Anyone here play REAL RPGs face to face with paper and dice?

Played FASA Trek a couple of times. Thought it was great. I was disappointed when they pulled the license just before the Final Frontier Sourcebook was supposed to come out.

 

Every week

 

Every now and then (most Fridays with off weeks) the gang and I get together for "World of Darkness" (currently on "The God Machine"), "Aberrant", "Exulted", "Werewolf the Forsaken", "Shadowrun", or "Cyberpunk" to name a few.

 

I play D&D 3.5 every week. I have never played a Star Trek RPG though.

 

Ditto.

Back in the day, played:

AD&D
Traveller
Star Trek (FASA)
The Morrow Project
Shadowrun

 

I've got all the LUG and Decipher RPG books, and a good chunk of the FASA ones, but have never played. :-\

Always wanted to play RPGs when I was a kid, but never found anyone to teach me. Everyone assumed that because I was such a nerd, I already knew all the ins and outs and wanted me to DM/GM for them. The look of shock on their faces when I said I didn't even know how to play and would like to learn was so utterly disheartening, almost as much as when they said they didn't "have time to teach a noob."

Last year, though, a friend of mine got me into playing the old Star Wars d6 game with a group of his friends. I had a blast, although a rather disorganized GM and an extreme lack of focus sort of doomed the group after a while.

Tried D&D Encounters at the local game shop, but even though it's designed as an introduction for noobs, it was mainly experienced players who assumed I knew everything even though I said up front I didn't, and it wasn't the right atmosphere. If I want to do nothing but combat, I'll play HeroClix or an online game, thanks.

I want some storytelling, character-building, fun interaction out of a table-top RPG, and so far, I haven't found any local groups that are really compatible with that mindset yet.

Would love to do something with the FATE system, like The Dresden Files RPG, but again, getting a group together has been proving insanely difficult.

 

In junior high and high school, I played mainly AD&D, but also did get into briefly, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Twilight 2000, and Traveler 2300\2300AD. But AD&D was the mainstay. This would have been the mid to late 1980s.

 

I'm an old-skool pencil & paper gamer. Played FASA Star Trek for years, and owned the LUG and Decipher versions. For a while I ran ST games at conventions here in the UK. Also ran/played West End's D6 Star Wars and the Victory Games James Bond 007 system, SJG's Toon and GURPS, RTG's Mekton and Palladium's Robotech and Recon RPGs. My longest campaign was a decade-long ongoing storyline from the first edition days of R.Talsorian's Cyberpunk.

I still own an f-ton of RPG stuff, but sadly I find it hard to make time to play these days... And I miss it!

 

FFG's narrative system being used in Star Wars Edge of the Empire, Star Wars Age of Rebellion, and in a slightly different version in Warhammer, would make a great game system for a Star Trek game.

I have no idea what the status of the Trek RPG license is now, though.

 

I wouldn't mind starting a trekbbs RPG thread and GM it. The character sheets would be easy, set it as who ever wants to joins first post. The minimum daily situation post would move the story, but dice rolling would be difficult.

 

Generally, set up should only be rolling up characters, which need not be repeated each session. The GM should already have a plot in mind.
I started with AD&D & Star Frontiers. Got into FASA Trek early, still the definitive basis of Trek for me. LUG/Decipher were okay, but not as interesting to me.
BTRC's Timelords is one of my faves, and the basis of my house system.
Other games include Traveller, 2300, World of Darkness, GURPS, Scion, SW d6, SW d20, Runequest, Morrow Project, Twilight 2000, Gamma World, Warp World, Cyberpunk, Worlds Beyond... well, too many.
If you don't have a group, look on the meetup sites for your city. Skype old players - but this really only works if everyone skypes in on a headset. A skype player or two in an otherwise F2F group can be difficult to hear.

 

That was stupid of them. They could have taught you the mechanics, helped you acquire the basic books (Player's Guide, DM Guide, Monster Manuals) and from there all you need is your imagination (and dice).

Have you tried building your own group? Sometimes you have to ask around; the results can be surprising. The people I've played D&D with were also the people in my local Society for Creative Anachronism group and the Star Trek club at the local college.

