Hi.. I've been interested for a while on how I would create my own star trek rpg? I know that some people use NOVA where it like automatically gives you templates and things but I found it very difficult to use. Could someone please help me by telling me what I would do to start my own RPG? -erin
Game Maker has free trial editions, but it's difficult to use for complex projects like RPGs if you're a beginning user. If you're willing to discard graphics and learn some coding, you can download the Python interepreter and create an RPG as simple or complex as you want- however, the lack of graphics means that you would have to describe everything in the game through your writing. No matter what you do, it's going to help infinitely if you have a particular role-playing system in mind; for example, Planescape: The Torment and Baldur's Gate are based on the Dungeons & Dragons rules, and the Knights of the Old Republic games are based on a modified version of D&D. Since it's a sci-fi game, I'd recommend the Star Frontiers system (under "Digitally Remastered" on the left)- it has rules for space combat in the Knight Hawks supplement, and for mutation in the Gamma Dawn book. The rules from Zebulon's Guide to the Frontier (an update of the core rulebook) are incompatible with the other supplements IIRC.
You could use Forum Motion, a lot of PbP that I do use that system. As for rules, I would recommend Traveller; I like the system a lot.
I couldn't ever figure out pygame. Even following along with a tutorial, it didn't make any sense to me I'll probably take another crack at it eventually, but for now I'll stick to learning vanilla Python.
It's actually pretty easy once you understand its basic mechanisms. It's really just a port of SDL, which is a fairly common graphics/audio/input API.
I've been using C# with XNA for my game. I originally tried making a game with SDL, but it was far too time intensive. XNA is a huge improvement.