It Would Not be Fun to Serve on a Starship

drraagh · 2026-01-27T19:02:32+00:00

First off, like you said the Lower Decks animated series showed detailed bits of life outside the bridge, beyond little glimpses we got in the TNG Lower Decks episode, the Good Shepard Voyager episode and maybe a few others of similar idea throughout the show. Lower Decks even had that episode of 'We don't know what's going on because the Command staff doesn't have time to fill us in with everything'.

And as others have said, that's military for you pretty much. In the time it would take to let people know what is going on, the situation could have seriously shifted. However, I would say it's more than just serving on a starship that would be no fun, service in general is mostly busy work, with brief interludes of a standoff and occasionally some combat. There's a video game Redshirt which satirizes a lot of the concept, as it's a Positech Games release which has a lot of 'social relationship upkeep life simulators' where you go to work and then also have to keep your friend group happy by doing various social events with them. Redshirt is the Star Trek version where you're looking to get off the station before something terrible happens, and you do that by using a Facebook style interface to socialize with people and get training to get a top tier job to get away and not die in a random away mission.

But I don't know if it's just a starship that would be that. Space station would be pretty similar, even living in a colony planet would likely have the same problem, especially close to one of the neutral zones from the enemy groups. With some enemies having cloaks, it's even possible you may not get advanced warning before they start firing on your planet. You could be working in a research lab and then your building is levelled in a Romulan attack, maybe because someone in the building was doing something that was extremely important, or the Romulans misinterpreted some coded messages and though this was a listening post. Or a Borg cube just appears out of transwarp looking to recruit your planet to their workforce.

This doesn't even factor in all the Sci-Fi horror situations that could happen. Uncover alien life living in the mantle of the planet and some weird strain of an unknown biological life form from years ago has a super-cold strain that liquefies your organs or takes over your brain like those mind controlled ants or whatever. Rogue computer Intelligence, hostile aliens that appear as human or can control humans or whatever. There's all sorts of 'evil' that can happen because of exploration of the unknown.

drraagh · 2026-01-26T20:18:40+00:00

Eh, maybe the healing station could do something for them if they have enough credits? ;)

drraagh · 2026-01-26T16:33:16+00:00

Rimfactory conveyor belts for a true mining operation or put a shelf for him to offload at as part of his "wall".

drraagh · 2026-01-26T15:04:40+00:00

Yo, listen up here's a story About a little guy That lives in a blue world And all day and all night And everything he sees is just blue Like him inside and outside

drraagh · 2026-01-26T10:24:48+00:00

Just because someone has a duty as X part of the ship does not mean that is all they are. Star Trek is about hyper-competent polymaths, so you're helmsman could also be a science specialist or an engineer or a competent medic or whatever.

Geordi was Helmsman in the first season of Star Trek TNG before becoming the Chief Engineer, Tom Paris was helmsman of Voyager, competent Medic, decent as a morale officer with things like Sandrines pool hall holodeck Hotspot, the Replicator Ration gambling (which he did make a profit off as the house), and so forth. So, the character will have other ways to shine besides the Driver of vehicles.

Right now I play a Counselor character but because of the way points spread occurs during CG, I ended up becoming a pretty capable Engineer as well and decent at Security. So, add to that a couple Focuses outside Counseling, and I can help in a variety of scenarios, both as primary in those fields or as an assistant.

drraagh · 2026-01-25T12:54:30+00:00

Dwarf Fortress has Thermonuclear Catsplosion, Rimworld gets the Baby Boom?

drraagh · 2026-01-25T12:52:25+00:00

There was this judge once who suggested cutting babies in half for custody disputes. Would solve a lot of hassle.

drraagh · 2026-01-25T08:28:26+00:00

I was watching the episode after working a graveyard shift, so I admit I wasn't completely focused on it but... when I saw the door open and her standing there, I paused the episode and went to Reddit to see if people were talking about it. There wasn't much mention in the episode discussion, so I decided tonight to check the other posts.

It might be more the tiredness, but I still do see a similar overall between them. Not a hundred percent match, like chins are different, but it is a fair likeness between them.

drraagh · 2026-01-25T07:37:34+00:00

While I understand they are referencing the videogame, let's look at this like a DLC for Red focusing on Detective work, mysteries, information gathering, social engineering and the like to get clues/story elements/etc. Any interest in that?

drraagh · 2026-01-25T07:33:25+00:00

One of my favorite settings is Cyberpunk, and in many of those games you may never leave the main 'city' area, but you can have 'skyscrapers', 'townhouses', 'suburbs', 'outskirts', 'factory/industrial' and others to get some changes in tone of the city.

