My greatest fear about the Star Trek campaign that I'm slowly working on is that the players won't like it. My aim is to run a campaign that's more cerebral and puzzle solving, than the sort of combat-focused campaigns we usually play. Something where talking your way through is the best way to achieve your goals.

That's not to say that we don't do this. Every campaign we play has a fair amount of problem solving and diplomacy. We don't just barge in with blasters firing. But many a time, violence is the last and all too expedient resort. So it worries me that if I slow down the gameplay it'll bore most of the players.

The other danger being that fights take a long time to resolve. We can easily use up most of the game session in a big fight, and even significant fights can take an hour or two to finish. Combat is easy to run, very little thinking on the part of the Gamemaster. Everything else is harder.

A game with reduced combat means more time to roleplay, which means that I as a GM have more work to do preparing and during actual gameplay. My hope is that I will be able to run most of my games out of prepackaged modules. And to be sure, there are quite a few adventure packs for ST:TNG. That still means I have to read them and do some amount of work.

I've written about this before, and I bring this up because I just read an article in rpg.net called "The Tigger Effect". It's a short piece, the point of which is that players won't tell you what kind of campaign they want. A GM can talk to the players and get the feeling that a political campaign would work well. He prepares for a few weeks beforehand. The campaign starts, and after a few sessions of struggle he can't figure out why the characters go out of their way to avoid situations. On asking the players, he finds out that they don't want to play a political campaign. Well, what kind of campaign then? Anything you come up with, just not politics. That was the last campaign he ever ran.

And that's something that I'm afraid of. After I read the core rules, the narrator's toolkit, and the first volume of the main campaign, I'll write a bit of how I plan to run the campaign, the tone and specific setting. What I expect from the players, what kind of characters they can play, the kind of attitude I'm trying to promote.

Will this work? I don't know. We don't really know what we want. I feel that if AD&D is on in the morning then a combat light campaign can survive. But then again, we've started campaigns that just died after a week or two. And not all of them were mine.

One of the ones I remember is Traveler: The New Era. We got everyone hyped up for it. Shannon read the rules. It was an off week so Shannon, Matt, Eric and I went through a test scenario. System sucked big time, we never played the game. I'm also planning on running a test scenario with pregenerated characters to get people used to the system and for them to see what skills are necessary. That way when they make their real characters they don't make someone who couldn't have lived to become a Starfleet officer.