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STA Dev Blog 005: A Guide to Star Trek Adventures

By Sam Webb, Head of Product for Modiphius Entertainment

Extended Tasks in Star Trek Adventures

While they may seem daunting, extended tasks in Star Trek Adventures can be a fantastic tool to structure a bigger problem your player characters might face compared to an obstacle they can overcome with a single task. Extended tasks need more effort and time, like when Geordi tells Picard repairs will take hours, or when your science officer needs time to analyze the data they’ve collected.

To cover the basics, let’s talk about one conceit right away—extended tasks are just skill tests with a Stress track and injuries. They use exactly the same mechanics as taking Stress and suffering injuries in combat; we’re just applying those concepts to a problem your player characters are facing, instead of someone they’re fighting.

An extended task’s work track is its Stress track, and represents how much effort is involved. Tasks that require more work are longer, while tasks that don’t require much effort have shorter tracks. Breakthroughs represent key developments in getting the task finished, and this is what your player characters need to score to complete the task. Breakthroughs are the thing to focus on with extended tasks, because in the fiction of your scene they are the eureka moments, the points of discovery while getting the extended task done. An extended task’s magnitude is both the number of breakthroughs the player characters need to achieve, and also the Difficulty of their rolls, like the Difficulty of a normal task. Any resistance the extended task has is basically its armor—anything making the task more complicated or getting in the player characters’ way.

Keep it Interesting

When you’re using an extended task, you’ve got to make sure you keep it interesting, so that it doesn’t just become a roll-fest. When a breakthrough is achieved, what happens for the characters? It has to mean something, otherwise your players are just rolling and rolling until they’ve done the task. This is where your narration comes in! Whenever my players score a breakthrough, I tell them something about the progress they’ve made. They might learn something about what they’re doing, or I describe the result of what their characters are doing in the fiction. It’s really important to give them that feedback loop.

Let’s take an example, one that I’ll detail out at the bottom of the blog, so you can use it in your missions out in the Shackleton Expanse or wherever your crew may find themselves exploring. The science officers in my group are asked to look into some long-range sensor data that looks strange: probe telemetry nearby shows the planets in a different order than the station’s data! My players get to work with an extended task to figure out what’s wrong here, and I write notes on what each breakthrough means:

• Breakthrough 1: The officers verify the data, the probe’s sensor readings are good—but so was the station’s! Analyzing probe data as it approached the system, it looks like the planets have moved!
• Breakthrough 2: Metaphysics analysis suggests objects in the solar system, at the subatomic level, show a recent state of transition, cause currently unknown.
• Breakthrough 3: There’s evidence from the probe near the system of a subspace anomaly. It looks like a fissure in normal spacetime, like a micro wormhole or similar phenomena.
• Breakthrough 4: The players find an alien station close to the center of the subspace array. The subspace tear could be manufactured! 

Each time they make a breakthrough, I give my players a bit more information and tell them what they’ve found. If I left it right until the end, they’d have to get through four breakthroughs before they knew what was going on. I broke down the information so they learned a little more each time, and made it fun and interesting.

In a future article, we’ll go through some of the nuts and bolts of extended tasks and how you can use them for longer-term projects in your continuing missions.

Shifting Planets

Scientific Method Extended Task

Step 1: Observe ( Star Trek Adventures core rulebook , p.157)

Step 2: Hypothesize ( Star Trek Adventures core rulebook , p.157)

Choose the “Right Way”

Step 3: Testing

Extended Task

Work track: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ (20)

Magnitude: 4

              Breakthroughs: 4

              Difficulty: 4

Resistance: 2 with the Right Way, 4 without the Right Way

• Breakthrough 2: Metaphysics analysis suggests objects in the solar system, at the subatomic level, show a recent state of transition, cause currently unknown. Inform the players whether they have the “Right Way”.
• Breakthrough 4: The players find an alien station close to the center of the subspace array. The subspace tear could be manufactured!

Thanks for reading this article, and thank you for your interest and support of Star Trek Adventures ! Keep your frequencies open for additional STA development blogs on a wide variety of game-related topics in the coming months.

Get the latest info on product releases, new sales, and development updates.

