When a company screws up, I complain about it. I want other people to know how badly that company handled a situation. Because I don’t want to be someone who complains all the time, I also want to point out when a company excels at what they do. And my latest good example of this is the team behind the Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game by Modiphius.
Like any successful roleplaying game, as time progresses the designers get feedback from players. They also make changes when the same RPG system is used in other games adding and removing portions of the game. Look at the latest version of Dungeons and Dragons. While it still has the D20 aspect, there are a lot of changes to the game if you compare it to Dungeons and Dragons version 3.5 or the older BECMI that I started out with. There are differences that are good and bad. After the publisher had released the first edition of Star Trek Adventures, they took the feedback to heart and made some changes that were reflected in the Klingon Core Rulebook and the STA Rules Digest. Later, they took more feedback (and aspects from other 2D20 games) and released the much superior 2nd edition.
An advantage for the publisher, besides making the game better, is the sales of new books. This also caused some difficulties as well. If a new version of a game is released, then their loyal customers wondered why they invested in the previous books. Most games were not very backwards compatible. This was particularly bad when it came to the Warhammer tactical games with the official miniatures. The older miniatures were not allowed in the new official tournaments to drive up sales. I remember a friend telling me after the latest edition change that he was done with Warhammer because of this. It had gone through it twice and was not going to follow a third time even with how much he had loved the game.
When the second edition of Star Trek Adventures was released, I recall a few players wondering if their books were no longer compatible. I even saw one collection going up for sale online as the seller thought they were no longer needed. The team behind STA2e kept telling us that the older books could still be used. Well, they have started doing something beyond talk. They are releasing free PDF updates to all the older books that makes them “second edition”. Usually, it’s a minor correction to a character stat, or the wording on a certain rule. These ‘revisions’ have been released for the division books covering Command, Operations and Sciences.
As someone who wants to homebrew for this 2D20 game, it’s been fascinating to read some of these revisions and comparing them to the original releases. It helps me get an ‘under the hood’ look in the system.
So, I’m going to grab one Starfleet officer from Star Trek Adventures: The Next Generation Player Characters and compare the 1st edition book to the 2nd edition revision that was released for free. That being our earl grey drinking captain, Jean Luc Picard.
Now the “story line” presented in the 1st edition publication is not present in the revision. I don’t believe that ‘revision’ meant ‘reprint with 2e stats’. The revision just presented the stats. So it’s still worth picking up the 1st edition publications for all of the lore presented within the books. With STA2e relying more on traits, our enterprising commanding officer has some of his traits reworded. For example ‘Former Borg’ is now ‘Liberated Borg’ which makes more sense. His position of ‘Captain of the Enterprise’ is also listed as a trait. In the STA2e stats, the new past time focus of ‘Ancient Earth Literature’ was added. I love the idea of a past time focus as it tells us that the character is more than just a bunch of stats on a piece of paper. For Picard’s talents, Spirit of Discovery is slightly re-worded (as it was between the two books) and the Veteran talent has a change since STA2e dropped the challenge dice (again, seen in the new core rulebook). This is the same reason Captain Picard’s attack stats are slightly different, no challenge dice means he uses the damage listed in the new core book. Besides the past time trait, the only other noticeable change was the ‘special rules’ listed for the character. These contain the Species Ability which gives the character the advantages of being Human. And the role benefit of Commanding Officer. These role benefits have been very interesting to read. Other than that, the character’s values, attributes, departments (called disciplines in the first edition), stress, focuses, protection and equipment are all the same.
So, as you can see, Jim Johnson and his team of writers have been true to their word. You can still use your STA first edition publications with the second edition with just some minor tweaks. And they are helping you along by taking the time to provide some of these tweaks themselves (at the same time that they are working on new STA2e content).
Besides being impressed with these ‘revisions’, I recently used a 1st edition adventure in a one-shot at SaltCON. I GMed a game using the scenario from the Klingon Empire Quickstart using the second edition rules. Other than a few minor strokes of the pen on the pre-generated characters and a few NPCs, I had no problems running it with the Star Trek Adventures 2nd Edition rules.
So, don’t sell your first edition books, and if you happen to see any dead-tree versions, snatch them up as they are no longer being printed. Or you can pick up the PDFs on DriveThruRPG. You can use them in a second edition game with minimal effort. Truly something to tip the hat to the writers of this game. Like I said in the title of this blog, Kudos to Modiphius.
ADDITIONAL: It was pointed out to me that I didn’t include a link to the free downloads on the Modiphius website. They can be found here: Star Trek Adventures Downloads.
Have you encountered smooth transitions between editions of your favorite roleplaying game systems? Tell me about it. This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.