By Kayleigh Bourquin, GM – Star Trek Fontana
Whilst browsing the internet one day I saw a spider plot graph someone made for their Pathfinder (TTRPG) character, and I thought that that would be pretty cool to do for STA. It didn’t look too difficult, so I grabbed a blank spider plot from an image search, opened GIMP, and had at it.
A spider plot, or radar chart, is a kind of graph that can show a spread of data points. It’s like a kind of spider web, with outward spokes and concentric circles connected between to them. Each intersection of the circle and spoke represents a data point.
In this instance each concentric circle outward with an Attribute value in red and a Discipline value in Yellow. In STA Attributes are a minimum of 7 and a maximum of 12, and Disciplines are a minimum of 0* and a maximum of 5. So each intersection is marked with one of the six Attributes in red and one of the six Disciplines in yellow. Then I take a character’s stats for those attributes and disciplines plot those points at each intersection, and then connect those points with lines.
This graph doesn’t serve much of an in-game function, but it is a fun visual way of conceptualizing a character, and their strengths and weaknesses in a quick, relatively easy-to-parse way.
My game is currently set in 2383, exploring the Shackleton Expanse onboard the USS Fontana NCC-80596, a Luna Class vessel. We currently have 6 players (plus me, the GM), and meet in person just outside Perth, in Western Australia. As of this coming February, we’ll have been running for 3 years.
I’ve attached a blank Spider plot, three different examples that experiment with color, and both a GIMP file and a Photoshop file so others can easily edit, either using GIMP (xcf) Photopea (xcf and psd) or Photoshop (psd) (some image editing skills probably required, stats and lines have to be made manually).
