Posted by Rear Admiral Lindsay Bayes (Gamemaster Director/Senior Gamemaster) in GM Course- Part 3
[continued from Part 2: https://www.star-fleet.com/core/command/gmd/notes/12205/]

Mission Types

Another way GMs can change the way they present a story is through the use of different mission types. Until you have reached Full Gamemaster status in STF the only mission type you are allowed to use is the normal mission. But there is no reason you shouldn’t be aware of possibilities in the future, when you do decide to move onto something different. Be sure to check with the GMD first about rules and such.

Finding Your Idea - The Story

When you’re a GM the first thing you need is a story, it’s hard to run a sim if you have no plot. There is no hard, fast rule on where to get story ideas, inspiration is as unique as each GM, and can be found everywhere. Television, books, movies, magazines, even the news can provide story ideas, look around, your next story could be hidden anywhere.

In Science Fiction as in any genre the best of stories revolve around the characters themselves. It’s all too easy to have the plot driven by the technology and Trek has its unfortunate fill of those types of stories. But if you look at some of the best Star Trek episodes, you’ll find that the technology frames the problem rather than being it.

The plot is only limited by your imagination. However, there are a few guidelines to follow to make sure the crew loves the story as much as you do:

1.Make sure the plot is big enough to keep everyone busy. If it’s not, you may have to add a secondary storyline to involve those left out.

2.Avoid scenarios used to death in STF, as well as plots your ship has seen before. Check with the CO of the ship to which you’re assigned, ask him if he has preferences, make sure that the battle sim you have planned isn’t going to be the third one in a row the ship’s been dealt.

3.Familiarize yourself with your ship’s class. A wonderful sim exploring the exobiology of a newly-discovered planet won’t work well on a Combat Orientated ship. Just as sending a McCoy-Class Medical ship into battle is suicide. Determine a ship’s capabilities ahead of time, too, so you don’t have a ship doing a saucer separation that would normally only be possible if it were blown in two.

4.Make sure your plot is plausible. Sure, it’d be really cool if the ship crash-landed, but unless the ship is capable of suborbital flight, don’t expect it to fly again. Likewise you can’t do anything that contradicts canon.

5.Finally, avoid rehashing Trek episodes and overusing Trek characters and ships. STF has its own ships. Rely on them. Keep appearances by Trek characters to cameos.

Now, here are a couple of questions to keep in mind. They should give you a springboard for developing your concept a bit more. What’s the style/tone of the story you’re trying to establish? What’s the central conflict?

That’s really the crux of the whole thing. What you have to do to have a successful mission is:

1.Set up a problem for the crew to overcome. Maybe they have to solve a mystery. Maybe they have to blow things up. Maybe they have to rescue someone. The point is, drama occurs only when there’s a problem to overcome.

2.The crew has to be invested in solving it. You can’t just put a Rubik’s Cube into space and expect the crew to solve it. Something important has to be at stake, something that the characters on the ship will care about and something the PLAYERS will care about.

3.There has to be some sort of “reward” or pay off for when the players finish the sim. I don’t mean you should pass out candy at the end of the sim; though sometimes the goal is in and of itself the reward. Rewards can be story or character based, google ‘journey of the hero’ which is a literary device used to detail how heroic characters grow and evolve over a story.

Planning A Sim

So you have a story idea, a mission, a problem for the crew to overcome. Now what do you do?

You sit down and plan it out. Whether it’s a point by point outline or something more involved. It is important you do it.

So why plan? Role-playing is a collaborative effort, and the crew is going to have a lot of ideas that surprise you, which is going to pull the sim in directions you not only didn’t intend, but couldn’t even foresee. Think of your plan as an itinerary or a road map for a road trip. A guide to get from beginning to end.

Now, once you’ve started on the road trip, you can – and should – be ready to take road detours; to stop at places you didn’t know about but can see from the highway, like, say, a roadside diner. This is the crew taking your sim in different direction but you are still heading to wherever it is your going.

