I picked Star Trek Adventures up recently on the Humble Bundle. A whole pile of books (all of them, I think) in PDF format for $25. Not a terrible deal. And since I collect RPGs and wargames anyway, why not?
I’m basing this review largely on the core book and system. I looked over the rules, designed a few characters, and gave them a Miranda-class starship as a crew generation test. I also looked over the other books, but I won’t claim to have read them thoroughly. So if your response to something amounts to “that’s in X sourcebook, genius!11!!” I don’t really care.
The Good
There’s a lot of good stuff in here.
While I’m not usually a big proponent of life path character generation, Star Trek Adventures’ life path rules are loose enough to make it a good set of guidelines rather than railroading. Specifically, rolling everything at random is optional; if you want to trust the dice you can, but you also won’t be forced into a character you want nothing to do with because “that’s how the dice went!”
There are also very few lockouts in the character generation system. A few Talents are limited to specific species (usually with the caveat “or GM’s approval), and some of the Talents listed by Discipline have “Discipline X+” as a prerequisite, but they make sense and keep certain of the Talents in the hands of the characters that should have them because of their skill levels. However, there are no “because of how the path chart works, you simply cannot be a Science Officer because one of your Career Events wasn’t in the right spot on the grid,” issues.
My first attempt at character design gave me a human Chief Engineer from Mars who joined Starfleet to get away from the family business and wound up becoming an anti-Borg specialist and combat engineer after surviving Wolf 359. Between him and the Andorian XO science officer I rolled later, they’d find a way to kill Borg with a replicator-based weapon that makes their own implants start punching them in the head. Neither character was intentional; at best I wanted the XO to be an alien science officer vaguely like Spock. When I rolled an Andorian, that just made it that much more interesting, and when she was the victim of a transporter accident…
The core attributes and Disciplines reflect the Star Trek feel overall. Instead of basic descriptors, they went with more cinematic-feeling attributes like “Daring” and “Control.” Likewise, instead of an extensive skill set it uses six core competencies linked to main departments or specializations among the crew, and added foci (which they call “focuses…”) to give better results in specific areas. Nice and simple, relatively straightforward, and if you really don’t want an ultra-crunchy game it works.
Your character is largely defined by their Values, and these Values can be challenged in play for character development. That’s huge in an era of games that play lip service to the idea of designing a character, but really you’re just slapping together combat stat blocks.
Adventure design is based a lot more on telling a story than “go out, kill things, take their stuff.” They explicitly tell the GM to plan for multiple solutions to any encounter: talking, thinking, and fighting, and that while all three may theoretically be viable, they won’t all be equally viable. These are shorthanded as Red (talking), Blue (thinking), and Gold (fighting) solutions, after the uniform colors of the appropriate divisions’ specialties (although gold is more for Security than Engineering and Operations in this case). Again, in a hobby that’s largely been taken over by wargamers who seem to think being able to upgrade your pieces makes it an RPG, this is beautiful.
Starships are fairly well balanced and can be modified for different mission profiles. Want to play a campaign along the lines of what the Reliant was up to before they met Khan? Take a Miranda and tweak it for science. Would you rather play Totally Not The Sisko and his further adventures aboard Totally Not The USS Benjamin Sisko’s Mothergrabbing Pimp Hand taking revenge against the Borg for Wolf 359? Outfit a Defiant class ship for straight tactical operations and go to town. Or do you want to play MASH In Space? Outfit a Nebula as a hospital ship and make sure you design a serious Chief Medical Officer.
The game isn’t built around resolving every situation with a starship firefight anyway; while I’m pretty sure a Sovereign-class starship optimized for tactical operations will do terrible things to an Oberth even further optimized for scientific missions, it isn’t a situation that will come up often. And if it does, the players deserve what happens if they think a Gold solution is in their best interests there; every time that kind of mismatch happens in the show, it’s invariably a Red or Blue solution, weighted heavily toward Blue. The most obvious example being The Best of Both Worlds, where they destroyed the Borg cube by hacking its systems.
The sourcebooks have some really good stuff in them; the Command Division sourcebook alone includes several nice starships including the Ambassador, Nebula, and Sovereign, the Operations Division sourcebook includes special Engineering rules and Section 31, and the Sciences Division book includes weird aliens, the Q, and advanced medical equipment.
Star Trek Adventures is not a “Quest For Stuff” game. Equipment is intended as the tools your characters use to do their jobs, and that’s it. You’re issued a few pieces of fairly generic equipment, and there aren’t any significant upgrades outside of mission-specific gear. You will not spend entire arcs of a campaign seeking out the Super-Duper Emitter Crystals of Tech-Wizard Jim-Bob to attach to The Phaser of Kirk for that +1 to damage. I certainly haven’t seen a “Vorpal Type-3 Phaser +2” or anything of that nature.
The Bad
This game requires a disclaimer similar to the one Cinema Sins has to include on certain of their movie reviews. No game is perfect. This one is overall pretty good, but it has some shortcomings.
Races, equipment, and starships are very limited in the core book, and not much is added in the supplements in the Humble Bundle (which, as noted above, seems to be the entire game). This includes the omission of several important items in the core book.
The core book gives you the option of playing as one of eight fairly iconic races. But not some of the others like Klingons. You literally cannot have Worf using the core book’s character generation rules. Not a huge deal, but still not great.
Equipment is very generic, which cuts down on crunch and micromanagement, but it also makes a Bat’leth functionally identical to an old Scottish Claymore. That said, it works in this game.
The Federation is limited to a half dozen or so hulls in the core book, and none are added in the Alpha or Beta Quadrant sourcebooks. While the game supports designing crews for the Enterprise era, you can’t have an NX-class starship unless you get the Command Division sourcebok. Dirty pool, requiring a separate sourcebook just to get the only major starship in one of the eras the game specifically supports.
I’m not a fan of how mechanistic and checklist-based character advancement is overall. It isn’t a straight XP based system, but more of “complete X Milestones to get a single advancement that isn’t just a neutral trade.”
The Ugly
Silly dice games for the sake of dice games. Instead of a basic core mechanic that’s intuitive enough to sink into the back of your head and allow instant results with a minimum of thinking – and therefore doesn’t disrupt the flow of the game – the 2D20 system they use forces the players and GM to think about game mechanics in play with every single action that requires a die roll. You don’t have a straight success/fail or success/fail and criticals, you get “roll X number of successes using a dice pool you screw with through spending tokens.” Most of the mechanics are about new and creative ways to get more tokens to spend on extra dice, making the rules as written a token management game rather than a simulation.
That is my sole real issue with this game. Switch up the core mechanics and it would be amazing.
Final Verdict
Not a fan as a game, solid background and idea mine. All things considered, I’d rather play GURPS Prime Directive and use Star Trek Adventures as a set of sourcebooks. I certainly don’t regret buying it.
The sourcebooks alone were worth the purchase price. Between the PDFs, my hobby of collecting games, and the sheer usefulness of the sorcebooks, I may end up dropping the cash and buying a number of the physical books anyway. Maybe not the big Borg Cube boxed set (which I have to admit would look really cool on my shelf), but at the very least the Core Book (which I have a half price coupon for thanks to the Humble Bundle) and three Department sourcebooks.