![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
subplotkudzuAfter Action Report - Messages from Earth
Act I: the USS Carter receives sealed orders to meet with the USS Yosemite to pick up Dr. Greenglass and his team for a secret mission to test terraforming equipment - research suggests that it will be used to build bases on the Klingon border in preparation for war. Greenglass' team includes his wife, an ex-girlfriend of Commander Funk. When one of the shuttles carrying his equipment explodes Greenglass acts like a man looking for an excuse to declare the project a failure. There are also scenes with Ambassador Rossad, Coy Mahn & Liefson returning, Fujita getting his promotion (& party) and Fraiser telling the captain of his intention to leave Star Fleet, grooming Fujita for his job.
The game started late and then we spent a lot of time with the set up. Sakhet & Funk were worried by the orders but failed to get the information about the Klingon border. The secondary scenes were good: Coy Mahn's displeasure that she had dropped in the rankings of security's informal unarmed combat competitions made her quickly re-assert her dominance; the promotion party for Fujita & Bernie - while as awkward as these things are in play - worked well enough and gave some worthwhile character bits, including Rossad dragging an electric organ into the dining hall to provide some music.
When Greenglass & co beamed over things got awkward. Funk jumped as I expected - Greenglass looked like a mad scientist who would endanger everyone - and the scenes with Mrs. Greenglass were worked well enough, but not perfectly. When Mrs. G met Rossad at the organ and asked if he knew any depressing songs he broke into "As Time Goes By" and we had a lurch to Casablanca
We nearly lost Bernie when everyone but him failed to detect his shuttle's warp core problems, but having the ensign on the ball made him look good. The failure of rolls here also made the sabotage feel believable: this problem was subtle, the explosion sudden, and could've been an accident.
Act II: An investigation of the shuttle's remains eventually confirms that it was sabotage. Dr. Greenglass' behavior makes him the most likely suspect - trying to scuttle a project he knows will fail with no damage to his reputation - but it could be any other member of his team. This includes Mrs. Greenglass, who makes a Play for Funk if he hasn't made one for her as Coy Mahn, at least, continues the investigation.
One problem was that Grey - my presumptive saboteur - was in the shuttle with Bernie and acted shocked at his near death. So much so that Bernie called Dr. Mark for a medscan. This would have revealed Grey as a Klingon before the players suspected sabotage, derailing the episode. A dose of Narrativium radiation suddenly made Sheerer - the other tech - the saboteur. I feel no guilt over this. I explained my choice to the players after the game and they agreed that catching the bad guy then would have made the rest of the game weak.
The next problem was that I spent too much time on the shuttle investigation. After a day or so they reached a point where it could be ID'd as an accident but given the top secret nature of the mission Funk had them keep digging. This revealed the actual sabotage, as I expected, but there were too many rolls and too much time spent on it - given how we were running an hour late I should have cut this short. Now would have been a good time to cut it to two rolls of 1 day each - roll 1 would have, if successful, shown them that the shuttle's destruction could be caused by a legitimate failure of maintenance, while roll 2, if they'd continued (as I knew they would, and did) would have nailed down that it was sabotage. It would have given the same information in the same game time with less play time. The game has rules for this, but I was so enamored with my other dice tool that I used a screwdriver to pound in a nail. Oh well.
Faced with actual destructive sabotage Funk & Sakhet set Coy Mahn (as the security chief) into the newcomer's files while Sakhet called on her Starfleet contacts to find out why this mission was so secret. This led to a nice scene with her and her occasional boyfriend (& fellow ship captain), which ended up being a better way to deliver the information than in the Hook. Not only did it show Sakhet's administrative skills, it gave yet another romance touch to the episode as a counterpoint to cold-hearted Funk putting Mrs. Greenglass at the top of his suspect list. The scene with Funk, Coy Mahn & Sakhet white-boarding suspects for opportunity, means & motive was nice, and Funk correctly placed Dr. Greenglass as being a master at CYA but not a saboteur. The lack of a clear suspect made Sakhet realize they didn't have time - she had to call on Rossad.
