RPGaDay Challenge - Day 21

Day 21 - Favorite Licensed RPG

Are you serious?

 

Without a doubt, the Star Trek Role Playing Game, by Last Unicorn Games. I also love the FASA Star Trek Role Playing Game, but my favorite way to play Star Trek remains LUG's ICON system.

Similar to West End Games' D6 system mechanically, but more detailed in some ways, it is the closest fit I have yet encountered to how I want my Star Trek to run, both rules wise and attitude wise.

Most attempts at Star Trek seem to fall into one of two camps:

Either they approach it from the 'Space Navy' standpoint and create something technical, military, and wargame-y, or they treat it as TV camp, pointing out the string that holds the Enterprise model aloft, and noting that the food is merely painted Styrofoam blocks.

While there's a time, a place, and an audience for each of these approaches, they don't make my tribble purr, if you catch my drift. For me, not only is a middle ground take on the whole thing preferred, but I actually believe both of those directions detract from what makes Star Trek, and Star Trek gaming, so awesome.

We, the players and GMs of Star Trek, are fully aware we are playing a game based on arguably the most popular Science Fiction television series of all time. The characters and the universe they inhabit, just as on the various shows, don't know this. They can't. They live in this milieu and explore the possibilities within it. Starfleet Officers are not overly combative by nature, not overly attached to rank and its hierarchy (unless it moves the story), but nor are they winking at the camera with their tongues in their cheeks.

Star Trek works best when it's serious about being Star Trek.

There are definitely some elements of the expanded Star Trek universe FASA did better (their original starships for example), but overall LUG Star Trek was well thought out, well supported and flexible enough to accommodate whatever the GM wants to through in.

New elements are easy to build and add in based on the rules provided, and in the sadly short run the game line had, they managed to crank out a good number of sourcebooks and supplements. One of those was Among The Clans: The Andorians, a sourcebook for the Star Trek Original Series RPG line. This excellent resource for my favorite Star Trek species has been a bit undone by the characters and events in Star Trek: Enterprise, but it's still a great book with work by the eternally amazing S. John Ross, the always excellent Steven Long, and, heheh, NPC write-ups by yours truly.

Whenever the opportunity comes to talk about this game, I think my love of it and closeness to the subject interferes with my ability to properly convey how good a game it is. It's a really good game.

Find it. Buy it. Play it.

Live Long, and Prosper.

AD
Barking Alien