Suggestions Needed- Ship's Counselor

Alrighty, then....

For the first time in 30 plus years of gaming Trek, I have a player who actually WANTS to play the ship's counselor.

The character is a male Betazoid, with (relatively) high scores and a strong background in xeno-anthropology.

Aside from allowing him to state the blindingly obvious a/o crash the ship twice...

... what the heck do I do to keep the character engaged and active inside the game?


Given the skill set listed, I expect the character will be useful in diplomatic situations a/o First Contact... but pretty damned useless anywhere else.

He still has some advancement picks left to spend so there's room to do some tweaking, but I'd like to avoid TOO major a re-write.

Any suggestions?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by selek

Alrighty, then....

For the first time in 30 plus years of gaming Trek, I have a player who actually WANTS to play the ship's counselor.

The character is a male Betazoid, with (relatively) high scores and a strong background in xeno-anthropology.

Aside from allowing him to state the blindingly obvious a/o crash the ship twice...

... what the heck do I do to keep the character engaged and active inside the game?


Given the skill set listed, I expect the character will be useful in diplomatic situations a/o First Contact... but pretty damned useless anywhere else.

He still has some advancement picks left to spend so there's room to do some tweaking, but I'd like to avoid TOO major a re-write.

Any suggestions?

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What time of campaign/game are you planning? The character could really excel at being the face of the ship especially in those social occasions. Crossing over to the Diplomat basic career with the edge innovative could be quite useful...

I think I would need to know more about what you are planning for the series before I could really give any good advice.

Depends on the character background... As you stated the standard skill set places them in contact with all crew in stressful situations along with a diplomatic role that makes them excellent on all away teams. They are also present on the bridge a lot.

This puts them front and centre of all the required action hot spots. But you are right the standard definition doesn't leave much to do.

But.

A full blown Betazoid gets pretty decent sweeping psionics that would give them a massive edge over 'norms' and skills unavailable to others. This also includes hand to hand combat. Somewhere I stumbled over Betazoid Martial Art; Tassa’Akai including a hand to hand Baton (Akai) which I imagine like the Minbari fighting pike.

A counselor has no active duty station. But Starfleet encourages cross training. Perhaps the Counsellor would look into emergency back-up of a duty station (of a NPC) or managing emeregncy response (fire control and first aid).

Or there is the sciences. Another role that is oftenunder staffed in the game... Pick a field of study.

Off the top of my head:

• Mental health problems amongst the crew.
• Cultural conflict from, say, two people from differing cultures in a romantic relationship. These people can be passengers or crew.
•*A murder investigation with a strong psychological aspect to it.
• Rehabilitate an important individual suffering from psychological stress or mental disturbance, either by addressing emotional issues or finding out if there's technology/psionics/alien powers/environmental stuff affecting them.
• Figure out who is lying and why in a complex situation—finding evidence of unusual behaviour in, say, a diplomatic meeting before someone's assassinated or something.
• Reconstructing the psychological profile of a long-dead alien individual or species to escape a dire situation they caused.
• Weird stuff starts happening on the ship and they have to determine if it's real, a hallucination, or both.

Look at media outside of Trek or SF for when they bring in psychiatrists or psychologists.