Star Trek Campaigns: Prime Directive vs GURPS Space/Spaceships/Psionics 4e

[Ezra]

Does GURPS Ultratech 4e have a more suitable stun? That's the only one of the required sci-fi books I haven't gotten yet.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Ezra

Does GURPS Ultratech 4e have a more suitable stun? That's the only one of the required sci-fi books I haven't gotten yet.

Yes, nothing called a phasor but neural weapons are pretty versatile and powerful. Options to combine weapons make them even more dangerous.
But if thats all you want just increase the Affliction penalty. Say to -5 or even -8

[Shostak]

Originally Posted by Ezra

Lastly, and this is a big plus, Prime Directive would save me the preparation time of reading 3-4 GURPS (Space, Spaceships, Spaceships 3, Ultratech, Psionics, etc.) books as opposed to one.

If a single book is your thing, you could try Transhuman Space. It has a detailed setting and even the GURPS Light rules all between its two covers. There is a lot of other THS material, but all you really need is in the core setting book. Your campaign would be a lot more like something between Altered Carbon and The Expanse than Star Trek.

[Ezra]

Originally Posted by Shostak

If a single book is your thing, you could try Transhuman Space. It has a detailed setting and even the GURPS Light rules all between its two covers. There is a lot of other THS material, but all you really need is in the core setting book. Your campaign would be a lot more like something between Altered Carbon and The Expanse than Star Trek.

It's not so much about it being a single book as trying to reduce the preparation time. I'm hoping to get a game going before the end of the summer, but considering I'm still studying the core mechanics of the system, if I need to read four hefty books, it could take as many as four to six months.

Transhuman Space sounds interesting though, so I'll definitely check it out! 😊

[adm]

For what it may be worth, ADB is working on an update for GURPS:PD. It is a ways out, but some fixes are on the horizon.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Ezra

This is good to know. Thank you!

I think you're right; I'll need to raise the point buy.

I did a thread on this board about stating Captain Kirk. That should give you ideas about how many points are needed.

[Gold & Appel Inc]

My group came to Prime Directive pretty much the same way: A fairly inexperienced GM wanted to run a Star Trek game with minimal prep and thought the PD books were more straight Trek than they are. He ended up treating it like a buffet, picking out the ideas we all liked and leaving the rest up to our collective knowledge of the tv/movie series. I ended up re-writing a lot of the crunch in the PD books for our game, including all the weapon stats and a few of the templates (EG: Andorians), to match up with my perception of Trek chrome, but you could run PD as-is if you wanted to.

Phasers are the easiest conversion of all: Don't get hit with a phaser. If your defense, cover, etc fails you're stunned if they wanted to stun you, disintegrated if they wanted to disintegrate you, etc. Buy up your Luck, not your Hard to Kill, if you want to be hard to kill once the shooting starts is the ethos du jour. True to the source, of course, the decision to shoot, and why, and drama-soaked debates about it between the command staff, took up way more screen time and plot weight than the shooting itself (except when everybody involved was using blasters or even more primitive gear for whatever IC reason, usually *muttermutterPrimeDirective* and or *handwaveLowProfileMissionhandwave*, the OOC reason being that my group enjoys shoot-outs, naturally). :]

[maximara]

Originally Posted by adm

For what it may be worth, ADB is working on an update for GURPS:PD. It is a ways out, but some fixes are on the horizon.

IMHO they should have looked into that before coming out with GURPS 4e:PD as the TL scale past 8 is effectively the 3e one in the current version of the book.

Based on the actual TOS I would put Star Trek in Kirk's era at TL(6+3)^ ie most of the "realistic" tech is TL9 with everything else in the superscience category.

The reasoning behind this can be found in the GURPS wiki listing for Prime Directive

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by maximara

IMHO they should have looked into that before coming out with GURPS 4e:PD as the TL scale past 8 is effectively the 3e one in the current version of the book.

Based on the actual TOS I would put Star Trek in Kirk's era at TL(6+3)^ ie most of the "realistic" tech is TL9 with everything else in the superscience category.

The reasoning behind this can be found in the GURPS wiki listing for Prime Directive

All right one more time. I'll just point out one thing. It is extremely problematic to do it that way because it means that technology does not advance in Starfleet. It always stays the same, meaning that the scene where Scott appears in TNG and has trouble with the new technology on board the Enterprise-D could not happen because there is no new technology. Scott's engineering roll would not be penalized.

[Astromancer]

I'll post a link to my Stating Captain Kirk thread.

There are many links by people better at Star Trek than I who posted links on it. There should be tons to mine.

Here's a link to another thread I started on Star Trek related themes. You should be able to mine that one too. More for the links than my ideas.