(Spoilers ahead...)
I'm not sure how many other STO fanfic writers we have here, but I have something that's part question and part observation...
Is it just me, or are 23c. Starfleet crews the most difficult to fit personalities to? I mean, Romulan crews get characterisation thrown at you (Khev's search for his sister, Veril and the events with Slamek and her father, rescuing D'Vex from the Elachi), the KDF and FED crews have plenty of character shaping moments too... but 23c. crews... Skavrin gets fleshed out well on Edran IV, but other than that Tarsi doesn't seem more than a simple redshirt, T'Met's only moment of personality is telling the player to turn around so she can be sure they're not infected by Denevan parasites, 'Hunter' turns out to be Daniels and leaves the fourth slot open for a generic BOff... they just seem kind of bland.
Now, don't get me completely wrong - I LIKE being able to create or elaborate (hm, something about that word makes me think of Exercises...) my own personality for a character, but I do sometimes wish - especially when writing more than playing - that 23c. crews gave a little more to work with for a starting point...
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid." -- Q, TNG: "Q-Who?"
^Words that every player should keep in mind, especially whenever there's a problem with the game...
0
Comments
Well, the whole Tovan Khev thing might have contributed to that.
Since I think you missed that, @turbomagnus, when the game originally came out, your boffs were pretty much a blank slate to enable maximum customization. Then Cryptic was bought by Perfect World and got enough investment finally to release Legacy of Romulus, which added the Romulan Republic sub-faction and redid the storyline for the Klingons into its current form (mostly; they didn't get permission to use Michael Dorn's appearance for Worf until later). With Tovan Khev, they attempted to give him his own story arc (the fact that Star Wars: The Old Republic, which has a fleshed-out player party and companion quests, came out about this time probably isn't coincidental), but that apparently meant making him a mandatory, unremovable character, and some people disliked that intensely for various reasons.
Essentially, between STO and SWTOR you're looking at MMO versions of the two main models of player parties in CRPGs going back to the Black Isle-Interplay era of D&D-based games in the late '90s:
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Heck, one of my Agents of Yesterday is flying around with a bridge crew that's entirely some sort of synthetic - android, hologram, or something even weirder. And I love that the game allows me that option.
I suspect that part of the reason for the resistance to the Tovan Arc, is because initially, when playing STO, either as Fed or KDF, the player was the central focus, so that's what players have become accustomed to being the centre of attention, so to suddenly not be, to be playing second-fiddle to Tovan, that's going to rub some people the wrong way.
My favorite beginning story is Agents of Yesterday: We take the role of a junior officer who is given a mission on the ground, then, they take the helm. Soon, they're given command: It makes sense (although I would prefer that it happen at level 40, but hey, that's the story we've got)
I'd have to agree though, that the 23rd C starter crew, is a bit lacklustre...
The Class of 2409/10, IMO, gives us a crew with a little more character (although Skavrin's quite cool) I think it's just a case of what we then do with those characters...
When I first started playing, I wanted my own crew, so I deleted the starters. Now that my main is 'done' (AFAIC) (and having seen so many Default Crews running round Nimbus and Kobalistan) I wanted to reunite her with her old classmates. Some boffs off the exchange, a reclaimed Elisa, and some tailor-reloads later, and the Class of 2409/10 is back
The thing I would say, is take the character, from what the character themself provides. For example, when I first played the tutorial, and T'Vrell ran straight into the fray, I was so surprized by the assertiveness and take-charge demeanour, I thought 'she's Romulan...'. Even after deleting T'Vrell, the thought stuck with me, so I made a gag of it with my AOY, and 'reclaim'.
The 'reclaim' behaves in exactly the same way (perhaps the code of the game simply reads VulcanFemaleScienceT'Vrell, so treats her with the same code as the original character) and she always runs into the fray, before standing around and DoingScienceStuff. I've tried giving her rifles, but she doesn't fire them (always defaulting to the science abilities before weapons) so in the end, I gave her a nanopulse Lirpa, which she does at least make use of. I had to follow he character's lead, rather than trying to dictate the character
"I was here before you, I will be here after you are gone. I am here, regardless of your acknowledgement or acceptance..." - The Truth
Yeah, well, that's the other problem IMHO: Tovan's sideplot doesn't even go anywhere. You don't spend any time looking for her, she just randomly turns up on Nimbus III, quest over.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
The old Fed tutorial gave you this female Andorian tac boff, usually named Corspa. It struck me that Eleya would tend to gather to her some fairly iconoclastic crew members, so from Corspa I developed Tesjha "Tess" Phohl, scion of an old-line Imperial Guard family who had a difficult family life growing up (her four parents having been put together by government arrangement due to the Andorian population crisis, a detail I borrowed from the DS9 Relaunch novels) and applied to Starfleet Academy instead of joining the Guard to spite one of her fathers. And so on and so forth.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
My first Rom's version of Tovan was an officer whose name she refused to utter, referring instead to "that man" with considerable venom. In a nod to the game mechanics, he was politically well-connected (Empire or Republic, some things don't change) and forced on her as XO with no way of getting rid of him (whether by transfer, airlock, or feeding him to the singularity core). He was a swaggering, arrogant, lecherous boor who thought he was the second coming of James T. Kirk (with pointed ears and eyebrows) and that her ship was just another stepping stone in his glorious, heroic career. The Romulan Zap Brannigan, basically.
(ICly if not OOCly, she did finally manage to get rid of him; he spun his minor contribution to the defense of Mol'Rihan from the Iconians (during "Blood of Ancients") into a tale of epic heroism that earned him his own command. Sometimes Taela is a little sorry for whatever crew got stuck with him... but not that sorry.)
For my Reman special forces guy, I dispensed with the existing character entirely and used him to represent the NPC captain of the warbird that carries the PC and his squad around to whatever needs killed, broken, and/or extracted.
Mr. Spock: And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty.
-Star Trek: Is There in Truth No Beauty? (1968)
Yeah, and I'd love to see a story dealing with the psychological fallout to our characters from three straight in-game years of unceasing warfare, but that ain't happenin' neither.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
That's what fanfic and Foundry are for, I guess.