D&D, Star Trek, Christianity and Cricket all walk into a bar...

On the way home from work I've been listening to some old Make It So - A Star Trek Podcast episodes (from before the half-way point, when it became progressively shitter). The hosts, who are around my age, discuss how they loved Star Trek: TNG as kids growing up, gradually stopped watched during their late teenage years and so missed out on some of DS9 and all of Voyager, stopped watching Trek entirely, and then around their late 20s suddenly rediscovered TNG and fell in love with it all over again.

It got me thinking: I went through pretty much exactly the same experience with Trek and rediscovered it a couple of years ago at the age of about 28 when I was bored and decided to order a season of it on DVD. Suddenly my interest in it was rekindled (though, thankfully, not enough to get interested in Voyager or Enterprise).

And I also went through the same experience with role playing games. I stopped playing those around the age of 16 or 17, I think, and then got back into them at age 25 or so. It happened too with cricket - I was a good player for my local team, then went away to university and drifted away from the game, to come back to it later.

It mirrors what happens to a lot of people with church, as well, I think. They drift away once they hit late teenage-hood, and often come back to it in later life (though that hasn't happened to me so far).

So I wonder: is the tendency to lose interest in the things you enjoyed as an adolescent a universal feature of growing up - a necessary element of the process of becoming an adult - and, if so, is a rediscovery of the things you used to love also a necessary element of maturity and confidence in yourself as an adult? It seems that way.

What I want in a Star Trek Game

Amongst my many sins, I am a fan of Star Trek. Well, let's be more specific: I love The Next Generation; you can keep the rest.

The thing about NextGen is that it's episodic. There might be recurring characters who sort of develop over the course of the 7 series, but ultimately it's rather like The Twilight Zone in space - every week the Enterprise rocks up at a new planet/space encounter and there's a new, self-contained story, almost always presenting itself as a problem followed by a solution. There may or may nor be a sub-plot.

I want a game that emulates this. It would need, primarily, three things:

• A way to randomly generate unique planets/space encounters quickly and easily. (Examples: A large gas giant orbited by a Ferengi space station. A jungle planet populated by ostrich people. A huge space fungus.)
• A way to generate unique problems. (Examples: A disease which makes the sufferer invisible. A Klingon spy. A star that's about to explode.)
• A sub-plot generator. (Examples: An ensign is in love with character Y. The holodeck is malfunctioning. Lieutenant Barclay thinks he's gay.)

The important thing here is, you don't know what the solution to the problem is - not the players and not the GM. You just have a hurdle, and how it gets solved is open-ended, with the GM acting as a sort of ideas arbitrator, deciding what would or would not make sense.

Ideally, there would be some sort of teching the tech pool, whereby the players could spend a finite number of tokens to pull technological bullshit out of their arses, so long as they made it sound sufficiently plausible/amusing/Star Trekish:

Picard: Mr. Data, can't you figure out a way to re-route the manganese sub-particle detector shield to emit caesium rays?

Wesley: Yes, sir, and that might positivise the helium ions and create a mass-resistant vortex to pull us out of the radon nexus! 

Face it: it would be awesome.

Twitter Is Good For Something

I was going to write a long post about Michael Polanyi after some interesting comments on this story-games thread, but it'll have to wait, because there is something much more important: somebody has created a twitter account purporting to be "Plots from the unaired 8th season of Star Trek: The Next Generation", the conceit being that each 140-character tweet is a plot synopsis for a NextGen epsiode. And it's brilliant.

As my friend who sent me the link put it, the tweets are comical, but there is something on the nose about them. You actually really could imagine all of them happening. Examples:

Geordie falls in love with a beautiful girl who turns out to be the exotic pet of a visiting dignitary. Riker's birthday party is a success.

Worf brags about a new ceremonial knife for a week, then must prove his innocence after a mysterious stabbing. Riker does 150 pushups.

A rakish pilot from Beverly’s past steals a dangerous prototype space fighter. Riker’s play ignites a sexual hysteria among the female crew.

Wesley returns from a trip to discover that the Enterprise crew has been transformed into pigs. Worf is a mean pig.

An alien judge imprisons Picard in a carnivorous plant for doubting his justice system. Guinan invents an amazing new "single level" chess.

Data must solely represent non-carbon-based life at a Federation symposium on galactic civil rights. Riker fights a bear.

And my absolute favourite:

Picard is trapped inside a sentient turbolift. A clip show highlights the most memorable “Picard is trapped on a turbolift” moments.

Of Hares and Quolls and Da Gama, Ceiling Wax and Kings

[Apologies for the lack of posting the last few days. We visited the in-laws, in darkest Tohoku, where internet access is patchy at best.]

