Monday, August 1, 2011

Monday's Pitch: Collaborative Star Trek

There is a collaborative board game based on the new Star Trek movie where you try to get a planet to join The Federation while averting a civil war, warding off Klingons, and...doing one more thing that I can't quite remember right now. I imagine it's a lot like Shadows Over Camelot, partially because I just got through playing several rounds of it, but also because it sounds like each of your objectives is analogous to the quests from SOC and you're trying to beat them all before time runs out, though ST: Expeditions[1] as an artificial time limit of 30 turns instead of just being designed to slowly push your head below water until you simply can't breathe anymore (like SOC and Pandemic).

But I was pawning through some cards from the terrible, terrible, terrible Star Trek CCG[2] and I was thinking about how the character development, mission accomplishment, dilemma overcoming, interpersonal relationships, and point-based victory (instead of defeat-based paradigm) is a great way to do Star Trek. Don't get me wrong, the ST CCG was [3], but it failed by being too thick with flavor and not enough with game. It was a game people enjoyed, but it just didn't play well. They had missions right. They had dilemmas right. They had winning with points via accomplishing Star Trek things instead of just destroying stuff. They had skills that drove the system; not just job skills and technical skills, but things like 'youth,' 'empathy,' and 'music'; humanitarian things[4] that made people who they were. Also, barbering[3].

I'm eating up word count here, but imagine your crew of three or four guys. They're all members of the crew (some dude has hilariously drawn Troi). Geordi is making the ship go with engineeringness to buy everyone some time. Picard is coordinating; going through plans and strategies (cards) and getting crew members on them as quickly as possible (possibly using a pool of lesser crew). Troi is negotiating with the threatening being, putting more and more counters on it, until it has the seven it needs to be convinced that humanity is not a threat. Data is doing a generic B-Plot/Character development mission where he helps evacuate crew members from a threatened part of the ship. If he doesn't complete it before the being is mollified, he only gets a lesser character development, but if he can hammer out this moment of humility (or if the Counselor just goes easy on getting the guy to feel better), then he gets a greater character development. Both will provide him with abilities later on in the game.

The game could be structured as a "season" of 6, 10, or 20 "episodes," defined as overcoming a central threat. There could even be a teaser portion at the beginning of each episode, which determines who our main character is, and drops a bunch of hooks. One of the hooks will go on to be the central conflict of the episode with the main character while the others are removed (or used to launch a complimentary B-Plot).

Right offhand, the B-Plots, Character Development, and Conflicts should have qualities that help socket them into each other; Stakes, type of threat (empathic, technological, psychological, investigative, intellectual, medical, ethical, etc.), special conditions.

Bits and Pieces:
Data - His 'emotional' abilities like empathy are replaced with functionally equivalent android things, like curiosity. The thing has always been that while Data is missing some pieces of the puzzle, he is more human than generally given credit for.
The Ready Room - Just like in SOC has The Round Table to get everyone around, The Ready Room is a good location to serve as a headquarters--for certain things--if there are some cards which work better for Medical personnel, but Geordi has it, The Ready Room could be a place where he can give it to Doctor Crusher.

[1] Only contains one expedition.
[2] So terrible I bought a box of starters and don't even get me started on the boosters![3]
[3] Still, legitimately terrible.
[4] 'Empathy' is technically, like, half of telepathic ability(Telepaths have Empathy x2 as a default), but it could go both ways.

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