Sounds like a great idea! If you can look past his heritage, Cheng is actually a very friendly young man. And is loyal to his friends unto death.

Excellent!

While I'm getting things ready on my end I had a couple ideas that I would like to run by you, maybe even take an informal vote.

Show Format
I was thinking about presenting the game in the style of an actual Star Trek episode. What this means is that each "episode" would be broken up into 5 acts and labeled as such, including "commercial break cliffhangers" during the transition from scene to scene.

While I won't be breaking the 4th wall the familiar style and format would lead a since of predictability to each mission. If you're on Act III then you have an approximate sense that the ending is going to come sooner than later although the actual length of each Act will vary wildly depending on how quickly or slowly you advance the plot.

I am not worried about you guys prematurely ending an episode. Star Trek is rife with surprise twists where it looks like the plot has been resolved but then suddenly a twist happens to extend it out another act or two.

I think this would be neat but I don't want to lean too heavily on the 4th wall if you find it disruptive to break things up like that.

B and C Stories
One thing that concerns me is that not every character will be engaged in every scene or even mission. In a tabletop game that is the point of supporting characters but given how long a play-by-post game can go I don't want you losing interest in the game because there isn't a medical/engineering/piloting/security emergency to deal with. Given that we can have multiple active threads going at the same time I was thinking about introducing "B stories" so that while Garrity and T'Saen are trying to navigate an ion storm in a shuttle Cheng and Abdool could be engaged in a increasingly competitive music competition or Timor could be overworked in engineering and having to learn a lesson about delegating work to others.

The idea that I had is basically to have another OOC thread called the Green Room where if you are not actively involved in the plot you can submit your name for either A) a side story or B) a supporting character to introduce into main plot or both. In addition if you have an idea like "I would like to have a thread with So'And'So about our friendship or rivalry or burgeoning romance that would be the place to nominate it, get acceptance and let me know to get it set up.

Romance
So as I put up in the important info thread romance will be an option but it is one your character can always opt in and out of. I may introduce NPCs to be the "minor object of your affection of the week" however before I even start thinking about romantic entanglements for your character, if either you as a player or you think your character would have zero interest in a random romantic side plot just shoot me a PM saying you'd like to opt out for now. Note that even if you opt out now that doesn't have to be a permanent decision and there is a big difference between a "Captain Kirk's love interest of the week" and a multi-Season relationship built up through trials and tribulations.

The point is that I would never wish to force you or your character into that kind of uncomfortable situation.

Also please specify whether it is you the player or your character who is opting out. I am currently re-watching Voyager and there are situations where aliens try to seduce either Captain Janeway or Tuvok with amusing results.

   Speaking personally, I'm all for an 'episodic' sense to the game. (Having a deliberate beginning, middle and end point has always been good storytelling, IMHO) Admittedly I'm not one for 'commercial break cliffhangers' - cliffhangers are (I've noticed) overused as a plot device, and grow stale all too quickly. Once in a while is good to heighten tension, but more than that, you'll have people turning blase to the storyline all too quickly. As for the '4th Wall', I'm content to leave things like that to the Superheroes - one in particular that I won't mention - and not go there. I'm no 'method' style of player, but breaking that wall just doesn't do it for me.



   Star Trek has more twists and turns in it than a logging road deep in the mountains ... If we end things prematurely, we're doing our jobs famously - and that's a good thing. If we're doing it most of the time, however, that's when the Universe starts taking stuff away. (No pun intended)



   This is a game about the 'lesser lights', like the upcoming (Netflix) series, so I'm not expecting to be going on a fair amount of missions. Bones didn't either, but he made the most of it when he was. I don't have a problem with putting the good doctor in a "B" or "C" story - I think of this as an ensemble cast, everyone will get their chance, at some point.



   That's fair - no rushing on that one, as long as we have the option of 'opting out'. I'd rather have romance happen on a more 'organic' level. (I personally am not wild about romance, so I'd prefer not to ... but if built up over time, I'm not averse to playing the concept).

