Star Trek Adventures: a first foray into the new Modiphius RPG

I’ve been playing some Star Trek Adventures recently. Star Trek has never really been my thing, but I’ve been strong armed into playing in the starter adventure for the new RPG from Modiphius. I’m also curious to try out their 2d20 system as this is something they seem to be using as the mechanics for many of their other RPGs, including Achtung Cthulhu.

I am surrounded by Star Trek fans with an encyclopaedic knowledge of what is a vast and rich universe going back to the 1960s. I think to GM this setting you really need to know your Star Trek, but luckily we have a GM who is a mine of information.

I’m still feeling my way with this universe, about which I know very little of the technical detail, and have started watching The Next Generation as part of my home work on Netflix. That’s when I’m not catching up on my Game of Thrones.

We are playing the starter adventure which Modiphius has put out for the game, which seems to come with some very nice floor plans and some pre-gen characters. I think it seems to scratch the itch for my fellow players, although there are a number of other science fiction settings I’d prefer to game in, including JudgeDredd and Warhammer 40,000, but that’s just me.

In Star Trek you are very much playing to character as the crew of a starship. In this case we are crewing the USS Armstrong in its efforts to work out what has happened to a missing research ship. I’m playing the conn – responsible for piloting ships and shuttles, tinkering with computer systems, jury rigging recalcitrant technology, and getting shot at regularly.

There is an entire sub game here around ship to ship combat which we have not explored, although we are on the trail of a rogue Romulan cruiser which I expect we are going to stumble on at some point. For ship operations you do get to draw on the rest of the crew and your vessel which acts almost like a separate character with its own stats.

The game abstracts much of the rest of the crew, as the focus is very much on the senior officers – i.e. the players – and not the grunts. Rather than provide actual NPCs like in Savage Worlds who function as mooks, crew are there to assist with critical rolls when required. The game tries not to get bogged down in the minutiae of the rest of the crew - the player characters are the heroes here.

The captain is interestingly an NPC in this campaign. He seems to be a conduit for the GM to feed instructions to the players and occasionally stop things from getting out of hand – e.g. a proposal to set phasers to kill during a recent encounter with Romulans in the Neutral Zone.

The 2d20 System

The 2d20 system is an intriguing one. The base check uses 2d20 while characters can assist others by rolling an additional 1d20 if they are not directly involved in an action. Additional dice can be added through various abilities, as can re-rolls. The players add an attribute with a skill to produce a target number they must roll under on each d20. The difficulty level is actually based on the number of successes you need. If you need three or four successes, you need to be finding ways to add more dice to the basic roll.

Further granularity comes from specific character abilities, core values and interest areas. There is no lengthy skill list and equipment is issued as and when required in Star Trek. Most crew have their basic tricorder and phaser.

The game also uses a couple of pools of counters. Momentum points seem to be a way for characters to buy extra actions and re-rolls to push the action in their favour or along routes they want to go. There are also some kind of challenge points which are used by the GM to create difficulties for the characters. There is something of the Savage Worlds bennie system in here. I don’t think we have fully got to grips with this yet.

That’s pretty much 2d20 in a nutshell. It does not seem to be a difficult game and is not very granular. Bear in mind we are only about four sessions into this with a GM who is still learning the ropes, but it seems to be going well. Overall there are other systems I prefer – e.g. the aforesaid Savage Worlds – and I’m writing my Achtung Cthulhu adventures using Call of Cthulhu at the moment. But never say never.