Vulcans in the Vineyard

[agrumer]

Something that popped into my head this afternoon while crossing Herald Square to buy Trauma Center: Star Trek would make a pretty good variant Dogs in the Vineyard setting. It’s got the basic format down - character go from place to place encountering problems, indoctrinating the locals into their belief system (interplanetary bourgeois liberalism

Comments

[agrumer]

I read some of them; I don’t remember anything about ship-to-ship combat.

[radiotelescope]

One solution is to eliminate that Trek plot from the repertoire. The U.S.S. Lumpley is assigned to a Federation route (not the crazy alien-empire stuff that the Enterprise has to cope with). That means that the players' ship is always the big gun on the block. Everyone else has freighters and shuttles. The players can fly where they want and shoot what they want -- that's not an issue. Or rather, that *is* the issue: that's why the Federation (and the players, the long arm of the Fed) have the absolute right to define doctrine.

Alternate solution: bag the starships entirely. It's a galaxy of stargates, and the players have the only reliable map.

[agrumer]

Urrm, yeah, but I’m specifically talking about running Star Trek (original series), not just any old SF story. And it just ain’t Trek without that classic Federation-Klingon rivalry, which means the Klingons (and Romulans) have to be a viable threat.

(Though yeah, Stargate SG1 would be a pretty easy port.)

[drcpunk]

Viable, I think. DitV has the Mountain People and the folks from Back East and such. It's not such a stretch to map Klingons and Romulans in.

[womzilla]

Someone has to run Damage Control (i.e., Scotty), which is distinct from just movement speed. It covers the whole range of energy allocation, energy alloction, and, of course, energy allocation.

The original ST RPG from FASA predates the idea of a dice pool, and assigns the specific tasks to specific player officers. The Wikipedia article on the game has a few details; kent_allard_jr could probably tell you more.

[agrumer]

I've played the old FASA Trek game, and probably still have my copy, but its solution isn't very Dogs-like. I want the individual bridge crew players to be able to make contributions that feel like a role-playing game, not like a mini-boardgame.

[womzilla]

Despite not actually owning DitV: What about having the space combat roll depend, in each exchange (or whatever the term is in DitV), on the stats of a single character, rotating through the characters every exchnage? So in Exchange A, your Science Officer rolls to jam the Klingons' targeting lockons; in Exchange B, your Helmsman rolls to evade their torpedo barrage; in Exchange C, your weapons guy hits them with the phasers, etc. In each exchange, it can be assumed that most of these things are being attempted, but the player character who's rolling in that particular exchange is the one who'll have a major effect on the action (or not). Would that work? --Fred H.