Trek Tech and Gaming

[subplotkudzu]

 Ty Beard, one of the contributors in A&E right now, is a big Traveller fan, running a game that's a cross between Military SF and standard Traveller Tramp Freighter stuff. He's repeatedly voiced the contention that High Tech "has a pernicious effect on RPGs - more high tech can often make it harder to create true 'adventures'." He then added "Star Trek had the same problem with the transporter - it was simply to easy to wisk Kirk & Co. out of danger. As a result nearly every episode had to waste time creating some reason to nullify the transporter so the danger would be credible."

Now, I obviously disagree. His ideas might be sound for a Military SF/Traveller game, but to my mind his broader claim that high tech makes adventures harder by removing the threat of danger only works if the sole threat applied to the character is the threat of personal danger. The transporter (and advanced medical technology) does limit the effectiveness of personal danger, but there are a lot of other things to hang adventures on. So far I've used danger to the ship as a whole (The Stars Overhead, Clouds and Sand, Sargasso), Saving others from their own actions (, Stellar Nursery, The only tar who's ever jumped ship - though in that one I did have the captain in a transporter-proof room, but did let a clever use fo the transporters save everyone else), political and diplomatic threats (Yethma), the threat being hidden inside the ship (Yethma again, and Messages from Earth), medical emergencies (Lysistrata), emotional/mental threats (Maris Ue and, to an extent, Messages from Earth) and threats to the timestream (Bones of Eden). I also included two puzzle worlds where the transporter was unavailable, but that was because the lack of transporter was a clue to what was going on (Writ in Tooth and Claw and The Bifrost Incident). Many oof these are also mysteries that need to be resolved or puzzles that require unraveling.

I'd like to think that these "adventures" worked, even in the absence of direct personal danger, but 'm raising the topic here to get my players' input (among other things). Have you lot found the adventures to be functional even if there was a low chance of your PC personally being killed in an encounter? 

In addition, I don't recall the transporter being broken or unusable in every episode - can anyone with a greater memory of TOS provide some support or refutation of that claim? (I mean, is the transporter 'nullified' in City on the Edge of Forever because they're back in time with no ship?)

Comments

[wombattery.livejournal.com]

There are any number of original series episodes where transporters are, arguably, nullified because the Enterprise is somewhere else, it's in range but has to keep shields up, or the people on the Enterprise can't find our heroes on the ground to communicate with them. However, that strikes me as less a matter of specifically nullifying the transporter and more as a way of keeping the Enterprise from providing any aid at all (frex, beaming down a bunch of armed redshirts), thereby keeping the focus on how Kirk is going to fix everything on the end.

However, for the most part, the transporter remains entirely functional but irrelevant to the situation. Glancing over a list of first season episodes, the vast majority of them take place on board ship (for example, Man Trap, Charlie X, Naked Time, Corbomite Maneuver, Balance of Terror, Space Seed) or on a planet where there's a problem which can't be solved by running away (frex, This Side of Paradise, Devil in the Dark, The Alternative Factor). The transporter doesn't work in Enemy Within, but leaving people on a fast-becoming-uninhabitable planetside is a side issue to add tension to the main issue of solving the "transporter splits people into good and evil halves" problem.

So, as you say, the stories aren't about personal danger. The problems are threats to the ship, political and diplomatic stability, populations outside the ship, and so on.

[kriz1818.livejournal.com]

I thought the adventures worked fine. Also that you're *partly* right about the personal danger thing. We've encountered plenty of personal danger that the transporters wouldn't help much with, usually focused around things we felt we *had* to do, despite the existence of personal danger (being transported out wouldn't help if one's injured beyond the ship's medical facilities to repair, after all).

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

its lack of functioning was therefore part of the plot complications (i.e. the one where Sulu and a landing party are on the surface of a cold planet and "ion storms" or something are keeping them there). There are episodes where a malfunctioning teleporter is part of the plot complications (the one where Kirk gets split into two moral halves).

Which, if memory serves, are the same episode. But I agree with your point. If part of the problem is that the transporters don't work than the hosing is central to the plot. I think I managed this in Writ in Tooth and Claw where the planet's strange energy field prevented safe beaming, so the away team went down in a shuttlecraft, only to be attacked by increasingly hostile predators while losing mental control themsevles. In this case the lack of transporters was a clue to the larger plot (the energy field, which was also casuing aggressive, irrational behavior). Yes, it was a conscious decision on the GMs part to up the stakes by stranding the away team on the surface, but it wasn't a bolt-on hosing.

Of course, to players with a Military/Tactical mindset it would be all too easy to see the aggressive animals as the core threat, ignoring or embracing the GM's direction for more aggressive behavior. If they never identify the larger problem then all they can see is the GM hosing them by denying them a handy tactical tool that would help win fights.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

However, that strikes me as less a matter of specifically nullifying the transporter and more as a way of keeping the Enterprise from providing any aid at all (frex, beaming down a bunch of armed redshirts), thereby keeping the focus on how Kirk is going to fix everything on the end.

Which I suspect from a Military SF mindset is just as bad, because of the old argument that Logically Starfleet wouldn't run ships that way. That leads you to the Prime Directive game in the Starfleet Battles universe, where it's a standard practice to fire a stun blast from the ship to KO everyone in 30m of the transporter zone before beaming down your special forces/first contact team (the PCs).

Burt thanks for confirming my suspicions. I didn't think there were that many trasporter-free episodes.

[netcurmudgeon.livejournal.com]

That is the same episode. Which -- as a tangent -- raises one of the other problems with TOS: the incredible vanishing shuttle craft. It's established that shuttles are the the alternative when beaming isn't possible, yet in that ep Sulu and party are about to freeze because the writers apparently hadn't read the series bible (or one didn't exist at that point) and *poof* no 'Galileo 7' to snatch the landing party from the jaws of arctic doom.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

I'd got for not having a series bible.

According to the Chronology, Spok couldn't send down a shuttlecraft to get them because at that point in the series the show didn't yet have a shuttlecraft. It is only the 4th episode, after all. (Even if they had developed the concept, I doubt they had the money for the model, being on as tight a budget as they were.)

[netcurmudgeon.livejournal.com]

I concur. I can't think of a plot that didn't work as an adventure. Of course, as a group we're not focused on the Treknology -- we're focused on characters and personal action. We are not your average gamerz!.

Also, I'd amplify something Brian said about the transporters in this game -- when they've figured prominently it was as part of an unorthodox solution: the near-warp beaming in The Only Tar... and stuffing critical patients into the pattern-buffer as a substitute for a stasis field in The Lysistrata Plague.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

The general rule in TNG is that the transporters can't solve the problem unless the transporters caused the problem. Since we're in a TOS setting I'm giving you guys a little more leeway.

Of course, in The Only Tar... the trick wasn't the transporters so much as the time dilation, and that was an aspect of the scenario that I presented as a problem (and that will hold true - time dilation can only solve the problem if it caused it, just like time travel). I couldn't complain that you turned it to your benefit, but I did take steps to make sure that you couldn't beam the whole solution into your laps.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

I'd just like to say again that I'm intensely envious of your players and wish I was one of them. :)

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Well, there is the problem of being on the other side of the continent.... It's the same problem I have with hearing about Bill Stoddard's games.