Getting Our Game On!: Decipher Star Trek RPG

Last week, we looked at Decipher Inc’s groundbreaking attempt to take the traditional mechanics of a RPG, and put them into a card game. This week we’re going to look at what happens when the same company decides to make an actual RPG. From 2002-2004, Decipher released six books under the Star Trek license. I call them Decipher Trek, but many call them Coda Trek after the system that Decipher created to run the game, the Coda System. Whatever you called it, it’s a fascinating chapter in the history of licensed Star Trek gaming and it definitely deserves a look!

But first, a rather lengthy history! In the 80s Star Trek RPGs were simple in that there was only one company handling the development, FASA. FASA held a license until 1989, when they flew too close to the sun, and started stepping in areas of development that Paramount didn’t like. It was at that point that Paramount pulled the license, and Star Trek RPGs went on hiatus. It was nearly a decade before Star Trek found another home in the pencil and paper RPG sector via Last Unicorn Games, or LUG as most people refer to them. That license lasted about a year before interference from Paramount once again left the world without a Star Trek based game of imagination. The point to this brief historical recounting is heading somewhere, I promise.

LUG bought the license for Trek around 1997, and released their first book, a core book for The Next Generation in 1998. Subsequently, LUG released 14 more books, and a limited line of miniatures in around eighteen months. That’s ludicrous! Once, again, it speaks to the commercial viability of Trek back in this era. Anyway, right around the end of ‘97, Wizards of the Coast, who make Dungeons and Dragons now, had recently acquired TSR, the company that originally made D&D. It was at this point that they started developing what would become the third edition of the world’s most recognizable RPG. *Understand that what follows is mostly theory that happens to fit the facts. I think that this period of gaming history saw WotC greedy for RPG properties. Between 1997, and 2000, they acquired D&D, West End Games, which netted them the license for a Star Wars RPG, and LUG, which probably should have netted them a license to develop a Star Trek RPG. However, Paramount plays by their own rules so when LUG got absorbed into WotC, Paramount simply shopped the license around, and settled on Decipher to develop the next iteration of Star Trek RPG. It made sense since Decipher was already making the Star Trek CCG.

Rumor has it that staff from LUG who had been brought on to Wizards had already been tweaking the rules system for the LUG game so that WotC could release a new version of the game. However, once Decipher got the license, many of those employees jumped ship, and went over to Decipher to develop. What all of this culminates into is a system that’s a disturbing hybrid of the LUG system, and WotC’s D&D third edition. That’s a really long way to explain that, but the more you know, right? The team at Decipher spent probably over a year developing Coda Trek, and for the most part, it pays off. However, as we’ll see, there are some glaring deficiencies.

The LUG system was a great system in its own right. It used character templates, and overlays to generate characters that, for the most part, were multi-faceted, and well-rounded. The character creation aspect was easy enough, and didn’t take terribly long. We’ll discuss all of this at length next week, but suffice it to say for now that LUG made a really good system that focused on great storytelling. By contrast, the Coda system was, well, not quite as good. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a really fun system to play, and once you get the hang of it, it’s not too bad, but here’s the thing: LUG had a great system. Having to tweak that great system in order to avoid IP litigation resulted in a system that was heavy on mechanics, and also pretty clunky. It’s about the only system that I play that I need a character generation guide in order to play.

Wow, we’re not off to a good start on a system that I claim to enjoy tremendously, are we? Starting at the basics, the Coda system that this game uses runs off of a 2d6 mechanic. So any skill or combat checks that need to be made use 2d6 plus any skill modifiers in order to do so. It’s a pretty straightforward mechanic, and I really can’t complain. Alright, in the positives category, there are only six books, well, eight if we count the PDF books, and a Narrator’s Screen that were published in the two years that decipher was making their game.

Pictured here for your convenience!

A lot gets accomplished in these eight books. Some are more effective than others, but it does make our look at the game somewhat succinct. There’s a Player’s Guide, because obviously there is. There’s a Narrator’s guide. These are the essential core books for the game. Pretty much anything one could need to know in order to play are in these books.  There’s a creature guide, an alien guide, a starship guide, and for some reason, a Starfleet Operations Manual. In PDF form, we also have a world guide, and a mirror universe handbook.

