Your character doesn’t need trauma to be interesting.
Somewhere along the way, some roleplayers seem to have collectively decided that an interesting character needs something deeply wrong with them. You know the types. The alcoholic security officer. The captain haunted by the mission that went catastrophically wrong. The Vulcan secretly losing control of their emotions. The doctor who couldn’t save someone they loved. The disgraced officer looking for redemption. The engineer hiding a terrible secret.
And before anyone starts digging through old episodes of Continuing Conversations to call me out, I’ll save you the trouble. I’ve talked extensively on the podcast about Trauma and Scars and how useful they can be in creating interesting characters. I’ve encouraged players to think about the experiences that wounded their characters, changed them, or left behind emotional scar tissue they still carry years later. I still believe all of that. Trauma can give a character history and vulnerability. It can complicate relationships and explain why someone behaves the way they do.
But it can also be overdone.
So, I reserve my right as a sentient being to change my mind—or at least modify my position a little. Because lately I’ve started wondering if we’ve gotten so good at giving our characters Trauma and Scars that we’ve forgotten how to make someone interesting without them. How many Starfleet officers can have terrible childhoods, dead spouses, catastrophic missions, estranged families, personal betrayals and crippling guilt before somebody at Starfleet Medical finally asks, “Good lord, how did these people pass their psychological evaluations?”
I’m not suggesting we abandon Trauma and Scars. I’m suggesting we leave some room for the alternative. There should be a place at the table for a Starfleet officer who isn’t running from something. Maybe their parents were wonderful. Maybe they loved their years at the Academy. Maybe they have friends they’ve known for decades. Maybe the defining moment of their youth wasn’t watching somebody die but looking through a telescope and realizing they wanted to see what was out there.
And maybe they believe in the Federation because, from their experience, it’s actually something worth believing in.
That kind of character can be interesting too.
Competence Isn’t Boring
One of the things I love about Star Trek is watching ridiculously competent people do their jobs.
Data notices the detail everyone else missed. Uhura figures out the language. O’Brien (most important character ever) looks at a piece of technology built by a civilization he’s never encountered and somehow finds the one access panel that will allow him to make it compatible with a Cardassian station.
There’s something deeply satisfying about watching people who are really good at what they do.
Starfleet officers should be good at what they do. These are supposed to be some of the finest explorers, scientists, engineers, diplomats, physicians and leaders produced by hundreds of Federation worlds. They attend an incredibly demanding Academy, receive years of specialized training, and then get sent into space representing the Federation.
Yet I’ve noticed that some players may create someone who is exceptionally capable, but they often feel the need to immediately balance it with something terrible. “I don’t want them to be too perfect.” So the brilliant scientist is arrogant. The doctor is emotionally unavailable. The transporter chief hates transporters because his mother was once accidentally beamed into a cornstalk.
Ouch. That last one was a little corny.
But why are we so suspicious of a character who is simply a good person who is good at things? (Probably the same reason some jerks think that talented writers are actually AI chatbots nowadays.)
Star Trek has always suggested that humanity’s progress wasn’t limited to better technology. People got better too. Not perfect, certainly, but better.
Starfleet Academy Should Matter
Think about what it actually means to wear that uniform. Your character didn’t answer a Craigslist ad. They got into Starfleet Academy. They studied science and history. They learned diplomacy, survival skills, ethics and Federation law. They trained alongside people from different planets and cultures. They were evaluated psychologically. They learned what to do when the bulkhead explodes, gravity disappears, somebody turns into an amphibian, and the computer announces that the warp core is going to breach in three minutes.
Then somebody gave them access to antimatter.
Clearly, Starfleet trusts this person quite a bit. Maybe we should too.
Instead of asking what’s wrong with your character, I think there’s a much more interesting question: What situation would make everything right about your character difficult?
Make your captain compassionate, then introduce someone whose suffering can only be stopped by violating the Prime Directive. Give your security officer a profound commitment to protecting life, then make them decide whether killing one person will save a thousand. Make your doctor absolutely devoted to medicine and introduce a patient who refuses treatment.
The character doesn’t need to be broken. The situation can do that work for you.
Stop Making Everyone Captain Sisko
I love Benjamin Sisko. That’s precisely why I don’t need every Starfleet captain to become him.
