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Published on: 2021-12-19
Let me explain.
I wouldn't consider myself an expert on the game. I've played some sessions with a friend (1 on 1 TTRPG, who knew that would work?) back in 2017 when the game was in play-testing phase. Then we played again after launch with a bigger group. I've recently come back into the fold and have played two sessions with a new group.
So, I'd say I've played somewhere around 20 sessions with the STA system over a period of five years. We used varying degrees of home-brewing across those sessions. And certainly my own expectations of TTRPGs have changed a lot over that time.
But still, throughout it all, I always had a nagging feeling something is wrong with the game. And I think I just figured it out.
Or a Trekker, I don't mind. The point is, while I approach the STA with a few expectations, I also have a lot of good faith and genuine enthusiasm. And the game delivers in a lot of ways. It captures the feeling of a TV show, with sessions broken down into scenes, and with how characters (especially NPCs) work. It captures the idea of serving on a Federation starship. The momentum / threat system works well.
But then we come to actually doing what characters do in a Trek show and it falls apart. And I think it's because it lacks a "technobabble mechanic".
A lot of times, admittedly this varies from show to show, Star Trek relies on technobabble to solve plot complications. It's not the point of the story, but it can be the bulk of it. And I generally don't mind it all that much while watching the show.
I accept technobabble because Trek (at least in the TNG/DS9/Voyager era) maintains high level of internal consistency. I as a viewer know some basics of how physics work in the Trek universe, and then characters build on top of it with their babbling. Rules here are fuzzy, like deflector can emit beams of stuff, transporters don't work sometimes, subspace disturbance shakes the ship, etc. But these restrictions are familiar enough for characters to seem clever while they come up with their technobabble solutions.
This, unfortunately, doesn't translate well into a game of Star Trek Adventures. There the GM sets up a set of challenges for the players to overcome. But, I as a player cannot just freestyle a technobabble solution to the problem, else we run the risk of me solving every task by reversing the polarity. So what's the solution? GM, in addition to coming up with situations that players find themselves in also presents them with "technobabble" options they can attempt in order to solve them. At best I as a player get to choose between several options, in which case I can usually just go with whichever one requires the use of my strongest skill. Suffice it to say this kills player creativity and any sense of accomplishment when problem is solved in the end.
In Dungeons and dragons, and most other fantasy based TTRPGs, the magic system fulfills a similar role. DM presents a party with a challenge, and then players devise a solution. If the challenge is "fantastical" in nature the solution is often based on casting particular spells. The key difference, at least from player perspective, is that DM doesn't suggest the spell combinations to use. Players come up with the solution on their own. This feels infinitely more rewarding than picking among options presented by DM.
Let's explore an example in the D&D setting. DM presents players with a challenge: they need to gain entry into a tower with no doors or windows, save for a balcony that's 20 feet high. Players have many options to solve this: they might have access to a spell or a magic item which grants them either flight or teleportation. But let's say they are low level and don't have it yet, so they need to get more creative. They could, for example, cast the Mage Hand cantrip and have it take one end of a rope up to the balcony and tie it to its railing.
This would be a creative solution, and it could involve cooperation of multiple characters: one could provide the rope, the other could cast the cantrip. Players that come up with the plan at the table would probably feel good about themselves. Let's see what preconditions do we need for this kind of player problem solving:
Players need an intuitive understanding of the game world. They need to be able to predict that flying, teleporting, jumping very high or climbing a rope would allow them access to the balcony. At this point players are thinking abstractly, they are not yet considering exact mechanics of the game. But what's important is that either game mechanics mimic real world closely enough (like in the case of the rope climbing), or that "extra magical" rules are common knowledge to the players (like in case of teleportation).
Mechanical systems in the game need to be composable and set clear restrictions. For example if the balcony was 40 feet high the Mage Hand based solution would not work, as it would extend beyond the 30 feet range of that particular cantrip. Also, if there were no rules around the weight in the game it would not be clear if Mage Hand could carry the rope up to the balcony. Having consistent systems in the game allows players to validate their wild ideas and focuses their creativity. This would not work if they needed to consult DM on every idea they had an if DM needed to offer arbitrary ruling on viability of each of those ideas.
Let's come up with an example in Star Trek Adventures now. Let's say players' ship drops our of warp unexpectedly. They scan the area and find a subspace anomaly of the starboard bow. They detect that it is preventing them from moving and jumping into warp. How would they even begin to think about freeing the ship from this anomaly?
Here's where the STA lacks in the first criteria: intuitive understanding of the world. Even if GM offers some hints about the anomaly, those would not necessarily help players. Let's say the anomaly emits tachyon radiation. An astute Trekkie might associate tachyons with time travel, wormholes or cloaking technology. But knowing this does not immediately lead to ideas on how to solve the challenge. Let's say players are super inquisitive and do some more scans, roll well, and discover that the anomaly is a "subspace wormhole", and their starship is cough in its event horizon. This seems like a lot of information, and supposedly players should feel good about this discovery. But in reality this information was just divulged by GM after a sufficiently high roll on jet another scan action. It required no creativity from players and it brought them no closer to a solution.
At this point GM is getting desperate and reveals to players that they need to expose the subspace wormhole to "Schwarzschild particles" in order to close it. Players still have no idea if they posses those particles, if they can replicate them, or if they need to somehow synthesize them in a lab. What resources would they need for such a task? And after they get the particles (how much do they need?) they still need some delivery mechanism. Can they stuff them into a torpedo and fire them at the anomaly? Can they reverse the polarity of the deflector dish and shoot them out in a particle beam? Can the just teleport particles into space near the anomaly? There are no mechanics that govern any of these actions, and as a result they are all equally valid in players' minds. All they can do is randomly quiz GM until they stumble upon "the right" solution. Since number of potential solutions is not limited by mechanics GM usually presents a few predetermined options to players. Picking between presented options brings to satisfaction to players.
We could probably just dump a hole lot of mechanical systems into Star Trek Adventures, but I'm not sure it would solve the problem. There might be a special set of rules for "closing a wormhole" or for "navigating subspace", etc. But that would directly complicate the game world and reduce players' already weak intuition. The core problem here is that players can't think about "closing the wormhole" in the same abstract way in which they can think about "reaching a 20 feet high balcony".
Fantasy games have it easier. They can base their challenges on common, everyday obstacles, like navigating a world not unlike our own. Means of navigation can then be more or less magical, but the problem is understandable to players. This is not true for technobabble based challenges in STA, and potentially other futuristic settings.
Another way to solve this would be for GM to embrace the "rule of cool" and just go with the coolest solution players suggest. But this complicates things for GM to the point of breaking the game. Some restrictions on characters' capabilities need to exist, and GM needs to be able to plan their plot lines around them. For example, perhaps GM envisioned the only way to synthesize "Schwarzschild particles" is as a byproduct of telepathic activity. The entire point of the session is for one of the characters to get in touch with their innate telepathic abilities and overcome their fear of their own powers. The crew gets to collect particles they need and the telepathic character gets to grow in a meaningful way. This would be impossible for GM to set up with 100% rule of cool approach.
This post is already long enough, and yet I have no satisfying solution to offer. Perhaps the best takeaway here is that it's hard to design TTRPG systems, and it's hard to run games. Despite the technobabble issues I still enjoy playing STA. I have fun roleplaying, and I have fun interacting with my co-players around the virtual table. In the end that's what matters, and so I'm grateful to folks over at Modiphius for crafting the game and to Mislav, my GM, for running it for us.
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