Star Trek Adventures is such a great RPG that lets you create very detailed characters and adventures. I really like the way Starships are treated as characters with their own System and Departments similar to character attributes and Disciplines as well as Talents.
Is there any chance that there will be a separate supplement just on Starships? I know the current rules already provide a great deal of information on starships and their systems, but for starship freaks like me, it would be nice to have a supplement that would cover all of the ship classes in one book, as well as all of the information on the starships of all of the major races as seen in the various Star Trek series and additional official rules for the Star Trek online/Picard era. Maybe a tabletop combat system similar to the old Starfleet Battles system or some type of starship miniatures rules
I know it is difficult to integrate an RPG with more technical and combat oriented game play but it would be great if it could be done.
As Spock once said, “There are always possibilities.”
A dedicated starships book has been on my development wishlist pretty much since the beginning. Hoping to make it happen.
Would it include a tactical starship combat system? Let me set your expectations and say no. STA is not a tactical combat game, for ground action or starships. There are some optional rules in the Gamemaster’s Guide to check out if you haven’t seen them yet, but they’re nothing like the old starfleet battles system. Just not what STA is designed to do.
Thanks for your reply Modiphius Jim. A dedicated Starships Supplement would be awesome. I completely understand that STA is not a a tactical combat game. But a supplement to fleshout and detail the starship rules would be great!
I would definitely be all over a sourcebook for ships. I love the way the ships are treated almost as characters, and I’m excited for new options there. Season 1 of my campaign was set on a Ptolemy transport, and I spent an inordinate amount of time figuring up spaceframe stats for the characters’ ship for season 2 as a Constitution doesn’t make sense for them and a Miranda wasn’t really what they were looking for. A Hermes wasn’t quite right either, though it’s easy enough to extrapolate a Saladin from the Hermes write up. I eventually figured out stats and write-ups for the Akula, Loknar, Larson, Remora, and Kiev classes before they agreed upon a Wilkerson for the next ship. I had a ton of fun with it, and even so I wouldn’t mind seeing official write-ups that make my efforts obsolete.
Hmm, maybe I should have a chat with @Modiphius-Jim about my train of thought for some of these…
[quote=“Gross, post:6, topic:17745, full:true”]I eventually figured out stats and write-ups for the Akula, Loknar, Larson, Remora, and Kiev classes before they agreed upon a Wilkerson for the next ship.
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Given they’re all non-canon, you’re able to do with them as you please. They won’t be in a STA product other than maybe as a name-drop if our licensor is ok with it. No ship stats, though. Out of scope for our license.
Gross, have a gander at some of my fanmade starships here. Of the ships you listed, only the Akula is a starship I didn’t draw up, but I have plenty of other starships in that folder that I did draw up. And feel free to poke around all of my public GoogleDocs, even the non-Star Trek stuff, if you like.
Just keep in mind that the Scale documents are being rewritten since the publication of the DISC Character Sheet Pack a few weeks ago showed me that I need to make some recalculations for the Scale 4 to Scale 5 ships. I’m in the process of rewriting my Scale documents and will have them republished at Continuing Mission in a few weeks.
It’s interesting to me to see where we seem to think the same and where we differed on some of these. With the Kiev for example we were pretty close on the systems (though really how far off can we get) and made the same choices on department bonuses, but had different takes on the direction for ship talents. Improved Impulse and Improved Warp drive make sense for the fast response role. When I wrote it up for my players I leaned a bit more into the boarding action and security personnel deployment parts of the fluff I read while researching and decided on Extensive Shuttle Bays and Dedicated Personnel (Security). Both ideas make sense, and give a good starting point for a group to build their vessel.
For the Wilkerson I didn’t find as much background material to work from so I decided to make up a few things. For instance I liked the look of the V shaped Warp Nacelle pylons and wanted them to be an interesting part of the story so I chose High Resolution Sensors for one of its built in talents and theorized that the pylons would contain a number of sensor arrays that would aid the ship in detecting and reacting to possibly hostile ships in a patrol role.
The book could also tackle non-Starfleet ship construction: Cardassian ships and Romulan ships and Orion ships, as well as Tholians, Suliban, Ferengi, Breen, and so forth.
My one beg would be: ship pictures for each spaceframe, please! In some recent videos, Jim has been talking up the value of having access to image libraries. I want to believe that that’d make images of each ship affordable.
My shameful secret: sometimes I read about something in one of the books – an alien species, or something – and I think “wait, what was that, again?” and I have to look it up on Memory Alpha. I feel like a fake Trek fan! A picture might help me avoid these moments where I feel like a poser.
Yeah, this is something that struck me as somewhat common in game books: having a starship described but no picture to depict it. This is why I always include a good-looking picture when I make my fanmade starships.
Something that would be nice for it are stats for specific ships that we don’t have stats for.
Examples would be:
We have the USS Enterprise stats
but what about the refit or A, B, C, or E?
The USS Excelsior, General Chang’s ship, the USS Reliant, etc
My primary reason for it is that official stats make it easier for like running into characters from the shows and movies or set games during those like what we have for character sheet packs.
Also great for team ups.
Also I’m having my crew go and beat up Khan and Chang because time travel shenanigans.