Kiss and a Slap: Star Trek Adventures Review

For those new to the blog, which is almost certainly almost everyone who comes to my blog, I rarely do reviews. When I do, I do them in a format called "Kiss and a Slap". That's where I list 10 things I hate about the product, and then 10 things I love about it. The idea is to give an honest review that admits the shortcomings of a product in the format of constructive criticism. Normally, I just review adventures, but today I'm tackling a bigger beast. I'm going to review a whole goddamn game system. Because I CANNOT stay silent about this game! Now, before I get to it, I'm going to head off some of the flack I might get for my criticism of someone's favorite game. I believe the following:

1. Nothing is perfect.
2. Nothing is sacred.
3. All things are deserving of criticism.
4. Anything that can be improved should be improved.
5. your feelings are meaningless.

OK! Let's dig in!

 

The Slaps

1. It's so fluffy I'm gonna DIE! Look, I get it, Star Trek is massively overwhelming to people new to the fandom. It's hard to get people onboard with Trek content. The lore is intimidating. And I can understand dedicating a section of the book to conveying the fundamental basics of the setting to new audiences. That's fine. What is definitely NOT fine, is that it is jumbled up and mixed in with the rules text of the game throughout the goddamned book!!! At first, it starts out reading like an admiral addressing you as a captain who is going to be in charge of a new ship. That's OK, a framing device works. But they don't stick to it. It's like they repeatedly forgot they even had a framing device in the first place. They dedicate multiple pages of setting explanation just to follow it with one paragraph of rules with no visual distinction between the two or even a heading to mark the actual rule. To confuse matters more, they have 2 types of sidebars in the book; purple and pink. Pink ones are USUALLY fluff, and purple ones are USUALLY rules... except some rules are in pink sidebars and some purple sidebars contain no crunch whatsoever. The end result is that you have to read everything- EVERY-FUCKING-THING, just to make sure you didn't miss something, and I guarantee you, you will miss something. Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't the worst I've ever seen. That award goes to Polaris. (Not the french one.) But this is a close second place.
2. Disorganization in the extreme. Here's how it reads: Here's some fluff! Here's a rule! By the way, before we finish explaining that rule, here's a note about another rule that sometimes applies to this rule. Here's some fluff! Oh by the way, here's the rest of a rule we started explaining a few pages ago. And here's a list of all those side rules that keep interrupting the main rules explanations! More fluff. Here's the end of that other rule we didn't finish explaining earlier. Oh, by the way, in another 100 pages there's a stray sentence that clarifies something on this page. It is a god damn outrageous mess. It makes the game nearly incomprehensible to new players. Watching Modiphius play their own game, it's clear that even they don't fully understand it, since they forget something different in every episode. (Like, for example, resistance being rolled in challenge dice, not a flat penalty) A perfect example of their disorganization is that multiple playable alien species, some of the MOST ICONIC species, including Klingon and Romulan, are in the back of the goddamn book, rather than in line with the playable species section at the start of the book!
3. Muddled language. Throughout the book, they make it clear that their task resolution system is called a Task. Fine, good, that's easy to understand. (Except that 25% of the time they accidentally call it a check!) Later, in combat, it is revealed that each player can make a minor action and a task on their turn. OK, so that means they can do a thing that requires no roll and a thing that requires a roll, right? NOPE! Not all combat tasks require a roll! That means combat tasks and normal tasks are two separate mechanics that share the same word! So you can take a task that makes you make a task! Fucking brilliant! Genius! And if you only have minor actions and no other type of action, why include the adjective "minor"? That's fucking idiotic! There's a reason I changed the terminology to major and minor actions in my notes. Another example of poor language is regarding terrain effects. Throughout the book, they imply that terrain effects are applicable specifically to zones, and are separate from scene traits. One sentence hidden amongst the copypasta jungle that is the GM section bluntly states that terrain effects are just traits. HOLY FUCKING SHIT WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST SAY SO INSTEAD OF BENDING OVER BACKWARDS TO AVOID YOUR OWN DAMN TERMINOLOGY?! And this slap isn't done yet, either! Yet another example of poor language is the word "Spend". They never define the