Any Star Trek type?

General
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I am new to this Choice of stuff, but I love it! I am curious though if any of the Choice of Games veer to being Star Trek like? From what I can tell, like with the Treasure of the Lady Luck, they seem to have a Star Wars sound to it. Not that I have anything against Star Wars, but I am a big Trekker.

For those who dont know the difference, I am really wanting a Choice of Broadsides but set in space, now I know they can’t do licensed stuff, but I think it’d be an amazing experience if you can work up to becoming the Captain of your own Starship and being responsible for your ship and crew, and generally being like Broadsides but in a space navy setting.

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apex patrol

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Thanks! That was a lot like I was looking for.

Though I still hope someone makes broadsides in space. Being able to work through the ranks and also have a personal life and such would make the Trek like experience even better.

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well you can try with the fleet is similar to a star trek mission you are a commander but for me i dont know is a little more political battle focused that star trek maybe a gallactica style

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The Fleet is specifically more Reimagined Battlestar Galactica. It’s very much about military and civilian disputes in a time of crisis and the infighting that crops up even in the times of greatest need. It’s about taking your planet back and the sacrifices you have to make to do it. There’s no crew of noble idealists out to go where no one has gone before and make the galaxy a better place.

Apex Patrol is the Trekkiest thing up right now.

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Having played them on this site now, I do agree Fleet felt a lot more Battlestar, and while Apex nailed the Trek experience very well, the element I felt missing from both of them was exploring the personal life of the Captains.

Both Battlestar and Trek are notable because they also explore the personal life of the Captain and other officers.

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@VampLena Why dont you start your own game star trek inspired? Choice script its no so hard at least the basics and i try help you in all i can same all people here thats a friendly comunity.

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@Vamplena I agree with @Marajade if you want a Star Trek style game then have a go at making it yourself. I’d actually love that. If I could play a female or gay Captain Kirk style character, seducing my way through my away missions, phasers on stun, breaking the prime directive at every opportunity. I’d want Star Trek the series though, not Star Trek the new movies.

I’d want start as a captain though, perhaps a very young, inexperienced captain undergoing their first command, with their own hand-picked crew. Or something like was it Red Squad in Deep Space 9? That crew of elite cadets who ended up with a ship of their own behind enemy space, performing missions they really shouldn’t have been. Or even something like Voyager but with all of the older crew killed, so a very young, inexperienced crew attempting to get back home.

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Or even funnier a star cadet academy game with you start your star fleet studies and end with your own ship after the exams it was the only think I feel really star trek in the first Abrams thing

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@Marajade It was terribly unrealistic though. Oh look, let’s just give this cadet the best star ship in the fleet. He’s going to promote inexperienced crew members to positions just because he feels like it, yeah sure thing.

The movies don’t actually feel like Star Trek to me, they feel more generic sci-fi. Star Trek in name, with the Star Trek characters, but they’re not the Star Trek I grew up with.

The other Star Treks all had experienced captains with experienced crews who’d worked their way up to the point where they were. They earned their positions. Even Captain Kirk, who became captain at the very young age of 30, earned his position. He wasn’t just some troublemaker, who got lucky being in the wrong place at the wrong time, breaking the rules. He had had a chance to prove himself.

I just don’t think the movies capture that, especially since they’re not doing the things I loved about Star Trek. They’re starting off with a corrupted, flawed Star Fleet. There’s none of the exploration and visits to planets and fixing the problems of the galaxy, while undergoing their missions, which I love about Star Trek. There was never any huge moral dilemma over the breaking of the prime directive. It just seemed to take the essence of Star Trek, throw it out the window and replace it with lens flares.

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Yeah I called it star trek for dummies I see the original series Abrams probably never saw an episode. The second i didn’t bother to watch it yhe trailer its so awful its like a cod trailer without any deep guion in it

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Yeah it definitely watched like Abrams had heard of Star Trek, but never actually understood it and what made Star Trek so appealing. He failed miserably with actually capturing the stuff I loved about Star Trek. As a sci-fi film I thought it was fine, but it just wasn’t Star Trek.

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I think this just went from On-topic Apex Patrol to Off-Topic Star Trek

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(*)

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The Star Trek movie actually reminded me of the DS9 episode with Red Squad in it. The Red Squad episode was one of my favourite back when I originally watched it, probably because I was still in my teens and there was something compelling about the idea of a ship run by cadets.

In both the commanding officer is incapacitated and an inexperienced person takes over and then starts promoting other inexperienced members of crew to different roles.

But the Red Squad episode explores how this can go drastically wrong. It’s a crew of the elite, the best the academy has to offer, but completely inexperienced. They push themselves too far, and yet they do manage to continue their mission for months. They make a decision, the sort of genius decision you see all the time, they’ve spotted a weakness in the enemy vessel and they jump at the chance to exploit it. They hit their target and it fails to work and they pay for that mistake with their lives.

I loved that episode. I loved how it didn’t take the traditional way out, which would have had them destroy the ship and all return as heroes. Contrast it with the movie which just played the trope straight. Captain Kirk was less genius and more just extremely lucky over and over again. I found it less compelling.

@BlueOwl358 I don’t think we’re being off topic. Discussing Star Trek, leads to discussing what would make a Start Trek style game. However if @VampLena complains and thinks it’s offtopic I’ll shut up.

What is the essence of Star Trek?

For me it’s exploration. Travelling the universe, encountering new races, new planets, playing diplomat, hero, saviour, seducer. Having first contact, helping to fix problems, resolving things and then moving on to a new world and a new adventure.

