"Using" Dogs in the Vineyard for Star Trek

My RPG group got together today for our game. The current D&D GM still was out, so we continued the Star Trek game.

After last week's game, I really had a strong feeling about free-form and this group. A few of my previous posts are my thoughts that came out of that. And after tonight's game, my opinion hasn't changed. Or if it has changed, it's strengthened.

The story of the game isn't terribly important, and was mostly cliche. After tracking down the kidnappers to a remote location, they used their superior technology and tactics to take down the kidnappers (phasers set to stun, of course) and rescue the kidnapped leader of the Warrior clan. One of the kidnappers was the terminally stupid son of the Civilian clan; he didn't seem nearly smart enough to put together the plan to kidnap and hold the Warrior clas leader, nor to manage negotiations, so the crew suspected a secret leader. While the engineer and science officers tried to track him down through the splinter group's makeshift communicators, the captain and security officer went to let the Civilian leader know what happened. He was furious, and refused to help any sort of investigation until he got his son and the other splinter soldiers back. The captain wanted to speak with his daughter, the sister of the "lead" kidnapper, but she was gone. In the mean time, the engineer had tracked down a signal and decided to leap into action without letting anyone know. He transported in, surprised someone, and managed to successfully stun him with some tricky transporter usage.

It turns out that the man was a war profiteer who had fooled the Civilian leader's son into kidnapping the Warrior leader, and the son wasn't smart enough to see through the plan. The profiteer was attempting to respark the wars and continue making money. The crew uncovered the plot, and managed to get the groups working together again. And the daughter of the Civilian leader, in love with one of the Warrior higher ups, was married at the end of the story. A metaphor of sorts, I suppose.

The first conflict (attacking the kidnappers) didn't go well. I mean mechanically, because it went fine for the PCs in the fiction. The players didn't seem to like the way it worked, abstract in the wrong places and too concrete in others. Plus, it was an utter blowout -- the kidnappers never had a chance. So, from then on, I went free form. The players said what they wanted, and how they were trying to get it, and I weighed their abilities, relationships, and methods against the trickery and plans of their opponents to determine what happened. It was fairly easy, to be honest, and the game went great. There were a lot of distractions and jokes, but we eventually got up to a good pace. The only other conflict I played out was the engineer versus the profiteer fight, and even that wasn't necessary. The engineer player's clever use of his transporter experimentation basically closed the deal, and was cool enough that it would have done the same in a free form environment.

So, I consider this an unintentional experiment with the group and free form play. With all of the different systems we've played and tried to run games in, for the most part the group flows really well with a specific type of free form that isn't very complicated. Tonight, the nominal system didn't work for them, and drifting back to a free form system did. And in a post-game discussion, it became more and more apparent to me that the previous games the group has played, before I arrived, relied a great deal on free form play. I'm completely convinced that an explicitly free form game would work for most of the group, and I would love to try one out and see what happens.