Official Star Trek Tabletop RPG Adaptations (& Their Unique Strengths)
Throughout the history of Star Trek as a popular science fiction franchise, fans have tried to create their own Star Trek narratives through a plethora of creative activities - fan-fiction, costume designs, artwork, video games, and even tabletop roleplaying games. From the early official tabletop adaptations made by FASA to the modern day game-line of Modiphius entertainment, Star Trek enthusiasts have had more-or-less continuous access to official Star Trek RPG systems, each with their unique innovations in gameplay and setting interpretation.
Canceled in 1969 after airing three seasons on NBC, the original Star Trek series seemed doomed to the same level of obscurity as past sci-fi shows like Captain Video or Rocky Jones: Space Ranger. Then it went into syndication on dozens of different TV channels, surging in popularity and acquiring a massive fanbase of "Trekkies." Soon Star Trek became a franchise rivaling Star Wars in scope, generating motion pictures, cartoon animations, new TV shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, video games, and even licensed tabletop RPGs.
Modiphius Entertainment currently holds the license for official Star Trek tabletop RPG adaptation, with the older Star Trek RPGs published by FASA and Last Unicorn Games long-since out of print. Each of these RPG systems strive to give tabletop gamers "toolkits" needed to tell stories in the style of Star Trek episodes - rules, lore entries, and narrative structures that reflect the predominant RPG design philosophy of the era those games were published in.
Published by Heritage Models Inc. in 1978, Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier was one of the earliest licensed RPG adaptation of Star Trek, drawing most of its inspiration from the original Star Trek and Star Trek: The Animated Series. The system's rules, as described on RPGGeek, were heavily influenced by early Dungeons & Dragons, focusing on "Away Team" missions on uncharted alien worlds teaming with monsters, Klingons, and other threats. Rules for science-fiction scenarios like space travels and piloting spaceships were practically non-existent, and wound up being developed more later on.
Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game was published by the FASA Corporation, the same creative studio behind tabletop games like Shadowrun or Battletech. With a percentile-based dice system, a character generation process similar to the sci-fi RPG Traveler, and extremely detailed space battle rules that become its own separate war-game, Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game, as detailed in this Geek And Sundry article, leaned heavily into the "simulationist" school of RPG design.
FASA's many Star Trek sourcebooks, centered around topics ranging from starship designs to alien empires, introduced interesting "lore" information about the Star Trek universe occasionally at odds with the official television shows – for instance, describing the 'human-like' Klingons in the Original Star Trek series as genetically engineered human-Klingon hybrids, specially designed to interact with the humans of the Federation.
The Star Trek Roleplaying Game, first published by Last Unicorn Games in 1998, then re-worked by Decipher Inc. in 2002, focuses on the time-frame and visual aesthetics of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. The Star Trek Roleplaying Game, according to an RPG.net review, was built around a relatively simple D6 dice system, its gameplay much faster in pace than the simulation-heavy mechanics of previous Star Trek RPGs.
Character creation in Star Trek Roleplaying Game's system revolves around choosing a racial template (Human, Vulcan, Betazoid, etc.) and a Career path that grants a character skills and positions on a starship's command crew.
The newest officially licensed Star Trek tabletop roleplaying game, Star Trek Adventures, is currently being published by Modiphius Entertainment, the makers of games like Mutant Year: Zero and Forbidden Lands. Focusing by default on the Next Generation/Deep Space Nine era, Star Trek Adventures can easily be adapted to the telling of TOS-era or Star Trek Voyager-style stories thanks to a rule-set focused on narrative twists and turns.
The core gameplay mechanics of Star Trek Adventures, as described on the review site Shut Up And Sit Down, are centered around rolling handfuls of D20s and D6 dice, with "Momentum" and "Threat" being two renewable resources the players/GM can accumulate and expend to resolve/escalate situations. Unlike earlier Star Trek RPGs, character creation in the Star Trek Adventures is more free-form, with the written-down "Values" the player character upholds being just as important in gameplay as the numerical strength of their attributes and skills.
Sources: RPG Geek, Shut Up And Sit Down, Geek And Sundry, RPG.net