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Characterization pet peeves
gulberat
Member Posts: 5,505 Arc User
Apologies if this has already been discussed somewhere, but I just got a friendly warning from a mod in another forum about necro-posting (definition here is different than the fora I'm used to), so to be on the safe side I'm starting another thread.
I just wanted to open up a discussion about some of the characterization pet peeves that I've encountered in various Foundry missions.
1) Please remember that my captain is not human. Not every captain is human, and may well be insulted by being called one or being expected to know the most obscure human cultural references. (I may know those references, but when I'm in character, I know my captain doesn't know everything about humans.)
2) Please remember that my captain may not be male. Even when I play a male captain, I can't help noticing. The only exceptions to this rule--though obscure and not always liked by every Starfleet captain--are the use of "Mr." and "sir" to address officers in a military context. I have run into it on occasion where (perhaps because of more than one character being involved in the conversation, or my captain reading some sort of record about himself) somebody did use a gendered pronoun (usually "he") to refer to my captain. While it's OK with my character, that is not OK when other players may have female captains.
3) Shoehorning my captain into being a jerk or a perv. This is actually my number one pet peeve--even above calling my captain a human when he's not, or assuming that all captains must be men. I understand that some people like this kind of humor, so offering it as an option is understandable...but I do not like being forced to choose an option like that, where my captain is flippant, hits on everything that moves, acts like a speciesist, or is cruel. And remember that some people have Vulcan captains that are not v'tosh ka'tur, so that's going to be especially OOC for them.
Sometimes the option to do this can be funny, but it should be only an option and not the only choice. Two examples stick out of cases where it did work. On someone's mission (I forget the title or author), my captain located a stash of Romulan ale while searching crew lockers for something even more incriminating. One of the choices was for him to turn to his crew and say, "Sweet! I mean--seize the contraband!" That I couldn't resist--but what was great was that it was a choice.
The other two cases stick out very well. I particularly remember ajstoner's mission "Finding Resolution," where after overhearing Captain Kull give a very Sun Tzu-like speech about my captain, that really increased my captain's respect for Kull's personality and intellect. From there he began to respond to Kull in a much more belligerent (and Klingon-like) manner than he ordinarily would. Establishing that unusual banter with Kull had a really cool payoff in "Avenging Resolution"!
I also remember another case where my Cardassian captain had the opportunity to completely go off on a Cardassian war criminal in "The Spirits of Ramok Nor" by alimac30. While it's not like him normally to lose his temper, the option was there. (And more neutral responses were offered for those whose captains might not act like that.)
Speaking of shoehorning I didn't appreciate, Cryptic has actually been guilty of it on a few very notable occasions. I did not care for being made to blindly follow Admiral Zelle in "Divide et Impera" when I was getting suspicious much earlier than the mission allowed me to show my suspicions. But the worst offender of all that I've encountered thus far was the Torture-the-Fed-Captain mission on the KDF side. Yeah, I know KDF is more brutal, bt even among Klingons there are variations. Can you imagine Worf or the cloned Kahless torturing a defeated enemy? I could see a duel to the death or fighting until the destruction of the enemy's ship, so as to give an enemy a proper death--but a Klingon like that would see no honor in torturing a disabled, disarmed enemy. It almost made me feel sick to do that and I would have MUCH preferred an alternative means to accomplish that objective.
4) Disrespectful bridge officers
Oh boy. Let me put it this way: I would not allow someone who was disrespectful to me or others to be one of my senior officers. Cryptic seems to be mindful of this in their official missions: once in a while a BOFF might make a slightly pointed remark, but these instances are kept rare and are not inappropriate.
Heck, even at work I would likely write up one of my direct reports if they said some of the outrageous things I have seen some people write my bridge officers into saying. Please do not make my BOFFs hit on me (adding to that, you don't know what the BOFF's gender is in advance and whether the player's captain is straight, TRIBBLE, or otherwise interested in responding to that BOFF's advances) or be OOC jerks.
They also shouldn't be calling me by my first name...or at least Foundry authors shouldn't assume that sort of relationship is there.
5) Be careful with disrespectful military NPCs.
