How to play Star Trek Adventures

With Earl Grey… Hot!

How does the 2d system work in Star Trek Adventures?

How do you play Star Trek Adventures? What are the basic rules of Star Trek Adventures?

Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, the Star Trek RPG offering published by Modpihus uses a completely different set of rules. Make no mistake; this is a lush game with plenty of action, suspense, and gritty space battles to get involved in. But leaping from one RPG system to another can be super tricky to get your head around, especially if there’s no clear guidance online on how to do that as smoothly as possible.

Start with the basics.

Star Trek Adventures rule book is a tomb of lore, rules and resources packed perfectly for any Gamemaster or Player to dive right in and kick off with the action of learning this excellent system. But all of those rules and regulations (come on, we’re talking about Starfleet here) can be worse than navigating through a Romulan cloaked minefield! Yes, they have those.

The basics of Star Trek Adventures is simply this…

The GM has a pot of points called threat that they use to pepper threat throughout the plot of the game, a tool to raise the stakes, if you will.

The Players also have a pool of points called momentum. They can spend their momentum to learn more about a situation they’re in or to gain some other advantage. They can also use it to buy dice when undertaking player checks. 

Each player interacts in the world exactly as you would in D&D; roleplaying, asking questions etc. However, in Star Trek Adventures, you conduct tasks to do things. So, for example, the warp core has breached, and you need to seal it. That would be a daring + Engineering task with difficulty set by the gamemaster of 3. 

Daring is part of your attributes and has the number 9 next to it. 

Engineer is one of your disciplines and has the number 5 next to it.

You add these two together and make 14. So when you roll both your D20 dice, they need to be equal to or under 14 for you to score a success, and every success counts towards lowering the difficulty you are ultimately trying to reduce to 0.

To improve the odds of rolling 3 successes, you can use momentum to buy extra D20s, or you can use one of your focuses special skills (like, for example, you might have warp core expert), which means if any of your dice rolls under the discipline number (which in this case is 5) you score 2 successes. 

Rolling a 1 counts as 2 successes.

Rolling a 20 is bad… really bad. This causes a complication, so the GM might decide that the warp core sealing doors are now jammed and need to be released.

If you get more successes than the difficulty, say you get 4 successes against a difficulty of 3, extra success is turned into a momentum point and added to your team pool to spend later.

See, not that complicated and pretty easy to get your head around.