And neither is mine sometimes.
There. I said it.
I have played Star Trek Adventures for years. I’ve written for the game. I’ve run campaigns, played campaigns, written adventures, interviewed designers, created characters, blown up starships, negotiated treaties, investigated spatial anomalies, fought Klingons, argued with admirals, and violated the Prime Directive for extremely defensible reasons.
And I’ve increasingly come to believe something uncomfortable:
A lot of the Star Trek games we play aren’t really Star Trek.
They’re science-fiction adventure games wearing Starfleet uniforms. That isn’t necessarily bad. Sometimes that’s exactly what I want to play. But there is a difference.
We Have Gotten Very Good at Simulating Star Trek’s Stuff
Give Star Trek fans a new RPG and we immediately want to know whether it can simulate the things we recognize.
How does ship combat work? What does a phaser do? Can I play an Andorian? What are the stats for a Galaxy-class starship? How fast can my ship travel? Can I command a Klingon Bird-of-Prey? What’s the Difficulty for reversing the polarity of something that absolutely should not have polarity?
These things matter. They help make the universe feel authentic.
But they aren’t what makes Star Trek Star Trek.
Consider some of the franchise’s most memorable stories.
A Starfleet captain discovers that his own government may have committed an atrocity. An android goes to court to establish whether he owns himself. A doctor has to decide whether curing a disease might interfere with another civilization’s development. A captain realizes that maintaining his principles may cost his entire crew their lives. A Ferengi bartender becomes the unlikely conscience of a space station during wartime. A captain helps deceive an enemy empire into entering a war—and discovers that he can live with it.
Strip away the transporter beams, starships and forehead prosthetics and those stories still work.
Because the technology isn’t the story.
The decision is the story.
Star Trek Isn’t About Solving Only Sci-Fi Problems
This may be the greatest trap in running a Star Trek RPG.
Most sci-fi roleplaying games train us to solve sci-fi problems.
There’s a monster. Kill it. There’s a dungeon. Explore it. There’s a conspiracy. Expose it. There’s a villain. Defeat them. There’s an anomaly. Technobabble at it until the warp core stops making that noise.
But some of the best Star Trek stories aren’t asking: “Can the crew solve this problem?” They’re asking: “Who will the crew become because this problem cannot be solved cleanly?”
That is an entirely different kind of adventure.
Imagine that your players encounter a pre-warp civilization dying from a planetary disease. Starfleet possesses the cure. That’s not an adventure yet. The adventure begins when you tell them that administering the cure will permanently alter the civilization’s natural development.
Now the captain has to decide.
Make matters worse. The civilization discovers your crew has the cure. Better. A member of the crew secretly gives it to them. Better still. The crew member is someone the captain loves. Now we’re playing Star Trek.
Stop Giving Players the Right Answer
I think Gamemasters—including me—sometimes make things too easy on our players. Not mechanically. Morally. We create dilemmas with secret correct answers.
Save the colony and preserve the Prime Directive. Prevent the war and expose the conspiracy. Rescue the crew and protect the timeline. Convince the hostile aliens that Starfleet was right all along.
That’s satisfying. It’s also frequently less interesting.
Sometimes there shouldn’t be a third option. Sometimes Picard should have to choose. Sometimes Janeway should have to choose. Sometimes Pike should have to choose.
Sometimes your captain should stare across the gaming table at five friends and realize: Whatever I decide, somebody is going to pay for it.
And then the GM should shut up. That silence might be the most Star Trek moment of the entire session.
Your Villain Probably Thinks They’re the Hero
Here’s another test I’ve started applying to adventures: Can the antagonist explain their position without sounding insane? If not, I may need to rewrite them.
Star Trek certainly has monsters. Khan isn’t misunderstood because nobody sat down and listened to his feelings. But Trek’s most interesting conflicts frequently involve competing worldviews.
Security versus liberty. Individual rights versus collective survival. Noninterference versus compassion. Truth versus stability. Justice versus reconciliation. Duty versus family. And the frightening thing is that intelligent, decent people can land on opposite sides.
That’s fertile territory for roleplaying because suddenly a character’s Values aren’t flavor text. They’re ammunition.
Maybe We Need Fewer Phaser Fights
I love starship combat. I love Klingons charging across a corridor. I love Borg cubes emerging from transwarp conduits.
But imagine ending an adventure without defeating anyone. Nobody gets arrested. Nobody gets vaporized. Nobody admits Starfleet was correct. Instead, your crew encounters something genuinely alien, spends four hours attempting to understand it and finally establishes just enough common ground for both civilizations to say: We should speak again.
That’s Star Trek.
Roll credits.
And pulling that off at a gaming table might actually be harder than defeating a Borg tactical cube.
The Test
So here’s the experiment I want to propose. Before your next Star Trek Adventures session, take your adventure and remove every proper noun from it.
No Federation. No Klingons. No Vulcans. No warp drive. No phasers. No Starfleet.
What’s left? If the answer is: “The heroes must stop the bad guys from obtaining the powerful device…” you may have written a perfectly entertaining science-fiction adventure.
But put the nouns back in and ask yourself one more question: What is this story actually asking the characters to believe?
That’s where Star Trek lives.
Maybe the question is whether peace requires forgiveness. Maybe it’s whether tolerance has limits. Maybe it’s whether a synthetic being deserves rights. Maybe it’s whether cultural traditions deserve protection when those traditions cause suffering. Maybe it’s whether the needs of the many really outweigh the needs of the few. Maybe it’s whether telling the truth is still moral when the truth could start a war.
And perhaps your players won’t agree.
Good.
In fact, that’s the point.
Because the greatest achievement of a Star Trek RPG isn’t making your players feel like they’re standing on the bridge of the Enterprise.
It’s putting them in the captain’s chair—and making them understand why that chair is so damned difficult to sit in.
My two cents…
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