I just read through the Star Trek surveys. Only Donald is left, and if he doesn't do something dramatic it's going to be a rather inconclusive survey. What makes me say that? Well, let's go back a bit. Why did I write this survey? Ostensibly, it was a bit of fun for the players and a way for me to see how I should focus the campaign. But what did I really intend? What did I really want?

The first two questions are meant to determine how much focus I should give characters in relation to each other. If everybody answers that they want to be Kirk, well I can't do that. Likewise if everybody just wants to eat and sleep. The hope was that there would be a spectrum, with one or two people wanting more. Those two people's characters I would focus on.

Instead, only one person wanted to be something other than middle of the road. And apparently everyone wants a subplot every couple of adventures. This really distressed me, because I'm having a hard time doing the minimal amount of prep that I'm getting done now. Chances are I'll have to ignore everyone and only concentrate on the A-list characters. It'll be up to the rest to instigate things, and really that's what I want. I can't initiate all subplots, that's why I always ask "what is yout character you doing?" before the adventure and during shift breaks and other down times.

Question 3, where I ask how many promotions your character should get, is not really there for me. Note that the top choice is unrealistically high, and most of the others except for two are no gain or demotions. The intention of this question is to subtly say that you're only going to be promoted once, maybe twice during the course of the campaign.

Question 4 is another important question. Actually only questions 1, 2, and 4 are important, the rest I'm unlikely to use and were there for fun. So Q4 is how much action should there be in an episode. I was actually expecting people to say that they wanted to fight all the time, or at least in every episode. Unfortunately, quite a few of the Star Trek adventures are easily solvable by shooting your way through them. Too many are involve puzzles/mysteries or extensive conversations with NPCs. To my great relief, the results seem evenly split between one fight per episode and we can be challenged in other ways.

Question 5 was one of those possibly important questions. I really want to know if people are bothered by some of the things I do, and yes I do all four things occassionally. But I know that people are hesitant to criticize, more so to criticize the game master, so I had a fallback option which just about everyone took.

Let me say now that I think I have a good capacity for laughing at myself. And yet it does hurt to be criticized. I don't blame people who've hurt me, well not usually. I'm glad I'm not picked on as much as most of the others in the group, I don't think I could take it as well.

The last five questions were totally what does your character think? As usual, I'm only looking for the people who mark either one of the top two or one of the bottom two. Really, most questions I'm only looking at three regions: top two, middle two, bottom two. The exact choice doesn't matter, I want to know if they marked higher or lower than what I consider average.

Again, everybody tended to be middle of the road with the answers. There were a couple of exceptions, which I may use as a future subplot. So now, after writing about the survey, I guess I don't have too many problems with the results. Mostly that everyone seems to want more attention, which I really can't do. I wonder how long I'll be able to keep up the illusion before people start wandering away becuase they don't get enough screen time?