This was far enough in to the episode that her using the telepath worked, as opposed to using him to avoid any investigation. Asha told me later that she was happy with how this played out: she knew eventually Sakhet would turn to Rossad for something, and having it be concern the ship's security made sense. Jason later back-wrote that Rossad would've required Sakhet to submit to a scan confirming she honestly suspected the targets - something he saw as part of Betazed ethics - and Asha agreed. Rossad did surface scans, and while he 'heard' Sheerer thinking about the chemical toxin she was placing in the galley he couldn't identify what it was. It also meant he was in Mrs. Greenglass' head when she made a play for Funk and Funk threw her out (Darius: I didn't need to hear that…).
In other Romance issues the scene with Dr. Mark walking in on the singing Bernie went as well as I could have hoped, and the 'Girl Talk' scene between Dr. Mark and Lt. Raven was priceless - everyone accused Dr. Mark of channeling Avenue Q's "Bad Idea Bears" when she told Raven to sure, go ahead with making a play for her direct superior. Raven, in turn, pushed Mark to make a play for that cute ensign Bernie who's been goggling after her for a year.
Act III: A galley crewman goes missing, eventually being found murdered in the biomass tanks. If the PCs don’t tie this to the galley large swaths of the crew will fall dangerously ill, with Dr. Greenglass & co having the worst of it, from the poison the saboteur slipped into the food vats. Said saboteur is Mr. Grey, one of Greenglass' teams and a disguised Klingon who must be dealt with. Assuming Greenglass survives his experiment will be a partial success that he will be happy with, as it shows the basic validity of his theory. Mrs. Greenglass will likely leave with her husband, who now has time for her again.
Rossad tells Sakhet that for his scan to requires the suspects to be thinking about the explosion. She arranges a 'drawing room scene' as a progress report, with her, Fujita & Funk inside and Coy Mahn & Rossad outside the door. Coy Mahn gets Greenglass and team from their in-lab dinner, but Mrs. Greenglass is turning away all visitors; Funk vouches for her absence. Darius starts to get suspicious thoughts from Sheerer but nothing concrete. Coy Mahn gets the call about the missing crewman, sets some security people to searching for him and gets Funk. Funk sends Coy Mahn to check Mrs. Greenglass who, being unaccounted for with someone missing, is again a suspect. Meanwhile, engineering detects a mass imbalance in life support, leading T'Prin to the crewman's corpse; she calls Dr. Mark to the location.
Shortly after Mark leaves Sickbay the poisons Sheerer added to the galley hit Greenglass & co. as well as the coffee drinkers in the conference room: Sakhet & Fujita collapse in the room; Funk falls down feet from Rossad. Sheerer takes Sakhet's phaser to destroy the experiment, only to be blocked by Rossad, whose telepathy let him sense her coming and get his knife to her throat. He has her pinned down when Funk flips open his communicator. The beep startles Sheerer & Rossad both, but the Ambassador still has the initiative, dodging her strike and slamming her chin first into the wall. To his surprise she reattaches her jaw and floors him with a punch. She snatches up the phaser and flees, thinking him disabled. She is, bad for her, running towards Coy Mahn, who'd been informed of Funk's hail. Worse for her, Rossad is more resilient than she thought. He throws his knife through her thigh, knocking her down, the fall making her drop the phaser. Coy Mahn attacks and, despite Sheerer's Klingon durability, breaks Sheerer's other leg during a tough fight. Sheerer pulls the knife from her thigh, either for one last assault or a suicide, but Rossad reclaims his blade with a wrist lock.
By this point we were 10 minutes past Jason's target end time, so we rush through the rest of it. Dr. Mark gets back to sick bay and manages, with quick rolls and courage points, to stabilize everyone who'd eaten the toxic food. Sheerer ends up in the brig. The experiment is slightly delayed. Its partial success meets with Dr. Greenglass' approval and the married couple leaves together, with the husband none the wiser.
One bit happens off screen - the Carter got its orders from Sulan of Vulcan Military Intelligence, and his plan involved a fake mission & log. For verisimilitude Sulan wrote log entries blame the failure on those he had identified as unpromotable: poorly performing Yosemite crewmen and T'Prin (who has the flaw of Black Mark: Vulcan Fleet). This is to show the human cost of Sulan's cold logic and to mark him as a foil for the crew - part of this season is T'prin's redemption, after all. This made Sakhet & Funk irate, and Funk hacked into the log entries to edit out Sulan's hanging T'Prin out to dry. This all came up in after game discussion & e-mail - always a benefit when you run out of time at the session.
