Sunday 6 July 2014

New Developments - TSN RP Community (OOC)

It has been a while since I last posted. I had a couple of requests I think, so since I have some spare time I thought I might post an update on all the developments that have been happening so far, and some of my ideas for the future. These are all on the TSN RP Community.  I'll make another post about the TSN Sandbox.

The TSN RP Community is still growing, with new people applying weekly. It seems the recently (this week and last week) during the duty shift numbers have dropped a little to about 25-30 officers attending, but I am putting this down to the holiday season starting. Hopefully it will pick back up again, but even if it doesn't,  I intend to keep going! There is a core of regular officers, and even if it were just these turning up, the quality of play would still be high and worth keeping the community alive for. Besides, there was a similar trend last year I believe, and the community came back stronger.

In terms of new developments, there is a growing team of Game Masters, who have trained on the TSN Sandbox and are running missions and simulations regularly. Over the past month or so, the campaign team, run by a couple of officers, have been designing and running an extended war campaign. They have developed a pretty good storyline, and have added in news announcements that we listen to in the mess hall, emergency actions like having to evacutate the base suddenly and some really excellent scenarios. I want to continue to grow the team of those trained as Game Masters, and have started a thread on the TSN website in the GM forums for missions to be posted. These should give a good set of stock missions that could be picked up and run at relatively short notice.

I am not sure if last time I posted we had the website up and running. www.terranstellarnavy.info is now becoming more established.  We have a number of different  forums on the site for communications between officers, and all applications and communications are handled through there. There is still a lot of information on the wiki that needs transferring over, but during the summer months when I have more time, I want to do a little work on it. The site itself was set up by one of the senior officers, and I will have to make sure they show me the ropes before I start adding too mich in, just to make sure I am doing it right. 

I have been talking over with the command staff bringing back the TSN Corps. The initial idea didn't really take off, and the corps that did get started has stalled it would seem. My idea therefore is to relaunch them with a similar purpose, but less of them. There would be three corps - the Tactical corps, for helm and weapons specialists, the Communications and Intelligence corp, for science and comms officers and the Engineering corps for engineers. I want to hand the responsibility of coming up with role specific commendations to the officers in those corps. They would be required to design the commendation,  decide on specific criteria and then, after the commendation has been approved by the command staff, they would be able to recommend people to receive them. All final decisions would be made by command staff to make sure what is created is done to a high standard, and handing them out is managed. Such awards would be ones that are challenging to earn, and not handed out at the drop of a hat. The aim would be to make earning them all the more significant.

I have not finalised all the details for the new corps yet. I want to create something to track officers who join them, and make it clear how they are to be managed and run. Last time I just offered them out and left them open to be run however officers wanted, and I think that was one factor which caused them to stall. This time, command officers will be more involved, and I want corps to become part of the duty shift... perhaps a corps meeting on a monthly basis at the start, or a time where members of the corps must plan a training mission with  a particular focus in which certain skills are taught. 

And I think that is it. There is probably a lot I have missed out. I will try to post more often with other developments - I am going to use a separate post to talk about the TSN Sandbox mission script later on.