The lack of consideration of military protocol sometimes affects what people write for military NPCs too. Ensign Helna is the character people seem to assign this to the most (she seems to occur in multiple people's missions). There's more leeway for this with NPCs, but I'd at least like the option to warn or discipline a crew member who mouths off to me. (Of course sometimes such aberrant behavior is a sign that said crew member is about to go bad or go psycho, in which case it's perfectly understandable in the plot.
)
What about you guys? How do you approach these in your missions?
I just wanted to open up a discussion about some of the characterization pet peeves that I've encountered in various Foundry missions.
1) Please remember that my captain is not human. Not every captain is human, and may well be insulted by being called one or being expected to know the most obscure human cultural references. (I may know those references, but when I'm in character, I know my captain doesn't know everything about humans.)
2) Please remember that my captain may not be male. Even when I play a male captain, I can't help noticing. The only exceptions to this rule--though obscure and not always liked by every Starfleet captain--are the use of "Mr." and "sir" to address officers in a military context. I have run into it on occasion where (perhaps because of more than one character being involved in the conversation, or my captain reading some sort of record about himself) somebody did use a gendered pronoun (usually "he") to refer to my captain. While it's OK with my character, that is not OK when other players may have female captains.
3) Shoehorning my captain into being a jerk or a perv. This is actually my number one pet peeve--even above calling my captain a human when he's not, or assuming that all captains must be men. I understand that some people like this kind of humor, so offering it as an option is understandable...but I do not like being forced to choose an option like that, where my captain is flippant, hits on everything that moves, acts like a speciesist, or is cruel. And remember that some people have Vulcan captains that are not v'tosh ka'tur, so that's going to be especially OOC for them.
Sometimes the option to do this can be funny, but it should be only an option and not the only choice. Two examples stick out of cases where it did work. On someone's mission (I forget the title or author), my captain located a stash of Romulan ale while searching crew lockers for something even more incriminating. One of the choices was for him to turn to his crew and say, "Sweet! I mean--seize the contraband!" That I couldn't resist--but what was great was that it was a choice.
The other two cases stick out very well. I particularly remember ajstoner's mission "Finding Resolution," where after overhearing Captain Kull give a very Sun Tzu-like speech about my captain, that really increased my captain's respect for Kull's personality and intellect. From there he began to respond to Kull in a much more belligerent (and Klingon-like) manner than he ordinarily would. Establishing that unusual banter with Kull had a really cool payoff in "Avenging Resolution"!
I also remember another case where my Cardassian captain had the opportunity to completely go off on a Cardassian war criminal in "The Spirits of Ramok Nor" by alimac30. While it's not like him normally to lose his temper, the option was there. (And more neutral responses were offered for those whose captains might not act like that.)
Speaking of shoehorning I didn't appreciate, Cryptic has actually been guilty of it on a few very notable occasions. I did not care for being made to blindly follow Admiral Zelle in "Divide et Impera" when I was getting suspicious much earlier than the mission allowed me to show my suspicions. But the worst offender of all that I've encountered thus far was the Torture-the-Fed-Captain mission on the KDF side. Yeah, I know KDF is more brutal, bt even among Klingons there are variations. Can you imagine Worf or the cloned Kahless torturing a defeated enemy? I could see a duel to the death or fighting until the destruction of the enemy's ship, so as to give an enemy a proper death--but a Klingon like that would see no honor in torturing a disabled, disarmed enemy. It almost made me feel sick to do that and I would have MUCH preferred an alternative means to accomplish that objective.
4) Disrespectful bridge officers
Oh boy. Let me put it this way: I would not allow someone who was disrespectful to me or others to be one of my senior officers. Cryptic seems to be mindful of this in their official missions: once in a while a BOFF might make a slightly pointed remark, but these instances are kept rare and are not inappropriate.
Heck, even at work I would likely write up one of my direct reports if they said some of the outrageous things I have seen some people write my bridge officers into saying. Please do not make my BOFFs hit on me (adding to that, you don't know what the BOFF's gender is in advance and whether the player's captain is straight, TRIBBLE, or otherwise interested in responding to that BOFF's advances) or be OOC jerks.
