Posted by Vice Admiral Daniel Lerner (Procedures Guru / Personnel Director / Chief EGO) in Proposal: FCOMM Revision (Open to 9/22/20)

Posted by Sharon Miller in Proposal: FCOMM Revision (Open to 9/22/20)

Posted by Vice Admiral Robert Archer (Vice President) in Proposal: FCOMM Revision (Open to 9/22/20)

SNIP

Personally, I’m still not convinced that the suggested wording DOES clarify what does and doesn’t constitute a standard ship (and it certainly does nothing to make the case for the Viking alt-charter for me, but that’s a different debate that I’ve already conceded defeat on). The suggested wording still says “A theme must be approved by the relevant Fleet Commander”, so how does that in any way avoid “leave(ing) it open to interpretation by FComms” as Katy suggests not implementing this wording will do above?

• Sharon

I agree with Sharon for exactly the reasons Sharon gives.

To prevent this from going in a circle, I would suggest that the lack of agreement on whether or not the wording achieves its intended goal, means that it fails at achieving the intended goal. Sarah said she sees two ways out: this wording exactly as is, or a back-handed agreement that Standard Ships are not cookie cutter ships. The wording as is does not work, so that leaves the “back-handed agreement” as the only option, unless there is another alternative that hasn’t yet been identified.

What would help me to suggest an alternative would be if there was a more clear way to define the thing we want to achieve. This is all steeped in saying “well we don’t want Viking-type situation that is confusing for people, re: placing new members” except that presumes that the Viking-type situation is actually defined in a clear way, when if you actually drill down anyone’s perspective on it, it boils down to “I know it when I see it.”

An alternative that comes to mind is to try to do this the other way around: apply the same standard that was applied to the Viking to everything, consistently, all of the time. Which means, instead of a carve-out for “canon compatible themes” or whatever, everyone who deviates from canon in any way at all needs to be an alt. That way, if ships really are supposed to be “cookie cutter” then they would be. So, Olinski would become an alt-RPG, because it has fighters, and carrier spaceships are not canonical (and don’t make sense in any setting, but that’s a nerd rant).

I don’t actually like that alternative, but it would be clear and consistent if it was applied everywhere. If we don’t find that an option to consider then we should really rethink this whole “cookie cutter” idea, which doesn’t seem to make much sense upon any inspection (why do we have different specs if every ship is supposed to be the same?).

Joe

First off thank you everyone for your comments and thoughts on this. I had to give this thread some serious thought myself on how to better word this. Sadly my little roach brain is coming up blank at the moment. I really feel there could be a third solution but what form that might take is escaping me. Personally I would prefer we avoid a ‘know it when we see it’ approach as that wont serve any purpose but to bring us back to this point in the future if/when it happens. Conversely we dont want to dampen the creativity of ships with marines/fighters even if canonically there isn’t necessarily president for them.

Maybe the third option is a further discussion on what STF considers canon? What I mean is beyond the established list of obvious canon material we then make a ‘reasonable’ exception clause? Things then such as fighters, marines, etc would fall under but are more then ‘one shot’ things that happen in the shows/movies things which reasonably could be considered on going and happening elsewhere in universe? I don’t know if this is a solution or idea worth following its the only thing I could come up with that might contribute.

Thoughts?

Robert Archer

To Rob,

Maybe the third option is a further discussion on what STF considers canon? What I mean is beyond the established list of obvious canon material we then make a ‘reasonable’ exception clause?

My knee-jerk reaction is to question whether it would be possible to reach a consensus, or if we’d simply be setting ourselves up for never ending debate? But then taking a step back and looking at it more subjectively, I’ll admit I really like this idea in principle and would be happy to give it a go.

To Joe,

…I don’t actually like that alternative, but it would be clear and consistent if it was applied everywhere. If we don’t find that an option to consider then we should really rethink this whole “cookie cutter” idea, which doesn’t seem to make much sense upon any inspection (why do we have different specs if every ship is supposed to be the same?)

So at this point, I might as well just go all out and make a radical suggestion (hehe). What would be the downside if we got rid of the ‘alt’ designation entirely? I mean, recent Star Trek shows have seen canon moving further and further away from the initial setting established in TOS and continued in TNG, so surely it wouldn’t be a bad thing for us, as a club, to reflect that?

I am aware this could make things slightly more difficult for Personnel, when deciding where to place new players, and I honestly have no idea whether drowning people in a hundred different ship options when signing up would be considered too overwhelming? But I’d be interested in exploring alternative ways to handle this, if we did decide to just open this kind of creativity up to the club as a whole and not just the agreed upon ‘alts’.

Just another suggestion to think about.

• Sharon

Memo from the Personnel Department:

Please don’t do that. That would really suck at a couple levels personnel wise. :)

Sincerely
Personnel Department

I don’t think “it would make things suck for the Personnel Department” should be a primary reason toward not doing this, or really any idea in general. The Personnel Department should adapt to serve the ships we have and want to have, because roleplaying is the primary activity that we do here. We shouldn’t generally adapt the ships we have and want to have to serve the Personnel Department. That’s kinda backwards, at least in general.

What I would cite as a primary reason not to do it though, would be exactly the fact that Sharon cites, that the recent Star Trek shows are deviating further and further from the original sort of understanding of what Star Trek is. Discovery, Picard, and the Short Treks are worse than they otherwise would be for having done that and many fans feel that way; presumably the fans that we are like to convert into members of this club come from this group. Incidentally, Lower Decks is a fun show to watch in part because it pays much more respect to the sort of traditional Star Trek we’ve had for the 50 years before all of that, even as it makes fun of it.

People might disagree on how much they like those shows, but I think the evidence that people do not like them is very noticeable from the absence of any enthusiasm for a ship based around Discovery. If anything, there was more excitement around having a TOS ship despite the fact that Discovery deviates from TOS in very extreme ways, which is kind of an implicit (sometimes explicit) statement that people don’t want what to play in the universe that is currently offered on CBS All Access.

Plus, it’s pretty hard to do something that’s totally original and novel. The nice thing about having standard ships (regardless of whether or not those standard ships have a theme) is that they offer an experience that people already have a shared understanding of, and that makes them easy to plug into, which makes it easy to create stuff around that with strangers you don’t know at all or only barely know on the Internet.

Joe