Star Trek Adventures Probability Analysis

This has to be the prettiest output I've ever seen.

Well. I've done it. It took a solid 12 hours of hard work. I had to learn things about probability and excel I never knew before. I have seriously grown as a human being. I present to you a PDF document that can tell you exactly, given the number of dice being rolled, the target number, and the DC your are rolling against, what your chances of success are. In decimal format. Ignoring crits.

With this document, a savvy GM can plot the challenge of the tasks presented to the players and intentionally drain metacurrency resources, or demand threat feed, as they see fit.

Here's The Document

Star Trek Adventures Ship Stat Analysis

Free PDF!

Well, I got down to doing some technical investigation of how starships are designed for STA. I broke them down by category, era, and scale, and found the average for each group's systems and departments.

But why? What use is this?

Homebrew. This information is used as a guideline to create new content that is in-line with that provided by the game. Using this as a basis, I could make a Curry-Type, a Saladin Class, a Chimera Class,
or one of those origami nightmares from the FASA game. For example...

Departments always get 3 points, with the following exceptions:

1. Pre-TNG scale 1 shuttles get 2 points.
2. Scale 2 Shuttles get 4.

Anyways, yeah, give it a look!

Star Trek Adventures Roll20 Tokens Pack!

FREE STUFF!!!

The above is a zipo file containing hundreds of tokens fro playing Star Trek Adventures over Roll20. They were created using Token Stamp 2 but I went and did all the work for you. The only thing that's really missing is tokens for the Gamma quadrant Dominion ships, because I couldn't find pictures for any of them, really. Enjoy!

Star Trek Operations Notes

FREE STUFF

Well, the third part of my notes series is done. This one contains significantly more personal commentary than the last two, mainly because I had more room for it. There was a lot of fluff in this book and very little crunch. What game material that was added consisted primarily of content, not rules. Even so, the Red Alert rules for miniature PvP and wargame combat gave me a lot to think about regarding my earlier notes. I may need to do a reread and put out revised versions of those notes documents to reflect my expanded understanding.

Star Trek Adventures Command Notes

FREE STUFF!

Hey there! Remember my compressed rules notes for the Star Trek Adventures CRB? Well now I've done it for the Command sourcebook as well! Enjoy!

STA Player Reference Sheet

MORE FREE STUFF

The above is a link to a player reference sheet. It uses the language from my notes, so unless you're familiar with that, it may seem a little confusing. It lists alll actions, all spends, the task resolution process, a guide to attributes and disciplines, and a reference fro challenge dice.

Also, in case you're interested, here's a blank version of it! Go ahead and make your own nice-looking things.

Star Trek Adventures Talent Cards

MORE FREE STUFF!!!

So, I was browsing the Modiphius forums for the first time recently, and stumbled across this topic about cards made to represent talents. For those not in the know, talents are just STA's version of feats. The problem is that the official character sheet gives you only enough room to write the names of the talents, not what they do. This is problematic, because STA is finnicky and has arbitrarily convoluted rules. The talents are no less elaborate. As a consequence, pretty much everyone always forgets how their talents work all the time and have to look it up whenever they think they should use it. As such, giving players handy-dandy reference cards is the way to go!

Now, I'm a little more advanced than the folks who made that topic. I put out real money to have the best software for making digital and print products from my own home.

So I made my own.

They're PDF format, so they should be ready to print from any computer to any printer. No fiddling about with settings to get that one perfect print. Additionally, I included every talent, including species, career, etc. I divided the document into character talent cards and ship talent cards, just because you're likely to have to print multiple copies of character cards, but starship ones are less numerous in play.

I am currently planning on making cards for the other books that have talents as well; specifically for the new species available in the quadrant books, the new character talents in the division books, and the new starship talents in the command book. (People seem to be saying that there's more starship stuff in the other division books, but I can't see it?)

• STA Character Talent Cards
• STA Starship Talent Cards
• Blank Card RTF (In case you want to make your own.)
  