meaning of this word in mechanical terms or the conditions under which a spend may be invoked, but they use the term throughout the book as if it should be plainly fucking obvious! And you know what? It probably would be for fans of other 2d20 games, who are familiar with the system, but this game is appealing to people who don't game and have never heard of 2d20 in their fucking lives! Acknowledge the reality of your damn audience, you pretentious pricks! Yet more terminology that gets confusing; traits can apply to a character, a situation, the environment, and equipment. That sounds good, right? Here's the wonky thing: Equipment are traits. That means equipment are traits that can have traits. It gets weirder. Groups of NPCs can be traits, who have equipment in the form of traits, which might have traits of it's own. I'm not a fan of babushka doll mechanics.
4. Never, EVER give one player authority over the other players! This game violates a fundamental game design theory principal: If you give a player authority over the other players, they will invariably abuse it. This game practically demands that a player be given the position of captain of the ship. This is a one-way trip to a fucking disaster show. It gives absolutely no warning or alternative options. Even worse, the designers are clearly aware of this fact, because not once in any of their live plays do they show a player captain, the GM always makes them an NPC! Always! If you know it's a fucking bad idea, why do you promote it to people who have no experience that would tell them so?!
5. Copypasta! Copypasta everywhere! One obnoxious thing about this book is that, later on, beginning about halfway through, any time it references a previously explained rule, it copies the text from earlier in full, followed by explanations, expansions, or addenda. This makes it really hard to read because I don't want to waste my time rereading shit I already know, but I also don't want to miss out on the book finally explaining a rule in full. I get the impression this happens to a lot of people, and they wind up skipping the copied sections completely, as the most forgotten rules are the ones that are hidden at the end of a copypasta chunk. This is why you don't redundantly copypasta your own rules. If you have to reference back to a rule, give a page number or a heading title and let the reader go find it if they need a refresher. My god what inefficient writing.
6. The task resolution system fucking sucks. OK, let's get down to brass tacks and talk crunch. The D&D task resolution system is simple: Roll 1d20, add ability modifier, check if proficiency applies, add proficiency mod if necessary, compare result to DC. 5 steps. Quick and easy. Most of those steps are done simultaneously if the player knows what all of their stat mods and proficiencies are off the top of their head. STA's task resolution system is 17 fucking steps long. Don't believe me? Go download my notes, I break it down in there for you. This is obnoxious, and it doesn't actually achieve anything of relevance. The individual dice still have a flat distribution, so play is still arbitrarily swingy, it just doesn't have easily predictable success percentages because it's a dice pool system. It doesn't even do what dice pool systems are supposed to do either, since the cap is 5d20!! The whole idea of a dice pool system is that you roll handfulls of dice to feel obnoxiously powerful! Way to go on completely missing the point of your own resolution system!
7. Combat is a drag. I hate single turn combat. I think it takes for fucking ever and achieves very little. At the end of the day, all that matters in combat is: Did we win and how much did that win cost us? That's it. And I don't feel like spending an hour or two obsessing over the minutiae of how the players got to that result. Especially in Star Trek. I don't know if you've ever seen the show, but combat was always a last resort. Almost no episodes had the characters pulling phasers, and when they did it was usually just an exchange or two and then the fight was over. The characters were, above all, peace focused, genuinely concerned with achieving positive social relationships! They aren't soldiers, they're paramilitary explorers, scientists and politicians! Sure, they defend the Federation from interstellar threats when necessary, but their main tools in combating said threats are their minds and their words, with weapons only being drawn in response to violence. This isn't fucking D&D, guys, there's no loot to be collected from the corpses, no XP to be earned from slaying foul beasts, and no treasure chest behind the guardian! The game kind of acknowledges this, as a character's reputation can be easily dragged down by resorting to violence needlessly.
