I recently reacquired some FASA Star Trek RPG stuff.

I had kept some of my old FASA stuff (the starship combat game, a couple of supplements), but discarded the core RPG rules years ago.  I always thought the game was clunky and not terribly interesting.  However, in retrospect, character creation was kind of fun.  I made a lot of characters back in the day.

Anyway, I had just reacquired the FASA Star Trek 2nd edition game with the three blue books.  I also had recently received the brand new Star Trek Adventures RPG.  And I also have the Last Unicorn Games and Decipher versions.

And something that struck me was how all the other non-FASA official versions of the game feel very much the same.  The Last Unicorn Games, Decipher, and Modiphius versions all have that same...feel.  I don't want to say cookie cutter or sanitized, because those have connotations I don't really mean, but I can't think of other terms to use.  Processed?  Whatever term I think of, it has a very negative connotation I'm not trying to imply.

I guess... the others feel very... Next Generationy?

But FASA just has a distinctly different feel.  The core focuses on TOS, but nearly all the supplements and adventures focus on movie era (because that was the main franchise of the time).  It's the only one of any of the official RPGs to give any serious attention to TOS movie era.  It also treats TOS seriously instead of as camp (LUG) or tongue in cheek (the others).  

Anyone else with FASA Trek thoughts, or just Trek RPG thoughts?

Only thing that comes to mind is, that I couldn't find an official ST RPG that captured the right feel. Nowadays I would go straight to Mini Six and use the FASA books as inspiration.

I had great fun playing it. I don't know if the system is all that great, but TOS has always been my favorite era so I enjoyed playing a Doctor who had his own Still.

Quote from: Gabriel2;1043355I recently reacquired some FASA Star Trek RPG stuff.

I had kept some of my old FASA stuff (the starship combat game, a couple of supplements), but discarded the core RPG rules years ago.  I always thought the game was clunky and not terribly interesting.  However, in retrospect, character creation was kind of fun.  I made a lot of characters back in the day.

Anyway, I had just reacquired the FASA Star Trek 2nd edition game with the three blue books.  I also had recently received the brand new Star Trek Adventures RPG.  And I also have the Last Unicorn Games and Decipher versions.

And something that struck me was how all the other non-FASA official versions of the game feel very much the same.  The Last Unicorn Games, Decipher, and Modiphius versions all have that same...feel.  I don't want to say cookie cutter or sanitized, because those have connotations I don't really mean, but I can't think of other terms to use.  Processed?  Whatever term I think of, it has a very negative connotation I'm not trying to imply.

I guess... the others feel very... Next Generationy?

But FASA just has a distinctly different feel.  The core focuses on TOS, but nearly all the supplements and adventures focus on movie era (because that was the main franchise of the time).  It's the only one of any of the official RPGs to give any serious attention to TOS movie era.  It also treats TOS seriously instead of as camp (LUG) or tongue in cheek (the others).  

Anyone else with FASA Trek thoughts, or just Trek RPG thoughts?

I have a vague recollection that the FASA Trek rules for hand phasers meant you could dial 'em up to 100 and one-shot anybody/thing. It was a percentile skill game system mostly, right?

LUG and Decipher feeling the same is no surprise, since they were done by mostly the same people and within only a few years of each other.

The FASA game is awesome and we had a lot of fun.

One thing that is necessary is that all players (including the ref) have to have a fairly congruent vision of what ST is.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1043384One thing that is necessary is that all players (including the ref) have to have a fairly congruent vision of what ST is.

All the players, plus ref? I don't think any two fans of ST have the same vision regarding what it is. Heck, get 3-4 fans in the room and you get 5-6 mutually incompatible visions of the IP.

I played in a decently long FASA campaign when I was in high school; I remember specifically getting 48 bonus points (50 is the max I believe...maybe it was 99/100, been a while) and having a character that could rival Scotty for engineering ability. All the players were bridge officers, and the captain was a Kirk clone, right down to the poon hound behaviors. Played pretty much exactly like you think it would.