I am very much in favor of the B and C stories as an idea. You make valid points about the time scales involved in play by post and having your main character sidelined for a few months could indeed damage fun. I think that that idea addresses it well and is in the style of the show. Every got screen time every episode even if it wasn't part of the main plot. I am similarly pleased with the idea of being able to opt in or out of romance as some people may be more or less comfortable with it. The ability to say "No." is important and I appreciate your attention to that.

I had a long thing on my opinion about the show format idea, but I'm just going to go with: I have mixed feelings and concerns, but I'm generally positive about it. Both of you made decent points about plot twist being a common thing and getting a feeling about an arc for each is valuable, as Laila pointed out. Rather than it all feeling long and rambling, we get the arc in each episode that contributes to the over all story.

On format of the game. I am a go. In a STA forum; a writer made the point that threat was the means to allow the traditional Star Trek format to exist. The Director introducing new story elements by spending threat, and allowing the players to deal with those elements.

   And just to get a post in about characters possibly knowing one another ...

   Some possible contact points for Ens/Doctor Abdool:

• - Born in Vancouver, North America.
• - Daughter of Federation Diplomat - Faisal Abdool and Star Fleet Commander Ja'nelle Shepard-Abdool [ret.]  Her father is a Diplomat to the Klingon Empire and has been for some time. Her mother was a respected member of Starfleet Sciences until her retirement and worked in the Astrogation and Stellar Cartography branch. Since her retirement, she has been a consultant to that same branch and commutes between her home and Star Fleet Headquarters in San Francisco
• - Considered very studious, usually found in the Academy Library researching her latest assignment. Known for pursuing a point with near Vulcan-like intensity until finished.
• - Caught up in a cheating scandal, was thought to have been the Cadet responsible for the submission of several graded assignments found to be fraudulent. Cleared of any wrongdoing when another Cadet stepped up and admitted guilt. (Three Cadets were dismissed as a result)
• - Was challenged by Cadets from Command Services to play out the infamous 'Kobayashi Maru' test. Although her command was eventually destroyed, Cadet Abdool managed to keep her command and the crew of the 'Kobayashi Maru' alive the longest of any previous Cadet. Her use of beaming photon torpedoes onto the unshielded bridges of the enemy Klingon ships resulted in the loss of 42% of the attack force and has since been dubbed the "Shepard Option" - at the Cadet's request.
• - Seriously injured on a field trip to Onari V to help with recovery efforts after a massive tectonic shift on the planet's main continent. When asked to help, Starfleet sent their most senior Cadets in addition to Doctors to aid in the recovery. During an aftershock, while Cadet Abdool was in the midst of moving a patient, the ground gave way and she fell two stories, the building then collapsing atop her. When she was rescued, she was unable to walk and was taken back to Earth, where her shattered hip was replaced. During her recovery, Starfleet permitted her to graduate with her class - although she was only permitted to attend via teleconference.

I'm not a fan of threat as it ignores the nature of the GM and could make them somewhat adversarial. They control the universe no matter what pool they have. They don't really need threat to say, "5 more romulans show up having heard the phaser fire and converging on it." or "Unfortunately, you ship was damaged in the crash." They build and control the world and could send a whole army of romulans or have an asteroid hit us. They don't because they are not our adversary. We are working together to have a good time. The fact that they have a pool of points in front of them to screw us over sends the message that they should be spending them. Ideally it is to improve the story, the same way they might bring in the romulans mentioned above after a decent first volley from us unexpectedly takes out the first ones too quickly or tell us our engines are broken to avoid having us take off and short circuit the story, but they never needed threat points to do that. Similarly, if I give the GM a billion points of threat by getting additional information, its meaningless. Sure the rules let them wipe the floor with us by using that, but that would be no fun for anyone and no different from our perspective than sending the asteroid or army. They could have done whatever they would do with the threat with the power they have as a GM and still have to act responsibly in that position.