8. Internally inconsistent rules. OK, this is primarily a complaint from my simulationist and minimalist tendencies. Not all people will agree with me on this, but I think it is a huge mistake to have NPCs and PCs follow different rules. Plain and simple, it's a goddamn mistake. First off, it results in rules bloat- a problem this game already suffers from severely- as you need to explain one set of rules for player characters, and then a whole different set of rules for NPCs. Secondly, it means NPCs can do things players cannot, or vice versa, even if that NPC is technically identical to the PC. Eventually, someone at the table will make tactical decisions regarding an NPC based on the assumption that they are just as capable as the PCs, and that strategy will be wrong. Nothing is more blatant than the rules regarding NPC starships. When NPCs target PC ships, they always hit a system on a breach, even if they weren't aiming at a specific system. If the players target a ship without aiming at a system and score a breach, that ship goes through a completely different track of damage effects. Another example is that PC starships get turns equal to the number of PCs on the bridge. NPC starships get a number of turns equal to the scale of their ship. That means a scale 3 ship with 6 PCs aboard will always annihilate an identical twin NPC of their own ship! Or how minor NPCs can't take the Avoid an Injury spend, while major NPCs can do it limitlessly! (Notable NPCs can use the spend once, but there's no clarification if they can use the Recover action to regain that use) Most of this is an easy fix. Either run NPCs equally to PCs, or apply NPC rules to the PCs. (For example, allow NPCs to use the nonspecific targeting breach track for PC ships, and limit PC ship turns to ship scale so the captain has to decide which crew should act and when.) But that shouldn't be necessary!
9. Warp factor schmorp schmactor. The game does not give a damn about travel times or distances. The game is designed with the assumption that play opens with a ship arriving in a system, doing stuff in that system, and then ends with the ship warping out of that system. Nevermind episodes that happened while on the move at warp, or in multiple systems! Maybe I'm just being a simulationist again, but I kinda want to see more than just the missions! I kinda want to give my players a taste of what starfleet life would feel like, off the clock! What kinds of times we're looking at, how people keep themselves occupied aboard a giant negative pressure submarine! That kind of stuff! This game doesn't care. The closest it gets to caring is that it states a sector is 20 lightyears across, gives a listing of how fast each warp factor is, and gives you a sector map of the alpha and beta quadrants. The only thing that's missing is the MAXIMUM WARP OF EACH SPACEFRAME. Which leaves the GM in the homebrewing lurch. So much for supporting different styles of play. It also states that warping out of a system costs power equal to the warp factor chosen, which puts unusual limits on certain spaceframes that should be faster, and enables certain ships to go faster than they should be able to. Stated along with that rule is that you can pursue a ship at warp by spending 1 more power than they did, but it gives no explanation of what happens when you catch up to them!
10. False promise regarding alternate playstyles. The book repeatedly makes a point of saying it supports alternate playstyles, such as lower decks, or different eras of play. The problem? There's little to no content support for that! For example, let's say I wanted to play an ENT era game. There's no NX-01 spaceframe! Or spaceframes for any other vessels from that era! Let's say I wanted to play a lower decks game, what would the characters do other than just get bossed around by the bridge crew NPCs? Even with the expansion books, this idea that "any kind of Star Trek game can be played with these rules" is patently false, unless the GM puts up some serious work to make relevant content for such play. Frankly, I think the developers have an absurdly narrow vision of the potential for the setting.
11. Challenge Dice are retarded. Somehow I ALWAYS wind up with an 11th complaint! The game calls d6s "challenge dice". No, they are never used to determine how challenging something is, or to resolve a challenge. Rather, they are invariably used to determine the effectiveness of a player's actions. Weird ass name aside, (should really be chaos dice or something) the way they roll is also idiotic. See, instead of rolling for their face value, each face has a value stored on a table somewhere in the CRB. 1=1, 2=2, 3=0, 4=0, 5=1+effect, 6=1+effect. The effects are neat, but it is not necessary to completely rewrite the way the dice roll just to justify that. The real reason they reduce the die roll values, is because player character HP er... Stress... can be between 8 and 17 points. With such low survivability values, the damage output had to be reduced, but they seriously could have come up with a better system. (For example, you could just say that the result gets divided in half, rounded down, and 6s generate an effect. Super simple. 1=0, 2=1, 3=1, 4=2, 5=2, 6=3+E.)

