Star Trek via Ghostbusters: Character Basics

As a thought experiment, what might a Star Trek role-playing game based on Ghostbusters: A Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying Game look like?

Traits

Characters start with 14 points to distribute amongst four Traits. Each Trait must have at least 1 point. Instead of Brains, Muscles, Moves, and Cool, characters have:

• Intellect
• Physique
• Coordination
• Composure

Talents

Characters have one Talent per Trait. Each Talent adds 2 dice to its related Trait roll. Most Talents pertain to skills appropriate to Star Fleet personnel, but players can create just about any Talent they can imagine with the Trek Master's approval. Talents and Specializations are stackable.

(I may add examples in the future.)

Specializations

Each character has one (or, rarely, more than one) Specialization and receives 2 bonus dice to all duties pertaining to that Specialization. Specializations and Talents are stackable. The following are common Specializations found in a starship crew:

• Command
• Communication
• Engineering
• Helm
• Medicine
• Navigation
• Science
• Security

Powers

Characters of certain species may possess Powers at the expense of certain Limitations.

For example, Vulcan Powers would include Increased Strength (Physique), Mind Meld (Intellect), and Nerve Pinch (Coordination). Vulcan Limitations would include Interspecies Social Awkwardness (possiby involving a penalty to certain rolls involving negotiation or etiquette outside of Vulcan-to-Vulcan interactions), Logical to a Fault, and Code to Preserve Life.

As a standard rule, each Power confers a bonus of 4 dice to relevant Trait rolls. (This may vary.) Powers are not stackable with Talents or Specializations.

Luck

Instead of Brownie Points, characters have Luck, which functions identically. Each character starts with 10 points of Luck. Or 20 points. (I'm still pondering this.)

Advancement

When characters achieve Mission Goals, they are awarded Luck points that may be used in the same manner as Brownie Points: they can be saved, used as bonus dice, expended to reduce injury, or spent to improve Traits.

Advancement is also marked by promotion in rank and/or assignment to various positions in the crew.

RPG Campaign Tour Challenge 2026: Day 02

[This is a placeholder. Actual article coming soon.]

Actual article begins here (on 3 February 2026). Sort of. It turns out I'm stumped already and it was only the second day of the challenge. I can't decide which non-player character to use as a campaign tour guide, I can't find my campaign notes (although I know I saw them a week ago), and I just realized the Toledo Ghostbusters campaign has been on hiatus since 2020. I'm not proud of that. I need to get that campaign moving again as soon as possible. If I can start it up again this year, maybe I'll have enough material to answer these questions next year.

Maybe this was the kick in the jumpsuit I needed.

In the meantime, I am managing to participate with my Mutant Crawl Classics RPG campaign, the Zem of Null, in Applied Phantasticality.

[For more information about RPG Campaign Tour Challenge 2026, read this.]

[Read Barking Alien's Campaign Tour Challenge 2026.]

RPG Campaign Tour Challenge 2026: Day 01

1. Campaign Introduction and Overview

This might be overly ambitious of me, but I'm attempting to tackle Adam Dickstein's RPG Campaigh Tour 2026 in two separate blogs. In Applied Phantasticality, I am describing my upcoming Zem of Null campaign for Mutant Crawl Classics RPG. Here in Decidedly 6-Sided, I will be describing my on-again-off-again Toledo Ghostbusters campaign.

The campaign is known as Toledo Ghostbusters. The system is Ghostbusters: A Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying Game (the first and best edition). Although I have tinkered with many different house rules in this blog, I have used none of them in this campaign, choosing to play by the rules as written simply because so far the rules as written have been more than sufficient. They allow us to do everything we need or want to do. So far. If I need to tinker later, I will, but I am consistently pleasantly shocked by how well Ghostbusters does what it does.

The setting, as one might guess, is Toledo, Ohio, U.S.A. in 1980-something. The player characters (as I mentioned in "Ghostbusters Go Zoom") include:

• Carroll "Carl" Düsseldorf (played by Sarah),
• Ray Stantz, PhD [helping out while staying with relatives] (played by Mary Lou), and
• Thalia Wainwright (played by Emily).

Together, they operate a local Ghostbusters HQ that was formerly a fire station and drive a black hearse with purple and orange lights. Their receptionist is a goth girl who formerly worked for a roadside attraction company that operated a quasi-haunted haunted house. They also have two Norwegian forest cats they liberated from an avant-garde boutique engaged in incomprehensible activities. Each character has their own motivations as well as an earnest desire to make their Ghostbusters franchise a success. And they're hiring.

[For more information about RPG Campaign Tour Challenge 2026, read this.]

[Read Barking Alien's Campaign Tour Challenge 2026.]

My Blogging Challenge Sense Is Tingling

Adam Dickstein is starting a new blogging challenge in February called Barking Alien's RPG Campaign Tour Challenge 2026. I think it's an excellent idea, and I think it behooves us as bloggers to share this idea widely.

[This article is cross-posted here in Applied Phantasticality.]

Simple Binary Dice Conversion for Ghostbusters

These are the quick and easy house rules for converting the Ghostbusters rules for use with binary randomizers such as coins, binary dice, or counting the even numbers of ordinary dice.

The Ghost Die is rolled in addition to the binary randomizers (instead of replacing a die), and the only face that is read is the Ghost. It has no numerical value of its own, but it helps ghosts and hinders Ghostbusters in the usual way. Any non-Ghost result on the Ghost Die is ignored.

Difficulty is divided by 5. A difficulty of 20 becomes 4, 15 becomes 3, 10 becomes 2, and 5 becomes 1. If the difficulty is not divisible by 5, round it to the nearest number that is.

And, I think that covers it. I am probably forgetting something (being distracted by supernatural phenomena and other concerns), so please leave a comment if you think of anything I might have missed.