase, which shields are powered, which aren't, etc. Too bad the mecanics don't lend themselves at all to an update with the TNG-era ships, although with some serious re-working it could be done. As great as the system was I had a few gripes with, namely the shields were often useless and powered up as an afterthought. 15 pts shields didn't do much in the end when 75 pts of damage was coming the ship's way. The sensor damage rules didn't work well as when the sensors were knocked off you couldn't fire anymore and thus your ships became useless; and knocking off the sensors was too easy- a single hit from a FP-4 torpedo did the trick. We had an house rule giving a to-hit penalty if the sensors were knocked instead of not being able to fire at all. Also as the good general pointed out it was way too easy to design ships loaded with nothing but torpedoes. Well I have to admit we did that a couple of times and we had a blast (!) However even after all these years the game is still thrilling and every time new converts discover it they find it refreshing.

[Sho-sa Kurita]

Originally posted by General Chang
That was cool that you could do that at work. Wow. You must've miniaturized the maps. Would love to know what you did with the counters?

Didn't use counters. Laminated the maps and used eraseable pens.

Originally posted by General Chang
Playing it over intercoms must've made it seem even more Trek like. Hailing frequencies...LOL!

Absolutely! It was always fun to yell "You Klingon bastard, you killed my son!"

-- Daniel

[General Chang]

Snake and Shosa...

Wow...I wish we could hook up and play some good ol' FASA STCS. We could probably come up with some killer ideas to enhance the game. That is the thing I've always loved about RPG's and their ilk....if you don't like something, modify the rules so that you do like it.

I agree that the whole shield system in FASA was a bit lame...a single hit from an FP-4 could take down a shield side on most ships. So what we did was still play the three phased combat system, but the shields of the ships were tripled...the shields would batter down over the three phases. Shields were fully regenerated at the start of the next phase, if the shield generators weren't damaged.

I think LUG Trek got the idea right when it came to multifire weapon impacts on shields and internals. I am going to try to find a way to combine the rules of FASA and LUG.

I am also going to submit a simplified construction manual to Memory Icon for LUG Trek...using the statistics as found in the TNG/DS9 Core Rules, and The Price of Freedom.

Respectfully,
General Chang

[D.S.McBride]

I'm definitely on-line with the majority here: the character creation system and the starship combat were the definite high points of the game. I also have to give them credit in that they were one of the few games I knew of - back in '83, anyway - that eschewed the 3-18 point attribute system that had become more or less de riguer in RPGs at that point. I felt the 1-100 point system was way, way too clunky - and I remember how damn much we ended up concocting homebrew to get the hand-to-hand rules into something we could live with - but overall, it was certainly liveable. As the acknowledgements read in the LUG Core books, Guy McClimore and Greg Poelhien were the trailbreakers; the path they carved was rough, certainly, but they are to be commended for the effort they made.

That said, we're still using their character creation process from second edition to flesh out characters we're putting together with Icon. Some things are never really obsolete unless you want 'em to be...

[Snake_Plissken]

Wow...I wish we could hook up and play some good ol' FASA STCS

that would be awesome!

I know there's a program out there on the net that simplifies online wargaming- you have a hex-grid map, an automated dice system, etc. And there is even an STCS module that has been designed for the program. I think the program can be found on the Starmada website www.mj12games.com I downloaded it but I have no clue how to make it work

As for the STCS the more I think about it the more I'd like to do an overhaul of the game (and the construction manual) which would reflect all of the changes that have occured in the last 16 years of Trek. From the top of my head I'd like to make shields stronger- and General Chang and I must really think alike because I was thinking about using the LUG shield rules for the STCS: the 1st hit does full damage than the subsequent hits do partial damage. I'd also insert changes to reflect canon, like increase max beam range to 300,000 and taking care of the torpedo range (3,500,000 klicks) problem. I'd simply make the last range increment infinite- ex: a torpedo with 'S' range would keep the same range to-hit brackets, except for the last one which would become 16-infinite: 1, meaning that a successful torpedo hit at ranges 16+ would only incur on a '1'- which I think solves the problem nicely: torpedo hits at 1,000,000 klicks are still possible, its just that they're highly unlikely. I was also thinking about introducing rules for launchers like Galaxy's that can fire more than one torpedo per turn.

A lot of folks don't like the STCS because of the element of power distribution. They say that ST ships should have all the power necessary to run all systems. The way I see it is that a ST ship has all the power necessary to run its systems at normal levels but not to get optimal performance from EACH system at once. If you figure that the normal impulse speed is 0.25c then all ships in the STCS can attain that speed quite effortlessly, especially since one movement power pt can make you travel 2 hexes (20,000km). Its when you want to achieve very high impulse speeds (like 0.9c) that you need all the 'juice' you can get. Same goes for phasers. We always assumed that the normal level of operation was only to pour in 1 power pt per phaser, and the range bonus would do the rest. It is when you want to attain above-normal power levels with the phasers (like reaching 10pts with that FH-11) that you start drawing power away from other systems.

Anyways, I think I'm really interested into working on a conversion.

[General Chang]

Snake....

Great minds do think alike.....and so do ours..LOL!

I have an idea about the Normal power level standard for phasers in the FASA system.

Ok...the phasers have damage modifiers +3 at such and such a range, + at further range, +1 at extended range. How about this, and we'll use the FH-11 as an example.

Ok, 10 pts of power can be applied to the FH-11 according to its stats. How about this...the bonus damage modifiers could actually be extra power added to the phasers. For example:

If you want to strike some ship at optimal range with the FH-11, and not use the bonus damage mods...the cost is 10 pts. However, if you wish to incur bonus damage...you would apply three extra points to that phaser. The bleedoff of damage for range would remain the same. +3. at close range, +2 at further range, +1 at extended range....0 for maximum range. So, if you are at extended range with an FH-11, and know for sure that you need to incur the maximum possible damage to your opponent, knowing full well that your bonus mod would only be +1, then you would still have to apply 3 additional pts to the phaser bank in question.

Then again, this is where LUG had the right idea about the single phaser element that could simply fire in any arc. You could still target multiple enemies, it would just come at penalties for multiple actions. Also, in LUG, there is the special rule where you can burn your phasers at 130%.

Tell ya what, Snake, I have to go for the moment. Will expand more on these ideas a little later.

Respectfully,
General Chang

[ghosty]

Loved FASA trek. Started playing the bad old days before TNG. My only problem was that it was pretty difficult mechanics wise to get promoted.

[Capt. K. Vaughn]

A buddy of mine and I did completely rewrite the STSC and the associated Construction Manual many years ago and then reworked every ship.

Our final system worked quite well and took into effect everything from TOS on up through most of DS9. It took us quite some time to do but in the end we were quite satisfied as it gave us the feel from the show while hardly increasing the complexity.

Regards,
CKV.

[Snake_Plissken]

say Capt Vaughn, would you mind sending me a copy plz?