Starting from the beginning, the Player’s Handbook is a pretty useful resource. However, I don’t feel like the information is laid out as well as it could be. I find myself constantly flipping back and forth between pages trying to find information that I need. However, what the book lacks in organization, it more than makes up for in its index. The indexes of these books are fantastic! They will help you find everything, and you’re going to need it because as I said before, the layout of the books leaves a lot to be desired. There’s also an issue of the character sheets:

And this is just one page!

There’s a lot there, but I’ve found that there are skills mentioned in the books that aren’t present on the sheet. This can be a little frustrating as there aren’t a ton of empty spaces to write skills into. The broad strokes information does attempt to walk you through character creation in a pretty logical way. It doesn’t mesh with how I build characters so that might be why I don’t like it as much, but at least an attempt was made. By necessity, there are a lot of tables, especially where weapons are involved. When you have a universe that used variable strength particle weapons, it almost becomes necessary to table out damage amounts at various settings. The tables are easy to read, and I can’t complain.

I’m not going to lie, I very rarely even open the Narrator’s Guide. I’ve had some instances where specific situations have required me to look up a particular rule, but for the most part, I’ve found most of the information I’ve needed as Narrator in the Player’s Guide. I’m not knocking this. Wizards uses a fairly similar setup these days. I just feel like things become extraneous here because some of the information that you use out of the Narrator’s Guide is rehashed in so many other books. But, if all you had when the game first came out was the Player’s Guide, and the Narrator’s Guide, then you’d have all of the info you could ever need. I do really like that this book talks about how Star Trek should feel as you’re running it in different eras. Each show got a short write up about what type of action drove that show, and how to incorporate that feel into your games to that, in theory, you could run several different campaigns in several different eras and have them feel much different from one another. I also have to give kudos to Decipher for trying to slip Star Trek: Enterprise into the material with such short notice. Enterprise had barely been on the air for one season before these books came out so even though the info is sparse, I was glad to see they made an attempt to cover that era. Also, there’s a lot of really helpful information on how to structure campaigns in order to keep things fresh. And of course, combat rules. So I suppose that there actually is a lot in this book that’s both exclusive and extremely helpful.

Alright, after this, I promise we’re into the home stretch. I can gloss over the other books and sum everything up because the rest are just straightforward things, but let’s talk about the book that I thought was the least useful book that Decipher released, the Starfleet Operations Manual. I’m not going to lie, I only really cracked this tome open just this morning in order to do ‘research’, but HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS! All I can say is this:

Just all of that! This is a prime situation where the name is totally misleading. I thought that this was a book to teach noobs all about Starfleet in universe. It turns out that all of the complaints that I had about holes in the system with the Player’s Guide, and the Narrator’s Guide are totally examined and improved in this magnificent bit of mana from Almighty! It was a legitimate epiphany moment for me! It seriously had me all like:

I just can’t say enough! Feel like your choices in character advancement were limited in the Player’s Guide? Starfleet Operations Manual. Pining for more races to explore and play that were left out of the Player’s Guide? Starfleet Operations Manual! Still fuzzy about how certain skills work in context of both the game overall, and playing a Starfleet officer in particular? Starfleet Operations Manual, SUCKER! I’m not exaggerating when I say that pretty much everything that I felt was missing from the other two volumes is covered in this one. It’s almost like Decipher was in a mad dash to get a product out, and knowing that the product was flawed, decided to follow that product up with this fix so that players and GMs alike could have a better handle on their game. It’s a really short book by comparison, clocking in at a meager 90 pages, but everything is covered in it, at least as far as playing a Starfleet character is concerned. There are revised, and new improvement paths, explanations of the various fleets that comprise Starfleet overall, and what each does, as well as where. There are new pieces of equipment, and better explanations of how old ones work. There are starship templates that show how all of the cool ships work within the game mechanics. I’m going to officially retract my previous allusion that some of the books were weak, this might be the most comprehensive book in the series. After this, everything else in this series is just going to seem mundane! Oh well, let’s press briefly on anyway…