They also shouldn't be calling me by my first name...or at least Foundry authors shouldn't assume that sort of relationship is there.
5) Be careful with disrespectful military NPCs.
The lack of consideration of military protocol sometimes affects what people write for military NPCs too. Ensign Helna is the character people seem to assign this to the most (she seems to occur in multiple people's missions). There's more leeway for this with NPCs, but I'd at least like the option to warn or discipline a crew member who mouths off to me. (Of course sometimes such aberrant behavior is a sign that said crew member is about to go bad or go psycho, in which case it's perfectly understandable in the plot.
)What about you guys? How do you approach these in your missions?
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Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
One Cryptic mission really bothered me as well: it was the one where Franklin Drake tricks you onto that holodeck where he and another character are each accusing the other of being an Undine spy and you have to decide to attack one. It made no sense; I would have taken them both into custody and brought everyone back to my ship for a nice blood test, not shoot up the place on a wild guess.
My character Tsin'xing
Thing is there IS a reason for doing what you're doing, but to reveal it would ruin a major plot point later on in the series. In a different media like a TV show it might be possible to give the viewer an idea of what has happened, but with our essentially first person story telling experience here it becomes more problematic showing things your captain doesn't know or see.
However, when I'm writing, I tend to ignore them and just write.
The thing about our audience is that it is so widely varied and have so many ideas about their characters and their bridge officers, none of which we can know. To my mind there are two approaches you can take. You can either attempt to write for every eventuality or write what you want.
That's a decision each author has to make for themselves. I lean toward the latter. I think writing for every eventuality just makes things very bland. I do try and give options though. Sure, i get a couple "my character would never say that" comments per mission, but sometimes you just have to say sorry buddy, but the Foundry is the author's sandbox, not the player's, and I needed you to say X so the story could go in Y direction.
Anyway, I can add a couple pet peeves.
1. Klingons are not evil. They may have been straight-up mustache-twirling villains in TOS, but the Ron D. Moore Klingons of TNG, on which all subsequent klinks have been based, are not evil at all (Duras family excluded of course). They are different from humans, they have different cultural values and different rules, and they would do things humans wouldn't, but that doesn't make them evil and it doesn't mean that they always do bad things.
2. Not all KDF players are Klingon. Players should note this one too. In many reviews people said my spotlight mission "Raktajino in a Jar" was not very Klingon. However, I wasn't really writing it with Klingons in mind. I was writing for Orion or Gorn or whatever others (my own KDF main is a Vorta).
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
Sorry I forgot that was you! :eek:
I still think your best moment in that mission was when the player has the opportunity to eavesdrop on Captain Kull. It's a shame some players probably miss that, because I know it totally revised my opinion on Kull when I heard him do what struck me as a very intelligent, Sun Tzu-like analysis of my character (yet without getting TOO personal and inferring traits Kull couldn't possibly know).
Yeah, that one definitely had some problems too, though the one with Admiral Zelle bothered me the most because I'd basically been co-opted into committing a war crime.
(I was irritated with Zelle from the moment we had our first fight and she wouldn't pick up a phaser. Leading from behind and not facing the consequences--good sign of "Crazy Admiral Syndrome" there...)
I tend to like some dialogue options because I enjoy seeing the author's writing on display. I especially like branching dialogue because it a) gives me a choice to fit my captain's personality and b) may lend itself to re-playing later just to see where the other options lead. (Alimac30 is a particular master at that...making you want to try his missions multiple times to explore other paths.)
I haven't played your mission series that I'm aware of, but is there any way to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance at some point, but force the player to go on anyway? An unhappy talk with bridge officers, perhaps? (Either one of your subordinates is unhappy with your course of action, or you ask them for alternatives only to have those alternatives shot down?)
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
I try not to necessarily ascribe "abnormal" personalities to bridge officers. Since I don't know what the player has in their head for them, for instance on my main the tac officer i have in one of my boff slots is my first officer, she's Bajoran from one of the DMZ colonies and is "involved" shall we say with the captain, but nobody outside of me knows or cares about that.
So what I do is just write them like they were normal Starfleet officers, which is they are good at their jobs, come up with alternatives, don't tell the captain what to do, are respectful towards superior officers and spout exposition like there's no tomorrow.