Sisko’s compromises work because they’re compromises. “In the Pale Moonlight” matters because we understand the principles he’s violating. We know what a Starfleet officer is supposed to believe, and we watch Sisko cross those lines one by one because he believes the alternative is worse. If your captain begins the campaign cynical, traumatized, morally compromised and willing to break regulations whenever the situation calls for it, what exactly are we going to test?
Sometimes I think we’ve become so enamored with morally gray characters that we’ve forgotten how difficult it can be to play an idealist in an imperfect universe.
Create a captain who genuinely believes in the Federation. Don’t make them naïve. Let them understand perfectly well that the Federation has failed before and that Starfleet sometimes gets things wrong. Let them know that some admirals are corrupt, that diplomacy sometimes fails and that good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes. Then let them believe in the Federation anyway.
Now put that belief under pressure.
To me, that can be far more interesting than starting with someone who stopped believing years ago.
Your Character Can Have a Happy Childhood
Here’s something radical for your next character: their parents can be alive.
They can even be nice.
Maybe they call occasionally. Maybe your character enjoyed growing up. Maybe they have a healthy relationship with their siblings and still talk to their Academy roommate. Maybe they joined Starfleet because they looked up at the stars as a kid and thought exploring them sounded like the greatest job imaginable.
Nobody has to die. Nobody has to betray them. Nobody has to disappear into a temporal anomaly. Nobody has to secretly be a Romulan.
(In fact, some other characters (PC and NPC alike) might become envious of their seemingly perfect childhood. That can make for interesting scenes.)
None of the above means the character has to be boring. Interesting people aren’t exclusively products of suffering. They’re also products of the choices they make, and Star Trek Adventures gives us a wonderful tool for exploring those choices: Values.
Take a character with the Value “No Life Is Expendable.” That’s heroic. It’s optimistic. It’s wonderfully Starfleet. Now put 400 colonists on one side of a force field and one infected crew member on the other. Suddenly those four words aren’t just something written on the character sheet. They’re the episode.
Or give your captain the Value “The Truth Must Always Be Told.” Then hand them evidence that revealing the truth will collapse a planetary government and probably ignite a civil war. Do they still believe it?
That’s the character development I want to see. I’m less interested in discovering what terrible thing happened to your character twenty years ago than discovering what they’re going to do right now.
Optimism Isn’t Easy
Star Trek’s optimism sometimes gets mistaken for simplicity. The Federation is good. Starfleet officers are enlightened. Humanity has overcome many of its old prejudices. Therefore everybody must be boring.
I don’t buy that.
Optimism isn’t the absence of conflict. Sometimes optimism means walking into a situation knowing perfectly well that trust can be betrayed, mercy can be exploited and diplomacy can fail, and choosing those things anyway.
It’s easy to play the cynical captain who assumes every diplomat is lying. Try playing the captain who knows the diplomat might be lying and chooses to begin with trust anyway. It’s easy to play the security officer who reaches for the phaser at the first sign of trouble. Try playing the officer who keeps it holstered while everyone else at the table is yelling, “SHOOT HIM!”
There’s risk in that. Maybe you shouldn’t trust them. Maybe your mercy will come back to haunt you. Maybe the person whose life you spared will use the opportunity to hurt someone else. Suddenly optimism isn’t the safe choice at all.
It’s an act of courage.
And that’s something I think we could explore more often in our Star Trek games.
Maybe Your Character Doesn’t Need Fixing
So, here’s what I’m going to suggest the next time you sit down to create a Star Trek Adventures character. Don’t immediately ask what trauma shaped them. You can always get there later if that’s the character you want to play. Instead, start with what they believe.
What are they really good at? Why did they join Starfleet? What do they love about serving aboard a starship? What kind of future do they think the Federation is building? Who do they trust? Who do they love? What line are they absolutely convinced they would never cross?
Then give that character to your gamemaster.
Because now the GM doesn’t need to dig through the character’s past looking for the horrible thing that will come back to haunt them. The GM has something much more dangerous to play with: everything your character believes about themselves and the universe. And then the GM can design games that challenges those beliefs.
Trauma and Scars still have their place. I’ll probably keep talking about them on the podcast, and I’ll certainly keep creating characters who have them. But I’m going to try to remember that pain isn’t the only thing capable of making a fictional person interesting.
Sometimes they’re competent. Sometimes they’re compassionate. Sometimes they’re principled. Sometimes they genuinely believe that tomorrow can be better than today.
That’s pretty much Star Trek. And maybe that’s enough.