The Tapestry of Star Trek
Lately I've been watching loads of Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: The Next Generation. It made me really want to play an RPG that allowed people to explore that type of wonder in space.
Star Trek's episodic approach is what separates it from being a pure space opera. That's an oversimplification, but helps to frame why I love and enjoy Star Trek. You can estimate the budget of any Star Trek show like The Next Generation or Enterprise by looking at the fake rock walls that exist on every single planet. The starting point of these walls is obviously fabric and paint, but the ending point is an alien world. For anyone who can suspend their disbelief, the optimism of Star Trek makes the kitsch of Star Trek feel just a bit more genuine.
I've been working on making a tabletop RPG that is largely inspired by these things. The goal is to convey Star Trek's characteristic optimism and wonder while allowing the players to build characters that they can rely on, both in their own skills and in each other.
The basic resolution mechanic that I've settled on is a success-based dice pool of six-sided dice where 4, 5, and 6 are considered success. There are three target numbers of successes for tasks that are easy, moderately difficult, and those that require technical expertise. Two, three, and four dice need to come up as a success in order to achieve these tasks. Attempting to do something without any knowledge or training and with only decent relevant attributes is impossible for a technical task without modifiers.
My settling on a success based dice pool system came after I set up a spreadsheet in Excel to give me the probability of passing a check based on the characteristics of die size, success criteria, pool size, and target number. As I design and implement specific mechanics I can inspect the probabilities of various challenges to get a feel for likely and unlikely outcomes.
Figuring out the right formulae was... frustrating. Probability and statistics are so horribly unintuitive.
Star Trek's episodic approach is what separates it from being a pure space opera. That's an oversimplification, but helps to frame why I love and enjoy Star Trek. You can estimate the budget of any Star Trek show like The Next Generation or Enterprise by looking at the fake rock walls that exist on every single planet. The starting point of these walls is obviously fabric and paint, but the ending point is an alien world. For anyone who can suspend their disbelief, the optimism of Star Trek makes the kitsch of Star Trek feel just a bit more genuine.
I've been working on making a tabletop RPG that is largely inspired by these things. The goal is to convey Star Trek's characteristic optimism and wonder while allowing the players to build characters that they can rely on, both in their own skills and in each other.
The basic resolution mechanic that I've settled on is a success-based dice pool of six-sided dice where 4, 5, and 6 are considered success. There are three target numbers of successes for tasks that are easy, moderately difficult, and those that require technical expertise. Two, three, and four dice need to come up as a success in order to achieve these tasks. Attempting to do something without any knowledge or training and with only decent relevant attributes is impossible for a technical task without modifiers.
My settling on a success based dice pool system came after I set up a spreadsheet in Excel to give me the probability of passing a check based on the characteristics of die size, success criteria, pool size, and target number. As I design and implement specific mechanics I can inspect the probabilities of various challenges to get a feel for likely and unlikely outcomes.
Figuring out the right formulae was... frustrating. Probability and statistics are so horribly unintuitive.
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