Vulcans in the Vineyard

[avram]

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), and depending on the situation, dispensing advice or lending a helping hand or kicking ass or making out with the virginal space hooker. That whole moral issue at the heart of Dogs, that of whether the moral situation justifies escalating to violence, that’s a natural for Trek.

The bit that doesn’t fit is space combat. I can’t see having each of the bridge crew handling their own station as a full conflict participant — that’s just too many traits and dice floating around for the density of narrative.

One solution is a group conflict system of some kind, one where all the characters get to contribute to the same pool of dice. But I’m not sure how to work this. Maybe for each arena, you’d define both a pair of stats and a pair of bridge positions, and each of those positions contributes one of the two stats’ dice. Like, maybe:

• Talking: Captain and Communications
• Chasing/Fleeing: Navigation and Engineering
• Fighting: Captain and Helm

I can’t think of a fourth, and I’m not sure what stats to use. There should probably be a catch-all for things like trying to beam up your planet-side crew members without letting the Klingons get a shot in while your shields are down, and maybe a way of handling repairs. And the Captain can call on any player to contribute trait dice as narration requires, but there may need to be a way to keep this from leading to a huge dice pool.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

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.

[avram]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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.