Using a Drama Tracker in Captain’s Log

Star Trek is one of my favorite IPs, and I love the tools and flexibility of the Captain’s Log RPG from Modiphius. Captain’s Log allows you to play in either Solo, Coop, or Guided modes. I’ve run games in all three styles and noticed some challenges when playing with multiple players. I’ll review the issue and suggest a solution at the end.

PC Difficulty in Solo vs. Coop Mode

The issue is the Difficulty. In Captain’s Log, your Difficulty target number is either 1 success (the default), or 2 (if things are really a challenge). In Solo mode, I think things work best if you have one named character (your hero or viewpoint player character) and for any other named PCs, you just use your ship’s stats. PCs are very competent and succeed most of the time, whereas NPCs using the ship’s stat fail more often, which feels about right.

Coop and Guided modes start to run into problems when you have 4 or 5 PCs whose stats are higher than ship stats. In situations like ship combat where PCs are doing all the rolls, the PCs are succeeding a very high percentage of the time. When you are nearly always winning on rolls (especially when you can spend Momentum to do so) it can deflate the normal tone of a game where you have a mix of successes and failures.

Looking at the math, the odds of success for a PC rolling an Attribute of 10 and a Discipline of 5 is about 94% for a Difficulty 1 task, and 56% for a Difficulty 2 task.

By contrast, the odds of success for an NPC (who has lower stats if you’re using a typical ship stats) for rolling an Attribute of 9 and a Discipline of 2 is about 80% for a Difficulty 1 task, and 30% for a Difficulty 2 task.

In a party of 5 player characters, people will tend to roll their highest stats since you have niche protection (a Captain doing leadership and diplomacy rolls, the Science Officer doing science rolls, etc.), so in Coop gaming, PCs rolling all the dice against Difficulty 1 tasks tend to succeed a lot.

Increasing the Difficulty

The two levers you have to even things out is increasing the Difficulty to 2 periodically, and perhaps increasing the number of hits for extended tasks, enemy ships, and groups of adversaries. In Guided play, the GM can work to keep things sufficiently hard, but for Coop mode (or for Solo mode if you’re running multiple PCs) it adds an extra burden to keep making judgement calls to make things challenging.

So how can you automate managing the Difficulty?

Using a Drama Tracker

Here’s one way to potentially solve this issue: use what I call a ‘Drama Tracker’. In each adventure, designate a starting Difficulty, consulting the Yes/No probability matrix based on the situation of this starting scene. Thereafter, each scene in Captain’s Log ends after a Task roll, so you just look at the success or failure of that roll (or series of rolls, in something like combat). If the Task (or combat) ended in a failure or a success, track it, and consult the following table:

Using the above tracking mechanism should yield a natural ebb and flow of harder or easier scenes. If PCs have high stats and are rolling hot, things will get more difficult until they finally fail. If PCs have encountered a stretch of failures, things cool down and they start to succeed.

Note that when the Difficulty goes to 2, you should narrate what circumstances are making things harder, and likewise, if things get easier, consider adding flavor to the narrative to explain why.