In Star Trek Adventures, when a player attempts a roll, and a d20 comes up a natural 20, bad things happen. These bad things are called Complications.
Now, the player can still succeed on his roll. It isn’t an instant fail like in many d20 games. It’s more like having more Threat than Advantages at the end of a dice roll in Edge of the Empire. The roll succeeds or fails on its own merits, but something else, related to the skill attempt, happens.
I’m a big fan of taking away the crew’s toys on the ship. Roll a 20 while attempting to scan a system? The scanners short out. Roll a 20 firing the phasers? Phasers short out. You get it. I fall back on these because it’s easy to figure out what needs to be done to eliminate the Complication. The broken part of the ship needs to be fixed. Suddenly, the Engineer character gets to be the hero after taking a back seat to the crew members involved with diplomacy and combat for hours on end.
When a Complication is rolled, it becomes a scene Trait that lasts until the crew can eliminate it. Getting rid of a Complication requires a Difficulty 2 task roll. This isn’t the easiest thing to roll, but it appears to be a baseline of difficulty for rolls in Star Trek Adventures. And why shouldn’t a moderate difficulty roll be the baseline? The characters in this game aren’t start-up adventurers. They’re the best of Starfleet at the top of their game. We’ll talk about consequences of that in a future article.
What kind of Complications can we do in Combat or physical scenes? Twisting an ankle. Breaking a bone. In the Next Generation era these injuries won’t take a character out of action for more than a couple of moments, thanks to breakthroughs in healing. It makes sense that a Difficulty 2 Medicine roll would be sufficient for treating this injury, given what we see from the source material.
My favorite kinds of Complications occur during the diplomacy scenes. Especially if there’s a language barrier for some reason. Create Complications of Misunderstood Meaning to sow doubt amongst the alien diplomats about whether they want to have anything to do with the Federation. Have a character who’s a lady’s man like Captain Kirk? Create a Complication like Realized this Man Slept With My Wife. Bring in character backstories and personalities… so that the characters have to answer for their actions.
An important thing about assigning a Complication is making sure there’s a way to remove it… and even more importantly that there’s a way for a character to shine when doing so. Let’s take the Realized This Man Slept With My Wife Complication. There are many paths to take to remove this Complication. Using Command, a more diplomatic route is taken to ease ill feelings. Fitness can be used to resolve the matter in a good old-fashioned fist fight. Use that primal urge of men to beat their problems out of one another and then be good spirited towards one another afterward. Reason can be used to use logic to explain away the circumstances of the infidelity or create reasons why it should be disregarded. Presence is a fun one. That’s putting on a huge smile and trying to make up… or intimidating the diplomat and making him feel ashamed for bringing personal feelings into diplomatic business. Daring can involve making a threat to do something rash if things don’t calm down. Ordering the weapons to be brought online is a Daring move when used in a diplomatic way. Insight can be used to look within and empathize with the diplomat, understanding how he feels and feeling horrible this situation happened.
Let’s not forget about Disciplines. Conn is a difficult one. Changing the subject to admire the diplomat’s ship and talk about its capabilities might work for a ship jockey like Tom Paris. Medicine isn’t just fixing broken bones. It’s also the skill for psychiatry. Getting into the diplomat’s head and talking about his frustration knowing about this affair can get the diplomat to get past the incident.
From this Complication that could halt all negotiations, we have ways using all the Attributes and some of the Disciplines to remove the Complication, making it a very effective Complication. With Conn, we have a way for the Conn officer to resolve it. With Medicine, we have a way for the Counselor to get involved. The offending party on the crew has a wide amount of tactics to try to weasel out of this unfortunate situation
When assigning a Complication, don’t think just how you’re going to put a roadblock in the crew’s way, but think of how you can get a wide variety of the crew to get a moment in the spotlight as they step up to resolve the Complication.