On a more useful topic, more in line with the doctor's post about getting to know each other than the nature of mechanics. Timor, due the events rolled in creation, was embroiled in a scandal that ended in the court martial of another officer for negligence. Timor's reports and other records were quite damning. Much like Cheng, he was called upon to rat out someone who did some thing wrong. Unfortunately, he wasn't nearly as noble as Cheng was. His reports and documentation already existed. It may not have been intentional, but he had ratted out a fellow officer. All he ever did was speak honestly about his own work and evaluations of the situation. Not being intentional may have been worse, at least if he had been trying to do it, he could have claimed some nobility in trying to take down a bad actor. There were no good guys in this situation.

I definitely understand what you are saying and it is less about giving the GM a way to screw the players as much as it is a way for the players to understand why they are being screwed with.

First of all threat plays out a lot more in published adventures that I have been flipping through. Second it gives the GM "permission" to be a jerk without being unfairly judged. As a long time GM I can say that it is really hard sometimes to balance drama and tension without a jerk. There are definitely encounters that I planned out where three turns in I'm mortified thinking "I'm suuuch a jerk because I misread the group's capabilities". If they are mopping up with the bad guys do I let them have the easy win or bring in reinforcements? If they're cruising right along do I throw up some obstacles and increase the difficulty or risk making the game too easy.

Threat isn't about giving permission to GMs, its about giving justification to both GMs and players that your actions earlier are why this encounter suddenly became harder. Threat is just a "get out of guilt free" card for GMs to use to push their players more.

All positions are filled. Almost everyone has a character sheet complete. I plan on kicking off the game Monday so get ready to rumble!

Cool. I look forward to it. I'm interested in seeing how things go. We can have all sorts of ideas, but until the rubber meets the road and things actually start up you never know how they are going to play out.

Hello everyone, I snuck in under the wire. I'm your friendly neighborhood red shirt. Don't mind me, I'm going to go over behind this rock and die horribly off screen!

Dying off screen doesn't work. We need you to die on screen so that the audience can see how hard your death hit us and how serious the situation is.

On that note those of you done with characters start thinking up fun support characters. I plan on putting them into a public pool so they can be reused so try and make them more fun than just “generic soon-to-be-killed guy #6”

Also I said the game wasn't going to start until Monday however I'll throw up a quick introductory post so you guys can get into character before the big day starts.

Slight note on my post. I may have screwed up a pronoun somewhere, but the bolian was female. Timor and the ferengi are male. I will reread my own post to see where I screwed that up, but there seemed to be somewhere I lead Laila to think that the ferengi was female. Sorry for the confusion.

Welcome aboard Ylis zh'Kerja! And no dying on my watch!

I'm interested in seeing how Ylis reacts to an Andorian/Klingon officer.

I will try to get an introduction post up in a bit.

Perhaps it is a feminine Ferengi?

   Cheng: Are you Operations, or Sciences? You list wearing a standard Security uniform on your description but came into the lounge in Science blues ... just wondering.

  *Waves to the new batch of arrivals*

He should be in yellow. I believe I confused him during a PM.

Fixed it. Sorry about that.

I'm fine with this. I think presenting the mission in acts will help us format our posts as we mutually drive the story. If we don't expect a conclusion until the last commercial break we'll be able to work on subplots, complications, relationships, etc., even though we understand that we might find the answer sooner than expected.



I like this a lot. Plus it'll give us a chance to flesh out the ship's crew.



I'll give this one some thought if that's okay. Most of the time I like to allow for relationships to build naturally, but since this is a new character it may be that "minor object of affection for the week" or NPC romance is the way to go.
This message was lightly edited by the player at 13:20, Mon 15 Apr 2019.

Random musings:

Star Trek Voyager
This is what I'm currently working through. Next up is to finally finish Enterprise and head on to Discovery.

At least from what I recall Voyager caught a lot of flack compared to DS9 and TNG but watching through it again I think it compares better than critics gave it credit for. I think Seasons 2 and 3 kind of spoiled the show for many but by Season 4 it seems to have really hit its stride.

