Saturday I set up the Airport Base Station at Shannon and Kimberly's place. Setup was easy as I had already tested it by setting it up for my home network. Basically just use the Admin utility to set the Aiport to DHCP and not be a DHCP server or do port mapping, assign a name and password to the network and that's it. We were using the connection from downstairs and it was at full DSL speed to the Internet. Almost made me want to buy another battery pack so that the PowerBook could be truly tetherless. Speaking of which, the battery is more efficient, as it lasted at least three hours before I got nervous and plugged it in.

Gaming was a bit short this week. Dave only had a little bit to run to finish his adventure. There were a couple of short fights but eventually we left the prison after an hour or two of gameplay. Then we went out to buy meat for the barbeque. After another large meal we settled down for the Star Trek game. For some reason though Dave (in command) refused to cross the Neutral Zone to help a Romulan ship in distress. Sensor scans showed no life signs aboard, the distress signal had specifically asked for military help (it is a Romulan Warbird after all) and without clear indication from Starfleet Command he was very hesitant to start the adventure. So nothing happened and we stopped after two hours of gameplay.

This brings up the question of just how much railroading can a GM do in an adventure? I think I had given clear leads for the course of action: a distress signal from a Warbird in the Neutral Zone (where there shouldn't be any Romulan warships). They also asked for guidance from Starfleet Command (so already they had blown that Initiative Renown point), who sent back a message reiterating that Starfleet vessels must help vessels in distress unless their current mission prevents them from helping. Dave decided to play it safe, against the advice of the rest of the players, and so we have no scenario.

Now, I could have given Dave an excuse he could live with. Maybe there is one survivor (who may still be alive when they reach the Warbird) left or perhaps Starfleet Command or Starfleet Intelligence can order Dave to go in. But really, this campaign is about giving players the chance to make the right decisions on their own. Theoretically natural curiosity plus a gift for finding trouble is enough to get the players to the adventure.

There were two other things which I didn't agree with. I gave the players a simple starting mission (not one stated in the adventure) wherein they're transporting some Vidorian Fever vaccine to Psellus III. This is actually an important clue that can be used later in the episode, but it also meant that when the distress call came it was a choice of delivering the vaccine and saving some unknown number of Psellians versus investigating a recently dead ship. In real life most ships would stop and give aid to another ship in distress, even if it looked like they were too late -- versus getting to port a few hours later and maybe having some more people die from some plague. The sea is a harsh place to get into trouble and sailors realize that, which is why distress calls are taken seriously. The same should apply in space. But that is the GM's interpretation, which is of course the correct one for the universe.

The other point I disagreed with was Eric wanting to go in and drag the Warbird back to Federation space as some sort of trophy or intelligence coup. Although that's great from a Starfleet Intelligence standpoint, that's not who I want the characters to be. They should have been thinking first about the ship in trouble and what they could do to help, rather than how they could most profit from it. In the end this was a very short adventure and now that I think about it some more I will probably penalize everyone involved, since I started out by giving them a free skill to use in this adventure. I do have to balance the scales.