Over the last four years, I’ve run many Star Trek Adventures games at conventions online and in person. There’s no end to the joy of sharing a mutual love of Star Trek with people who sign up for my games. The most common reaction I get at these conventions is how the players wish they could find a group to play so they could enjoy Star Trek Adventures even more.
I get this with a lot of the games I run that aren’t Dungeons and Dragons, like Deadlands, Conan and Dune. These are niche games, and I guess I’m a niche Game Master. No matter how niche, my tables always fill up at the conventions… and the players lament how there aren’t more opportunities to play these systems.
I’ve offered two or three of these players a chance to play in my home campaign. Sometimes it’s a good match. Sometimes it isn’t and they go their own direction. Such is gaming.
The Star Trek Adventures Game Master’s Guide has a side bar about running games at conventions. The first point is to make sure the session illustrates proper play of Star Trek Adventures. It’s easy to dismiss this statement as being about making sure you know the rules. You don’t want to send new players to other tables with a completely wrong interpretation of the core rules.
Also, it’s important to best represent a common adventure for the setting. This doesn’t mean to run a mundane adventure. On the contrary, a convention module should be the most exciting adventure in the lives of the PCs. This means the adventure should mechanically and thematically represent what the game has to offer.
For Star Trek Adventures, this means running a game where the PCs are a crew on a Federation or Klingon starship, exploring space, in search of new life forms and adventures. Running a game where everyone is a miner on a colony world might fit in the Star Trek universe, but it isn’t the image that comes to mind when you hear the words “Star Trek.”
For a convention game, you want exploration of space, discovering new life forms and possibly getting into some space combat. This might be scary for some Game Masters. Remembering back to my Star Wars Saga Edition days, most GMs were afraid to incorporate space combat in their adventures, when space combat is a major staple of Star Wars. There’s less space combat in Star Trek than Star Wars, but when it comes to the major adventures, the ones that are made into feature films or to be continued episodes, there’s almost always at least a little bit of combat.
So, what are the common mechanics of the game?
There’s the core mechanic of choosing an Attribute and Discipline, adding them together to create a target number, then roll 2d20 to see if you get equal to or less than the target number on either or both of those dice.
There are gated challenges, where there’s a whole series of tasks the crew needs to complete to achieve their goal. They can’t move on to the next task until the current task is resolved. In some cases, the challenge can continue despite failure, but the Difficulty of the following challenges increases as a result of failure with a cost.
Gated challenges can be represented by the crew having to work together to fix the ship after something goes horribly wrong on the vessel, and systems go out. The first step is to calm the crew who may have reason to panic. Then, getting power back online is necessary before individual systems can be brought online. Then, repairs to the hull need to be accomplished before crews can be returned to the damaged levels of the starship.
Then, there are extended tasks. These are the challenges we’ve talked about before where there is only so much time to work on a task before something really bad happens. Take the prior example of fixing the broken ship. To make it an extended task, have the ship plummeting in a planet’s gravity well. The ship must be operational again before the vessel crashes and everyone dies.
The scientific method should be part of the game. The science officers and engineers will have endless fun rolling on technobabble tables as they create in-world solutions to impossible problems.
Next, the pillars of play need to be represented. The game can handle combat in several different styles: social, starship and individual combat. Have a variety of situations the players find themselves in. Offer different opportunities for the rules to be used to resolve unique situations.
Finally, the Star Trek Game Master’s Guide suggests having a session zero before the convention game begins. This handles the issue of using safety tools and providing lines and veils in case there are topics that might cause triggers. The best Star Trek episodes explored politics and social issues of their times. When doing this, it may result in a trigger. Avoid these by discussing potential triggers before the game begins.
The cleverest point I got from this sidebar was to ask the players to describe their experience with Star Trek and what they hope to get out of the game. We all got into the fandom from a different direction. It’s a good idea to compare our experiences with the franchise and see what about Star Trek really speaks to the players. Some players might really want to spend time exploring the endless tracts of space. Some might want to get into some starship combat. Others might be heavy roleplayers who want to experience a first contact scenario.
Most convention Game Masters probably have their adventures written and planned before getting to the convention table, but these wishes for what the scenario encompasses can be worked into any Star Trek Adventures story and allow those players to shine and have their Star Trek dreams come true.