If I need someone to have a more radical personality, I make up a new NPC. Even then I usually have any Starfleet officer preface everything they say to the player with "sir."
I get what you're saying...I guess to me, it's more fun to try to imagine how different personalities might respond to a different situation. And also fun for there to be different consequences according to the choices the captain makes.
I do think that some things have to be considered no matter what, though. I played one Foundry mission where the entire thing hinged upon my Cardassian captain having had a human son with a human name whose primary residence was on Earth. The son also spoke to his "father" as exactly that: his father, meaning players with female captains were just as completely excluded from that mission as aliens were.
Sometimes yes, there may be only one way to get to a certain place. But, I also find myself considering if there are multiple ways to reach the same objective. (Though when that happens, the way the other person will respond to your captain varies.)
Funy enough...I actually find the TOS Klingons more sophisticated. The movie ones to an extent, too (Chang on Trek VI: yeah, he had a moustache to twirl, but dang, he was smart and sophisticated while doing so). They really got dumbed down on TNG and especially DS9 (ironic given that DS9 upped the ante for most species).
Perhaps multiple paths--or failing that, something in the mission description to give people a heads-up would've helped keep people's expectations in line with what you created?
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
I had a mission where someone made my tactical officer involved with my captain and calling him by his first name. It didn't matter that the genders happened to line up. My reaction was still :eek::mad:. (
Oh...one scenario where you could get away with an abnormal bridge officer personality--though it would be really tough to write given the limitations of the Foundry (especially the fact that your BOFFs will fight in tip-top condition unless injured or incapacitated)--would be for said BOFF to somehow be possessed or under outside influence, or a holodeck simulation.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Yeah romance with player characters as one of the parties is... difficult. Especially if you run across players that have a very strict view on such things. I usually don't go there. Except once and she was tricking the player anyway lol.
Could certainly do that. I have 3 missions on the KDF side that are holoprograms that put the player in the shoes of Kang, Kor and Koloth. I remind the player several times that they are playing as themselves playing someone else and should get into the spirit of the role.
There's a fine line and tension between interesting characterization and being too obviously tramping on a player's freedom.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
granted your playing your mirror counterpart.. people seem to liek it overall.
I have a very simple technique:
1) I have a general dialogue line with very straight, by the book comments that would be suitable for any character; the kind of responses that a Vulcan or Picard type would make.
2) I add two divergent lines (as appropriate to a situation) at certain key points: A belligerent one and a sarcastic one. I then give each its own mini side-tree where these interactions can develop on their own and I can go "full bore" with that line knowing the player has already consented to it by picking the initial choice. Just make it obvious where it's going by the initial statement and you are fine.
3) Once I have completed these "tangent dialogues" I link back to the main line as soon as possible to allow for more possibilities of variation.
By using these three response types, allowing them to go as far as they need to, and allowing for multiple instances of each where possible, you can make your dialogues feel perfect for almost any personality type. The best part of it is the player will happily do all the real work for you, picking and choosing as they go. Since we can't really do multi-pathed missions this is also invaluable for creating the illusion of veriety and choice.
Don't get me wrong, I love those games, but that has to be a lot of writing to do.
One official metric ****-load. Still, worth the effort imo.
Next thing I knew I was making super short, shoot first options, Diplomatic Captain Fed options, and a little more (Curse you ME references) Renegade Captain or perhaps... a Klingon Captain.
Then what I started doing, Shoot First Short Version, Diplomatic Fed Captain, then Fed Captain more like a Klingon.
Then for Klingons the Inverse. A Klingon Captain that acts more like a Diplomat. And I try not to pigeon hole everyone as klingon, let alone supportive of the empire, but... like most Federation Captains would be aiming to get all the answers and solve through words... let's be honest... the warriors way tends to be more blunt. It's the outliers that ask questions first.
It's a lot of work, but, I find it fun and intuitive, perhaps like other authors find map design.
