Fudgerylog

5 Comments

1. SG wrote:

   Amusingly enough, I’ve also been watching the Original Series for inspiration, but I’m just DVR’ing episodes as they fly by. I realized there were some episodes I’d never seen, like “Whom Gods Destroy”.

   I ran a couple of Fudge Star Trek pickup games in December and January, based on Fudge on the Fly.. It’s a pretty simple system, but the key toward my desire to create a conversion was an epiphany that Star Trek is a universe where Science is a single skill. I found your site when I was searching for other conversions, and I was curious if you were still working on your game.

   The background aspect I spent the most time on so far was trying to figure out how large the Federation was. Maybe I’ll write that up and put it on the web somewhere.

   Sunday, March 1, 2009 at 7:23 pm | Permalink
2. Gordon Cooper wrote:

   I’d be interested to know how your games went. Have you thought about posting actual play reports? I’d especially like to know how the chain of command was handled amongst player characters of differing rank.

   As for the background question, I, too, have wondered exactly how much of the galaxy Federation Space occupies (and the same goes for the Romulans, Klingons, and Gorn.) The maps depict the immediate area, but they never show it in the context of the galaxy itself (as far as I know).

   Another question occurred to me: Do the Vulcans and Andorians have colony worlds, and if so, how large is their space within the Federation?

   Monday, March 2, 2009 at 12:01 am | Permalink
3. Gordon Cooper wrote:

   I must confess I was distracted from the project, but I’ve picked it up again and I plan to post it to my site in stages.

   Monday, March 2, 2009 at 4:58 am | Permalink
4. SG wrote:

   I think they went well, especially considering I wasn’t done with the rules yet and I was converting a free Star Wars adventure on the fly. (I only talked about ‘droids’ a few times.)

   I had not thought about posting actual play reports. I will think about that.

   Chain of command ended up not being a major issue. The two active characters were both department heads (vulcan science officer & human engineering chief), and the science officer was techncially senior but the engineer had taken “Insubordinate” as his flaw. The third player has taken the first officer / head of security as his character, but we haven’t played with him in the loop yet.

   I see a couple of ways around the command issue:
   1) Keep the captain an NPC, let the players present their plans, and the captain decides then they carry them out.
   2) Treat the captain as a permanent “caller” and encourage the players to take a collaborative approach to command. I think this would work with the right PC as captain, and it seems to match the Picard style and even Kirk when he’s not being a jerk.

   I think there are three main settings for games:
   1) away team games
   2) bridge crew games (ship to ship combat, spatial anomalies)
   3) ship-based games

   So that everyone has fun and there’s a mix of games, I think you either need to play on a small ship or have an Ars Magica troupe-style game where some people may play two PCs, one bridge PC and one away team PC.

   We decided to play on a fairly small ship, a Kremlin-class exploration craft with 86 crew members. Small enough that the bridge crew can plausibly go on away team missions, large enough that we can lose a redshirt or two (and we did lose a redshirt early on; poor but very dramatic planning on the players’ part).

   As to background, there are a number of Star Trek maps, a few of which do have some galactic context but I don’t find it convincing.

   I decided that the Federation at the time of the old series was about 200 light years in radius, and my estimates were about 58,000 stars. If we figure 15% of stars are F-type or G-type, and on average there’s one class M planet in every F or G system, we get 8,700 class M planets. Half of those will be in binary or multi-star systems, and so might not be good for evolving life, but should support it once it moves in. There could be class M planets on the 2/3 of stars that are red dwarfs, but that might require more terraforming.

   200 light years would take 11 months at warp 6, but I read about a fanon idea called the “Cochrane factor”, which speeds up warp travel based on ambient conditions. My idea is to have ‘currents’ in subspace which speed up travel by a Cochrane factor of 5 (coreward) to 10 (rimward), so the edge of the Federation is between one and two months travel at warp 6 from Sol.

   To me, that was big enough to have a lot of room to put things, but small enough to cross in the course of a game. Exploration ships will usually stay on one side of the frontier, but if you want to switch from Klingon-centric plots to exploration on the non-TOS side of the Federation, you can. The existence of subspace currents of variable speedup means that exploration ships have something to chart betwen systems and that ships still travel at the speed of plot (as JMS would say re: Babylon 5).

   Canon seems to be that the Romulan star empire is smaller than the Federation and the Klingon empire is larger. The latter didn’t make a lot of sense to me initially, but I decided that the Klingons have the advantage of faster subspace currents and are only interested in subjugating inhabited class M planets. That leaves a lot of red and brown dwarfs in the Klingon Empire that no one really cares enough to check out…

   Monday, March 2, 2009 at 3:12 pm | Permalink
5. Gordon Cooper wrote:

   The idea of space currents is very appealing. You should write it up in game terms and post it.

   I like the idea in the original series that the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans really have no accurate idea of the size of one another’s spheres of influence, and that each have plenty of room for exploration. Some of the canon maps and Star Fleet Battles maps I’ve seen make their boundaries look like Europe, with everyone squeezed together. I prefer a “final frontier” perspective in which borders are hazy and in flux — that their borders with the unknown are greater than their borders with their known neighbors.

   Monday, March 2, 2009 at 10:46 pm | Permalink

Post a Comment