All told, not as good as last month, but an OK episode. I wasn't happy with the end of game rush or any other pacing problems. I was so afraid of slighting the players other than Stephen that I put in more subplot scenes than out already shortened time could handle and paid the price at the end.
After Action Report - Messages from Earth
Act I: the USS Carter receives sealed orders to meet with the USS Yosemite to pick up Dr. Greenglass and his team for a secret mission to test terraforming equipment - research suggests that it will be used to build bases on the Klingon border in preparation for war. Greenglass' team includes his wife, an ex-girlfriend of Commander Funk. When one of the shuttles carrying his equipment explodes Greenglass acts like a man looking for an excuse to declare the project a failure. There are also scenes with Ambassador Rossad, Coy Mahn & Liefson returning, Fujita getting his promotion (& party) and Fraiser telling the captain of his intention to leave Star Fleet, grooming Fujita for his job.
The game started late and then we spent a lot of time with the set up. Sakhet & Funk were worried by the orders but failed to get the information about the Klingon border. The secondary scenes were good: Coy Mahn's displeasure that she had dropped in the rankings of security's informal unarmed combat competitions made her quickly re-assert her dominance; the promotion party for Fujita & Bernie - while as awkward as these things are in play - worked well enough and gave some worthwhile character bits, including Rossad dragging an electric organ into the dining hall to provide some music.
When Greenglass & co beamed over things got awkward. Funk jumped as I expected - Greenglass looked like a mad scientist who would endanger everyone - and the scenes with Mrs. Greenglass were worked well enough, but not perfectly. When Mrs. G met Rossad at the organ and asked if he knew any depressing songs he broke into "As Time Goes By" and we had a lurch to
We nearly lost Bernie when everyone but him failed to detect his shuttle's warp core problems, but having the ensign on the ball made him look good. The failure of rolls here also made the sabotage feel believable: this problem was subtle, the explosion sudden, and could've been an accident.
Act II: An investigation of the shuttle's remains eventually confirms that it was sabotage. Dr. Greenglass' behavior makes him the most likely suspect - trying to scuttle a project he knows will fail with no damage to his reputation - but it could be any other member of his team. This includes Mrs. Greenglass, who makes a Play for Funk if he hasn't made one for her as Coy Mahn, at least, continues the investigation.
One problem was that Grey - my presumptive saboteur - was in the shuttle with Bernie and acted shocked at his near death. So much so that Bernie called Dr. Mark for a medscan. This would have revealed Grey as a Klingon before the players suspected sabotage, derailing the episode. A dose of Narrativium radiation suddenly made Sheerer - the other tech - the saboteur. I feel no guilt over this. I explained my choice to the players after the game and they agreed that catching the bad guy then would have made the rest of the game weak.
The next problem was that I spent too much time on the shuttle investigation. After a day or so they reached a point where it could be ID'd as an accident but given the top secret nature of the mission Funk had them keep digging. This revealed the actual sabotage, as I expected, but there were too many rolls and too much time spent on it - given how we were running an hour late I should have cut this short. Now would have been a good time to cut it to two rolls of 1 day each - roll 1 would have, if successful, shown them that the shuttle's destruction could be caused by a legitimate failure of maintenance, while roll 2, if they'd continued (as I knew they would, and did) would have nailed down that it was sabotage. It would have given the same information in the same game time with less play time. The game has rules for this, but I was so enamored with my other dice tool that I used a screwdriver to pound in a nail. Oh well.
Faced with actual destructive sabotage Funk & Sakhet set Coy Mahn (as the security chief) into the newcomer's files while Sakhet called on her Starfleet contacts to find out why this mission was so secret. This led to a nice scene with her and her occasional boyfriend (& fellow ship captain), which ended up being a better way to deliver the information than in the Hook. Not only did it show Sakhet's administrative skills, it gave yet another romance touch to the episode as a counterpoint to cold-hearted Funk putting Mrs. Greenglass at the top of his suspect list. The scene with Funk, Coy Mahn & Sakhet white-boarding suspects for opportunity, means & motive was nice, and Funk correctly placed Dr. Greenglass as being a master at CYA but not a saboteur. The lack of a clear suspect made Sakhet realize they didn't have time - she had to call on Rossad.
