Star Trek Games

[MisterBoring]

@Faraday said in Star Trek Games:

Stuff has to happen. There have to be stakes. The drive needs to be fixed in time to get the ship away from some threat. The anomaly has to put the crew in peril somehow.

I think this might actually lead to more problems for a MU.

Assuming a game focuses on a single ship or station, and the majority of players are playing that ship or station’s crew, any problem that puts the crew in peril puts most of the playerbase in peril. And it’s been my experience that if a PC is in peril, that PC’s player would like their character to have some hand in thwarting that peril. And if only 5-6 PCs in the whole game get to thwart that peril, it leaves an untold number of PCs just standing in the wings waiting for their chance. I think lack of spotlight would build up way quicker on a Star Trek MU than any other for that reason.

[Faraday]

@MisterBoring “The crew” in that example could just be the crew of the shuttle, not necessarily the entire crew. But yes, you’re right about the general problem. My point is just that there needs to be something more going on besides just “Ensign Bob technobabbles the broken thing”, and players on the whole are not great at driving stuff like that (in my experience).

[Raistlin]

I think this conversation is largely over with everyone’s opinions stated, but I did want to address how I would handle the various scenarios people mentioned if I were actually playing a character in this situation.

I’m making some assumptions here, including that staff supports player-driven RP. Honestly, I wouldn’t be on a game that didn’t.

1. I log on and put out a call on the OOC channels looking for players who want to RP.
2. I contact those folks and tell them their characters receive orders to report to Shuttle Bay 1.
3. My character briefs them on a subspace anomaly that needs investigation. Should be routine sensor sweeps, but in Star Trek, it’s never routine.
4. It’s not routine! The anomaly starts interfering with our warp core as we approach, meaning someone has to recalibrate the deflector array while another crew member pilots us to safety.
5. We get dramatic RP with various characters contributing - someone pilots the shuttle, someone works the sensors to analyze the phenomenon, someone reroutes power to compensate for the interference.
6. They make it back to the ship or station with their data, and now have something to debrief senior officers on and discuss in Ten Forward, setting up future RP hooks.

This small, initial scene could lead to all sorts of future RP opportunities. Engineering could discover that the anomaly is affecting the station’s reactors, a strange illness could develop affecting either the away team or other crew members, etc.

For me, I just don’t buy into the “there’d be nothing to do unless you’re a senior officer” belief. If you want RP, you can find RP. Star Trek has always been about the crew working together to solve problems, and there’s no reason a MUSH can’t capture that same collaborative spirit.

[Jennkryst]

@Faraday said in Star Trek Games:

Stuff has to happen. There have to be stakes.

This isn’t Trek-specific, it’s literally every MUSH ever.

Some players can be those three people on Voyager who never volunteer for any away missions and just do the social rp. Or be a Dabo Girl on DS9. It’s fine.

[Pavel]

@Raistlin said in Star Trek Games:

For me, I just don’t buy into the “there’d be nothing to do unless you’re a senior officer” belief

Historically, that has been the case. So you, or whoever is running this game, would have to prove otherwise. If you’re playing Crewman A. Nonymous you better not be anywhere besides a jeffreys tube and not getting in the way of the person we especially chose to play Lieutenant Commander Action “Buzz” Heroguy.

[Jennkryst]

@Pavel said in Star Trek Games:

If you’re playing Crewman A. Nonymous you better not be anywhere besides a jeffreys tube and not getting in the way of the person we especially chose to play Lieutenant Commander Action “Buzz” Heroguy.

Gentle reminder Harry Kim spent 7 years in the Delta Quadrant with a single pip, and while he may have manned the engineering console on the bridge, he was never a department head. He’s an ensign. There were five people on the ship with a lower rank - Nelix, Kes, Seven of Nine, Naomi Wildman, and Miral Paris (and technically the Maquis, but they got whole uniforms and pips to reflect their Maquis ranks, it’s fine).

And he still got up to some wacky shenanigans.