The last three volumes are fairly self explanatory. The Aliens book expands the offering of playable races by giving summaries of new and old races, as well as mechanical information for playing one of these races. The Starships book gives expanded information on various starships within the Star Trek universe, how they work within the game, and also how to make your own should you have the need. The Creatures guide gives the Narrator a bunch of freaky deakies to throw at their group while said group is planetside. The Worlds PDF is also pretty utilitarian. It provides data on various known worlds within the Star Trek realm, and tells the Narrator all of the various ways that an unsuspecting player could die while exploring these worlds. It also provides information on how to build custom worlds so that a Narrator can easily shake things up during the course of a campaign. The Through A Glass Darkly mirror universe guide is probably the one that I find the most interesting and tantalizing. The Mirror Universe in Star Trek is an interesting look at what happens when all of those noble ideals that Roddenberry held so dear get rejected, and man allows his carnal passions to govern his actions. This book gives players and Narrators all of the tools they need to play in this savage and unforgiving facet of Star Trek lore. It’s pretty sweet.

With all eight of these releases, Decipher actually managed to make a fairly complete game. I can only imagine that had they had a chance to develop the property further, there might have been some adventure modules, some more setting fluff, and maybe even some Enterprise specific material to really get games into that era. But as it stands, this system is pretty complete as it is. And as with the card game, this game has managed to maintain its core following well after it’s demise. One can visit this site right now and get all sorts of goodies to further enrich your game play. The site offers new species that weren’t covered in the official publications, adventure modules, and starship builds for those who desire a change.

As far as systems go, I really can’t complain too much about this one. The character creation is probably the most prohibitive part of this system, and once you get past that, and the missing skills on the character sheet, it’s a pretty easy system. It offers a lot of possibilities, and a lot of fun for players. I know I’ve had plenty of dramatic and rewarding adventures playing in this system and I can’t recommend it enough! Stick around because next week, we’re going to look the predecessor to this RPG system, the Last Unicorn Games system! We’ll see what made the two similar and what made the two different!

All About Gaming: Star Trek The Customizable Card Game

Let’s face it, the 90s were a wonderful time if you happened to be a Star Trek fan and a gamer. Over the next few weeks as we lead up to the release of the new Star Trek Adventures RPG game, we’re going to look at some of what has come before, and how those things have shaped what we’re getting presently. To kick all of that off, I want to start by looking at Decipher’s Star Trek CCG, a game that is as convoluted as it is fun to play. The game was produced from 1994 to 2007 so it had a pretty long run. However, constant rules updates, and a lackluster second edition coupled with CBS pulling the license ultimately laid this interesting game to rest.

The basic premise of the game is to incorporate the elements that make Star Trek unique into a card game. To do this, the rules set, and the gameplay are designed to reflect that goal. The game is primarily for two players, but there are unofficial rules for adding more. In a two player game, players actually have two decks. One is for building a deck from which they’ll play during regular game play, and the other is called the seed deck. This deck consists of location cards, artifact cards, dilemma cards, doorway cards, and station cards. Basically, anything that is going to need to be in play throughout the game that serves as the foundation of the game. Each player takes turns seeding things as a space line is created, and dilemmas/artifacts are secretly seeded under mission location cards.

Once everything is completely set up, it looks more or less like the picture above. As you can see, there are ships involve. Obviously. Each ship, and each personnel card that’s used during the regular play have stats associated with them, and look a lot like this:

In my opinion, this is where this game is extremely unique. Not only did the designers attempt to capture the Star Trek spirit with their game, they also incorporated gameplay elements that are more closely related to your standard RPG. You’ll notice that Captain Kirk has the attributes of Integrity, Cunning, and Strength. He also has a laundry list of unique skills from which to pull. Every character follows this same pattern, and these skills and attributes play a large role in the game. See, the win conditions are either accumulate 100 points first by solving missions and dilemmas, or be the last to run out of cards in your draw deck. Hence, each mission has a point value, and list of requirements necessary to solve it. The player, therefore, would take their crew to the mission of their choosing, and attempt the mission by committing personnel to that mission. If there are dilemmas beneath the mission, (graciously seeded by your opponent), the the crew have to solve those as well. This can be problematic as a player may not have the skills necessary to solve a particular dilemma. In this case, the entire crew become stopped, and cannot move again until the dilemma is solved.

