When you’re a GM the first thing you need is a story, it’s hard to run a sim if you have no plot. There is no hard, fast rule on where to get story ideas, inspiration is as unique as each GM, and can be found everywhere. Television, books, movies, magazines, even the news can provide story ideas, look around, your next story could be hidden anywhere.
In Science Fiction as in any genre the best of stories revolve around the characters themselves. It’s all too easy to have the plot driven by the technology and Trek has its unfortunate fill of those types of stories. But if you look at some of the best Star Trek episodes, you’ll find that the technology frames the problem rather than being it.
The plot is only limited by your imagination. However, there are a few guidelines to follow to make sure the crew loves the story as much as you do.
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Make sure the plot is big enough to keep everyone busy. If it’s not, you may have to add a secondary storyline to involve those left out.
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Avoid scenarios used to death in STF, as well as plots your ship has seen before. Check with the CO of the ship to which you’re assigned, ask him if he has preferences, make sure that the battle sim you have planned isn’t going to be the third one in a row the ship’s been dealt.
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Familiarize yourself with your ship’s class. A wonderful sim exploring the exobiology of a newly-discovered planet won’t work well on a Combat Oriented ship. Just as sending a McCoy-Class Medical ship into battle is suicide. Determine a ship’s capabilities ahead of time, too, so you don’t have a ship doing a saucer separation that would normally only be possible if it were blown in two.
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Make sure your plot is plausible. Sure, it’d be really cool if the ship crash-landed, but unless the ship is capable of suborbital flight, don’t expect it to fly again. Likewise you can’t do anything that contradicts canon.
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Finally, avoid rehashing Trek episodes and overusing Trek characters and ships. STF has its own ships. Rely on them. Keep appearances by Trek characters to cameos.
Now, here are a couple of questions to keep in mind. They should give you a springboard for developing your concept a bit more. What’s the style/tone of the story you’re trying to establish? What’s the central conflict?
That’s really the crux of the whole thing. What you have to do to have a successful mission is:
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Set up a problem for the crew to overcome. Maybe they have to solve a mystery. Maybe they have to blow things up. Maybe they have to rescue someone. The point is, drama occurs only when there’s a problem to overcome.
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The crew has to be invested in solving it. You can’t just put a Rubik’s Cube into space and expect the crew to solve it. Something important has to be at stake, something that the characters on the ship will care about and something the PLAYERS will care about.
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There has to be some sort of “reward” or pay off for when the players finish the sim. I don’t mean you should pass out candy at the end of the sim; though sometimes the goal is in and of itself the reward. Rewards can be story or character based, google ‘journey of the hero’ which is a literary device used to detail how heroic characters grow and evolve over a story.