The second reason for an outline is that it helps you evaluate where you are. This way, you can track your progress, and see what parts of the crew need more attention than others – or perhaps some nudging to keep them from holding back the rest of the crew.

It lets you identify weak spots before you start. If you map out a rough outline in advance, you can see things like – oh, the science department has nothing to do the entire mission and you can come up with something.

It tides you over while you’re at a loss for ideas. I quite often get stuck and wonder, oh where was I going with this? I can then go back and read my outline and find where I am or get inspiration.

You might try to divide things up into acts, sometimes three, sometimes four, or more. What this does is it gives you a few milestones along the way. That way, you can reassess where you and the crew are at each act break.

Remember, there’s anywhere from 12-20 crew members on the ship; there’s only one of you. The only tool in your box you have to deal with that – other than brute force – is the ability to plan ahead. (Crews do NOT enjoy the brute force approach.) You want to be at least two steps ahead of the crew.

And most importantly, it gives you a sense of accomplishment as you move through each act.

Often when writing, an author will use what they call a ‘throughline’. That is a single sentence put as a question and applied to the book and/or each chapter they are writing. The question asks what needs to be done and aids the author in the construction of his writing. You can apply this to a sim or even down to the individual acts in the sim and it can tell you as you move through through the sim when that act, or sim, is completed. In short, it defines the objective. For instance:
-Can the crew stop the self destruct that the malfunctioning computer initiated?
-Can the crew find the cure to the plague sweeping the colony on Draxis IV?

In the Academy sims tend to last about three months, on regular ships most average six to nine months. That doesn’t mean you should let your sim meander along for years. Presenting a journey too long and arduous can make the players bored and/or frustrated long before they reach the end. Those obstacles mentioned earlier, the ones you throw in the path of your crew to keep things interesting: make sure they’re surmountable. Learn from experienced GMs:

“Never try to outline every movement that will take place within a sim. It is extremely important to allow the players to have some flexibility within the sim; people will undoubtedly come up with ideas that the GM would never think of, and it’s important to keep that in mind as much as possible. By the same token, though, it’s equally important to not let the players run away with the sim by grandstanding, et al. If one person tries to run away with the sim on his own by doing something that’s next to impossible, then the GM needs to put the skids to that so that solving a sim can be a team effort.”

“It was my first official sim. I planned the whole thing out, from beginning to end. I had every event worked out. I was very inflexible as the sim progressed, not having experience with running a sim. The result: The crew lost interest, and I had to narrate the end just to get the darn thing over with! That was my bad GM experience.”

“Keep notes. My goodness, keep notes. Yes, the sim can be of any amount of detail but as you progress through it you may introduce NE’s and describe them in a post. Write them down so next time you will remember that NL Mueller has a monocle and is bald and has a German accent, is portly and precise. I can guarantee you that a month down the line when you come back to needing him you will be thankful for that note. Do that with NE’s and with small notations that you insert in your plot that are important and will play on later. Memory is great. IF you write it down.”

“Keep the individual characters on your ship in mind as you go along. Become a collaborator! When the crew feels like you’re interested in their characters, all sorts of interesting possibilities for character and sim development can emerge.”

World Building: The Depths of Imagination

STF operates within a set Universe that we know a fair bit about but that doesn’t mean you’re limited within it. You have the opportunity to create a vast number of elements that are uniquely yours and can not only set your sim apart, but add a richness that will help your crew immerse themselves better in your story.
But before you go creating all these fantastic pieces, it is wise to double-check that there isn’t something already done in canon. That’s where you check our club resources and places like Memory Alpha. The more you’re familiar with these sites the more you’ll know what you may or may not need to create.

Characters
Not every sim will require fleshed out characters, but even having a few details about what few characters you do use will help enrichen your sim environment. It can be simply a name, species and appearance, or you can go ahead and write a quick bio for them. A quick rule of thumb would be that the more interaction this character will have with the crew, the more details about them you should prepare in advance. Having a solid backstory for a character for whom the sim revolves around will keep you organized and stop you contradicting yourself as you go along.