[Pavel]

@Jennkryst said in Star Trek Games:

There were five people on the ship with a lower rank

Gentle reminder that I’m talking about the enlisted crew, who constituted the vast majority of the ship’s complement and generally didn’t get to go on wacky adventures. I’m also, more pertinently, talking about past games that have existed not one of the TV shows, where people who weren’t lucky/connected/whatever enough to get a senior position didn’t get to have wacky shenanigans anywhere near as often as The Main Cast. So please don’t “gentle reminder” your way through ignoring my experience.

If you want your game like Lower Decks, focus on those people. If you want it like TNG, focus on those people. Yes, players can run shit, but staff run the game and set the tone; so if you’re focusing on telling a story about The Senior Officers that’s who people will want to be and will feel left out if they can’t.

[Faraday]

@Pavel said in Star Trek Games:

So please don’t “gentle reminder” your way through ignoring my experience.

100%. I’ve played on (and run) tons of military games, and the rank divide has always caused issues. There are ways around it, but it needs to be acknowledged and planned for.

@Pavel said in Star Trek Games:

Gentle reminder that I’m talking about the enlisted crew, who constituted the vast majority of the ship’s complement and generally didn’t get to go on wacky adventures.

Yeah, one of the things that always bugged me about Trek is that more of the wacky adventures rationally should have involved the enlisted crew. It’s a Hollywood-ism to always have the heads of departments doing everything, but that mentality also pervaded the Trek games I tried through the years.

Then again, Trek has always been weird about its handling of officers/enlisted. At one point in the 60’s, Roddenberry even insisted that Starfleet had no enlisted ranks at all. (This is seemingly contradicted not only by simple logic but also by various characters throughout Trek canon.)

I know Star Trek isn’t RL, but just for reference/scope, a US aircraft carrier would have ~3000 enlisted crew and ~200 officers. So even the most junior Ensign is still in the top 6% of personnel, rank-wise. Lower Decks seems to contradict that conclusion, so who even knows.

[Pavel]

@Faraday said in Star Trek Games:

100%. I’ve played on (and run) tons of military games, and the rank divide has always caused issues.

At least in my experience, also, senior ranks (or senior positions, or whatever shiny thing gets the story) are often like Jedi in older Star Wars games. If you’re not friends with staff, you’re not getting it. You get to be set dressing, at best, for other people who had the good sense to be friends with those in charge.

Not always, obviously, but it’s probably the clearest and most blatant way folks have historically shown favouritism.

[Jennkryst]

@Pavel said in Star Trek Games:

staff run the game and set the tone

So we agree that…

@Jennkryst said in Star Trek Games:

This isn’t Trek-specific, it’s literally every MUSH ever.

I’m not saying it’s never been a problem, I’m throwing out ideas to try and prevent it from becoming one, while also pointing at shows to go ‘see? Its viable!’ Ask lower rank people what their IC career goals are, that’s how 1 pips get assigned to bridge duty.

@Faraday said in Star Trek Games:

I know Star Trek isn’t RL, but just for reference/scope, a US aircraft carrier would have ~3000 enlisted crew and ~200 officers.

Memory Alpha lists THE D as having 1,000 people aboard, including family members and so on. Voyager had… a variable number, but lists 141 as the usual compliment. As always, you can scale down because the computer can follow verbal commands, but we also see problems that could easily be handled by a fully coordinated crew just wreck a ship with people only on the bridge.

While 1st/2nd/3rd class crewmen and NCOs exist (can you tell I can’t remember proper titles or rank structure?), you have significantly less need to balloon the crew compliment with people who haven’t gone to the Academy yet… doubly so in Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism where the poors don’t have to sign up for a chance to crawl out of the bottom rung of capitalist hell.

For Voyager’s crew, Memory Alpha lists 60 people with the rank of Crewman, as opposed to an officers rank (this includes Maquis with provisional ranks). So depending on crew size, you could have half or even more being officers. I dunno. I only counted ‘crewman’ on my fingers, I didn’t check civillians or figure out how many if each rank were around. Mlstly because the list includes people whose names are only ever seen on an LCARS.