But your preference for storytelling and character building are exactly the kinds of RPG gaming I found the most fun. We had a DM who made actual miniature props - if we found a potion it came in a little plastic container with a lid (was actually water & food coloring in a plastic vial). If anyone wanted to drink the potion, they actually had to drink it! Same with finding scrolls... we had real ones, and there was no hedging about who was unrolling and reading them. This was important because the adventure we were involved in had a number of cursed scrolls, and it was hilarious - after the second time we got cursed, it was a case "I'm not gonna read it - YOU read it!" while saying "I'm slowly backing away..."

And when the party's best fighter slipped on a bar of soap (in the castle laundry) and broke his ankle, we didn't tell him to keep fighting because he still had plenty of hit points - we had the cleric heal him.

That would be a hoot! As for dice rolling, there are some good automatic dice rolling sites available. Some of the D&D PbP (play-by-post) games I've been involved in use them.


Has anyone here tried the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks? There are multiplayer ones now, but the one I'm thinking of in particular is Starship Traveler. It's loosely based on Star Trek, and you manage a crew of the Captain, Science Officer, Medical Officer, Engineering Officer, and two Security Officers.

I have yet to figure out the solution to that book, some 25+ years later... (and if anyone here knows, DO NOT tell me!)

 

It'll be a trust system. No one can prove/disprove who rolled what (not that I don't trust anyone, in fact I'm too trusting at times). I thought about doing a diceless game but it's the dice that moves the story.

 

My "walking system" is simple: for any action, I secretly pick a number between 1 and 20. You state a number, I compare, and then decide what happens based on how far off you were. Initiative and damage the same way, but using 1 - 10.
So, as GM, everyone has to trust you. I'd suggest you simply tell everyone when they post their activities that any action they think they should roll for is posted like so: I pick his pocket [18]. Whether they select a number or roll a die for it is immaterial, since you're comparing their number to yours, and they can't cheat by trying to pick high or low to fit your system.
When you respond, you put it like this : "You tried to pick his pocket [18 / 3]. He easily detected your clumsy attempt to snatch his purse, and now he's trying to punch you. Initiative call."

 

^But when do you pick the number, at the end of your last post or after the posted action is complete? Some situations might not need dice too.

 

There are dice - but they're rolled on a different site, you can specify any number of any kind of die (ie. roll 3d6 or 2d20 or whatever). The dice get automatically rolled, and the results are emailed to the GM/DM and the roller. It's possible to set up any number of pre-rolls, so people aren't constantly having to do this. Unless there's a glitch in the software, there is no possibility of cheating.

Mind you, I have some very nice sets of real dice that I don't get to use very often anymore...

 

If I were using my walking system for PBEM, I'd tell the players to bracket the numbers they pick and put them next to the action they want to roll against. Like I said earlier "I pick his pocket [18]", and then the response was [18 / 3], so the number the GM picked was waaay off from what the player picked. By posting the player's number-slash-GM's number in brackets, the player sees why the NPC detected the failed attempt and responded with violence.
If you don't think you need to roll, don't. If I think you do, I'll tell you so. If you think you need to roll, but I don't think so, I will ignore the roll and move on with story.
The major advantage of my walking system is that there's no need to trust the player's rolls, as it's compared to a random target, not a fixed target, so players can't cheat, and nobody has to use a third-party site for cheat-free rolling.

 

There's options such as Roll 20 too, though that's a little less play by post, which might defeat the purpose of the whole idea.

 

^Looks amazing, but I never put my RL image online, for privacy reasons.

 

I'm intrigued. Do you know of any site like that in particular, or should I take the first one I google?

I'll make up some character sheets tomorrow evening after work (with unique TrekBBS rules pulled from multiple systems), give a set amount of build points each person must spend, make two threads (Rules/Character sheets and Game), and limit the game to a weekly event (Mon-Sun for those who work and a switching point if someone else want to be the GM). The Character thread will be a first come first serve basis. I'm making a Captain NPC for my game but whoever chooses Commander first is second in command, the Helmsman gets to roll for piloting (or the person who replaces him when he critically fails and his panel explodes ), and so one and so forth. The Game thread will start off with the setting and characters will be in charge of moving the story. Characters who live (don't fight a Klingon if you have Body 1 and Brawl 1 and not expect to be impaled) get experience and can use their character again if we use the same setting (TOS week 1, TNG week 2, maybe 26th century week 3...).

I think that covers the basics. Anything else before I start making a system?