Worlds
There are lots of reasons you may need to create a world. Perhaps that is where your crew is headed and where the sim will take place, or maybe this is the place where a central sim character hails from. Especially if it is a place that is unusual or unknown in some way, planning out the details in advance will save you a lot of grief and scrambling.

Some things you could consider:
-Size and class of planet, and location in solar system as well as within its home galaxy

-If in the Alpha or Beta Quadrant of our galaxy (the Milky Way Galaxy), refer to the GMD Star Chart and decide what makes sense for the fleet your ship/RP area is located within. Keep distances/travel reasonable!
-Solar system details, including the star(s)/star remnants found there. Are there special characteristics that shape this world or that the crew may need to know about for the sim?
-Orbital period (year) and rotation (day). How long are these? Are there any quirks that might need to be explained?
-Population size, if it’s inhabited. This should match the size of the planet and level of civilization found there. (Refer to Species section below)
-Climactic zones, geography, atmosphere composition.
-Presence of moons or other orbital bodies. Remember that moons (and stars) are important elements for tides.
-If it’s habitable, any non-sentient life that people might encounter (good to know if your crew is going to be present outdoors at all.

It’s important to remember that you may not know a lot about some or any of these topics. Don’t be afraid to do research to learn more and create a place that perhaps, despite some uniquely sci-fi details, still makes some sort of sense scientifically. Ground your sim in some realism!

Species

Creating a custom species can be an extremely rewarding process. You get to decide everything that makes this group of beings unique and compelling enough to have a place in your story.

Like any character you roleplay, what you choose to hold back about them in interactions with others is as important as what you reveal. But it’s important to have your species well fleshed out so that you aren’t creating questions you can’t answer and issues you can’t solve.

There are many details to consider and it can be overwhelming to know where to start. Some people have a particular crux in their sim they need this species to fulfill. For example, maybe you need them to be non-corporeal because of how you want the crew to first encounter them. Or maybe they are very religious and their encounter with the crew presents a problem that has to be solved. Whatever the details are, make sure they make sense when all put together.

Finding Inspiration

How do you go about even starting? It depends on your creative process. Some start with an image in mind of what their species looks like. Star Trek’s makeup designer extraordinaire, Michael Westmore, famously used images of dinosaurs, reptiles, fish and other creatures as a basis for the appearance of many of Star Trek’s alien species. Whether you use something existing as inspiration or draw out something entirely new yourself, imagery can be a powerful place to begin.

Some key things to decide about your species:

-Appearance and Physiology. Perhaps they not only look different than Humans but their physiology has many unique components. You can decide not only how long they live, but whether they are psi-positive (empathic/telepathic), corporeal or not, prone to certain diseases etc. The possible combinations are endless!
-Places they live and/or can be found. Do they live on one planet? Have many colonies? An unknown Empire? Are they Nomadic? This important decision can branch off and determine other areas, so decide this first. And if they live on a planet, see the previous section on Worlds.
-Level of civilization. Are they pre-industrial, warp capable, highly advanced? Often this is determined by your sim, but maybe not. Perhaps this detail will inspire possible events for your sim.
-Technology. Related to level of civilization, it’s important to nail down what they do and don’t have and whether this will pose any issues in their interaction with your crew? Keep in mind the Prime Directive!
-This is also your chance to think up new or modified technology that they might have, especially if your sim revolves around it in some way. Do your research, ask questions and try to imagine how things in the Star Trek Universe might function differently in a way that can be exciting for your crew, but also reasonable. Remember, you have to explain it and have it make sense!
-Culture. How do they entertain themselves? Do they have religious or spiritual beliefs? Do they value science? What values and social behaviours are important or even repulsive? How do they educate themselves?
-Societal structure. How do people organize themselves in groups? Do they at all? (ie. They could prefer isolation for periods of time) Do they have a form of government? Are there family groups?

No matter what you decide your species looks like or how they act, make sure you do your research where necessary and your details make sense. You want your crew to believe that this species could actually exist in our made-up Universe. The more compelling you make those details, the more interesting this species will be within your sim.

[continued in Part 4]

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Bumping for a final chance for feedback.
~Linds