I've been reading Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration by Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto recently. It's an excellent overview of human explorers from prehistoric times to the current day, with the bulk naturally focused on the Iberian voyages of the 15th and 16th centuries, though I confess to a slight irritation at the author. (Fernandez-Arnesto believes that it was the poverty of Western Europe, especially Iberia, which caused the burst in exploration and colonisation - not technological advances - and that this is generally the rule around the world. Fair enough, but it leads him to be overly dismissive of other factors, such as personal bravery - Vasco da Gama for example is portrayed as a fool and an incompetent who could barely tell his arse from his elbow, which simply doesn't square with his achievements. There are also a heck of a lot of unsourced assertions throughout the book; whatever happened to popular history books with actual bibliographies?) You can also quibble about whether mass migrations such as the Polynesian colonisation of the Pacific, however impressive, really qualify as "exploration" in the same sense that Magellan's voyage did.

But anyway, I'm getting off on a tangent. Reading the book has given me an idea: Animal fantasy in the Age of Sail. Think of it. European animals (Rabbits and lynx from Spain and Portugal, Hares and foxes from the British Isles, frogs from France) venturing across the mighty ocean on cogs and caravels, discovering strange foreign lands populated by weird and unimagined beings (quolls, bandicoots and wombats in Australia, dholes and cobras in India, ocelots and caymans in South America) and getting up to all kinds of hijinks.

It surprises me that there isn't a game, much less a series of novels, about this. (There may be and I'm just not aware of it, of course.) It seems so obvious.

Anyway, I'm of the growing opinion that the world needs more Animal Fantasy role playing games, if only to seize the ground back from the furries - who as we all know are the lowest of all the many forms of geek, sitting just below LARPers and people who write stories about Kirk and Spock naked bedtopwrestling.

More thoughts on this tomorrow. By which I mean Animal Fantasy, not Star Trek slash fiction. Just to be clear.

Second Chances

Just watched the Next Gen episode Second Chances the other night. It's the one near the end of Season 6 where the crew discover an alternate Will Riker who was spawned in a freak transporter incident and ended up marooned on an uninhabited world for eight years.

This is one of those fantastic ideas that (idiots) who poo-poo sci-fi don't appreciate. And like a lot of Next Gen ideas it's handled amazingly well within the space of 42 minutes; how those writers managed to pack so much story into that space of time and do it so competently is a minor miracle.


Anyway, it got me thinking about an idea for a one-on-one game. The fate of "Thomas" Riker is fascinating - how would you cope with suddenly discovering that not only have you been marooned for 8 years...nobody even knew or cared that you were gone because (effectively) a doppelganger was in your place, making up with your estranged dad and shagging your girlfriend? How would you make a life for yourself as "the other Will Riker" in the brave new reality you've had thrust upon you?

This is the kind of thing that role playing games were invented for.

Star Trek Film (Some Spoilers)

I saw Star Trek last night. I won't say I was disappointed exactly; some of my worst fears were confirmed, but in other ways it exceeded expectations. A strange mix. Let's go through the good and the bad with traditional point-blob things.

The Good

• Most of the acting and casting. The core crew have a lot of charisma in the best tradition of Trek. The main exception was Simon Pegg, who I have a lot of time for, but in this film was a scenery-chewing ham of the worst kind. It wasn't just the accent. (Although, why didn't they get an actual Scottish actor to play Scottie? Tradition?) He was an obnoxious twit throughout. Everybody else was pretty much spot-on.
  
• The special effects were never going to be bad, but there were some fantastic moments. The fight on the drill-bit, for one.
  
• There was a rollicking, barnstorming atmosphere to the whole thing that reminded me of the best moments of the good original series films. Despite its many flaws it absolutely did not fail to be entertaining.
  
• The actress playing Uhura is gorgeous.
• It was nice to see Captain Pike being given a role; a nod-and-a-wink thing maybe, but it's good to have some sort of continuity for the poor bastard.
• They didn't try to "do a Daniel Craig James Bond" on Kirk. He's a lothario and a bighead and that's what we like about him. Similarly, I was glad they didn't try to turn Uhura into one of those ninja-badass heroines that are ten-a-penny these days.
  
• The score was great. Not as memorable as, for example, Treks II and III, but did the job in an unintrusive and atmospheric way.
  

The Bad

• At times the whole thing threatened to slip from pastiche to parody. Did Kirk really need to get into so many fights and get beaten up so many times? Wasn't there one too many "oh look, Kirk has to run away from something really quickly" scene? (The snow-beast bit is the one I'm thinking of.) How many times did Kirk end up hanging off the edge of something? I mean, I know Shatner did a heck of a lot of getting beaten up/being chased/hanging off the edge of stuff, but it was never THIS much.
  
• The product placement was about the most hamfisted there's ever been. In fact, the entire bit with the young Kirk seemed to have been included mainly to have something good to put in the trailer and a place for a Nokia ad.
  
