My thoughts on last Saturday's Star Trek game. Since this was the only game I made I felt free to stretch it out. It was also going to be a longer episode already what with all the talking and the Captain's party. So it did run about five hours. Unfortunately that's still too long for me and once again I sort of faded. Once people got stuck with the mystery I left them there longer than I should have. One of the principles of running a Star Trek episode is that if a scene is bogging down, move on to the next scene.

One of the problems with running a mystery is that you have a group of people who will listen to all your conversations (I rarely resort to notes or going outside the room to talk to one player privately). So there is a sort of group mind effect where people kibitz based on information they don't have. Now, you can assume that characters talk to each other, but we as a group take that a bit too far sometimes, assuming that the trivialest of details are conveyed correctly between characters. Ever describe a conversation to someone who wasn't there? You never convey everything correctly -- details are missing or wrong or added.

So when running you can partially solve this by making the mystery harder. You can include some red herrings, though I find that the players make up their own red herrings quite nicely, thank you very much. The other thing to do is to advantage of the players. If they start interacting amongst themselves, that's the time to single one of them out to provide them with a vital clue. At least that way the player will have to explain what happened to everyone else instead of them getting it from the GM.

With only one episode left in the season, it's time to figure out how I'm going to do promotions. After some thought, I decided to make the roll more like a standard skill test rather than the flat 2d6 I used last season. With some players picking up a lot of skill check points (at the beginning of an episode I make the players roll 6 skill checks, simulating their on-the-job performance outside the episode; depending how well they do they get some points which accumulate until the end of the season), I decided to deemphasize them somewhat.

At the end I have a formula where the skill check points determine how many dice to roll (one of which is wild) and renown gives you a bonus to the result. The targets are 10 for Lieutenant JG and 13 for Lieutenant. So anybody with at least two dice (which comes out to anybody who showed up to at least two episodes) has a chance at making Lt JG. The bonuses range from -3 to +4, +4 being a breakpoint since at that point you don't need a six on your wild die to be promoted. In general it comes out that most of the players have at least a chance if they get a six on the drama die and another high roll. The only regular who loses out is Dave Sweet, who has the -3 modifier and since he's shooting for full Lt he has a target of 13 which is impossible to get to.