Effective Trek campaigns with few players?

Thought I'd throw this out there for general discussion.

Long story short, my good friend/co-GM and I are thinking of getting back to Trek and co-running a campaign. We've had great luck with this in the past and know we'll do well again. However.

The trick this time is that at the moment, we have just three players interested in playing the campaign full-time, including ourselves. We have two other players who don't want to commit to a long-term Trek game and will likely only be at occasional sessions, sort of as guest star characters or recurring role characters or the like.

So, with the possibility of only expecting three PCs at any given session (two of which are part-time GM characters), we're not sure our traditional and preferred campaign style based on a large Starfleet ship will quite work for such a small crew of players at the table.

I'm thinking we could do a smaller vessel with a smaller crew, or a larger ship with a whole bunch of NPC department heads and other officers, or something else. We're not sure yet, just tossing ideas around. We do know we prefer ship-based campaigns that allow the ship to have the potential for interaction with the majority of the major Alpha and Beta Quadrant species, and we prefer the TNG/DS9/VOY eras as setting.

What sorts of campaigns have you run where you only had a couple of reliable players at any given session? Did you do a starship campaign, a station-based game, something else? What other sorts of campaign ideas would work in Trek?

My first Trek group started, and ran for over a year, with only two players. It worked great role-playing wise, as both players didn't have to wait for spotlight time. Mechanics-wise, I would say it depends on what set of rules you're running with. I use the Coda system; I would guess from my limited experience that ICON should as well. I think with FASA you'd need a larger group and I just don't know enough about Prime Directive.

A cast of NPCs worked fine. My advice would be to let the player characters be in authority for the crucial parts of the game. The players were the center of their social circle during the Academy mini-campaign. While they were junior officers, I had them lead landing parties (away teams, you accursed 24th century :D) and during ship combat I turned over the captain's role to the players. This eventually led to the Command player getting a small ship of his own.

In my other Trek group, there are five regular players. However, the Command player didn't feel comfortable jumping into the center seat and is currently XO to an NPC captain.

I guess I bring this up because the NPC crew is important whether your group of players is small or not. Both groups rely on their NPC crewmates and enjoy interacting with them.

At the moment I am in a PBEM with BrianK with three of us, so at any one time we have only 2 players and a narrator.

TBH it has suffered a bit with only 2 of us. But a bit of brain-storming Brian and I can swap narrator duties and NPC our characters for an episode. Which gives us 3 crew. Still a bit light, even with a smaller 40-odd Sabre class crew.

So we are thinking about secondary characters. Each player will also take on a second character, now the focus will be on our original chosen PC but it means we can effectively be in 2 places at once with either an away team member and ship-side crewmember or a senior and junior officer...

And as you say, the irregulars, give them some mid-level characters in a useful position so that they can drop in and out as required and a protected status when the players are not about and just so that they dont lag too far behind give them 10% XP of the regulars so that when they get back they have the opportunity to develop a bit... But not as much as the regulars.

Seems like a fair compromise...

There were some story ideas floating around here awhile back centered around a small group of players. Some, as I recall, had some very good ideas for running a series on a runabout acting as courier between starbases in a frontier sector; and some decent ideas for a scout or light cruiser doing detailed exploration of a sector charted by an explorer sometime previous to play.

I think a search of “Danube” would find it and perhaps be of aid to you.

We're running a CODA group right now with only 4 players and we're having a blast. I'm pretty sure I could run it on as few as two players if necessary.

I agree 100% with K.G.'s earlier "spotlight" comment, as it is very true when applied. I think Star Trek is best played with a smaller group, especially if it's based in a traditional starship bridge setting.

I've been running a game with three players for almost 10 years in its current incarnation. For a long time, they were on a Runabout with 1 NPC, and are now the command crew of a Defiant class Escort. Check out my page below, namely the Relic, Rising Sun and Cretok Nor portions under the Relic banner. Much fun, but then I have a great bunch of players who have been close friends for many years.

For a while ran a 24th Century game w/my goddaughter & a friend of her's.They were the jr officers on a Nova Class Scout,who kept going out in a Danube Class Runabout exploring an area while the Einstien explored elsewhere. It didn't last more than about a "season"(10 games) before RL derailed the game(I ran it over the summer)
My current game is set on a Mission Class(I redid the deckplans to fit the hull better.) with a nine man crew.We just started the 2nd season w/them on a Modified-Tavares Class pulling exploration duty.

I've successfully run games with two players without needing to use a smaller vessel. I just make certain the PCs are in leadership positions, and when using an NPC captain have him or her solicit opinions from the PCs. "Our options, Number One, and which you see as best. Interesting. Do you concur, Lieutenant Briggs? Good, make it so."

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Originally Posted by RaconteurX

I've successfully run games with two players without needing to use a smaller vessel. I just make certain the PCs are in leadership positions, and when using an NPC captain have him or her solicit opinions from the PCs. "Our options, Number One, and which you see as best. Interesting. Do you concur, Lieutenant Briggs? Good, make it so."

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In this case it alow a set up with 2 bases of operation for the Narrators to use. Thus in one week, Narrator 1 is running a mission with the main players & Narrator 2 with their characters off on the runabout which doesn't finish at the end of the session. The next week, the recurring guest players attend, Narrator 2 can run it on the starbase or starship (where ever the runabout is based) with the main players play their secondary characters and the Narrator 1 and guest players' their primary characters. The runabout mission and the events back on the starbase can then be consider to happen concurrently (as basically an interlude) if need be. Thus no need to figure out how to shoe horn the guest players' characters into the ongoing events of the runabout mission (unless they need bailling out). Gives each narrator a "domain" of narration. Of course they might want to switch at times. The problem I see if the main base is the source of moving the general plot of the series forward and the guest players don't attend enough.