About making your own cards with the RTF. When you copy text into the image cells, the table will go wonky. You need to change the paste type to image, and then change the text wrapping to "above text". This allows you to move it around without affecting any formatting.

EDIT: Department Cards

The following link will take you to a post where I present my department book talent cards. The quadrant books are next on the chopping block.

LINK

Star Trek Adventures Rules Notes

FREE STUFF

OK, so, I really love Star Trek Adventures. It's a pretty bangin' game for a franchise tie-in TTRPG. It is far from perfect,but certainly an enjoyable play, so it gets a pass.

And the book is of excellent quality too, with a woven spine separate from the cover spine and impressive production value on every page!

But you know what doesn't get a passing grade?

The writing.

Oh god, the writing. Flaws I have seen:

• Inconsistent language. Is task resolution called a "task" or a "check" people? Get your language straight.
• Muddled language. Tasks are a type of action on your turn, but are also the task resolution system. This means you can take a task that makes you make a task. Buhwhaa?!
• Redundant writing. Every rule in the book is copypasta'd somewhere else in the book at least once. Some rules are triple copied.
• Skatterbrained rules explanation. Every time they try to explain a rule, it gets interrupted by a half-explanation of a related rule, then the text moves on without finishing the explanation of the initial rule until much later on in the book!
• Flavorful but misleading headings. The headings are fun to read if you read this as a book. But if you're trying to find the rule about spending momentum for bonus damage, the table of contents might as well be someone's shopping list!
• Flavor text overload. They have sidebars all over the book. Half of them are pink, meaning they're fluff, the other half are purple, meaning they're actually more rules content. EXCEPT for some of the pink sidebars that contain rules, some of the purple sidebars that contain fluff, and some main text sections that are not rules content either. You basically have to read everything to make sure you didn't miss something.
• Disorganized information. Did you know half of the book's playable species are actually in the DM section at the back of the book?! Without any warning or indication of such earlier on?? How convenient and useful!!! The whole book is like that.

So anyways, they can't write to save their lives. So, here, my gift to you, and the fruit of two months of reading and rereading this thing until its pages are nearly falling out. My notes. The entire rule system, sorted, organized, and stripped of fluff and specific play content. Just the systems you need to know to run the game.

You're welcome.

Star Trek Adventure Zoning

Let's talk about zone based combat for a little bit. Zone combat is a theater-of-the-mind solution to spatial relationships in tabletop combat. The idea's been kicking around for some time, but more recently it has been used in some fairly big-name RPGs. One RPG that uses zone based combat is Star Trek Adventures.

The key thing to remember about zones, is that they have no set standardized dimensions. A zone is shaped more by the environment and its impact on the battlefield than by discrete numerical measures. For example, in an office building, each cubicle, office, and hallway might be distinct zones, even though they all have very different dimensions.

Let's take a look at how STA zoning of a scene affects combat. The image above is a general map of a hallway in a building. We're going to assume the doors to the side rooms are all locked, so we don't have to worry about them.

Example 1

In this example, we make the whole hallway 1 zone. What does this mean?

• Anyone can move to or from melee with the movement minor action. The movement minor action can also be used to completely exit this battlefield.
• Someone can whisper to a person on the other end of the hall and it will be heard just fine.
• All combat is in close range. That means, if someone drops prone to get better cover, attacks against them gain 2 bonus momentum.
• On a melee attack used to shove, a person can be removed from this battlefield.
• Area weapons could harm anyone in the zone on effects and complications rolled.

As you can see, this one seems a little... goofy. Especially with how sound works, and how lying down for better cover doesn't really work. Too few zones in a relatively large-ish area results in things just being a little wonky.

Example 2

In this version, we've split the hall into 2 zones, each representing opposite ends of the hallway. How does this affect combat?

