FASA Star Trek Starship Tactical Combat Simulator

OK folks....here it is. I posted a teaser last year and recently got everything finalized. FASA's Star Trek Starship Tactical Combat Simulator, ported to the internet and powered by Roll20 and Discord.

I have put together an on-line game of the FASA Starship Tactical Combat Simulator on Roll20 and Discord (for audio) and am looking for players (around six is a good number).
So...who am I, and what makes me qualified to do this?

I have been playing the STSTCS for close to 30 years. I started off with the original game at Ohio University with a friend and later on a full-on RPG group. Over the years we morphed the game to work in the Next Generation time frame and created a system so unlike the original version that it was almost unrecognizable.

We will NOT be playing that version. 😊

Instead, this will be an old school movie era edition of the combat sim taking into account some tweaks that have proven useful over the years and a few things that I have picked up from another GM at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio over the last seven years.

I have set up the game space on Roll20 and so far it looks pretty good. If you aren’t familiar, Roll20 is a virtual tabletop used by gamers, mostly RPGers (think Dungeons and Dragons and Call of Cthulhu), to share maps, character tokens, roll dice and in general bring the normally in-person game to the internet. Roll20 takes a little getting used to, but I have put together a short tutorial on how to manipulate the game and bring the experience of the STSTCS to life.

Signing up on your PC is easy and free. I have a paid Pro account and will be hosting the service for free. For audio, we will use Discord, a free to join chat system that will work much better than Roll20s built in audio handling (it’s quite bad). You are going to need a PC or Mac with a microphone. You will NOT be able to run this on a phone or tablet.

So...how do we do this?

I will set up the scenario a few days before a scheduled game and post the fleet list in Discord. Players will choose their ships, and they will make up the ship sheets themselves. So, you can print out some of the old ship Master Control Panels and do it that way or use whatever scratch method you prefer. I think there are even some form fillable PDFs out there that you can use. Tracking your power allocation, damage and so on will be on the honor system. You will be able to move your ships around the map board in Roll20 just like you were sitting at the tabletop. It includes a turn tracker and a public dice rollers. There are tools for checking line of sight, adding “terrain” like planets, asteroids and nebulas, and just about everything we will need to enjoy the game as if we were sitting around the table.

I have tested this as much as I can on my own. It’s time to go live.

For now, there are only a few home rules. Some take into account the limitations of online play. Others I have found useful over the years.

No cloaked movement. The board isn’t set up for it...yet.

Let’s ditch the stress and warp movement. I never felt those were necessary anyway.

Slightly modified crew casualty chart. The original one is brutal. Mine tones it down a bit.

Bridge hit tables. This goes off the chart on the back of the game manual but in a bit more detail.

Fire/No Fire Declaration. I was never a fan of this, but in convention play I have seen how it can come in handy. In online play we will just declare fire/no fire in order of lowest Captain Skill Rating to highest.

I have some other home options we can introduce down the line as well.

Imagine options for Auxiliary and Reserve power. It brings a whole new dynamic to emergency power allocation. “Reserve power to shields!”

Calamities! Hull breaches, fires, system outages and jammed helm controls! You think normal combat is rough. Just wait until a direct hit to sickbay turns all of your casualties into fatalities!

New repair options to go along with the calamity tables. Multiple Alpha and Beta repair teams that can fix several issues at the same time but lose efficiency as crew casualties mount.

Nebula fights!

Normally, with just about any other system I would be open to new or inexperienced players. However, this is a...well...it’s whole new frontier. You will need more than a passing familiarity with the STSTCS. In fact, you are going to need to know it really well. I’m sure some of you haven’t played in person in several years. That’s OK. I can work with that and help clean out the cobwebs. But as far as teaching from scratch? Can’t do it.

If you have any questions please post them up here. Set up your Roll20 and Discord accounts if you don’t have one already. My preliminary plan is to play Sunday nights from 7:00PM EST for two or three hours.

I have borrowed heavily from Brad Torgersens’s ship manual redraws, so many thanks for him on that count.

THANKS!