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STA Dev Blog 005: A Guide to Star Trek Adventures

By Sam Webb, Head of Product for Modiphius Entertainment

Extended Tasks in Star Trek Adventures

While they may seem daunting, extended tasks in Star Trek Adventures can be a fantastic tool to structure a bigger problem your player characters might face compared to an obstacle they can overcome with a single task. Extended tasks need more effort and time, like when Geordi tells Picard repairs will take hours, or when your science officer needs time to analyze the data they’ve collected.

To cover the basics, let’s talk about one conceit right away—extended tasks are just skill tests with a Stress track and injuries. They use exactly the same mechanics as taking Stress and suffering injuries in combat; we’re just applying those concepts to a problem your player characters are facing, instead of someone they’re fighting.

An extended task’s work track is its Stress track, and represents how much effort is involved. Tasks that require more work are longer, while tasks that don’t require much effort have shorter tracks. Breakthroughs represent key developments in getting the task finished, and this is what your player characters need to score to complete the task. Breakthroughs are the thing to focus on with extended tasks, because in the fiction of your scene they are the eureka moments, the points of discovery while getting the extended task done. An extended task’s magnitude is both the number of breakthroughs the player characters need to achieve, and also the Difficulty of their rolls, like the Difficulty of a normal task. Any resistance the extended task has is basically its armor—anything making the task more complicated or getting in the player characters’ way.

Keep it Interesting

When you’re using an extended task, you’ve got to make sure you keep it interesting, so that it doesn’t just become a roll-fest. When a breakthrough is achieved, what happens for the characters? It has to mean something, otherwise your players are just rolling and rolling until they’ve done the task. This is where your narration comes in! Whenever my players score a breakthrough, I tell them something about the progress they’ve made. They might learn something about what they’re doing, or I describe the result of what their characters are doing in the fiction. It’s really important to give them that feedback loop.

Let’s take an example, one that I’ll detail out at the bottom of the blog, so you can use it in your missions out in the Shackleton Expanse or wherever your crew may find themselves exploring. The science officers in my group are asked to look into some long-range sensor data that looks strange: probe telemetry nearby shows the planets in a different order than the station’s data! My players get to work with an extended task to figure out what’s wrong here, and I write notes on what each breakthrough means:

• Breakthrough 1: The officers verify the data, the probe’s sensor readings are good—but so was the station’s! Analyzing probe data as it approached the system, it looks like the planets have moved!
• Breakthrough 2: Metaphysics analysis suggests objects in the solar system, at the subatomic level, show a recent state of transition, cause currently unknown.
• Breakthrough 3: There’s evidence from the probe near the system of a subspace anomaly. It looks like a fissure in normal spacetime, like a micro wormhole or similar phenomena.
• Breakthrough 4: The players find an alien station close to the center of the subspace array. The subspace tear could be manufactured! 

Each time they make a breakthrough, I give my players a bit more information and tell them what they’ve found. If I left it right until the end, they’d have to get through four breakthroughs before they knew what was going on. I broke down the information so they learned a little more each time, and made it fun and interesting.

In a future article, we’ll go through some of the nuts and bolts of extended tasks and how you can use them for longer-term projects in your continuing missions.

Shifting Planets

Scientific Method Extended Task

Step 1: Observe ( Star Trek Adventures core rulebook , p.157)

Step 2: Hypothesize ( Star Trek Adventures core rulebook , p.157)

Choose the “Right Way”

Step 3: Testing

Extended Task

Work track: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ (20)

Magnitude: 4

              Breakthroughs: 4

              Difficulty: 4

Resistance: 2 with the Right Way, 4 without the Right Way

• Breakthrough 2: Metaphysics analysis suggests objects in the solar system, at the subatomic level, show a recent state of transition, cause currently unknown. Inform the players whether they have the “Right Way”.
• Breakthrough 4: The players find an alien station close to the center of the subspace array. The subspace tear could be manufactured!

Thanks for reading this article, and thank you for your interest and support of Star Trek Adventures ! Keep your frequencies open for additional STA development blogs on a wide variety of game-related topics in the coming months.

Get the latest info on product releases, new sales, and development updates.

100% free, Unsubscribe any time!

• Opens in a new window.

Where's the Drama/Danger in Extended Tasks?

So, I’ve read the dev blog about extended tasks and now finally understand that “extended task” is STA’s wording for “make a problem be an NPC one can fight with wits instead of weapons”, which is nothing less than a great concept, by the way.

But still the question remains: Where’s the Drama? If I understand extended tasks as something akin to combat, the task being the enemy and problem-solving skills the weapons: Where’s the danger?

