Narrator Pride!

Okay here it is, with all the down in the mouth Trek stuff lately, I am determined to be positive :)

So what is the moment in a game where you feel you really connected with your group and brought them into the story and they in turn hooked you in?

What are the moments as a Trek narrator of which you are most proud?

For me it was the one time. . . I had the players all there on the ship. Voyager (and the Farscape, long story) had just come through the Transwarp Cooridor and the Lexington was holding the line. BORG were beaming all over the ship. One the bridge they were fighting hand to hand, since the BORG had adapted. Below decks it was a bording action. The players were scared. They didn't know left from right and they were pretty sure they were all dead.

10 minutes earlier (real time, not game time) they watched as the USS Exeter was cut in half by a cutting beam from the BORG cube. As far as they knew she was lost. BUt at the moment it seemed darkest, the sound of transporters filled the ship. At first the players faces fell. More BORG they assumed.

When they saw the crew of the Exter, who had managed to get their transporters working, beaming in with swords, lead pipes, etc, a cheer went up around the table.

Together they held the ship and were able to collaspes the transwarp conduit preventing more BORG cubes from arriving.

I was so caught up in the moment I felt like I was riding a wave of excitement. It was very very cool.

Ok...

I once ran a self written scenario called "The Maze Perspective" - the essence of the story was that the senior officers of USS BonHomme Richard had been captured by the Dominion and were being run through a series of tests (using the same devices used in "The Search" on DS9) to evaluate the resolve and resourcefulness of Starfleet Officers. The key to the scenario was that the players (and characters) didn't know that they were being evaluated.

They first lost their ship i.e. had it blown out from under them, then were accused of it's destruction, they believed they'd stumbled on a plot by the Maquis to send a catastrophic virus to the cardassian homeworld and so on for a period of three or four months while we played the game out.

The moment when they realised that the game had been a "simulation" for a lot of the preceeding sessions could've turned nasty if they'd thought they'd been wasting their time in some dumb holodeck simulation but the fact that they were just happy and relieved that their ship and shipmates were still intact, and that they'd proved their resolution to do the right thing even in their darkest hours gave me a lot of pride in my players, and in my own work as a narrator.

Long Tom

Hmm.

There was the time when it came time to merge the two games I was running simultaneously into a single game, because I and my one player were coming home from college to where I had been playing in my off hours with another group.

My solo player and I ran 2 characters each on a 4-person covert ops vessel.

She played the Commander and the CMO.
I played the engineer and the security specialist.

The sticky point: I was running the SAME 2 NPC's in the other game as well. And I wasn't about to run 4 characters, so 2 had to go.

So I arranged for the covert vessel to be stealthily witnessing the test of a Romulan "tranwarp drive," which failed in a spectacular and destructive fashion, dragging itself and the character's ship towards and into a singularity.

There were fore and aft escape modules. The Captain and Security got the injured CMO into the forward pod. The captain ordered Security to stay with the pod while she went to find the engineer. He refused. The friends shared a long (dramatically) moment while he reminded her of his tendency to be able to survive in the worst situations (this was old FASA stats, he had a LUC 0f 103.). And she let him put her in the escape pod and launch it.

And then she watched as a chunk of debris hit the ship and destroyed it, and her ship was sucked through the singularity.

And I had to end the session because she was sobbing, and I was about to.


Of course, at the beginning of the next session she woke up to find both those characters alive and well and serving on another vessel. And they'd never heard of her. And when she figured out what had happened, she wanted to strangle me. It was great fun.