After ten episodes completed, with only two episodes left before the conclusion of season two, I have to say that the hidden experience, actually all experience given, has been a bit too low. Now, when I started the Star Trek campaign, I didn't want characters to get better quickly. This campaign only covers the first five-year tour of a Starfleet officer, so at the end the most officers are not going to be substantially better.

Still, I am a bit dissatisfied with the results. Everyone is still pretty much the same as when they started, with only one or two skills improved. The problem is that people don't show up enough -- half the characters have been there less than half the episodes. I suppose I want to see it a bit more heroic which means faster advancement. But I don't want to fall into the characters-become- too-powerful-too-soon trap, where you have to restart with new characters because the old ones are gods.

Hidden experience has also failed to a certain extent. I don't give out enough of this extra experience, and I've wasted some of it by giving people useless skills (well, less useful skills in any case). As I look at the extra experience totals, only a handful of characters have enough for bridge certification, much less for promotions. So the concept of hidden experience needs to be adjusted.

At this point, I'm going to give some of the characters an extra base skill level. I've started making the characters roll some proficiency checks each week. Characters who continue to do well will get a bonus skill level. Hopefully people will use it to get to level three in a base skill.

Hidden experience I'll leave the way it is. Instead for promotions I'll use a combination of episodes and reknown. Promotions should be kept low so I probably won't promote anyone at the end of the season. I'm thinking of giving anyone that's appeared in at least four episodes their bridge certification, which will allow them to officially command a starship.

Reknown is also exploding a bit. Once again I'm giving way less reknown than what the rules say, but I can extrapolate and see that some characters will be more famous than Picard after the campaign ends. Not a good idea. So I've started to penalize and give out more bad reknown, to brake some characters. I'm shooting for about one reknown per episode appearance Not sure if I can do this without being too arbitrary.

Promotion depends partly on reknown. In the main rules, Starfleet likes its officers to have good Discipline, Openness, and Skill reknowns. I changed it a bit to suit my idea of Starfleet. In my universe Starfleet wants Initiative, Discipline and Openness. This promotes my beliefs that the characters should be independent, yet follow the rules and be friendly. Skill is rather less important in my campaigns. High Aggression can stifle your promotion chances, though high reknowns in the other areas will compensate.

I'm also changing the default skill use. Regular rules don't allow skill test attempts if you don't have star-marked skills. I want my characters to have some chance no matter how pathetic they are. So I'm going to change it to you can roll, but if the drama die is a one then it takes out the highest other die. You can still roll 12 with an unskilled roll, but it's more likely you'll roll less than 6. This may not be bad enough, but we'll see if it works.

In terms of the episodes themselves, I'm going more for trying to get them finished in one session rather than having them run for two sessions. Multi- part adventures worked in BattleTech because I had a few players that showed up every week. They don't work here because I have a lot of players, so each week there is a different group of people here. Makes it hard to continue an episode.