I think the main problem is that overall Voyager's best actors are Janeway, Seven, Doctor and Neelix. Given that the Doctor was restricted and Seven didn't exist that basically left Janeway and Neelix to carry the show which explains why Neelix is so over used in the first two seasons to the point of annoyance. He became the Wesley Crusher forced into each episode with a "Oh I know how to do that!" but without nearly as much in-universe justification. Once Neelix is no longer dominating the screen I started to appreciate him more. Same with the Doctor where before the show had to be forced to bring him on screen but once he became mobile it felt more natural. Kes was the biggest failure of that show. She was spoiled from Day 1 by making her 3 years old. I'm sure some writer though it was an interesting twist but then having her be in a romantic relationship with Neelix was just...ugh. I feel bad for the actress because Kes was an albatross on many episodes. She was too young and childish to be a real romantic interest, she was too inexperienced to be really helpful as a counselor, she was too adult-like for the classic "child coming of age stories". Basically what they failed on Kes they succeeded with on Seven because although she was also "only" 6-years old, she was also late 20's. I realized that they could have run almost the same storyline of Seven "discovering how to be human" with Kes with only a few modifications but they didn't.  Anyway Season 4 onward I think stacks up well against TNG and DS9 minus the odd silly gimmick episode here or there.

Exploration
I always wondered how Star Fleet was still exploring after hundreds of years. My mind literally could not comprehend the vastness of space until I played Elite Dangerous. Elite Dangerous is a space flight simulator that has billions of stars populated within. They basically just downloaded the entire NASA database of known stars (so 99% are just Epsilon 1, Epsilon 2 etc.) and they are not actually generated until the first player enters. Then the system is procedually generated and the seed is stored in the central database so even if you're playing single-player you can be part of the global exploration. If you're the first person to a system it gets noted. If you're the first person to scan a system, it gets noted.

I wasn't really paying attention and just flying around in the "bubble" which is the center of explored space. The game is 5 years old at this point with hundreds of thousands of players exploring the galaxy so the bubble is heavily explored. Anyway I was just cruising along and I found an unexplored system. Just like that. It was actually really easy. It then dawned on me that for every system you explore it puts you closer to 2+ unexplored systems. And that pattern repeats effectively endlessly. If I send out 100 ships to explore a hundred systems, they'll come back with 500 unexplored systems. If I send out 500 ships then they will come back with over 1,000 unexplored systems and so on.

This explains why Starfleet is still talking about short-term exploration even in the 24th century.  As part of the Fermi Paradox it's talked about that with exponential growth you could colonize the known galaxy in 5-50 million years. The thing is that is assuming exponential growth so by year 1 million you are producing millions of ships to explore. Given that it hasn't even been 1,000 years for Starfleet this is still an age with endless possibilities even close to home.

I did a long journey and in Elite Dangerous some people even done comparable 65,000 Ly+ missions making them comparable to Voyager's journey. It is really hard to keep forward momentum when you're trying to explore because there is always. ALWAYS something new to distract you from your destination :D

Conn Skill
I am planning on expanding/clarifying the Conn skill as all operations of technology. It's basically a stand in for "computer use" in y opinion and hopefully that makes the Conn skill a bit more applicable in game. While breaking into a system will still require Security, repairing it will still require Engineering and studying it might use Science, actually using a piece of technology for its intended purpose would use the Conn skill. There are obvious and numerous exceptions. Weapons still all use security. Scientific instruments still use Science etc. but to access an alien version of Facebook would use the Conn skill.

Let me know your thoughts, please!

I've been watching actual play stuff and they seem to allow for an argument to be made based on approach and I think that that would be the better approach. If the engineer is approaching it from a systems point of view and the Conn guy is approaching it from a familiarity with control systems then that is reasonable. I would just be careful about taking it away from the engineers. Suddenly they know how to build, repair, maintain, etc. but not how to use technology. Basically, I could repair the alien computer. I could reprogram the alien computer, but the proper user interface of the alien computer is beyond me.

I'm not saying that the expert in conn shouldn't be able to say, "Hey, I've been dealing with controls on innumerable ships and systems. I should know this." but I also think that the engineer has a good argument that they should know it from their side of things.

As one of the people who stands to benefit from this, I approve. :D