• A person in one zone can use the move minor action to move to or from melee within their zone, or to move to the opposite end of the hall, or to leave the battlefield.
• People must shout to be heard at the other end of the hall.
• Ranged attacks from one end of the hall to the other are medium ranged. This means they nolonger gain bonus momentum when firing on a prone target
• If someone tries to hide behind the corner on the opposite end of the hall, the DC to spot them increases by 1.
• An area weapon fired to the opposite end of the hall poses no threat to anyone in the same zone as the shooter.

This one, to me, seems about perfect. You should have to raise your voice to be heard around the corner of a long-ish hallway. You can still move quickly in this relatively cramped area. Dropping prone is actually useful. But, just to be sure, let's take this one step farther.

Example 3

The final example has the hall broken down into 3 zones. One zone for each intersection, and a third one in the middle as a sort of no-man's-land. How have things changed?

• The movement minor action can only take you into no-man's land. To get to the other end of the hall, you'll need to spend momentum for extra steps, or use the sprint action losing your attack for this turn.
• People at one end of the hall cannot hear people at the other end, no matter how loud they scream. This means that if the players want to negotiate a peaceful result, they'll have to walk into no-man's-land and risk getting shot.
• Ranged attacks are now at long range, which surprisingly has no mechanical impact compared to medium range.
• Someone hiding at one end of the hall has +2 DC versus people trying to spot them from the opposite end.
• It is impossible to throw a grenade weapon to the opposite end of the hall.

OK, nope, that's not right. Suddenly, the atmosphere is molasses. Sound is muffled, movement is restricted, people are hard to see even though they aren't very far away. Too many zones in a small area warps reality too much.

Theorycrafting...

So, I did some research and discovered the average human voice can carry out to 180m in clear conditions. That's obviously a shout, since I can't even clearly hear my wife talking to me on the other side of the bedroom. 

So, let's say that, based on voice range, "close range" would be anyone within 90m of the speaker. That means each zone should not have any dimension exceeding 90m in any direction.

Additionally, since the longest range for communication is 180m, it would be a wise bet to say that one should not set up zones such that more than 2 occupy a 180m length in any direction.

This is, of course, assuming you're building a battlefield in an empty field with no meaningful terrain variation.

On another point....

The throw range of grenade quality weapons is medium, or a 1 zone difference from point of origin. It isn't hard, with a bit of practice, to be able to throw a ball sized object about 50m, or even 100m if you really go hard at it.

So, in other words, going by the acoustic measurements above, you should probably be able to throw such a weapon somewhere into medium range, but definitely not beyond it.

So, uh... yeah. A zone should be about 90m across. There you have it.

Star Trek Adventures Resources

The following is a list of links to online resources for Star Trek Adventures games. Before we get into the meat of it, a lot of this is just curated links to specific blog entries by various people on the internet. This means 2 things.

Firstly, it means that there's a lot more content than just what I linked to. All of these bloggers are great, and you should read their actual blogs too.

Secondly, it means this page has a lifespan. Blogs deteriorate and die over time. Eventually nothing on this page will work. Use what you can while you can, nothing lasts forever. Show your appreciation to the people who made these resources; continued attention and praise is what keeps these things alive.

1. The Trove

The Trove is the most enduring online RPG preservation site in existence. How they survive in this age of aggressive copyright territorialism is beyond me. But they do. If you want to learn a game before you spend 60-80$ on the real book, this is where you go. If you already bought the real book and don't want to pay twice just to have a PDF copy, this is where you go. If the company refuses to make a PDF of their game, this is where you go. For STA, The Trove actually has two folders. My guess is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen, but they mean well at least. Here are the links directly to STA material.

Folder 1

Folder 2

2. Modiphius Character Maker

Modiphius is unusually fan-focused compared to game design companies of the past. They have provided an online app that allows you to create characters using content from all currently published content. You can then save your high quality character sheet in PDF format and print it from home. This tool essentially means the players don't need to have their own copy of the book just to play!