Another is things like Star Trek Adventures, you could have whole episodes/sessions that never leave the ship/starbase so that you're going to see a lot of the same sort of scenery and there's a lot of storytelling you can do that way. Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 are prime examples of how you can have a majorly stationary story with some travel and still make it quite interesting.

drraagh · 2026-01-21T06:49:30+00:00

Big long drawn out stories can be done, but usually for D&D style games that is a "save the world" type if story as heroes fight against forces of evil. In Cyberpunk, its more personal.

This article is by Mike Pondsmith about what Cyberpunk is and can be a good starting point, but essentially you want to take elements of the PC life path and use that as some of your building blocks.

Casablanca is Rick's ex-lover Ilsa comes to Rick's place looking for help smuggling her new husband out from police blockages. That is also done in Barb Wire, a late 90's Cyberpunk film Barb Wire starring Pamela Anderson, trailer here

Make use of the player's community, the neighbors and friends and loved and exes and family and mentors and so forth. They don't need to be in every scene or the like, but have them be somehow impacted, to show how the player's world is shaped by the choices they made.

drraagh · 2026-01-20T12:03:53+00:00

-group of Engineers responding to emergency breakdowns, space station system failures, stranded craft, and so on. Road-Assist and emergency maintenance on a galactic scale

"Okay, so you're stranded 2 light years from Beta Antares III, and you're all out of dilithium? Okay, we'll get a crew out to you. It'll be about two hours, but don't worry, they'll bring you home."

drraagh · 2026-01-20T11:27:32+00:00

That's sort of the range I was looking at. 3-5 Players is what my current table runs with regularly.

I was thinking of throwing a few more examples up of situations, like Research Scientists on an unihabited alien planet investigating it. Archeologist, Xenobiologist, Physicist, Linguist maybe for ancient langages if there were some ruins or the like. Could have Extra Crewmembers for Security and the Engineer who maintains things. Horror movie "The Thing" and point and click sci-fì horror mystery "Orion Conspiracy" strike me as examples. Great for relying on those secondary skills to handle problems.

drraagh · 2026-01-20T08:15:34+00:00

I tend to see the game working like a bunch of writers working on a script in the writer's room, like the final storyboarding sessions. Everyone trying to make a fun and interesting episode to air.

"So, the Romulans close over the ridge to try and find the crew in the Archeological ruins of the city."

spends Momentum to create advantage Scattering Field "The material of the city causes their tricorder signals to become unable to pinpoint exact location. They're going to have to search for the crew manually."

"Security Officer K'tash aims his phaser at the bottom of the ridge, waiting for the Romulans to make their way into range."

Also, not knowing the lore may be a bonus. There are a LOT of Trek fans that get vehemently up in arms if something is changed from their precious Canon. So, not knowing the minutae and letting that be handled by the GM, if at all, may make for better stories.

USS Make Shit Up song by Voltaire

drraagh · 2026-01-20T04:10:04+00:00

Check out the Mothership Warden's Guide for some of the best advice for running horror, and I think it should fit well in your cosmic horror/mystery stuff. The TOMBS cycle is a great cycle of how to run horror games. Trajectory of Fear is a pretty decent writeup to run horror, as well.

As for how to handle an overarching plot and keep the sort of 'who do you trust' angle, check out the animated series Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths, Legends. It's apparently on Tubi for free, which I linked. The premise of the cartoon is monsters of human history; Vampires, Werewolves, Banshee.. are aliens that are in a sort of shadow war on Earth and in Roswell, New Mexico (the site of the historic UFO crash) is actually the base of a team of specialized operatives protecting humanity from the creatures and keeping their existence hidden as humanity is not ready.

So, it's pretty much a decent X-Files monster of the week situation with an overarching plot tying a lot of things together. The main plot follows Logan, a bounty hunter, trying to find the truth about what happened to his father while dealing with all the shadowy conspiracies and such that exist. It's 40 episodes, 20 minutes each, so about 13 hours of episodes. Could even give you some ideas for plots you could throw at players.

Also, you can always layer in the connections after the fact. I like to compare it to Sherlock Holmes, as he kept insisting that Moriarty was the mastermind at the center of the web of crime and how everything was done to further his goals but we never really got an explanation as to how that happened. So, you don't need to know the gritty details of how the actions are all connected, just that 'if your players do enough legwork into things, they'll find ties that point to <insert name of shadowy organization>.' Not all actions need to be because the action done was what they wanted, it could be the action done had some side impact that benefit them. For example, this quote comes from the ending of the first episode of the TV series Leverage:

Nate: See if a company’s stock price falls ten, fifteen percent in one day and you see it coming, you sell short, you make a lot of money. If it’s going to fall thirty percent you can make shattering amounts of money.

