STF

Question for the candidates - Alt-RPG areas

Posted March 8, 2021, 8:21 p.m. by Vice Admiral Daniel Lerner (Presidential Candidate) (Daniel Lerner)

Posted by Sharon Miller in Question for the candidates - Alt-RPG areas
This is a question for all tickets,

I don’t think it’s a secret to any of you that I’m hugely passionate about alt-RPG areas here at STF and believe that they offer a lot of flavour to the fleets. I haven’t seen any of the tickets specifically mention anything around alt-RPG’s so far (although please feel free to point me in the right direction if I’ve missed something) so I wanted to ask the following:

  1. What is your opinion on alt-RPG’s and what, if anything, do you think they bring to the club?
  2. What, if any, plans do you have for alt-RPG’s if you are successful in becoming the next President/VP?

Thank you all in advance for your time. Depending on your responses, I may have follow-up questions.

  • Sharon

I hope it’s okay if I answer your two questions together, Sharon. Its easier for me to collect my thoughts on this topic (because I have a lot of thoughts on alt-RPGs).

I love the alt-RPGs we currently have. Although not all of them are my type of theme, I think they are great, and bring a lot to the club, and I’ve previously been a player on two of our current alt-RPGs which I enjoyed.

In terms of future alt-RPGs, we have to keep in mind the two issues that always need to be addressed: (1) what are our current resources and does this ship make sense given any resource issue (for example, if GMs are the resource issue, the ship may inspire more members to be GMs, or the ship is so important to the club for other reasons it’s worth adding more to our limited GM availability), (2) is the excitement of the idea sustainable?

On the first point, our current resource limitation is GMs, with our current active roster of GMs stretched to the limit. Nathan and I will be sharing one of our ideas this week that may help towards that, but we’re probably not going to solve our GM shortage in just one single term. Of our two most recent alt-RPGs, the Leviathan got around that because it is doing a self-sim environment - but you can’t do that for all future alt-RPGs. In fact, one of the things that has made STF attractive and a sustainable club for 30 years is our quality GM-ing, so we would want most future ships to be part of that’s what brings in our membership.

The other new ship, the Sentinel, was felt to be an important addition to STF’s roster of ships, as having a TOS-era ship just makes sense (and surprising we didn’t do that before). We had a GM lined up for the ship, and there was general consensus that stretching our resources made sense.

The other factor to consider is whether the excitement is sustainable. Let’s face it, our ship histories have a large number of alt-RPGs that just could make it in a year or so. Even some of our current ones needed to be suspended and disabled for a while while we went back to the drawing board. Please love new shiny things - the question is always will they stick with it after a while. The Leviathan had a proof-of-concept through the X-Fleet, and enough support in the membership that it made sense to try the Leviathan idea in the mainfleets. The Sentinel started without that initial test, and recently we needed to do more work on the ship to try to re-engage interest.

So I love our alt-RPGs. But I cannot promise what my position would be on a new alt-RPG ship without those issues being fully addressed on a ship-by-ship basis.

Thanks for the question, Sharon!

Nathan and Daniel: Two guys and a club.


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