"Best & Worst Star Trek RPG System?" Topic

Believe it or not, I have never played a Star Trek role playing game. What do you guys think is the best version of the game and which is the worst? Doesn't matter which era of ST it covers, I like 'em all.

My Favorite is still the old FASA Star Trek RPG. The Art was horrible inside, but the cover art was great and the Ship stuff was outstanding.

FASA, top notch writing.

Mechanically, I liked the Lost Unicorn games best, especially the TOS version. FASA had some very good adventures and campaign ideas, but I found the game engine rather clunky even back when it was new.

FASA.

fasa…dont know where my stuff ended up now that you mention it, but the ship combat was great and interchangeable with the RPG…good times:-)

Played tons of FASA and house ruled it to the Nth degree with my RPG mates.

Most surreal fun we had was TOS with Savage Worlds though. We made each department (redshirt, blueshirt, goldshirt) a race and rewrote the skills 'Earth thing called kissing', 'punch klingons', 'fire all phasers' and used the weird science rules for Treknology. Let's face it, warp drive and transporters are hugely arcane.

Twas brilliant. A little campy and played best with 'role' players rather than simulationists. I'd post the rules, but they died online in a shuttle accident.

-TV

Which reminds me … I did a conversion of XXVc (the TSR Buck Rodgers game) using Hell on Earth and a smattering of the FASA ship combat system. Worked much better than it had any right to.

(Better than Rokugan 40k, which was a combination of L5R, Traveller, and Heavy Gear.)

The only one I've ever played is GURPS Prime Directive… though I gave the original Prime Directive a read through.
I like GURPS and the Prime Directive setting better suits my preferences… and it throws off any ST canon lawyers in the group who want to argue that the GM got some minute detail wrong. Also, the idea of 'Prime Teams' make a lot more sense than beaming down half the bridge crew every time there's trouble.

Count me in among the FASA Trek fans.

FASA Trek for me too. Still got my paper character sheets stored somewhere.

Played the FASA one a whole load back in the good old days. I recently found my old box of stuff in the lofty and had a very enjoyable few hours reading, reminiscing and going through my old campaign notes!

I've played the Prime Directive and ran the LUG Trek for Next Gen Starfleet and briefly a Pirates and Privateers/DS9 game set in a neutral border sector between Klingons, Cardassians and Federation. That was a lot of fun. Mechanics weren't great, but there was plenty of background detail in the books.

GURPS Prime Directive for me as well. It is the Star Fleet Battles universe and not core Trek but it works for me.

I agree that the FASA adventures were great and the background material too but the game system itself was rather clunky.

FASA and Lost Unicorn was good.
The Decipher version was horrific…

And GURPS was, well GURPS. Same old, same old.

> And GURPS was, well GURPS. Same old, same old

Which is why it is my favorite, one set of rules to bind them all. The psionics rules were tweaked to work better with Vulan mysicism though. (I have the first edition – no idea if they changed it with the 4E version)

FASA did one thing that the other versions couldn't match: It could simulate the action and tension on the bridge during a starship encounter. Everyone had a role in ship combat, which was done very well with A4 sheets representing each bridge station.

I've used that approach in some homegrown Trek systems. It works nice when everyone has a bridge station and a duty when the ship is in combat.

It takes a while for a group to get the hang of working together in that way. But then it takes a real crew on a real ship some time before they work well together too. And I found a good solution by making their first mission a wargames drill exercise against a friendly ship using simulated weapons fire. That gave them some practice so once the real game was under way they'd got the hang of things.

Speaking of bridge simulators, for those of you who haven't heard about it:

artemis.eochu.com

Gah, I was just going to say Artemis…

Rich

Looks like FASA is the big winner, with the Decipher version being on the bottom.

FASA for me.

It was also the ONLY trek rpg I've ever played, though.
Our GM ran a klingons campaign, though (not the spick and span nicey-nice federation).

I only played FASA Trek. Lots of fond memories of the game, and the starship combat section. My friends and I have been playing the starship combat part, relearning the rules.

FASA would have to be my favourite. Only trouble was that a lot of the published scenario's were very spy / militaristic. Which I don't consider to be very 'Star Trek'. To me Star Trek should be about 'strange new worlds'.

Same here, although my friends preferred the starship combat to the rpg. I was more interested in the latter.

Ive played the FASA version. Last Unicorn Games and GURPs Versions. Each had their own particular things to like about it. FASA is very detailed but if you had a low percentage in a skill, well you had a low probability to do what you wanted to do. the LUG version a bit more streamlined, I wish they had the time to develop it a little more. GURPs was enjoyable but I found it really didn't capture the Trek essence. Just my two cents.

FASA, with honorable mention going to Chaosiums' Basic Roleplaying System (BRP).

And one of the first things I thought when I saw Savage Worlds was "Man, I could totally run a TOS game with this."

I've used GURPS as well, its a bit crunchy but if your players don't want to use/learn a new game engine GURPS Space pretty much has everything you need.

Also I have everything FASA ever did for Star Trek except the module Old Soldiers Never Die.

I'm touching all my FASATrek stuff right now.

Because I can.

So there.

Nyah nyah nyah.

:P

I loved the FASA system…and I too still have my boxed set (trotted it out a few months ago and had a read, rolled up some characters, great fun).

But I wonder about trying Trek with d6 Space. You could template the departments and alien races, there are even some sample races in the rules as written. And they have scaling rules for fights between things of vastly different size so you could easily run an Enterprise vs the Planet Killer type of scenario.

And a quick google search shows that I'm not the first one to have this idea! Hmmm, I think I'll need to go mine the web…