3. Star Trek Paper Minis

This tool does not work on mobile, but I promise you, it is worth shackling yourself to the desktop if you plan to run this game. Basically, it's a digital custom paper doll tool. After you design your paper doll, you can use prtscrn to take a picture of your work, then cut the image up in ms paint to make a paper stand fold-up, then copy that image into word to format it for printing. It's a little bit of work, but you'll likely only need to do it a few times, and the results are spectacular.

4. Star Trek System Generator

Another web app. This one works on mobile, but the formatting gets a little buggy on big systems. Basically, it generates all the details of a star system, right down to resources and life forms available on the various planets. It even gives you a detailed visual representation of the star system it generated! Very neat!

5. Blank LCARs Sheets

Ignore the janky work tracker at the top of the page. Beneath that is a real gemstone: a form-fillable LCARS PDF! Ever wanted to hand out a professional looking mission briefing from Star Fleet Command? Now you can! You can also print the blank white version on the back of your players' character sheets to give them a notes section! Comes in ultra-expensive black and printer friendly white variants.

6. Warp Factor Calculator

There's a fair number of these on the internet, but this one is a web app, no page reloading. It allows you to calculate speed from warp factor, or distance travelled by warp over time! In real time! It even let's you select whether you're using the TOS or TNG scale! Now, I know STA kind of expects the GM to have the ship move at the speed of plot, but I like to genuinely give my players autonomy over their movements. After all, what's the point of making an expert helmsman if the GM is really in the driver's seat? So I use this to figure out my players' time through the star system. Oh, for anyone who's wondering, each sector on the STA star chart is 20 lightyears across. It works out that roughly every 3mm is 1 lightyear, if youre using the inside-cover maps. You're welcome.

7. The Wikis

Memory Alpha is the ultimate source for cannon Star Trek information regarding the mainline franchise. You can use it to plan your campaigns and you can let your players use it as their ship's computer!

Memory Beta is the ultimate source for expanded (non-canon) Star Trek information from all of the side products, like TAS, the books, the other RPGs, etc. If you want to add more fluff to your setting, you can use this to supplement Memory Alpha

8. Starship Attack Guide

A handy PDF that clarifies how a starship attack works. If anything, it really just illustrates how elaborate starship combat can really be.

9. Milestones Log

Milestones are actually fairly uncommon. If you play biweekly, the party only gets 1 milestone every other month if you play by the game's recommendations! This means your players WILL forget how many milestones they've had. This sheet, if printed to the back of their character sheet, allows them to keep track of their character's development progress!

10. Basic Task Guide Tools

This is a learning resource for new GMs and players who are struggling with the task resolution system. A handy teaching tool, especially of you aren't playing with adults or older teenagers.

11. Figure Matrices

These sheets allow you to make hexagonal tokens that carry all the core stats of a character or ship on their face. Just buy some 10lb paper and print them out to make use of the things in your game! Personally, as a cheapo with no figures, I just use these as map tokens.

For Characters

For Starships

12. Extended Task Flowchart

Apparently a lot of people struggle with the concept of extended tasks when they first start playing. Here is a handy guide to what to do.

13. Task Record Sheets

This is a series of PDFs of printable forms that you can use to keep track of all the convoluted ways information is handled on a starship in STA. I think these are an interesting way to perhaps help the players feel like actual Starfleet officers doing work on a PADD. Maybe decorate a clip board for each player to hold all their forms and character sheet info!

14. Supporting Cast Quick Guide

This is a reference sheet (of exceptional production quality) that you can use to guide yourself and your players through quickly making up a cast of mooks! I mean redshirts! I mean meatshields! I mean backups! Oh you know what I mean.

15. Scene Trait Sheet

Keep forgetting the traits in the scene? Having trouble remembering the traits you planned for a scene? Players having trouble keeping track of it all inside their heads? Never fear, now you can make a character sheet for the scene! Just print out this luxurious form and write the traits out, then set it in the middle of the table for all to see!