The one thing I always struggle with, is the Vulcan captain. It's easy enough to throw in a "That's logical," or "That's Illogical" here and there... but it's the idea of it. There is a cold cut nature to it, and one... that may not using slang or contractions. I used "It's" and "can't" in my captain dialog a little to much for anyone playing a Soong-Type. I once got an angry letter for a having a captain use the word "Alright" as opposed to proper "All Right."
Melati Kusumu: Fed Orion/Kriosian hybrid, aside from being an outcast from BOTH of her races, she's a rather normal Starfleet officer.
Beltran: KDF Orion, He's not an honorable Warrior. He works for the Empire, but he's a marauder at heart.
Meghan Eridian: Fed Mirror Universe Vorta, she is unfamiliar with the culture of most Federation races and tends to use an excessively literal speech pattern because idioms confuse her.
Chuft: Fed Kzinti, he joined starfleet because he wants to kill klingons
Drexela: Fed Liberated Borg Joined Trill, she's an extremely cantankerous individual who generally comes across as unfriendly simply because she isn't 'nice'.
7 of 13: Fed Liberated Borg Human, he's a somewhat geeky individual who likes to use borg tech as a toy....
Carnlan Rixx: Fed Bolian, He's a very honorable individual, but not in the abstract "code of honor" way
Monica Rappaccini: Fed Human, a bit of a mad scientist, she experimented with giving herself implants based on Borg tech trying to gain the benefits without actually being Borg.
Sekkoth: Fed Romulan/Vulcan: he understands Vulcan culture in a way humans don't but he doesn't LIVE it.... in some ways he's like a nicer version of Sybok
My character Tsin'xing
But that's informed by other aspects of my approaches. I tend to be a very big believer in "show, don't tell", so I rarely do dialogs that are more than three boxes deep. I tend to feel that if I have to do more, that means something's wrong in the dialog's context or the overall structure of the mission. I'd rather create an extra map of player business to explain stuff than do so through text dumps. I feel this actually creates both a better story and a better gameplay experience.
I avoid involving the PC's personal life/history in the mission. While Foundry is a sandbox for the creator, any creator that fells he/she must hijack the PC like that is straight up being lazy/uncreative.
That business of creating a son for the PC that gulberat described... that's just horrible. I enjoyed the "New Australia" mission series, but I disliked the temporal agent character (sorry if the author's reading this, but she really comes off as annoyingly Mary-Sue-ish), and did not like how her dialog was written to imply that reciprocating her advances was the "true" or "canon" response even though you were technically given a choice.
I mean, an NPC that flirts with you and you have the options to reciprocate or not: that's awesome. But doing that while having here make wraparound comments where she claims you have reciprocated/will reciprocate regardless of what you actually choose invalidates that.
Boffs should be professional. It's the best way to avoid conflicts with people's characters, and it's the best way to handle things like the difference in attitude between, say, a Vulcan and a Jem Hadar tac officer. If you need someone close to the PC to make biased or insubordinate comments/observations, it's better to introduce a new character specifically for the mission. Even hero crews have B shift rotations, after all.
Bonus points if your can give the PC the option of acknowledging the B-shift boff's lack of discipline. Bonus points and cookies is you make it plot-relevant instead of simply flavor.
In regards to boff/doff discipline, I kinda think a lack thereof is a sign of immature writing. There's a trope I'll see from time to time with webcomics, where the protagonist will have a workplace setting that should be very high-discipline, but is instead even less so than middle school. Para-military government agencies that deal with supernatural crime or something, but let their people wear whatever slovenly thing they want, have no standards of conduct or responsibility, and have a command structure that's loosely enforced at best, stuff like that. It's tempting to say it's a thing that high-school age writers do 'cause they lack experience and are basically writing a wish-fulfillment job, but then I remember that I just described Torchwood. Also a lot of anime super-agencies.
Anyway, I think it's a bit of that creeping in. People are getting their wish-fulfillment on, and writing Starfleet like it was a better version of high-school, instead of like something that has actual lives depending on it.
Not that that half-arsed analysis helps beyond "just don't do it", but then I kinda feel that unless it's both a) portrayed as the unusual rather than the norm, and
My feelings as well. We allegedly know more about their culture in the later incarnations, but the earlier ones were more subtle as characters. The later ones tended to use the cultural fluff like a cartoonish stereotype to avoid actually writing people. And even that cultural stuff is pretty shallow and ham-handed. We may not have been explicitly privy to their culture with the earlier Klingons, but the implied culture (via the characters it produced) seemed more nuanced/rounded than what we actually got later.
