By Al Spader, STA Contributing Writer
When I first heard about this project, my mind raced at the possibilities that the book could encompass. As the Player’s Guide would be my first-ever writing project that would be printed in a physical book, I was filled with both excitement and nerves. Luckily, the team that was assembled to work on the Player’s Guide was stellar and extremely supportive of each other.
The section that I was in charge of was the often-overlooked role abilities that exist in Star Trek Adventures. I approached this section by considering how the roles would vary whether on the bridge of a ship or as a member of senior staff on a space station. The goal was to introduce some outside of the box ideas that each role would be responsible for, as well as talking about other roles that would synergize well together. It immediately became evident that many roles on a space station would have completely different job descriptions than their ship counterparts. This was an intriguing point that I tried my best to differentiate within the chapter.
The other fun part about looking at the role abilities was finding canon examples of characters from across Star Trek using these abilities on screen. The hope is that these examples would provide a reference point for players whose characters were senior staff. In the cases where there weren’t on screen examples, such as Klingon cooks, I tried to create thematic scenarios that illustrated use of the abilities.
The final piece to the role ability puzzle was to create some quick glance sidebars that would aid in building a character that would be serving in each role. The first sidebar suggests lifepath options that could be quickly added to a character for each role. The second sidebar provides a list of what type of roleplaying is associated with each role. Using these two sidebars, a new player can easily decide which role best suits their role-playing preferences and help them make an efficient character for that role.
While writing for the Player’s Guide, I referenced dozens of different roleplaying game player guides to help with organization and presentation. The goal was to make the information as easily accessible as possible and organized in a way that made sense. I hope this chapter will ensure that role abilities will be used in more games as they are flavorful and add can an additional layer to the characters in a game.
Thanks for reading this article, and thank you for your interest and support of Star Trek Adventures! Keep frequencies open for news about additional STA products in the coming months. Live long and prosper!