Missions, Assignments, & Events

Each month, the ships within a particular sector (or other area of operations) receive and carry out missions and assignments from higher authority, and deal with events that they may be drawn into. For the purposes of these rules, the following distinctions are explained:

Mission

A prioritized objective to which one or more ships (or other units) are given to accomplish.

Assignment

A tasking that tends to be more open-ended than a specific mission (such as patrolling low-threat areas), and generally represents a lower priority to the overall authority

Events

An occurrence or encounter that may or may not have been anticipated in a given mission or assignment, but one in which the ship must resolve.

Missions represent taskings from higher authority that have associated prioritization and immediacy, while assignments are generally given to starships when there is no pressing mission objective for that ship. Assignments often incorporate low-priority and/or no specific deadline goals for the immediate authority within the sector, and are generally considered to be Simple or Routine in complexity (see below). Events, however, tend to be unplanned and represent occurrences or encounters with which an individual ship (or maybe formation) must deal before completing the overall mission/assignment. (Most episodes in the Star Trek canon represent Events that occur to the heroes.)

Complexity

An Event is defined as an incident that could conceivably result in the ship's destruction, if not successfully completed. Generally, these Events are not defined any further than this, though they can be. Events are described as one of five levels of complexity:

• Simple
• Routine
• Challenging
• Difficult
• Extreme

Events have two potential Ship Mission skill rolls to be made, in order to be resolved. The first is the Mission Task roll and a successful roll here ends the mission on a completely positive note (though Skill points can be awarded for missions that are rated as Challenging or higher). If a Mission Task roll fails, then a Mission Failure has occurred and damage has been potentially received. After the initial damage rolls are made, a second Ship Mission skill roll is made, to see how the commanding officer and crew handled the sudden and unexpected damage. If they pass, they handled the emergency well, and no further damage is taken; however, if they fail this second roll, their lack of preparedness has resulted in additional damage to the ship.