|
Star Trek: Engage is a story-based roleplaying game based in the Star Trek universe, played on an IRC server. Also known as simming, this method of role-playing has been around for decades now, originating on old BBSes and AOL chat groups. As a player, you take on the role of a Starfleet officer in one of several different departments on board a starship or space station. You’ll begin your career as a cadet (unless you convince me to drop you in as a lieutenant) and through playing missions you’ll earn accolades and awards, getting promoted up the ladder until one day you might even have command of your very own ship. Promotions are our way of rewarding the more dedicated writers, as our aim is to have players carry a character or two with them over months or even years, earning promotions as they play. We've got people who joined us at the beginning who're just getting their lieutenant commander and commander promotions. Format Each game takes place on a specific ship or station, and is played over an hour at a specific time every week. The games are run by a Game Director, who lays out the story, controls some NPCs and plays out the results of your actions if they’re required, acting very much like a PnP DM. However there are no dice, no stats, no numbers, just community storytelling and character building. The director communicates information that you’ll need throughout the mission, either by PM, in an out–of–character room, or in the mission room as an action statement that all of the players can see and respond to if necessary. As a science officer looking at the sensors, the director might message you that you detect a Romulan warbird decloaking dead ahead. Your next character action could be based on this. If you decide to ignore it, then the consequences will play out, or you could notify the Captain who could then order the tactical officer (played by someone else) to go to Yellow Alert and raise shields. At this point, the director could post an action that the Warbird has now opened fire, then everyone gets to do the Enterprise Shuffle, and so on. Missions are played through like that; the director giving the players the gist of a story and letting them muddle through and do what they feel they need to, pretty much exactly like PnP, only without the pauses to roll dice after every message. This is a creative game and the aim is to have players build their character through pieces of creative writing, or “logs”, posted to the forums or e-mailed to the ship’s mailing string after every mission. A log is just a piece of writing to progress your character, give the crew an insight into their mood, their goals, their personality, and see how that plays on their relationships during the missions. I’ve been playing this sort of creative game now for nigh-on fifteen years, and one of the highlights is seeing what people do with the characters they create. Such as this hilarious gem Currently Star Trek: Engage has been running for over two years now and we currently have four ships running at different times and on different days, with a fifth game opening up within the next two weeks - a relaunch of our old station game, the Sigma Rho. The Rho roster is pretty empty as it is just launching, so there's lots of spaces available for new players and the timezone is more suited to east/west coast American evening times. We also have a couple of ships that are better for the UK/EU evening. I’ve coded a pretty robust character and ship database for storing everything, giving you easy access ship rosters, character profiles, game transcripts, calendars, etc. It takes you right through from character creation to picking the ship you want to play on. Afterwards, it lets you see services records, choose different assignments, and is generally there to make playing and keeping track of your character as simple as possible. We also have a fantastic design person who gives all of the games a personal touch with things like construction patches.  The site is starting to look a little old, but we have a redesign coming along within the next few months. There's also a wiki in development which will be filled with various articles from the in-game universe, stuff like events that the players have contributed towards, antagnoists encounters, new planets or races we've concocted, etc. We try and make sure that each ship's actions affect the wider game universe; we even run yearly ‘Game–Wide' story arcs, where there's lots of cross-game activity, with the actions in one game affecting what happens in another, things to that end. It was a hell of a lot of fun, and we got some really interesting little stories out of it. It's definitely something that's unique to this sort of role-playing game. We've already got a few goons playing but we're always looking for more players, so take a look at what we have - there’s a handbook for new players you can flick through and a quick test on chat protocols to take before you can make a character. It’s pretty simple, it's mainly there to help familiarise new players with how the game is played. Feel free to ask any questions in this thread and I’ll answer what I can! Links Star Trek: Engage Website Forums (Register on the first link) Player Handbook Facebook Page
|
#
?
May 31, 2016 22:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 13:22 |
|
|
I'm the CO and game director of the USS Atlantis, whose beautiful patch is on display in the OP. I've run the Atlantis since 1997, and a couple of years ago, found STE through the old thread here and brought my entire game into the group. Since then, it's been a shining success. Our participation in the group-wide story last year was epic, and I've met a lot of good people on the other games and collaborating with them has really fostered a sense of a wider universe. The run-up to this year's big story has already been quite fun, and I'm quite happy that I joined STE!
|
|
#
?
May 31, 2016 23:28
|
|
|
As an Australian the chances of me making any of these are pretty much nil but I've always enjoyed the logs and stuff that you guys have posted so keep up the good work.
|
|
#
?
Jun 1, 2016 21:57
|
|
|
Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying the writing! I've met some absolutely amazing writers/players in this last couple of years, you get some dregs too but the good writing really outshines it all. We're hosting all of the transcripts here at the moment, if anyone wants to see what a typical mission looks like and what's involved. One day we'll have a ship for the Australian time zone, it's just a matter of finding someone to run it and players to play on it. One day! Cthulhuite fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Jun 2, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2016 20:06
|
|
|
As a child I used to enviously read logs from groups like this. I never had consistent access to the internet so I was never able to participate, and anyway at my maturity level I doubt I would have been welcome. Now my enemy is lack of free time, but I might see about squeezing into this. It would be the realization of a childhood fantasy.
|
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2016 20:20
|
|
|
GlitchThief posted:As a child I used to enviously read logs from groups like this. I never had consistent access to the internet so I was never able to participate, and anyway at my maturity level I doubt I would have been welcome. Now my enemy is lack of free time, but I might see about squeezing into this. It would be the realization of a childhood fantasy. We welcome anyone! Free time is always an issue though, I an understand that. We're working on developing a forum game which would allow a few more people in to play at a slower pace and not have to worry about time zones, etc. The IRC missions tend to run between an hour to 90 minutes once a week, but at a specific time and day. We've tried to inject a little more maturity into Star Trek, so you'll see the occasional 'gently caress' or some bit of violence, but it varies depending on the person and we try to make sure everyone is comfortable. If you've got time to read more logs, I usually point to one of our goon player's threads as they are consistently fantastic. Have a peek here - it's even handily split up into sections in the OP.
|
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2016 20:36
|
|
|
I'd definitely be down for a forum game if you guys ever do get that route up and running. Most of the forum PbP Star Trek stuff I've seen out there has this really unpleasant grog undercurrent running through it which I think is something Eclipse avoids pretty well.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2016 03:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 13:22 |
|
|
We try and avoid the grog wherever possible, even if it means sometimes fudging things a little. The Sentinel which runs on Mondays just kicked off a new mission arc in honour of the upcoming Shark Week. Time to see how Starfleet handles a big rear end shark 
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2016 07:07
|
|