Star Trek as a mythology has a ton of things going on, and a lot of different races playing in its sandbox, and Decipher didn’t skimp on including these various races in the game. The interesting thing is that they tried to maintain the flavor of each race, or affiliation, as they’re actually called. So Klingons have a lot of strength, and honor is a skill that most possess, where Romulans have high cunning, and you’ll find a lot of treachery. This further affects gameplay as not every mission can be attempted by every affiliation. Furthermore, not every mission location can be seeded on the same space line. Using Delta Quadrant locations, one has to be playing a person who is also playing Delta Quadrant cards in their deck. This applies to personnel and ships as well. Also, as a Federation player, you can’t be the aggressor in a combat maneuver. Of course, there are cards that can change all of this, but it does add some extra depth to the strategy behind the game.

At the time that Decipher lost their license, Star Trek had been around for 40 years. That doesn’t seem quite as long now, but that’s still a lot of material to cover, and Decipher did an incredible job in the attempt. There were 17 sets in just the First Edition. There were also numerous promotional released as well. There were a further 14 sets released for the Second Edition, bringing the total to 31 full sets. That doesn’t seem like much, but bear in mind that this was a card game that was only in production for 13 years. Magic: The Gathering, and Pokemon may have more material to choose from, but they’ve been around longer, and they’re not working within the confines of a licensed property so it’s pretty amazing to see what one company could do with these unique limitations. Equally as interesting is what some companies failed to do in trying to mimic the Star Trek CCG. Google customizable card games, and you’ll see a huge list of games that were coming out around the same time that just didn’t last. It really says a lot about the staying power of Star Trek, and it speaks to the passion of the fans at the time.

We’re 10 years removed from the cancellation of the game so where does that leave us? Well, getting back to that staying power, there is a Continuing Committee that has taken it upon themselves to organize an underground community of players. They organize games for events, provide a forum for fans to meet one another online, or IRL, and even create unofficial expansions that can be used in friendly play. They’ve also been working to remove some of the complicated fat from the First Edition of the game to make it more easily playable. As of this writing, we’re ten years in and still going strong.

The Star Trek CCG was a game ahead of its time if you ask me. It took a concept that was radical and untried, and put it to the test, and quite successfully. It really went to the final frontier of card gaming. I never got too into the Second Edition, but played the First Edition from the very beginning, and I remember having hours of fun as I worked to out maneuver my opponent. The great thing about this particular game is that since it’s so old, many of the cards are pretty inexpensive. The later releases were not printed in huge runs, and those can fetch a mint, but the older sets tend to be pretty cheap. Being as it’s summer, this might be a good hobby to try and get into with friends, or family. It does have a pretty steep learning curve for beginners, but once you pick it up, it’s pretty straightforward, and if there’s something you don’t quite understand beyond the core rules, just ignore them. It was an oddity in its time, and monument to the passions of Trekkie gamers the world over, give this one a good college try, and stay tuned to next week! We’ll be taking a look at Decipher’s other Star Trek game!

Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition: A World of Wonder and Excitement

I mentioned earlier this year that I would be playing the various editions of D&D with my game group this summer, and I also mentioned that I would review each edition as I got a chance to play them. As luck would have it, my group and I are on our last session of 1st Basic. I specify basic because in 1977, TSR release 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I wasn’t actually there for the thing when it was all the rage, but from what I hear, the idea of players who played a basic version, and players who played an advanced version had the consequence of creating a little bit of a rift between the two groups. One loved the ease and simplicity of the basic, and the others saw themselves as somewhat superior because they could understand how to play the advanced version. That’s all hearsay now, but having had experience with some of these a-hole elitist grognards, I could see it happening. Anyway, I digest. The gang and I have been playing the basic version of the game via what is loving referred to as the ‘Red Box’. This box contained all of the basic rules that a group would need to start into the game. It had character creation rules, combat rules, and monster stats. It even featured a beginner dungeon crawl that could walk a group through the experience, and prepare them for further adventures. We did this dungeon crawl just so we could get the quintessential experience so without further adieu, here are my thoughts on this pop culture classic!