In combat, opponents react and their reaction create drama and/or is dangerous to the PCs. They shoot back, threaten or negotiate – basically: they fight back, one way or another.

What do extended tasks do other than stay mysterious if players can’t roll high enough? Yes, of course, I can combine extended tasks with timed and/or gated challenges, but I miss the drama and/or danger original to extended tasks. Clearly, I miss something.

Can you help me see it?

I think you are going about this the wrong way. You should not ask where the drama is in an Extended Task (ET), because drama causes an ET. If there is no inherit drama or danger, then an ET is just a waste of everyone’s time.

For combat it is easy to see because the drama and danger is clear. But if there aren’t any heavily armed Klingons around, it makes no sense for players to take separate turns.

The same goes for an ET. If you just want to clear up some rubble, no ET needed. But if you are attacked by Borg, then suddenly you have drama and danger and now an ET makes sense.

Or think of disarming a bomb. There, the drama is the time after which it goes off.

So in essence an ET arises from an inherit drama, not the other way around. Just like combat.

Shran has pretty much covered it there, but the setting in which you place the task is the source of the drama, as with any task.

You could use piloting the ship as an example. Simply flying in a straight line has no drama/risk of failure, so it just happens. You take the helm moments before a collision with an asteroid, then suddenly you have a risk of failure, so it becomes a task.

Extended tasks do exactly what they say on the tin- they extend the tasks in some way that makes them more than a series of gated tasks.

Continuing the example, having to pilot through an asteroid field might be a series of gated tasks if it is a simple duck and weave, however if you throw in an additional objective - find an efficient route out of the field - you can move into an extended task. You have the simple pass and fail of dodging the asteroids, but also a need to work on progressing through a larger objective.

Where extended tasks really shine are when other things are happening around them. That could be combat, or another high priority task. Maybe you’re ducking and weaving through asteroids as your doctor performs surgery on your injured captain, relying on you to keep the ship steady as you make an escape. It could also be a time factor - you need to escape this asteroid field before a spacial rift seals itself, trapping you in null space forever.

If you want real drama, you could stress the hell out of your helmsman - They need to navigate an asteroid field, keeping ahead of perusing ships, while also holding the ship steady enough for the doctor to complete surgery on the captain. But if they’re too conservative, the spacial rift they are trying to reach will close, trapping the crew here forever… actually sounds like a bit too much drama for me, but certainly adds some stakes!

Huh. Well. Duh.

One of things the designer pointed out early on is that an ET should always have a time limit. It might be a fixed limit (such as defusing a bomb before it goes off) or a shifting one (trying to fix the ship’s engines before it’s destroyed in battle), but without the limit, there’s no need to rush and no need to bother with the ET.

The ET always takes place over a series of periods (each roll taking a specific period of time), and so the player agency comes in their strategy: they have the option of rushing a roll or taking more time with it. Similarly, complications and other setbacks can delay or extend a roll.

Obviously the time limit needs to be achievable, but ideally it should be easy to miss it without putting in a lot of effort!

I one of the great things would be while slyly looking into a group or organization, sometime they look back. Or unknown to you another group takes notice of you an uses your group as pawns in their schemes. Or they set you up against the original group calling you out to them and the tables turn starting a war between yiu and them while the 3rd unknown group sits back and watches you take each other out. Will anyone notice, will they follow the clues in time to the reall enemy.

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[Star Trek Adventures] Extended Task Helper App

• Thread starter MarkGardnerATX
• Start date Oct 7, 2019
• Tags player aid star trek adventures

MarkGardnerATX

• Oct 7, 2019

In order to help my players understand Extended Tasks in STA, I ended up making a little web app to build out the task and show success and failure. Some of you might find it helpful as well. Star Trek Adventures Extended Task Helper I'm sure there are some kinks that need to be worked out so let me know what you think and if it's working in all situations. I'm only a novice coder so I'm sure there are some things that need fixing. But I hope it's helpful for you  

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Continuing Mission

A Fan Site for the Star Trek Adventures RPG by Modiphius

Replicator Resource: Extended Task Work Track & Blank LCARS

Here are a few assorted PDF resources I made for my game. I hope you find them useful.

• Extended Task Work Track (which you can either write on, or use tokens to track progress).
• Form-fillable blank LCARS ( black background  or white background ) for creating quick props or documents.

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