Using Dogs in the Vineyard for Star Trek

The new Star Trek movie came out a couple of weeks ago, and seeing as how there are a number of big Star Trek nerds in my normal Tuesday night gaming group, I proposed that we take a break from out long-running D&D game to play a Star Trek game of sorts. As I don't have an actual licensed game to run, I instead went through the trouble of doing a slight conversion of Dogs in the Vineyard. Both ST and DitV are about small, empowered groups sent out to protect and manage distant colonies, and deal with the people and problems of those areas. More or less. So I figured it would probably be a good match.

Last week, several of us got together and we made characters. This was a mistake; with the excitement over the new movie, the general level of Star Trek nerdiness, and no one but me having any real understanding of the game, it took us nearly two and a half hours to make characters. And, if you are unaware of Dogs in the Vineyard and how it works, this is insane. Creating a character consists of distributing some dice and making up some stuff about your guy. It should take no more than 30 minutes, and that's at the far end. I should have just pre-made some iconic characters (the captain, the security officer, the doctor, the engineer) and had the players pick from those.

Regardless, we got back together this week (with the number of players severely depleted) and actually tried to get playing, rather than just talk about Star Trek. And while there was a lot of side-tracking and joking, we did manage to play a bit.

The characters were sent to act as a "neutral" third party in negotiating peace between two warrings factions, offering the ability to join the Federation as a carrot. The two factions had been in a brutal war for decades, and they finally had leaders who were willing to create an accord, if wary of the other side. The crew showed them around the ship and presented their options should they join the Federation. And then one of the leaders disappeared, apparently kidnapped by their opposition. The remaining leader accused everyone of conspiracy to make his side look bad, but he was calmed enough to allow the crew to investigate the disappearance and figure out what happened.

It mostly went well, with regards to the fiction, but the mechanics were left almost entirely unused. In part, this was because of how the group normally approaches problems, realistically, carefully, and trying to avoid any real conflict if it can be avoided. Another issue was that I just wasn't pushing very hard. I sort of let the fiction move along as the players did, and there wasn't much opportunity for any real meaty conflicts. Yet.

It made me look back at my experiences with this group and the individual playstyles that I have seen. For the most part, I feel like the group would be perfectly happy with a mostly free form game, especially when it comes to a genre as well-known and and entirely "grokked" as Star Trek. There just isn't much need for any sort of tactical conflict mechanic, or really any sort of obtrusive mechanic at all. The fictional material is all shared through a mutual enthusiasm for the fiction itself. This in itself is kind of funny, because I also feel that they would balk at a game that didn't have some sort of initiative/attack/damage mechanics in it... they don't need it, but they wouldn't want to get rid of it either.

It's interesting to see the different ways that the players look at mechanics, and the different ways they use them (or don't). I feel like maybe we should try a relatively free form system and see what happens...