Narrators' Question - Advancement, Promotion, and Tour of Duty Package

[Miss Q]

I am wondering how others handle advancement in their games. I played in a d20 B5 game where the GM would give us a level every 2 sessions. Does this fit with Trek or not? I'm not a big fan of experience points and I am going to run a short compaign.

Also I am wondering about the Edge - Promotion, does anyone have any house rules for this. Should a Promotion be affected by Advancement, i.e. for each 3 advancements a character recieves, a promotion edge can be purchsed. The reason I ask this I think that a character with just 5 advancements should not be Captain.

My final question stems from the Dominion War Sourcebook for ICON, has anyone converted the Tour of Duty Packages to CODA?

[RaconteurX]

Advancements and levels are not quite on a par, as characters in Trek are fairly competent at creation. An advancement every two or three sessions worked quite well for our group, but we were all very story-oriented when making our picks. If a character learned something important in the course of play, or the player had declared that the character was engaged in a personal study of a certain topic at the prior advancement, those became the basis for our selections.

Our group used a small variation of the Renown-based Promotions rule presented in the Starfleet Operations Manual. We thought it better reflected the slower progress of higher-ranking characters on the promotion track. The rule works best when the Narrator gives out Renown, as players tend not to spend hard-earned advancements on such things unless it makes a significant difference (like being one Renown away from that promotion to Lieutenant Commander).

[Liquidator Queeg]

Originally posted by Miss Q
My final question stems from the Dominion War Sourcebook for ICON, has anyone converted the Tour of Duty Packages to CODA?

I'm working on converting the DWS packages to CODA, as well as packages from the ICON core books and various other supplements. They won't wind up exactly the same, since I'm tweaking them into "advancement packages" as shown in the Starfleet Operations Manual.

I'm also be creating some original advancement packages for the non-Starfleet type professions (in addition to those I can mine from the DS9 core book). Woot!

LQ

[vecna35]

wow that would be great.

I myself have completed polishing up some of the optional rules to make the game more canon or at a bit more realism in certain areas.

you should have seen my players face when they saw a borg cube. I use micromachines combined with a table top version of the coda rules that is really nice to look at. The borg cube was something I created that was to scale with the micromachines roughly. My players had a heart attack on when they saw the size of the cube compared to there defiant class. hehehehe

[Tobian]

Meh it's only 3 or so kilomiters wide, on a side, or so You should see the size of the thing they're gojng up against in a few epiisodes time (cue evil laugh )

Anyway back to the topic at hand..

I, as a GM am usually quite generous about my 'experience points' and I do allow them to spend them per pick, rather than wait for an advancement; advancements stink too much of 'levels' and they aren't meant too.

My house rule with regards to the promotion edge is similar to the one in the Starfleet handbook - I use that renown table as the minimum requirement for getting a promotion of that level, which i think goes 3, 6, 9, 12 etc, so your PC's would not get promoted untill their renown was 12 etc. This to me makes it far more realistic because then your PC's get promoted based on their reputation not how many experience points they have earned. Renown points are earned alongside experience as a means to show when they've done something famous or noteworthy, which is exactly how most people get promoted, rather than having acrued enough 'experience points, so they get it by default..

It's sort of like saying "Congratulations on your promotion, we thought you should have one... because it's been three years now, and though you've done nothing exemplary we thought you should uhm.. ok here's the pip now run allong now"

Players earn experience weather or not they succeed because you gain them as much for practicing your art and improving your skills. An expert Ferengi safecracker will get Experience points because he managed to crack into that safe, but would only earn renown when he got away with it!

To me promotions should happen as the basis of a story element, and as such renown is the abstract for that: "Admiral Tucker has authorised me to promote you due to your exemplary service and your daring mission to recover the Ambasador"

Sounds like you're busy ATM LQ - plenty of stuff planned latelly!