What’s a PNJ? Non-Player-Character? (I don’t know, personne-non-joueur or something? My french is the worst).
You seem to have five player characters. It can be reasonable to reserve the Captain (authority) and the science officer (plot exposition) to the DM, making them NPC/non-player-characters. But in these cases, I’d say make them Major NPC instead of full player models. The players should be the heroes.
Every character that you do not want to reserve exclusively for the GM should be a supporting character. You got five players and a scale 5 ship – you can have up to five different supporting characters showing up in the adventure. Thus, every player can, if they want, choose to have a scene with a supporting character in every adventure.
Corrected NPC thanks.
The captain and th science officer were made with PC rules because if somebody becomes game master I will play the Science officer. But treat them a bit as secondary actors. They aren’t playable by players. Just created with same rules.
Anyway, my rule of thumb is: Only characters that are GM-exclusive should be NPC/PNJ (hey, don’t let me die stupid and correct my assumption at least in spelling!).
I tend to see the rest of the ship’s crew completely as possible Supporting Characters. The ship (and its crew) belong to the players, in my opinion.
I agree that you should only make full NPCs for characters that are 100% GM control only. This will partly depend on the group and how much they want to use those other characters (most of mine would rather just have their main character do the thing even if they aren’t great at it).
That said, I also always have a PC captain, and having NPCs around tends to give that player someone to order around without feeling like they’re controlling another player.
I always have a PC captain as well. If my group’s captain were an NPC (i.e. 100% GM controlled), I think my players would feel like it was a safety net, to stop them from doing something really stupid. Also, a lot of my games are designed to draw out opposing views from the players, with the captain having to make the final decision, so having them as an NPC wouldn’t really work from that perspective.
The only crew member who is a full NPC is their XO. My players have varying levels of familiarity with Star Trek, so when we tried out STA by running a one-shot, they forgot to do a lot of the basic things that you would expect a Starfleet officer to do (e.g. scanning the area when something clearly isn’t right). Having an NPC XO is a nice way of being able to offer in-game suggestions to the players, to make sure they aren’t disadvantaged by not having watched Star Trek in a while. That being said, my players haven’t needed the XO to advise them on anything since we started our full campaign, so I might convert him into a supporting character, which is how we handle the rest of the crew.
Off topic for the post, but purely because I’ve had this exact situation myself- I had the XO there as support for the new CO until their long term XO completed some training.
I found it a really useful model for the same reasons, and then had him go off to take up his own long term post which also gave a nice parting of ways story.
For season 1, I plan on having the CO be an NPC. The reason I am doing this is to allow time for my group to get used to the rules and just how different this is from D&D. The end of season 1 or the start of season 2 will see the use of a new ship. At this time, the characters will either transfer over, or the players can start new characters that have been on the ship for some time. This is where I will let one of the players become CO if they choose.
Season 1 I am planning on runing the LC missions aboard the USS Farragut. Not sure how the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide will be, so I will either use that, or homebrew something.
I’m running a five-ship task force campaign using Captain’s Log solo rules and I have NPC Bridge crew for three of those ships.
Two of the ships are player ships.
On one ship I have a major NPC XO and major NPC engineer because no one wanted to play those roles and the captain wanted two characters that he could absolutely trust.
I also have an NPC doctor, that is replacing a player that left.
Many many minor NPC crewmen…a few notable NPC Chiefs and Petty officers as well as some Ensigns and lieutenants.
I pre designed a bunch of supporting characters about two per division all around the ship to save time if they need something to happen in medical or engineering or on the hanger deck.
I also designed some supervising characters like the chief of security, the operations officer. All these are lieutenant and above.
The other ship the players want to generate their own supporting and supervising characters.
have a few major NPCs about one per Division and then some notable NPCs usually Junior officers and some minor NPC crewman etc.
I have a question about some of the suggestions here of using supporting characters for missing senior officers. I was just reading the core book and found this paragraph puzzling:
“Where chain of command becomes significant, Supporting Characters are not senior staff, and do not have authority over the Main Characters”
I understand this is so the story centers on the main characters, but unless I restrict what ranks main characters can have, doesn’t this mean I can only really use ensigns or non-commissioned officers as supporting characters?
First of all: You use whatever you want for Supporting Characters in the way you want, full stop. It’s your (group’s) game and yours alone!
That being said: Supporting Characters got some love in several publications and the rules regarding supporting characters are now a lot more flexible than when the game originally released.
Originally, in the Core Rules, supporting characters were intended to carry ranks below lieutenant commander (cf. p. 134 of the Core Rules: “should never have a rank above lieutenant”). Yet, the whole chain of command thing is not (completely) rank-related. It is very common in modern military that a lower-ranking person can have command authority over a higher-ranking person if said lower-ranking person is acting in a specific function. The assumed default in STA is that main characters are senior personnell, heads of departments etc.
The intention of the rule you quoted is to keep supporting characters the stand-ins that are occasionally needed for a mission where it makes no sense a certain main character participates. In these cases these stand-ins should not get too much spotlight and that’s why they’re, rules as written, should not have command authority over main characters. Especially the base game was written with characters as senior/bridge officers in mind which is why the rule is formulated in that way.
To quote from the Player’s Guide (p. 202):
See p. 202 of the Player’s Guide on how to handle additional characters that don’t fit in this description.
Last, but not least, the Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide introduced rules for “Supervising Characters”, p. 79–81. There are optional rules that address rank and chain of command on p. 81 of the LD Campaign Guide.
(Edit: Edited a citation of a supplement to reference the correct book.)
Thank you so much for the thoughtful response. I will definitely take a look at the Player’s Guide and Lower Decks manuals. Although I got a lot of the STA books, I am just starting to really dive into them in preparation for my first campaign. Cheers!
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