Also! As a starbase was mentioned, you can consider different ships, different crews of department heads if you go that route, but still give the lower rank folks time to shine, if people want to play them. It all circles back to ‘staff makes plot, or endorses PRPs so other people can ST things for whomever.’

[Sammich]

My Mother and a couple of my sisters spent many years playing a Star Trek PBEM game (It was called the FGN I think) and I’m trying to remember what their experience was.

As far as I can remember, there really were only (or mainly) officers. Heads of department and then their 2ic. Like Chief Medical Officer and then Assistant Chief Medical Officer? Might not have been that nomenclature exactly but that was kinda the vibe. Obviously that doesn’t make for particularly large crews, but they had multiple ships and stations and stuff. The game runners basically managed the entire federation I guess and gave ships missions and stuff, and then the players mostly just did things with their crew. They could transfer to another ship or station in the fleet, and if you wanted to play with your friends they’d be as accommodating as they could.

Also like, I’m fairly sure there were people who were just like “I wanna be the wise bartender on the ship” and so they could do that if they wanted. But yeah, basically it handled having a lot of people by having a lot of ships rather than just jamming everyone into one. The ships would sometimes be on missions together or whatever, but also often were just doing their own thing in the galaxy, and one ship that got sassy with the romulans over here might cause problems for another ship who is trying to deal with some romulans over there, like it was a shared galaxy even if you didn’t necessary interact with everyone else in it regularly. In theory you got to have your ‘limited Star Trek ensemble cast on a ship’ adventures, while also being part of a much larger group of people also going on adventures?

Would that work as a MU? Would ‘real Star Trek stories’ be able to be told? Would it even be practical to try place many different ships and stations all doing different things asynchronously into some sort of coherent universal timeline?

I don’t really know. But I do know a ton of Star Trek fans had a ton of fun playing a PBEM game a couple decades ago, and I thought maybe a tiny bit of info on how they did things (even if maybe it’s not exactly the type of thing that we’re talking about wanting here?) might be helpful to someone. Or at least stand as evidence that you can do something with it, somehow.

[spiriferida]

Having played in a game in the past that probably could have been reskinned into a star trek game with a very small amount of effort, it worked best when it was a relatively small group, rank wasn’t several degrees of stratification (basically a few department heads and everyone else was about the same level, where most of the department heads traded off being STs) and players basically had free rein to propose a plot planet and put characters through hell on it.

We did some degree of bureaucratic rp, but there were enough interpersonal tensions due to factions present on the crew that there were reasons for conflict and consequences to that tension. The game runners occasionally threatened the ship itself, but some of my favorite plots there could start from a supply run gone wrong, or a investigation of a derelict station that was full of horrible monsters, surprise.

If a game is set in a tense environment where every PC is expected to have a competency or two that they bring to the table, then everyone has a good reason to go on away missions that put their life at risk. In fact, if part of the job of PCs is to go on those away missions, that solves half of the problem.

[Warma Sheen]

@Faraday said in Star Trek Games:

The default Trek would play like a FC-driven game, with the department heads as coveted positions and everyone else feeling like second fiddle. That was also how the old-school Trek games I tried felt, and why I believe they were never as popular as some of the other genres.

I feel compelled to point out that while this is a problem in many games, I can only imagine that on a Star Trek game this would only be amplified considering the series has a very popular similarly themed meme about being a red-shirt.

So even if your character was not actually wearing a red shirt, it would feel like you were - much faster, given the setting.

[Jennkryst]

The return of Strange New Worlds means we are primed for Trek, go go go go go!

[Raistlin]

@Jennkryst LOL As an aside, I thought the first two episodes of season 3 were really good.

[Gashlycrumb]

I love Trek and played Trek MUs, and I would again.

The first one I tried was not playable for me. It had multiple planets and ships and space code. It seemed to be the sort of deal where you’d do a group app as bridge crew of your ship and go around exploring and having ship vs ship battles.

