At the moment, I am looking at gaining a full understanding of the TSN and how it operates. We have between 15 and 25 interested parties during a given shift, three commanders a number of competent and willing Game Masters. The TSN is a success in its own right and I don’t want to detract from that in the slightest. If I do make a suggestion I want it to be right for the TSN and preferably not a half thought through. I want to avoid re-suggesting things as well.
With that said plenty of good and well reasoned suggestions have been put forwards by competent and proven individuals. So I’d like to refer to my earlier post and ask whether any of these suggestions have been taken forward and if so what kind of progress has been made?
So some of the things that were raised in those topics were (and I summarize, paraphrase for what I hope is clarity):
1. Reducing game manipulation: Would a Kralien realllly run headlong into a mine? Reward in game communication and co-operation between ships in character. *
2. Utilize the Sandbox instead of Solo Mode (done I think).
3. IC Discord/Teamspeak Bar (we don’t have an IC Teamspeak bar imo).
4. Increase opportunities for non-combat footing interactions between ship and crew.
5. Context is for Kings ~ More frequent ONI reports (After Action Reviews), pre-briefing briefing notes and encourage ‘free-form’. **
6. Rewards and Consequences – Role-playing should be rewarding for different actions, provide choices.
7. Get GMs to provide specific ship ‘events’ or problems to solve. So some ships may have different activities at any given time.
8. A possible separate chain of command from TSN role to ‘In Character Rank’ to allow characters to be different, while allowing the players to contribute to the TSN. (I don’t think this necessarily needs to be out of character but Nhaima make a valid point I think).
9. Allow for different levels of role-play within the TSN.
10. Encourage literate role-play around the Mission arcs (though I can’t do this without the ONI brief as I’m notoriously bad at listening…).
11. Encouraging players to come up with their own stories – (May need to take a more direct approach and teach them how they can do this).
12. Background RP stuff to promote ship chatter
13. Prepare a brief for Commanders to give to their ships.
14. Either have a per ship GM or make the Captain of a ship a ship GM giving them responsibility for making the ship more interesting without burdening the global GMs
15. Activities for crews outside of standard Duty Shift.
16. In Char: Discussion of events (possibly move to the Ship’s briefing room to get a status update or thoughts?)***
Notes
* We don’t seem to have a standard hailing and hailing response procedure and this seems to often fall into OOC sharply. I hardly hear a yes sir to the Flagship for example.
** It may be nice to focus the ‘Briefs’, so a pre Duty Shift OOC brief (i.e. from here on you’re role-playing you can be as creative or not as you wish), an IC ‘Orders’, IC ‘De-brief/After Action Review’ and then an OOC Debrief (How did the role-play go this time, any thoughts?). It may make it useful to take those responses it and use it revise the development process.
*** Normally these things would not be discussed on the bridge, except in a pressing circumstance where time was of the essence but at that point the CO likely already knows what they want to do.
I tried to gather as many of the suggestions I could and yes, I’ve added my notes. A good many of the suggestions off the top of my head have already been covered (and I have found myself recommending them once or twice) but as yet I don’t know what direction the TSN is moving in, it may be a decision has been made to go a different path.
Thanks again for your responses much appreciated.