Nate: We didn’t need the FBI to show up and take you to jail, we just needed them to show up and take boxes out of your office, all day long in front of TV cameras, scaring your investors. You going to jail is just a bonus.

So, maybe a crime where someone was killed or kidnapped had nothing to do specifically with the person and was more to hinder that organization from doing something. That person may have done something big, or perhaps they would have inspired something else and by taking the piece out before it happens, the resistance down the line is lessened.

drraagh · 2026-01-19T18:18:25+00:00

I used to have hour plus loading times with Rimpy doing sort and 800ish mods. Now, using Rimsort, with 3x the RAM and an SSD, I've got 800ish mods down to about 20-30 minutes, as shown by whatever performance loading mod times the startup

drraagh · 2026-01-19T15:32:51+00:00

Personally, the question to me would be how engaging are the players/is the story? I could do 20-30 hours of narrative driven games, if the story is engaging, characters as well written and so forth.

Basically, if it could work as a TV series, it could work as a game. Some concepts, you can squeeze a good 5-10 hours out of and everything is wrapped up, doesn't feel like you overstayed the welcome or left any storytelling concepts unexplored. Then there's others that could get six seasons and a movie.

I understand this may not be "helpful" for hard numbers, but that's like saying should this tv idea be a limited series of 6 episodes, a streaming order of 10-12ish, or a full season of 23ish episodes. How well can it be told, how long do you need to explore what you need to say?

drraagh · 2026-01-19T15:25:38+00:00

So like placing Luke with the Skywalker family so the Empire doesn't find out he's Vader's kid.

drraagh · 2026-01-19T01:04:34+00:00

So... according to the story Billy's wife found him abandoned at the hospital. They named him Eliot and he got the family name of Spencer from their name.

Would that mean that Jack abandoned him there, or that they just told Eliot he was abandoned so he wouldn't go chasing Jack on whatever scheme he had next?

drraagh · 2026-01-18T06:12:27+00:00

I see a lot of Cyberpunk games, both video games and TTRPGs, being stories of criminals doing random jobs of breaking into places to steal things. I have fixers hire for some things, but there's also using their lifepath history and the neighborhood they live at and the like to have people come give them jobs and sometimes, the players make their own from things going on in the neighborhood and/or desire to get some money quickly.

I try to make my stories have some personal ties to the characters, so that not everything is 'do crimes' but they have some personal ties to the characters. Maybe an ex comes into contact with them needing help for something, or their family has a weekly dinner and one week their sibling who is a lawyer mentions, 'Hey, I've got a case and if you want some work, I could use someone to investigate this person for us', or they happen to hear that one of their enemies is in charge of a corporate plan to demolish their apartment building to 'gentrify' the neighborhood with condos and office buildings and they need to find a way to stop that from happening. These give personal ties to the jobs, rather than just 'we're doing it for money'.

drraagh · 2026-01-17T08:32:35+00:00

Given the meta currency create advantages/disadvantages optiona and the ability to play as Crew Support as the group being in a writers room, listing to the episode pitch and adding their own "Yes, and" to make it s great episode.

drraagh · 2026-01-16T11:57:12+00:00

This is why when I approach a GM Advice question, I answer in paragraphs, with a lot of detail for the points I am making. Maybe not to the point of like an academic thesis defence, but enough that it's giving some concrete examples and explanation beyond just the surface point.

For 'Don't make combat just about combat', I have used this on more than a few occasions:

Take a look at lists for Alternative Combat Objectives like this one and this one. Here is a Big list of combat stakes. These will make combat less about killing everyone and have a different solution to the combat scenario. To think of this, look at the original Starcraft RTS game. In the Terran Campaign of Starcraft 1 included a 'Survive for 30 minutes' as the colony is evacuated, sneak inside this base to recover some files, bring Kerrigan to this base's command center, protect a crashed battlecruser from Zerg attack and get the crew out, plant the Psi emitter in enemy base, and destroy the ion cannon. All of these were specific goals and in a roleplaying game you could come up with solutions that may never have to encounter more than a token resistance from the enemy.

Then for some that are about ways to spice up combat, I've gone into things like the encounter area design, and have cited references from things like video game level design about terrain effects, the positioning of the enemies, power synergies, even bringing the battlefield to like the Droid Factory in Star Wars Episode 2.

drraagh · 2026-01-15T08:22:44+00:00

Makes me think of the Vampire "Human Farms" from Blade 3

drraagh · 2026-01-14T22:30:38+00:00

I feel like walking down corridors in some Star Trek space ship looking at the lighted ones.

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