The second one was Anomaly TrekMUX, which was pretty great. It didn’t have a pervasive bridge-crew/redshirt problem like people are predicting. At least, not in the sense of higher-ranking officers doing everything. At one point certain GMs were awfully keen on “this looks like a job for my alt!” plots, but that was Spider, and it did suffer Spidered-game problems of that era of MUdom. Really its major problem was that the really important plot was pre-written to end with the game runner’s PC saving the universe as part of a secret creepy fascist organisation of time-travelling murder hobos, which is kinda lousy game for those who ICly didn’t groove on time-travelling fascist murder hobos, and having them the heroes a betrayal of Star Trek-ness. (And not in a cool, fun, Lower Decks kinda way.)

There was a spin-off one, Gamma One, which was also a bit of alright, especially considering that it too was Spidered.

Those games had space-station settings and meant to be like Deep Space Nine. DS9 didn’t have redshirts and was about the biggest ensemble cast on, outside of afternoon soaps. It’s a pretty good model of alternating and overlapping running plots for different playgroups.

I certainly didn’t get to do all The Things when I had a department head PC. But I did also acted as if it was my role as a department head to assign The Things to my IC subordinates.

There were also a couple of Trek MUs around that time that were each set on a single large ship, Enterprise-D like. This cut out the possibility of civilian characters, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at all.

[Jennkryst]

@Gashlycrumb said in Star Trek Games:

secret creepy fascist organisation of time-travelling murder hobos

Section 31 is only fun when it is a dude who thinks it’s real, but it isn’t. Or a try-hard who thinks it’s really cool, Starfleet definitely needs a second, soopar seekrit intelligence arm, and just constantly fails because everyone else makes fun of this dumb thought.

… ahem.

So the ‘when’ is as important as the ‘where’. If you set it after Romulus blows up, and Romulans are kind of migratory, then options open a bit. If you set it after Picard, literally everyone in Starfleet has PTSD for Picard S3 reasons. Picard also feels like it plays things fast and loose with Stardates, so ???

Not terribly important.

(I do realize for the Romulus Nova to be a plot point, the game would be set a decade after the TNG/DS9 crossover bubble, which is more important than Picard fast/loose timey wimey)

Fun dates/basic timeline

2365 - Q Who, Borg meet cute
2369 - Deep Space 9 S1
2370 - TNG finale during December, leads directly into…
2371 - Voyager MIA
2375 - Odo asks Kyra if she would still love him after he becomes an ocean of goo
2379 - Star Trek: Nemesis
2380 - Lower Decks S1
2385 - Martian Shipyards go boom
2387 - Romulus Supernova

Anyway, Deep Space 69 (pun intended, what with all the TS) can be a joint mission base for exploring… somewhere. It could be Romulans just found out about the Supernova, and DS:69 is stationed in a system where another K-type Dwarf Star looked like it was going to Supernova in the past, but abruptly stabilized, and we are here to find out why/if that can save Romulus. Or it could be a hub where people are looking for nearby worlds that could serve as a colony for relocation, with multiple plots around making sure things won’t violate the Prime Directive, sticking it near a modern day Shackleton Expanse, or maybe even near the edge of Klingon space, which gives them a reason to be involved.

Or both! Alternatively, something else. Whomst can say?

Obviously have your different class ships for different missions. Alts are cool, just don’t let one person be the chief engineer on every ship. Maybe even say they can’t have a second engineer unless they have command and science alts, also? Now we’re in the weeds and need more feedback from other players.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Jennkryst Yeah – those games were all before Nemesis was released, and chose to ignore it and part ways with the canon timeline.

There was one good thing about the time-travelling murder hobos, which is that everyone OOCly knew their secret, since logs of their actions were shared on the game wiki. Contrary to the arguments of OOC masq proponents about how impossible this is, the players kept it OOC knowledge. Some managed to figure it out IC in purely IC ways. Many players thought it was pretty shite game-writing to restrict knowledge of and action regarding a universal threat to a small group of PCs, and had no desire to support or cooperate with that element of the plot, but still I have no recollection of cheating being a problem.