16. SFX

Here is a couple of star trek soundboards. Pull up your phone during the game and tap away as things happen in the game! Takes a little practice to remember which sounds you want to use for which systems/events.

The ugly but extensive one.

The pretty but limited one.

17. Ship and Era Specific Starship Sheets

Ever get annoyed with how your TOS era Miranda class ship is using a TNG style character sheet with the outline of a galaxy class ship? Go here. Click around a bit. You'll find a sheet for just about every published Federation ship for each era it is appropriate for. All in PDF format so they print clean and pretty. There's also a form fillable TOS character sheet hidden in there as a fun little Easter egg.

http://enklave-23.de/STA_Sheets/

Now, the style is so similar I'm not sure, but these additional ship specific sheets by Cory Belote may actually be the same author as the stuff on Enklave. Don't quote me on that. In any case, here's links to more of the same kind of stuff.

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

18. STA GM and Player Guides

Just some juicy PDF tips from an experienced GM to help you and your players get started.

For GMs

For Players

19. Starship Blueprints

This website is a massive warehouse of blueprints for pretty much any and every starship to grace the screen, and even a few from the expanded universe too! My link takes you to my favorite collection, which are LCARS cross-section displays for various classic starships. Print one of these out for your table and give it to them to help them visualize life aboard their space-house! Aside from that though, a lot of the bridge plans could be used in Roll 20 for large scale battle maps.

20. Communal Games Finder Map

Running a regular game? Pin it so we all know how big this community gets! Where's my peeps at??

21. LCARS Power Point Template

Want to show off your over the top roleplaying skills? Got a projector or large screen in your game room? Well, now you can present a stylistically sound PowerPoint mission briefing to your players! So extra!

22. Mission Record

Here's a form fillable PDF you can use to track notes from each session/mission your players play through.

23. Interactive Galaxy Map

An LCARS interface galactic map web app! What a treasure!

24. Hit Grids

These can be used to visualize where on the exterior of the ship your vessel has been struck. Using the schematics from a link upper in the list can allow you to then assign damage to systems based on the location of impact! Or you could go the other way around, and place little damage tokens on this to show where on the hull they got damaged based on the system that took damage!

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

25. Medals Tracker

Using medals from the Command Division Source Book? Here's a handy way to track them. (Though I'd personally rather make little paper badges and pin them to the character sheet.)

26. Practical Table Decorations

Printable LCARS displays for the various stations/positions available to the bridge crew. The best part? They're alaina cheat sheet to remind the players about what they can use their station to do! Just print them out and set them in front of the players using a station that covers that position!

One

Two

Three

27. Spaceframe Cards

I don't know who made these or how I got this link, but I'm spreading the love.

28. Official Free Stuff from Modiphius

Might as well link to this stuff just in case a new GM missed it.

The quickstart guide is a good rules only explanation to get a player going in your game. It offers virtually no support for a GM.

Red Alert is miniatures skirmish rules compatible with the game.

They offer free official PDF character sheets.

They made this goofy thing.

And finally they publish a series of freely available adventures for their living campaign that you can totally just hijack for your own game with wanton disregard for their intent. Or, you know, actually participate and influence future iterations in this incredibly generous product line.

Check out the Official Modiphius Forums if you want to get in touch with the developers themselves. They're directly active with the community, rather than interacting through appointed admin intermediaries the way some other game companies do. There's an official wishlist topic that's been ongoing for years that they actually pay attention to!

29. Extended Task Helper

A web application that lets you build an extended task track, and then track the work done! Probably not super duper necessary, but it sure helped me understand how extended tasks are supposed to work! Give it a fiddle! Oh, to get rid of the SUCCESS display, you have to refresh the page.

30. Player Reference Sheets

STA is a complicated game. Someone decided to make a bunch of high quality quick reference sheets to help their players. Honestly, I think I could do a better job, but hey, the man's on the right track. Here you go!

• Standard Reference Sheets
• Breaches Reference Sheets

31. A bunch of LCARS gifs

Perfect for making digital props!