Salutations, my curious congregation. I've finally gotten my spouse to watch Star Trek with me, and it turns out all it took was starting him on The Next Generation rather than the Original Series. Anyway, we're on Season 4 and today (writing this very early in the morning on October 26th but this entry won't go up until much later) saw Episode 14, "Clues". So we're going to talk about that.
TWs: This one is going to heavily discuss player agency so if you're seeing those words and starting to break into hives because how dare we consent to things, go crawl back in your hole. We don't want you here. How did you even find this place? Also spoilers for an episode of a TV show that aired February 11th in 1991.
Okay so, my spouse and I, one of our favorite things to do when we're watching Star Trek is mine the storylines for things we can do to our players. If you've been here a while, you know we're both DMs so this isn't an unusual practice for us.
Today, one of the Star Trek episodes we watched was S4:E14, "Clues", and when it was over the first thing out of Josh's mouth was "You could never run this as a D&D session."
Of course, my first response to a statement like that is always to kneejerk and try to find a way to do it, but actually, he's right. Any amount of pre-discussion would ruin the twist and doing it without any would be a huge mistake.
So what was this episode about, you might be asking?
Well, the crew of the Enterprise is convinced they lost 30 seconds going through a wormhole except for the fact that there's a whole lot of evidence that it was longer than that. There are several bits of things that just don't add up, and suggest it's actually been a whole day.
And only Data knows what's going on, but he's not telling, and because it's Data, who isn't prone to lying, everyone on the Enterprise is like "???".
Well, it turns out this extreme isolationist species called the Praxans were cheesed off because the Enterprise found out they existed and wanted to destroy them for it so Picard is like 'no it's fine just erase our memories and we won't tell anyone' and then orders Data never to speak of it again. But of course they managed to remember it anyway, and the Praxans are like 'okay time to die' and Picard is like 'no wait, let's try it again, we left too much evidence and humans just pry into everything'.
They survive so presumably it worked that time.
Anyway, the reason why Josh was so convinced you can't run that as a tabletop is that you basically have to convert all of the PCs to NPCs for a major moment in the set up for the adventure. None of that could have happened if the PCs hadn't made the decision to let these aliens mind wipe them in the first place.
So this isn't an issue of mechanics or dice rolling, it's a problem with player agency. And even as I write this I'm sure there's going to be someone whose like 'my group would be fine with it' which is totally okay! But it would also be totally okay if they weren't. Games like this are about getting to make choices.
But it is a pity because that's the sort of thing where putting together what happened would actually be pretty entertaining.
I think if I were going to try to run it what I'd do is, when they start putting together what happened, give the players a choice as to why they decided to go with this, or how it happened anyway. But even then the reveal just doesn't hit right.
This is going to be one of those things I have to really sit and think about. But for the moment I thought you might enjoy those preliminary thoughts. I'll be back with the 'Aha' moment if it comes.
Fortune Favors,
Robin the Red
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