In fact, the mustache-twirlers actually highlight this. There were a couple good, well done Klinks in the later era, but they were all good or neutral (relative to the Federation). Though the producers tried several times, the klinks haven't had a "magnificent TRIBBLE" since Chang.
My character Tsin'xing
Also, you can give a loser feeling by having the PLAYER make wisecracks and then letting the boffs respond in turn. This is a way of getting the player's "permission" to take things in that direction. Having been in the military, while we always tried to be professional, a group works together long enough and a level familiarity typically sets in.
I also have a silly little thing I do in all my missions where the ship tac (who's the first officer more often than not and pretty much always a Commander) admonishishs the player to be careful about something or other and the response "Yes, mother" appears.
Threw in a "He's dead [FirstName]" once as a lark and a nod to Mr. Kelly.
My character Tsin'xing
It's really weird, but being pigeonholed into saying something out of character takes you right out of the story. I've experienced that before where my captain was forced to make some really unprofessional remark, and I was just like WTF? I could have "imagined" I said something else, but it doesn't work like that. It's a weird psychological reaction.
So, that's why I try to keep at least one fairly generic remark, like "Acknowledged", "Understood", or basic statement of fact/question. Worst case scenario, if none of the responses fit, the generic should work.
However, it simply is not realistic to phrase every single line in numerous ways. For example, if one of several choices when talking to an NPC is "It's nice to see you again, Captain." it's impractical to also put "It's acceptable to see you, Captain." and "How the hell are you doing, Captain!". I might put multiple options like that if the entire purpose of a dialogue box is to say hello, but I won't do it on an NPC with several options. People will just have to settle with with generic "It's nice to see you, Captain." and if that doesn't fit their character, they can just not say it/find out where that dialogue path leads.
Ultimately, I find that I have to put so many dialogue responses in my missions that I simply can't spend excessive amounts of time fretting over each one. If I did that I'd get bogged down and never get done. So, if some responses aren't sufficiently formal or whatever, then that's just how it has to be.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
I always try to keep boffs basically generic/professional. I throw in my own characters to give the mission character. From my perspective, including unique characters is basically vital to creating an interesting and Trek-like experience.
I agree and disagree about the whole "show not tell" topic. I agree that for the most part the mission storyline should be progressed by actions of the player. However, I think that having the ability to talk to NPCs about the background of what is happening, what their thoughts are, even unrelated events, results in a much more vivid setting, and NPCs that feel more like people rather than a 3d model standing there to bark out a few lines.
It's all the optional/nonessential stuff that creates a deeper world, but for the most part you should be able to skip that if you want.
Also, DaiMon Tat always refers to the player as Hu-man, but I put in an option for the player to point out they're not Human, to which she responds she doesn't care because everyone in Starfleet is either a Hu-man or a Hu-man boot licker, and all of the puny lobed species look the same to her anyway. Sorry, I won't do that with most characters, but I had to have at least one Ferengi who used the term Hu-man.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
Is it just me... or is every engineer a little bit, well, less formal around the edges?
Making it optional is a good way of dealing with it. Though IMO if not handled right it can create a situation where the player feels like they're being encouraged to be completist about it. I've player your Atlas missions, and I though some of the early briefing stuff dragged due to this, but I liked how you had seeded the maps with all these NPC conversations the player could wander around and listen in on to whatever degree they wanted. I've been thinking of borrowing and/or adapting that mechanic for a few things.
I rather like that. It kinda echoes the comment Gorkon's daughter made about Starfleet being a "humans' club" (or something to that effect) during the dinner scene in ST-VI. Always thought that bit was clever on account of all the human-centric naming conventions and things in the shows.
I think that's just a curtural trope in general; starship engineers represent the roughnecks of the geekosphere. They are no nonsense (or lots of it, one or the other) hard drinkers, not adverse to brawling, etc.
These are the mighty men needed to make mighty ships go.