Star Trek Adventures PBF

Role-playing games Play by Post
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Characters in STA have 6 Attributes valued 7 to 12.

Control
Daring
Fitness
Insight
Prescence
Reason

They also have 6 Disciplines based on their training.

Command
Conn
Security
Engineering
Science
Medicine

Finally they have focusses. Which are specialised skills. For example; Transporters.

Example of a skill test.

Assisting another player adds let’s you also roll dove against your

A Scottish engineer is attempting to teleport someone.The GM rules this a test of their Control + Engineering. In this case a combined score of 15. (11 and 4)

The GM defines the difficulty of this test as 2 (The standard).

The Engineer rolls 2d20. (The standard) He gets a 4 and a 19. The 4 is a success because it is equal or below 15.

This would be one success BUT he also has the transporter focus which doubles any successes equal to or below their discipline score. Two successes, on a difficulty 2 test is a pass.

Additional rules

A roll of 1 always counts as 2 successes, a roll of 20 adds a complication as defined by the GM.

Players have traits, these can make rolls harder, have no effect or reduce the difficulty. (Number of success needed)

If you pass a test with spare success these are added to the momentum pool. These can be spent to create advantages add additional dice to a roll or make an enemies more need more successes.

The cost of additional dice is 1,2 and then 3 momentum.

You can assist another player by rolling your own attribute + discipline.

Threat

The gm has a threat pool. In the same way players have momentum to improve the odds, the GM can make things more difficult. If a player has no momentum and wants to gain an extra die they can add one threat to the GMs pool.

Combat

Is in rounds with each player and NPC taking a turn including a major and minor action.

Combat normally starts with one of the PCs. Initiative does not appear to be a thing?

  1. Choose a weapon and a target, and confirm if the attack is lethal or nonlethal.

  2. For a melee attack, the attacker attempts a Daring

  • Security Task with a Difficulty of 1, opposed by
    the target’s Daring + Security (also Difficulty 1). If
    the target wins the Opposed Task, then they are
    considered to have made a successful attack instead.

For a ranged attack, the attacker attempts a Control

  • Security Task with a Difficulty of 2. This is not an
    Opposed Task.

  1. Roll the number of dice for the attack or hazard’s
    damage rating. The total rolled is amount of damage the
    attack or hazard inflicts.

  2. If the target has any Resistance Dice (from Cover
    and the like), roll those dice, and add the total rolled
    to the character’s static Resistance, if any. The total is
    the character’s total Resistance for that attack.

  3. Reduce the total damage rolled by one for each point
    of total Resistance. If there’s one or more damage
    remaining after this reduction, the character loses one
    point of Stress for each point of remaining damage. The
    character may also suffer an Injury if one or more of the
    following conditions occurs:

5 or more damage is taken in a single attack or stress is reduced to 0.

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Eye-twitching intensifies

But… the font… it’s… oh no. What have I done.

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Look out, it’s Dalek Casual!

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Live long, and may the Force be with you. So say we all.

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A long time ago in a last best hope for the golden path, you can’t take the sky from me.

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I may have to move all of these excellent Frakking comments.

The skill check rules in the quick start guide are 5 pages long. I’m looking to summarise them in a coherent 2 paragraphs, which will be completed tonight.

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I’m slowly assembling a cheat sheet in the above post.

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Never give up! Never surrender!

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Not quite.

A Focus that you can apply allows you to get a Critical Success for any roll equal to or under the corresponding Discipline (usually a value from 1-4). So in this case, our Scottish Engineer, “Welshy,” gets 2 Successes because he rolled a 4 and his Engineering Discipline is 4 (or more).

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If I play an engineer, it will be “Spanners” McZielinsky. (The “Mc” is bestowed by Famous Engineering School.)

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Damn it, Spanners, I’m a management consultant, not a veterinarian!

I think the team’s coming together nicely.

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Ooh, I’ll do command.

“This isn’t a friend-ship. It’s a star-ship. Are you a star or not!?”

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So if I understand it right Daring and Conn are essential if there is to be bold going.

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Awesome. This is exactly why I’m clarifying above.

Now to parse momentum and threat.

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More details added above. Momentum threat and traits.

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So some small points of interest: Momentum doesn’t have to be agreed on to be spent. Any player can declare that they will spend momentum from the collective pool whenever/however they want.

Characters always roll 2d20 by default: the first additional die they purchase costs either 1 Momentum or 1 Threat (which the GM gains). The 2nd die purchased (so 4d20 at this point) costs 2 Momentum, 2 Threat, or 1 and 1. And the 5th and final die costs 3 Moment, Threat, or combination thereof.

No circumstance (that I am aware of) can get you over 5d20. Which means…

The most common way of doing this is by rolling 1d20 to assist the character. I don’t think it has to be the same Attribute + Discipline that you use to assist (ie: the pilot can do a skill check with Control + Conn, while the engineer assists by rolling Daring + Security… the “roleplaying” part here is figuring out what you’re doing to help to justify the skills you are using).

However, this 1d20 does count towards the 5d20 maximum for any given roll, and only 1 player can assist another at a time.

Also, when you are on the ship (whatever ship you are on), the Ship can assist instead of a player to contribute 1d20 to the task. Use the corresponding combination of ship abilities for your target number.

There are complicated rules for really hard tasks that involve multiple steps/phases, but most of the time they bog things down. Basically, complicated tasks (“Re-initialize the computer before the star explodes”) behave like combat, but all the terms are changed to maximize confusion. But even here the 5d20 for a single roll holds, but players usually act one-after-another rather than assisting each other.

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This last point is my real concern. There are lots of ifs and caveats. I’m also not a fan of the whole threat, momentum thing.

If I want to throw another Borg cube at you I bloody will :grinning:

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Honestly, I like the threat of Threat more than I like Threat.

In 95% of the games I have GM’d in our ST:A campaign (another game tonight in… 1.5 hours!) I haven’t spent a single Threat token. BUT, occasionally I will spend a heap of it to make the PCs lives more complicated… but I was going to do it anyway and I just spend all the threat (or however much I think is appropriate) to make them scared of just giving it to me willy-nilly.

Like… if they’re at a critical point in an adventure and I have 8+ Threat, I might spend it all to make their universal translators go on the fritz. Or I might say something like “Oh, I have 6 threat here… so 3 Klingon warriors are upgraded to 3 Klingon Experienced Warriors…” or whatever.

But yeah, I like the Momentum + Dice Pool thing (although I will often do the “The Number of Successes You Roll Determines What I Tell You” thing instead of making the players “spend Momentum” to learn more), but Threat is… less useful. But still, keeps the PCs on their toes and gives you an easy-out if nobody can think of anything interesting for a crit-fail.

Oh, suggestion (totally optional, of course!). When my players roll a 20, I usually ask them what went horribly wrong. They almost always come up with something far worse than I would (“My tricorder explodes!” “… huh. I was just going to have you drop it, but okay! It explodes.”)

I have very recently started to let them come up with a roleplaying “recovery” (I think some RPGs call it “Succeed at Cost”? Included ST:A, actually)… so they need to get 3 successes but only got 2. Fine, but they have to give me at least three uses of technobabble to explain how they fix it (and I’ll throw the technobabble at them they need to use). Makes everyone feel more involved in the situation.

But I don’t think that’s actually in the rules.

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Players describing their own failures is terrible!

Stealing it.

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In general I’m not a fan, because it brings me out of immersion in the character to a more authorial/editorial stance, but it certainly can work (e.g. in Genesys). I haven’t pinned down rules for when it irks me and when it doesn’t.

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