Representing Star Trek Babble in an RPG
A response to Antolius' post, Star Trek Adventures TTRPG has a fatal flaw .
3D Chess
When Star Trek fans wanted to make a Star Trek (ST) chess-board, there were two schools of thought - one reconstructed the rules from actors who were moving pieces randomly, and another created a game from the same board, but with their own rules. All-in-all, I think the second method produces more interesting results, and in fact is more authentic, because onlookers seeing someone play ST chess will think 'that looks like some real nerd shit', which is what it's meant to look like, and probably what the actors at the time were thinking.
I think this call for a similar strategy. ST rules should should create a situation which looks and feels right, without trying to twist to random writers' notions.
Principles
No Scientific Discoveries
Every time someone injects a phased baryon field into a nutrino emission, the fix works according to previously-understood laws, to create an effect which solves only the current problem. Nobody works with unknown types of radiation, and nobody returns to Earth to say 'hey guys - we can now create stable time-dilations with this thing I made!'. Every fix works only for the current situation, and nothing more.
Fixed Principles
The rules should produce predictable results. With the right wording, it could feel as natural as kludgey engineering fixes in the real world.
The trolls are really giving our server a bad rep, and there's no way to tell who's who, because they all act normal, then they convince yet another user to run one of their programs and steal all their banking details!
What if we take the pi-holes' list of bad domains, narrow it to just sites which serve malware, then use a ping to trace each domain's IP address, and do a reverse DNS lookup to see if any of those addresses match the IP addresses the last trolls used to sign into their Mastodon account. If any match, we'll be able to tell who's a troll before they any attempted authentication.
...tell that to your granny and see if she can tell the difference between that and ST techno-babble.
Anomalies Galore
One way to ensure that a quick-and-dirty fix can't repeat is to add 'anomalies' - i.e. strange things, generally in a fixed location, and often short-lived. The characters may be able to use the subspace anomaly to teleport the ensign past the klingons' shields this one time, but they can't bypass all future shields, because that subspace anomaly will have disappeared by then.
Any RPG core rulebook can lay out how a couple of known anomalies work, while leaving room for any adventures ('episodes'?) to add their own anomalies. Of course if we have rules for random anomalies, we'll need at least some basic categorization.
ST anomalies, if I recall correctly, typically deal with one of:
- Time (time-travel, time-dilation, et c.)
- Space (transportation/ shrinkage/ growth)
- Modality (create unlikely events/ parallel universes)
- Biology (diseases/ appearance/ whatever)
- Energy (kabooms/ shield drainage)
- Minds (rare)
Supplies
Supplies, unlike anomalies, are long-lived and travel fine.
- Dilithium crystals
- Baryon radiation in a vacuum chamber
- Graviton particles
- Positron emitters
- Antimatter
Each type of supply can interact with only certain anomaly effects, encouraging some effects, while cancelling others.
| Time | Space | Modality | Biology | Energy | Minds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dilithium | X | ⚡ | ⚡ | |||
| Baryon | ⚡ | ⚡ | X | |||
| Graviton | ⚡ | X | X | |||
| Positrons | X | ⚡ | X | ⚡ | ||
| Antimatter | ⚡ | X | ⚡ | |||
| (lots more) |
- ⚡: This supply can alter these anomolies.
- X: This supply not only cannot interact with those anomalies, but stops all other substances from acting upon it.
Example 1: Engineering reports the last time-dilation from the subspace anomaly has allowed the tribbles to multiply a thousand times faster than normal. At the moment, they're up to their ears, but if it happens again, they could grow so quickly that nobody has room to breath.
What if we use a stabilized positron force-field to cut the anomaly's effects on tribble biology?
Of course positrons also push anomalies to interact with modality and minds. The tribbles have no minds, so that's not a problem, but the DM ('director'? 'captain'? 'Q'?) now knows the anomaly will start interacting with modality somehow.
At this point, we could let the DM make up whatever they want, or have a table with a random roll.
Example 2: The inhabitants of a binary-star solar system have noticed a lot of people go missing lately, but when the crew arrive, they find the missing people have miraculously returned, and don't remember disappearing. It turns out that a cloaked Romulan Bird of Prey has been firing an antimatter beam into the Sun to make it give off deadly levels of radiation-poisoning, so they can quietly extract precious supplies in the planet, without the Federation interfering.
That explains the time-dilations! They must have been an unintended side-effect from the antimatter beams. We don't have time to find the Romulans, buy maybe if we place all the graviton particles we have in a photon torpedo, we could stabilize the Sun just long enough to come up with a way to find them.
This pushes the anomaly in the Sun to become a spacial anomaly, so we're back to the question of 'DM fiat', or a big table of results.
Engineering Skill
It takes more than shouting 'reverse the polarity' to get something done - you have to be an engineer, and know how to measure the polarity, and which tools will mess with it. Time's a big part of every technical decision, so whatever the rule for rolls is, engineers must gain some bonus for getting more time to work on a problem.
And so
That's really just a vague shadow of a system, rather than a real RPG system, but hopefully the overall proposal's clear enough. Whether this can maintain players' interest for long I don't know - perhaps the third time they encounter a spacial distortion and throw anti-matter at it, it'll start to get old. On the other hand, it can't be worse than hitting an orc with a broad-sword for the hundredth time.