• Eric Bana is a fine actor but he was completely wasted on probably the most bland villain ever (after Star Trek V, maybe). He didn't even get to quote any Shakespeare. And what the hell were this guy's motivations? Romulus was going to get destroyed through an act of God, Spock tried to help but failed, so now I'm going to destroy Vulcan and every planet in the federation for revenge? Rather than use the fact that I was transported backwards in time to, er, try to avert the original disaster?
• There was very little sense of danger throughout, which was probably the film's worst failing. It reminded me very much of the 'new' Star Wars films in that respect; there simply wasn't an iota of a suggestion that any of the cast were going to fail or be killed.
• There were lots of moments that, as a long term Trek fan, I found a bit weird. For example: it really only takes 3 minutes to get from Vulcan to Earth at Warp 4 (or whatever it was)? Where was the entirety of Star Fleet when Earth was threatened at the end?
• I feel like the first 'baddies' should have been Klingons. I think Romulans are actually more interesting, but Klingons are too iconic to only have a passing mention in what's supposed to be the first in a successful reboot of the franchise.
  
• There were quite a few clumsy bits of exposition. The Spock mind-meld bit, for one. "Hey audience, here's where we try to explain the plot..."
  
• Are people in the 23rd century really still going to be listening to the Beastie Boys?

Overall, 6.5/10. In the fair-to-good range, but by no means great.

Spelljammer Star Trek

Apropos of my post the other day, I was thinking about how you might map the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew to D&D classes and races for Spelljammer. Sounds like the geekiest thing ever, I know, but before you get the urge to point and shout 'nerd!' I should stress that I was thinking about it while watching a game of rugby, drinking six pints of Guiness, making millions on the stockmarket and having sex with three cheerleaders.

Anyway, so, here's the original series crew:

Kirk - Human fighter.
Spock - Half-elf mage.
Bones - Human cleric.
Scottie - Dwarf bard.
Uhura - Human bard.
Sulu - Arcane.
Chekhov - Tinker-gnome.

NextGen:

Picard - Human fighter/mage.
Data - Thri-kreen.
Geordie - Tinker-gnome.
Worf - Giff.
Troi - Human (level 0).
Tasha Yar - Scro.
Guinan - Illithid.
Riker - Human fighter.
Wesley Crusher - Halfling thief.
Beverly Crusher - Human druid. (Yeah, I know this doesn't really work biologically.)

I think Klingons would definitely be giff. Vulcans and Romulans would be elves. Cardassians are dracons, and Ferengi are clearly neogi. The Borg could be beholders. Not sure what Bajorans would be, but they're boring anyway.

I didn't give much thought to DS9 or the horrors that followed, but Janeway was definitely a scro. And Harry Kim was a kobold.

There's Klingons off the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow...

I've been on a big Star Trek trip recently after many years of shunning it. I was a huge Next Generation fan first time around (I was the perfect age for it, being about 10 or 11) but could never get into DS9, actively disliked Voyager (has there ever been a less charismatic set of actors gathered together in one place? except for the doctor), and by the time Enterprise came along, just wasn't interested anymore.

Then for some reason late last year I got a hankering to watch some Trek and picked up Seasons 3 and 4 of NextGen on DVD. Now I'm hooked again. There has never been such an imperfectly perfect TV series, and I doubt there ever will be again.

Naturally this has me thinking about the age-old problem which has haunted gamerdom for generations. I believe Marcel Proust put it best:

"In his younger days a man dreams of possessing a Star Trek role playing game which he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a Star Trek role playing game may be enough to make him fall in love with it."

Or; why are we satisfied with substandard Trek role playing games, dammit?

It is my firm belief that the ultimate tool for Star Trek role playing is Risus. This is because, let's face it, Trek is fundamentally about things which can't be covered by rules - i.e. morality, logic puzzles, exploration and weird aliens with funny heads. That's the essence of the show in my opinion. Working out how much damage a phaser does, exactly how much a Klingon can lift, or how quickly a ship flying at Warp 4 can get to Tau Ceti Alpha Gamma 6 from Beta Delta Centauri Alpha entirely misses the point. What you need is a rules-lite system that doesn't get in the way of the derring-do, the exploration, and the debates over the Prime Directive and whether androids are sentient - which is the heart of the series. (That doesn't mean the game has to be turned into a comedy, mark you - Risus works surprisingly well as a 'serious' rules-lite system too.)

The thing about Risus is that it can be easily used to emulate 'social combat' - way better than any Forge game ever could. And as a heavy element of Star Trek is social combat, it seems a perfect fit. Think of Picard (Interstellar Diplomat 3) debating with Gowron (Raging Klingon 4) over whether or not to go to war. Or Riker (Spacefaring Casanova 4) trying to seduce that sexy genderless alien (Genderless Alien 3) who just came aboard. See?

Barking Alien has some good posts about this too, in which he talks about how to run a Star Trek campaign (or 'series'). Take a look.