Planning is the key to a successful mission. Mission planning involves three distinct elements:
1. Plot outline
2. Collation of one-off resources & props
3. In-game direction
The best missions are those that are developed in-game with coherent input from all crew members—the holy grail of roleplay—where the mission plays out like a tightly edited movie with plot twists, heroic feats and a smart climax. Of course, even the best missions don't play quite like that. In Virtual Reality a player is controlling their avatar's movements, typing to speak, reading chat (and interpreting out-of-order contributions), monitoring panel instruments, screens and action, and communicating on private channels. They may also be referring to third party source material or controlling NPCs.
Yet, despite all that (and possibly because of it) a mission can and should be an adreneline-pumped adventure. This short essay is about how to improve the odds of that occuring through planning.
Writing a script
Missions can be self-contained adventures or they can drop as episodes into an ongoing narrative arc. In either case you need a storyline as a starting point. Much of the story detail will be added by crew playing out the mission, but a story has to start somewhere and have a skeleton to flesh out. The job of the script writer is to set the scene. Common opening gambits are "We have received a distress call from X..." or "Deep Space Telemetry has picked up an anomoly in the Y System". A premise like either of these sets up a situation at a distant location and lets you introduce a protagonist and a mission parameter. Most missions springboard from these features.
Bear in mind though that roleplay (and script writing) are essentially creative pursuits. As much as possible your script should avoid clichés and you should avoid copying plots from old Trek episodes where a playbook and end game have been established. A mission is a problem for the crew to solve collectively. The fun comes from devising and implementing your own strategies to deal with a novel situation.
A script writer should have a reasonable grasp of astronomy and knowledge of Trek canon. Starfleet operates in space. The Milky Way is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km (100,000 light years) across. That's pretty big and not the sort of crossing you can make in 4 minutes at Warp 5 (Warp 5 is 125x the speed of light so you will travel 0.586 light years in 24 hours at this speed). Here is a Warp Factor chart. Note that Alpha Centuri is our closest star, a mere 4.33 light years away, and there are at least 100,000 million stars in the Milky Way, current estimates are around 180,000 million.
The Sun does not lie near the center of our Galaxy. It lies about 8 kpc from the center on what is known as the Orion Arm. In Trek canon Earth marks the border between the Alpha and Beta Quadrants and is a class M planet, the third planet in the Sol star system in the Alpha Quadrant, at coordinates 1.23N 2.79W. There are from 300-million to upwards of 40-billion Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way. So, just because we have starfleet maps that show quadrants and sectors highlighting notable planets, that doesn't mean our galaxy has been explored and its secrets are known. There are infinite possibilities in space and lots of room for new discovery in our vast galaxy, even in the Alpha Quadrant.
Star Trek is near future science fiction. Science is an important descriptive word for the genre. We are not at Hogwarts or in a Middle Earth filled with wizards, elves and magic amulets (or "infinity stones"). The aliens we encounter are all somewhere on the technology spectrum. Avoid writing gods and supernatural beings into your scripts. Advanced technologies are fine but the laws of physics are a shared limitation of the Star Trek Universe.
STRUCTURE
Scriptwriting for RP (roleplay) is different to screenplay in one essential way: the ending is unknown. The RP script is a set-up and an outline. Its conclusion will be group written. Therefore, when you write a script, make sure there is at least one path, and preferably multiple paths, to solve the puzzle it poses. Your script resembles the first half of a screenplay in outline—the dialogue will be improvised and much of the action after your set-up sequences (engaging with an enemy or beaming down to a location) is unscripted.
With this in mind the first rule of writing for RP is YOU didn't write the story. The playing group wrote and produced the finished product. You supplied an idea and an outline. That's all. Ideas are cheap and seldom unique. No IP (intellectual property) applies to your script contribution. I've seen individuals claiming their IP was breached because other players changed details of their plot. That is absurd in a group-write situation. If you have these tendencies, go write a novel.
Your script should have a back story to add depth to the action. If you are creating a hostile alien, why are they hostile? What is it about the structure of their life cycle or their civilisation that makes them antagonistic to Federation species? That backstory already exists for canonical species, but you need to apply more thought to the development of new aliens. The same applies to creating benign alien species. When you write less advanced species, keep an eye on the Prime Directive and the rules that govern our interactions with them.
RESOURCES
Almost all plots require props and materials. Often props can be recycled with a lick of paint (e.g., the Navada Desert took a thrashing as the universal alien landscape of Star Trek TOS). If you have to make your props, or get them made by one of our 3D artists, make sure you have sufficient time for this job. "We play in 30 minutes and I need the interior of a Borg Cube," is not going to work. Complex sets need time to create, so plan your resource needs with a commensurate lead-in time.
The types of props you need to think about are:
• Actors to play alien avatars
•The construction of those avatars
• Creation of NPCs
• Images for the ship's screen
• Channel creation for NPC "voices"
• Locations to beam down to
• Special objects like contraband or weapons
• Player notes/instructions
The smart way to proceed with script writing is to work in advance so that we are not in a tailspin to get them ready for each mission. Have some up your sleeve pre-resourced to drop in at short notice.
DIRECTIONS
If your plot engages Science Officers and they need to report on a certain type of phenomena (let's say a Cepheid Variable Star), you will need to supply them with notes about this beast for them to report their findings. Ditto for plots centred on Intel, Engineering, Medical, Ops or Security. Creating these resources is part of the writing process.
Things can get tricky at this point. If you supply a notecard written as scripted speech, you are essentially screenwriting and taking away the player's agency. A good notecard will provide all the technical data the player needs while allowing them to format the data in their own words. Think about arranging it in essential bullet points and prefacing the card with a clear instruction for the player to report the information in their own words when asked for it, or to volunteer the information at a specific "event point" in the plot. Make your instructions as clear as possible and distribute the cards prior to mission so that the player(s) have a chance to absorb the information and ask questions.
If you are captaining or leading this mission, you will need to keep the plot on track. Private messaging is your best, but not your only tool. In the heat of a fast moving mission, players can misconstrue what has happened and throw curveballs at the plot that derail it, heading off in a direction that has not been prepared for (for example they might attempt to crashland your ship on a planet, but you don't have a spare planet up your sleeve). Your job at this stage is to deflect curveballs and keep the story viable... with one important caveat: there should be room within your plot for viable subplots and alternate endings. That is the nature of group-write.
If someone else is leading the mission (and therefore has to diffuse curve-balls), make sure they have all the information they need to oversee the storyline.
If you are keen to write stories, please talk to a senior player. We welcome all input and will help you where we are able.
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