How many Advancements would you give

First things first: It's good to be back home. It's my first posting on the resurrected trek-rpg.net

And now to something completley different...

While sitting on the hills watching the beauty of the Lake of Garda I was setting up my new capaign.

I started with building the ship's command (NPC) crew. I was buidling a character for every position, because I'm not knowing for sure what positions my players want to fill. But I don't want them to become XO or CO. Now my question: While building the XO, Daniel Kea, a Trill, I was wondering how many advancements you would feel the need to give a commanding officer. I just had the PG with my, so I could't take a look at the stats given in NG.

As a rule of thumb, how many advancements would you deem appropriate AND necessary to build a Lt. com.?

My campaign won't start of before november, but then I'll post more about it...

My players (junior officers) are on board Intrepid-class ship. I have created NPC-crew quite loosely, I have given most officers a name, rank, gender, country of origin and age. This includes command crew. I did not give them advancements, instead I created even a bit of history to most important NPCs.
When a situation comes in I decide what is the skill total for necessary skills for other crew. I tend to keep them quite low for NCOs, except for experts in their primary area and for senior officers I just give them a skill total between 10-15 when situation is at hand - depending on the situation. ;)
I stick to that choice for that scene but if I 'forgot' to write the skill total up then..

I have not filled the whole complement of officers with named officers due to possible changes characters make. There is now a option for me to bring up a new NPC or player on board from the ranks on board the ship or make a crew member a loose cannon.. ;)

But as for the command crew.. I like flexibility and storywise choose of their abilities. The player's don't have to know the exact numbers - or even the number of courage points for NPCs.

Vesku

Yeah, you're probably right about that.

I wanted to get used to character creation and so started making up the command staff and setting up their background stories. Everyone that will be replaced by a PC can come in handy at some point of time further down the (campiagn)road.

I think that most of my players will be department heads. One player always has to be a doctor, so she'll most likely be CMO or chief assistant to the CMO. One shys away from to much responsibility and yet asked to portrait a junior command character. We'll see what comes up. I intend to start my series shortly after the beginning of DS9 first or second season and assign them to an older Niagara-class Starship (not the one you find on the net, more like the ICON one found in The Price of Freedom Sourcebook). BTW must make stats for her ;-)

It will center around diplomatic stuff and a little exploration until the players feel at home in the setting. Than I have some interesting (at least I hope that they are...) ideas to throw at them.

Until now I usualy made up the NPCs but this was more a general question, about how many advancements one would need to achive a perticular level.

The numbers you have given, are definatley below those skill levels I assigned them during character creation. Perhaps I shall take another look at them...

I just base the advancements on age using the previous experiance rules suggested in the book with slight modifications.
1 advancement per 2 years of civilian life.
1 advancement per 1 year of military life.
2 advancements per year of wartime life.
3 advancements per year of high intensity wrtime life (such as the Dominion War).

I cobbled together a conversion of FASA's "lifepath" style of advancement. Gotta finish typing it in, though.