The Kisses

1. It FEELS like Trek! Oh my god do they get the feeling right! The whole book is in LCARS style, and the art has a unified aesthetic! The content matches the attitude of Star Trek, and everything about it just feels right! Moreso than any other RPG incarnation of Star Trek, they nail the mood like it's nobody's business! If you love Trek, this book will enchant you so hard the system's failings will seem mild by comparison.
2. Highest quality production I've ever seen. A woven spine separate from the hardback spine, full bleed white-on-black pages, a unified aesthetic, this book is a god damn masterpiece. It is beautiful, it is durable, it is easily one of the highest quality gaming products I've ever bought! Truly magnificent.
3. Chargen and ship creation are fun! It's an absolute blast to make up characters in this game system! The lifepath system actually produces characters who are relevant to play, unlike other Sci-Fi games that produce mostly hodgepodge nobodies. (I'm looking at you, Traveller) The addition of mission profiles significantly expands the statistical variety of ships available to the players! (And, I'm not sure, but I think you're supposed to apply them to NPC spaceframes as well maybe?) Despite the complexity of the rest of the game to understand and play, getting started is super easy and enjoyable. Gold star for that.
4. Modiphius is actually really cool. You know how WotC is only nice when they're engaging in a marketing ploy? Yeah. Modiphius is actually just nice. Bought the Core Rule Book? Contact them with proof of purchase, and they'll send you the PDF for free! Bought the PDF? They'll set you up with a discount on the CRB! They offer an extensive free-to-play and publicly accessible living campaign! Their website offers a variety of free products, including an introduction PDF that can get people playing ASAP with far less fluff! Their staff are personally active, not only on their official communities, but also on the major fan communities as well, and the company divests itself of responsibility for their actions, so they can unofficially say whatever they want and not worry about losing their jobs just because it wasn't vetted first. (Within reason. I'm sure if one of them started posting swastikas all over the place, he'd be short on employment rather swiftly.) The staff who make the game are also the people who play the game, and part of their marketing is to show their in-house games to the public via their youtube channel, which gives a great insight into what they intend this thing to play like! Just, in every way shape and form, Modiphius is simply cool.
5. Supporting characters are a genius mechanic. In Star Trek, there are often many more characters than there are in the average gaming group. Often, characters must be split up in different simultaneous situations. STA handles this by giving each ship a crew support score, which is a resource players can spend to create slightly less advanced characters to fill in the gaps, or to participate in scenes where they would otherwise be unavailable. For example, let's say an away team gets sent down to investigate some spooky ruins. The Chief of Security's player says that given the risk of a Romulan attack, he should remain aboard, and so he spends 1 crew support to create a supporting character, a security officer under his department, whom he sends down on the away mission. Now, whenever the scene switches back and forth between the ship and the away team, that player still gets to be involved, if even at a slightly reduced competency in one instance. Another example is to use crew support to fill roles the players don't want to do. For example, if nobody is interested in medicine, they could make the Chief Medical Officer a supporting character. Then, whenever someone needs healing they just spend a crew support and transport that character on to the scene! I also have an idea for the command role issue. I've been thinking about making the CO an NPC, and then making the XO a supporting character. Because supporting characters are shared by all players, the XO stands as an option for anyone who wants to take a turn in the big chair for a scene or two, without forcing everyone to serve just one player all the time, and still having a superior officer available that the GM can use to keep things in check.
6. Metacurrencies are fun. The game features 3 metacurrencies. Determination, Momentum, and Threat. Players gain determination whenever the GM takes a value from their character sheet and makes it into a complication, or when they refuse the complication and question that value, forcing it to be changed at the end of the adventure. They can spend determination to do a small range of very powerful effects only by invoking and roleplaying out how their values motivate them to greatness in the current situation. Determination is an excellent system for encouraging and rewarding real roleplay, and also for developing characters over time. Momentum, (poorly named) is a currency generated whenever the player rolls more successes than the required difficulty on a task. They can spend these points on an insanely long list of fancy effects that can alter the game. Most momentum spends can only be done as part of a task, but some can just be done willy-nilly. The players share a group momentum pool, which means everyone gets a say in who spends it and when, keeping off-turn players engaged, as nobody wants to see their hard-earned momentum wasted frivolously. Finally, pretty much anything the players can spend momentum on can be paid for by giving the GM threat points, in addition to the 2 per PC the GM gets at the start of every adventure. The GM can spend these threat points to dramatically alter the situation. This game strongly opposes the illusionist method of DMing where the GM can call blue bolts of lightning from the sky on a whim. Instead, the GM's ultimate power ends the moment play begins. From that point forward, the only way they can alter the scenario is by spending threat or through the actions of their own NPCs. The goal of the GM is to spend all that threat by the end of the adventure, but ideally in a manner that challenges the players rather than annihilating them.
7. Traits are brilliant. The game is really easy to prep for, because a scene is just a description of a situation and environment, followed by a list of words or short phrases that describe the traits that affect gameplay in the scene. For example, if the players are surviving on a desert world, the scene might just have the trait, "Overwhelming heat" as a complication. A player could make a task to find shelter and, on a success, spend momentum to remove that complication, indicating that he found suitable cover for the party. But if he rolled a 20 as well in the process, the GM might add a new complication, stating that as it grows dark, the planet begins to become "unbearably cold". Gameplay proceeds like that, with players and GM modifying the traits of the scene and characters in the scene to resolve the central problem that scene represents. My only nitpick here is that the GMing section gives 0 support to a first time GM how to prep a game at all. Sad, but not unexpected.
8. Zone based combat is brilliant. I switched to zone combat a long time ago when I started abandoning gridded combat. Zones are a super easy way to manage an environment without having to draw anything, which makes it perfect for voice-only theater of the mind roleplay, sucha s the kinds of games I've been playing online during this pandemic. I also love how zones are just subdivisions of the environment, and the terrain effects in those zones are just environment traits attached to those zones! Very easy to remember what is where, and why, and how it all connects and interacts. I would have preferred a little more guidance on the maximum and minimum sizes for zones in personal combat, given that they have an actual mechanical impact on throw range and non-electronic communication range, but I think they wanted to inspire GMs to experiment through play.
9. It's an excellent product line. The expansion books actually expand the game, both mechanically and thematically, for both players and GMs. That means every book you buy in this line contains something genuinely useful for everyone at your table. (Yes, even content from the adventure books could be cannibalized by a creative homebrewer to make cool new stuff.)
10. Uh... huh... well this has never happened to me before, but I really cannot think of a 10th item. I know that makes it look like this game sucks, or like I hate it, but... I'm actually a huge fan! The positives I've listed are infinitely more important than the complaints- most of my complaints aren't even about the game anyways, but rather the editing of the book. So uh... yeah. Go buy it.