Episode 103 of my Star Trek campaign has come and gone. This was a holodeck adventure since I only expected two characters to play, although eventually three people showed up. A very linear adventure, with only a couple of small fights. Supposed to be more of a horror adventure.

With three people, there was an extra sidekick to help the main hero. Both sidekicks had relatively less of a role to play in the story, so it was hard to keep them involved. The main hero reacted in a few unexpected ways, and I was hard-pressed to let him escape with his soul, since right at the start he had some people executed (one of the losing conditions was taking an innocent life).

Another problem, is that since this was a holodeck adventure, another character kept pausing the program and had a hard time getting into the concept. This became distractive at a couple of points. Eventually I decided to only award minimum experience for a successful adventure, no extra xp for upholding the main Star Trek genre.

The game did take longer than I had anticipated, and in the end I had to rush through the last couple of scenes as people had to leave. What happened is that the characters got caught up in some red herrings and tried to complicate things too much. The adventure itself has no subplots and is rather straight- forward, but players have a knack for seeing things where there is nothing.

One of the characteristics of this and the last episode and ST:TNG in general is the lack of combat. At best you could say there were two "fights" in episode 102, and there were three four possible sword fights in this episode, although only one was played out fully. Most of the adventures rely on players thinking and talking and figuring their way through instead of fighting. And I'm trying to promote that in my campaign since we do enough fighting in the AD&D game to satisfy the players.

Next up is to get the characters to their senior year, then The Kobayashi Maru scenario, which I'll have to write up. There is an writeup on www.trekrpg.net but it's all starship combat pretty much and it also involves a lot of rolls to test systems and such, much like the introductory scenario in the main rulebook, which I'm planning to use as the first adventure in the cadet cruise.

I'm thinking more of The Kobayashi Maru Star Trek novel, wherein Kirk, Scotty, Sulu and Checkov relate their experiences with the test. It's not the same exact scenario year after year; it does change to keep cadets on their toes. Sometimes it's easy to rescue the freighter but then something happens on the way home. Still, I want to keep it on the individual character level rather than the starship level. I'll think about it some more.

I've also decided to reward players as a group instead of individually. So if one player is really bad, they'll bring down the xp awards for everyone. This is supposed to encourage the players to police themselves and to think more like a group instead of just themselves. It's much like the way we usually do experience so I don't really expect any changes, other than not completing an adventure correctly gives very few xps, so that may influence their playing. Not like I'm going to tell them.