I’ll admit that leading up to running this system, I was a little nervous. I had no experience with the system previous, and I knew that I would be having to learn all that I could in a very short period of time. Fortunately, I have a group that’s willing to rules jockey in an amiable fashion, and none of us really minds the process of a cooperative learning experience. Off the bat with character creation, I realized that this was going to be a special experience. The rules were much different than what I had grown accustomed to playing later editions. Gone was the freedom to assign ability scores as I chose. Instead, ability scores were rolled in the order that they appeared on the character sheet. This is an interesting way of doing things as a player could hope to play a particular class, but then end up with attributes that support an entirely different class. I was also taken aback when the book ‘generously’ declared that each player character would start the game with at least one hit point! This was to assuage any fears that a bad roll combined with a bad modifier would leave the player with zero hit points! Yeesh! Also gone from the character creation model were races, at least in the way that I knew them. Sure, you can play an elf, or a dwarf, or a halfling, but your ability to do so it based on your generated ability scores, and you must meet minimum score requirements in order to play these ‘demi-human’ races as the book calls them. It’s all extremely foreign feeling, but really fun. I had a blast watching players make their rolls, and realizing that the dice weren’t their friends.

I had another wave of uncertainty as some Facebook peeps were telling me to memorize my THAC0 tables. “THAC0,” I thought nervously, “I thought that was a second edition thing!” Alas, it was not just a 2nd edition thing. However, unlike 2e, THAC0 in 1st Basic is actually not too bad. There are a few situational modifiers that a DM can impose should he/she see fit, but the base mechanic is extremely simple. You look at your armor class, reference a small chart that’s conveniently on every character sheet, and if you rolled the minimum number to hit, you hit. The most disorienting thing about the system is that your AC is better the lower it is. So instead of saying, “My AC is 14. Therefore you need to roll at least a 14 to hit me.” You look at a chart and see that, “My AC is 2. Thus, you need an 18 to hit me.” It’s backwards, and hard to keep straight at times, but it isn’t so unnerving as to ruin the experience. In fact, I’ve rather enjoyed the simplicity of it all.

Another thing that players of later editions are going to miss is the huge block of skills that are typically listed. This is an entire character sheet for Basic:

As you can see, it’s all very... Basic… Classes give players short lists of skills that they get to take. Magic users have a list of a couple dozen spells that they can choose from as the level to higher levels. It’s all stripped down to just the bare essentials. I’m sure that there are types of players out there who would see the simplicity, and lack of things as a hinderance, but my group actually has had the opposite experience thus far. Without all of the mechanics to get in the way, everyone has seemed to have a much easier time with the roleplaying aspect of the game. I do my best to describe a scene, the player interact with the environment, and when they want to do something, I just say, “So do it. Show us what you do.” It’s been an exciting and liberating experience.

Combat is another area where I have felt liberated as a player. This may have a little to do with the fact that I haven’t been able to learn all of the combat rules as well as I would like. I have a basic understanding of how they work, but in terms of situational effects, and modifiers, I’ve just made an effort to avoid all of that for the time being. The one thing that I have really enjoyed as a DM is just how deadly this system can be. Sure, you might have great AC to protect you from being hit, but if you get hit you will most likely die. At least that’s the case at lower levels. Our first session, I shot a player with an arrow and killed the character in one shot. To be fair, the book recommends avoiding combat, but as a game master who typically avoids killing player characters, it’s really a breath of fresh air to be playing a system that allows me to do so without the burden of knowing all of the hours that a player spent building a character in the first place. It’s a fantastic bend on the game play as I’ve grown used to systems where you can blaze into combat with reckless abandon, and be nearly guaranteed to survive. It also alleviates the lame death saving throw mechanics that I’ve grown to loathe. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen saves against death add some great tension to sessions, but in general, I feel like the best tension setter is the knowledge that one wrong move could be fatal. Action without consequences just rings hollow, and I find that boring.

This is apparently going to be a pretty short review, but just like its subject, I really feel like less is more. I know that there are people out there playing RPGs who like to have thousands of player character options, and at least as many monster creature options. These types may not like this system as much. However, there are probably people like myself who appreciate being able to pick something up, learn it quickly, and play it at least as quickly. These are the types of people who are going to enjoy a system like Basic. There are a lot of things that the rules don’t specifically say you can do, but that gives a DM the freedom to decide whether or not they want to allow it, and more entertainingly, how they want a player to try to do things. It frees players from the shackles of an endless list of skills, and constant dice rolling, and it allows them to explore the imaginary environments provided as well as the character that they’ve created, instead. It encourages players to get into the game and all of its quirks as players act out actions in order to accomplish their goals. This is a great system to pick up and try out over a weekend should you be the type to play such games, and I can’t recommend it enough! Grab some dice, grab some friends, and enjoy! Also, stick around for next week to see what we’re looking at next!