It’s Star Fleet, belonging to an extremely diverse organisation, with extremely strong ethics, which promotes a set of ideals and tries to do the best for all. Star Fleet is about equality. It’s about a crew of all different races working together for the good of the galaxy where there is no prejudice. It’s an idealised society.

It’s about the prime directive, and the moral dilemmas that can cause. Do you interfere with a society, changing their society forever, or do you let them die. Do you let them commit atrocities and injustices that go against your own ideals. Do you just walk away or do you interfere, making things far worse.

That’s Star Trek to me.

And it’s about the crew, their relationships with eachother, how they all pull together. Their various personal lives and how their missions impact on them.

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The thing I loved about the original Star Trek was that the crew of the USS Enterprise were obviously flawed people, but they were still examples to look up to. McCoy let his head be muzzled by his heart, and Spock was the exact opposite. Kirk (as a certain episode showed) was a two-fisted strongman who was constrained only by his heroic sense of right and the Federation’s enlightened ideals. It was that balance between humanity’s brighter future and the flaws which we could easily recognize as shortcomings (or simply characteristics) of the human condition.

I never liked how Gene Roddenberry’s over-optimism tipped that balance in TNG. In the first few seasons, the galaxy of the 24th century seemed like a place somewhat distanced from reality, as if it was assumed that the violent, competitive and aggressive instincts that make us human had been eerily sucked out.

I guess that’s why I like DS9 so much. It shows that under that veneer of omni-toleration and enlightenment, there were still vestiges of humanity as it exists now, and that the galaxy was still a dangerous place that still required people who would do terrible things to keep a greater good. (My favourite characters are Kira, Garak and Bashir, guess why)

That is the spirit of Star Trek for me, and the Abrams movies make good action movies with a few sops to the prime continuity, but it’ll always be “the other Star Trek” to me.

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@FairyGodfeather

As someone who loved Star Trek the series but not actually a Trekkie. It’s always surprised me how many fans still seem to try and compare it to the originals. I enjoyed JJ’s attempts at Star Trek (I liked both films).

From my POV it’s like @Cataphrak says it is the “Other Star Trek” comparing it to the originals isn’t fair considering the person who wrote them isn’t around anymore so it automatically loses the essence of it.

As for the “Corrupted Star Fleet” I have to disagree, you have to remember that the Star Fleet we know and love didn’t lose a ship to a brutal and unprovoked attack. Because of that it makes sense that Star Fleet would want to make sure that didn’t happen again.

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@Cataphrak I agree, completely, and you’ve phrased that so well about The Original Series in contrast to The Next Generation.

@Nocturnal_Stillness

I wouldn’t say that I’m a trekkie as such. I do enjoy Star Trek. I thought the movies were good as sci-fi movies. They weren’t Star Trek though.

I think the movies missing the point isn’t summed up any better by the fact that they cast a white actor as Khan. Add to that there were only two female characters with speaking roles that I remember, and one of them had the obligatory standing about in her underwear scene, which was included in the trailer, despite it having absolutely no relevance to anything.

Equality was a very strong Star Trek theme and the movies just failed to deliver. They didn’t build on the framework which was laid out before them, they just tried to recreate the 60s series but without understanding what it stood for. What was progressive for the 60s isn’t anymore.

Movie-Kirk gets by by sheer luck and being in the right place at the right time. He never seems to have to work for anything in the way that Original-Kirk had to.

DS9 was my favourite Star Trek. DS9 was created without Gene Roddenberry’s influence, but I still think that it managed to capture the essence of Star Trek. My favourite episodes are the ones which don’t portray Star Fleet in a completely positive light. They’re episodes that explore the lengths people will go to in order to win the war.

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@Nocturnal_Stillness
The Starfleet I know and love lots a *lot* of ships to brutal, unprovoked attacks. I could name the USS Intrepid, USS Defiant (the first one), USS Constellation and the USS Lexington in the original series alone. Starfleet was a military arm and an exploratory one. Ships with hundreds of sophonts on board were lost on a regular basis because that was what happened, because what Starfleet did was dangerous and the original show never tried to gloss over that.

The fact that Original!Kirk and his staff were able to hold on to their basic decency and nobility through their dangerous mission (where they would not be subject to any authority for months on end) was part of what made them examples to look up to. Captains went crazy or mad with power, like Ronald Tracey and Garth of Izar, but that was shown as the accepted risk of a thing that was worth doing: peaceful exploration in the name of an alliance of free worlds.

The fact that Abrams’ Starfleet lost one (relatively small) ship and lost sight of their original goal shows a rater substantial lack of backbone IMHO. I could actually excuse that in the second movie more than in the first one: losing forty-odd ships and one of your founding worlds would push you towards militarism, just as Wolf 359 (39 ships lost) and the opening of the Dominion War (Hundreds of ships lost, civilian casualties in the billions, enemy fleets a week’s warp from Earth) did in TNG and DS9.

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@FairyGodfeather

Not at all, I tend to agree with you, which is what I was curious if they had such a game.

While Apex Patrol nailed a lot of the elements of Star Trek, I think it left out what is really the most important part, which is the actual lives of the Captain and their crew. As Per Gene Roddenberry’s own vision, all that tech and stuff is a background for the interplay between the crew and the universe.

Thus I believe there should be a healthy balance between on duty storytelling and off duty. In almost all the Treks, they very clearly go into detail about the Captain’s personal life, as well as those of the crew and their love lives.

I still feel Choice of Broadsides would be the best guideline to follow in making an Star Trek inspired choice game.