This was far enough in to the episode that her using the telepath worked, as opposed to using him to avoid any investigation. Asha told me later that she was happy with how this played out: she knew eventually Sakhet would turn to Rossad for something, and having it be concern the ship's security made sense. Jason later back-wrote that Rossad would've required Sakhet to submit to a scan confirming she honestly suspected the targets - something he saw as part of Betazed ethics - and Asha agreed. Rossad did surface scans, and while he 'heard' Sheerer thinking about the chemical toxin she was placing in the galley he couldn't identify what it was. It also meant he was in Mrs. Greenglass' head when she made a play for Funk and Funk threw her out (Darius: I didn't need to hear that…).
In other Romance issues the scene with Dr. Mark walking in on the singing Bernie went as well as I could have hoped, and the 'Girl Talk' scene between Dr. Mark and Lt. Raven was priceless - everyone accused Dr. Mark of channeling Avenue Q's "Bad Idea Bears" when she told Raven to sure, go ahead with making a play for her direct superior. Raven, in turn, pushed Mark to make a play for that cute ensign Bernie who's been goggling after her for a year.
Act III: A galley crewman goes missing, eventually being found murdered in the biomass tanks. If the PCs don’t tie this to the galley large swaths of the crew will fall dangerously ill, with Dr. Greenglass & co having the worst of it, from the poison the saboteur slipped into the food vats. Said saboteur is Mr. Grey, one of Greenglass' teams and a disguised Klingon who must be dealt with. Assuming Greenglass survives his experiment will be a partial success that he will be happy with, as it shows the basic validity of his theory. Mrs. Greenglass will likely leave with her husband, who now has time for her again.
Rossad tells Sakhet that for his scan to requires the suspects to be thinking about the explosion. She arranges a 'drawing room scene' as a progress report, with her, Fujita & Funk inside and Coy Mahn & Rossad outside the door. Coy Mahn gets Greenglass and team from their in-lab dinner, but Mrs. Greenglass is turning away all visitors; Funk vouches for her absence. Darius starts to get suspicious thoughts from Sheerer but nothing concrete. Coy Mahn gets the call about the missing crewman, sets some security people to searching for him and gets Funk. Funk sends Coy Mahn to check Mrs. Greenglass who, being unaccounted for with someone missing, is again a suspect. Meanwhile, engineering detects a mass imbalance in life support, leading T'Prin to the crewman's corpse; she calls Dr. Mark to the location.
Shortly after Mark leaves Sickbay the poisons Sheerer added to the galley hit Greenglass & co. as well as the coffee drinkers in the conference room: Sakhet & Fujita collapse in the room; Funk falls down feet from Rossad. Sheerer takes Sakhet's phaser to destroy the experiment, only to be blocked by Rossad, whose telepathy let him sense her coming and get his knife to her throat. He has her pinned down when Funk flips open his communicator. The beep startles Sheerer & Rossad both, but the Ambassador still has the initiative, dodging her strike and slamming her chin first into the wall. To his surprise she reattaches her jaw and floors him with a punch. She snatches up the phaser and flees, thinking him disabled. She is, bad for her, running towards Coy Mahn, who'd been informed of Funk's hail. Worse for her, Rossad is more resilient than she thought. He throws his knife through her thigh, knocking her down, the fall making her drop the phaser. Coy Mahn attacks and, despite Sheerer's Klingon durability, breaks Sheerer's other leg during a tough fight. Sheerer pulls the knife from her thigh, either for one last assault or a suicide, but Rossad reclaims his blade with a wrist lock.
By this point we were 10 minutes past Jason's target end time, so we rush through the rest of it. Dr. Mark gets back to sick bay and manages, with quick rolls and courage points, to stabilize everyone who'd eaten the toxic food. Sheerer ends up in the brig. The experiment is slightly delayed. Its partial success meets with Dr. Greenglass' approval and the married couple leaves together, with the husband none the wiser.
One bit happens off screen - the Carter got its orders from Sulan of Vulcan Military Intelligence, and his plan involved a fake mission & log. For verisimilitude Sulan wrote log entries blame the failure on those he had identified as unpromotable: poorly performing
All told, not as good as last month, but an OK episode. I wasn't happy with the end of game rush or any other pacing problems. I was so afraid of slighting the players other than Stephen that I put in more subplot scenes than out already shortened time could handle and paid the price at the end.