The advantage the FASA system over any other has is the excellent combat simulator. It was a great change of pace from SFB.

I have the LUG and Decipher versions, never played them, but I agree they definitely have a TNG feel; the books themselves look TNG.

Also have Prime Directive, three versions: GURPS, d20, and the TFG system. Never played any of these, but the TFG version is pretty much SFB universe. To be honest, I greatly prefer the direction SFB went vs. canon TNG (I dislike all the DS9/Cardassian stuff), so I'd probably play this over the newest game now.

FASA's Star Trek is a great game. Just takes some getting used to the system.

Another good ST game is Starships & Spacemen 1978 by FGU. Combine it with Star Explorer and you have a pretty good Star Trek game with the serial numbers barely filed off.

Star Frontiers can be retooled to play a ST setting as well.

There was also a Star Trek RPG with a solo mode I think. Also by Fasa?

Quote from: Gabriel2;1043355The core focuses on TOS, but nearly all the supplements and adventures focus on movie era (because that was the main franchise of the time).

I think that this is a critical point in your post. Once TNG (and other series) came out, I think that Star Trek was looked at through a very different lens. Early days of Trek role playing focused on TOS and the big arguments were "do we include stuff from the animated series?" or "should the movie material be canon?" but either way the bulk of the source material came from three seasons of TOS, a Technical Manual and blueprints, and a handful of paperbacks. When I ran OD&D-based Star Trek games for my friends in the 1970's it was all off-the-cuff "make up weapon damage and alien hit dice and play" stuff because there really wasn't much source material to go from. Even games like Star Fleet Battles and Federation Space had that "wild frontier" feeling that TOS had.

Once TNG came into the picture I feel like the focus of Trek was lost and so much material got created in such a short amount of time (since the 21 seasons of TNG, DS9, and Voyager became 6x or 7x the amount of material from TOS). RPGs at that point seemed to want to encompass all of Star Trek, which I think is really impossible since the power scale of the ships in TNG is way different from that of TOS, the overall feel of TNG is way different from TOS, and the Venn diagram including TNG-era and TOS-era has almost no intersection. If I was to write a Star Trek RPG I think I would try to focus on one core rulebook for each era and not try to use everything in one rulebook.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1043378LUG and Decipher feeling the same is no surprise, since they were done by mostly the same people and within only a few years of each other.

Exactly. I had actually gotten the LUG version and a few months later, the Decipher license was announced, and actually shipped rather quickly. I lost interest at that point.

FASATrek remains my all-time favorite alt.Trek setting. Game mechanics? I formed my opinion of FASA's inability to design and publish a decent set of RPG mechanics based on their Star Trek, and none of their subsequent RPG products changed my mind in the slightest.

(FASA created awesome settings, though. FASATrek. Battletech. Shadowrun. Renegade Legion. And here comes my Mekton Zeta fetish, but I could use MZ for any of those settings* much easier than I could use the original FASA RPG rules.)

*Although I don't think they ever did a Renegade Legion RPG.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1043388All the players, plus ref? I don't think any two fans of ST have the same vision regarding what it is. Heck, get 3-4 fans in the room and you get 5-6 mutually incompatible visions of the IP.

Then the Reff is the final authority on the universe - just like any other RPG.

- Ed

FASA Trek character creation was a bit slow for my 13 year old self but the starship combat simulator was fun.

Now I'd probably just run it with BRP and narrate ship to ship stuff based on skill rolls, just lazy I guess, I've been working on some Trek material for Galaxies in Shadow forever.

I'm afraid GURPS Prime Directive annoyed me a bit with it's DR 8 velour uniforms and phasers that can't just disintegrate people.

Quote from: RandyB;1043426FASATrek remains my all-time favorite alt.Trek setting. Game mechanics? I formed my opinion of FASA's inability to design and publish a decent set of RPG mechanics based on their Star Trek, and none of their subsequent RPG products changed my mind in the slightest.

You think that's bad, you should try Doctor Who. I don't recall Mechwarrior being that great either, but those games were still fun to play.