Game Rules

Our Activity Plan

The Endeavour NX-06 is an active game which expects at least three posts per player per month and hopes to maintain between six to eight players for a range of posts between 10 and 12 per month. This will be a mixture of solo and joint posts, spread out over four missions per year. During Fleet Actions & Campaigns, the game’s activity may drop due to the GM & AGM’s involvement in these community events.

General Rules

  1. Enjoy being part of the Endeavour RPG – get to know and encourage one another with your creativity.
  2. We will not always agree on everything, but when we do disagree, it’s important to handle those disagreements respectfully. It’s also essential that it stops when a moderator (generally meaning the GM or AGM) asks for a discussion to stop.
  3. Bravo Fleet’s Non-Discrimination and Harassment policy applies to every interaction you have as a member of this group, whether it occurs directly on the Endeavour’s server or not, so please be courteous and respectful in your interactions with your fellow members.
  4. Membership on the game’s Discord server is required to participate.
  5. The GM reserves the right, as specified under the fleet’s RPG policy, to remove any player at any time, especially for conduct that does not align with these rules. 
  6. Players are free to create a reasonable number of non-player characters up to one rank below their character’s rank. Just discuss your ideas for this with the GM first.
  7. In our game, we write our posts in the third person in the past tense (unless you are writing a log entry, then make sure you use the blockquote feature). For more guidance, see below.
  8. Remember, we are set in a specific era of the Star Trek timeline, this is the mid-22nd century, so there are no holograms, quantum torpedoes, or PADDS! The Federation does not exist, and we do not use the ‘USS’ prefix on our ships. See below for more details.
  9. Have fun and participate not just with the Endeavour but with Bravo Fleet too!

Applications and Characters

  1. As we are an era-specific RPG, having many non-human crew will be unrealistic. If you want to write for an alien joining the Endeavour, we will only accept Vulcan,  Andorian, Tellarite and Denobulan (ST: ENT showed these to be the allies of Earth). The position your character holds will need to be worked on with the GM to make it realistic. 
    1. Non-canon/custom species characters will not be accepted aboard the Endeavour. 
  2. We will accept only characters with complete biographies aboard the Endeavour. If you are unsure what “complete” means, the Character Creation Program through Bravo Fleet’s Academy is heavily encouraged.
  3. The sample post is required for everyone and must be written with the character you are applying.
  4. Before applying, you should join our Discord and discuss your character idea with our GM and AGM.
  5. Please select a rank for your character that is appropriate for their age, the position you are speaking of, and the ranks of other characters on the game. We may request that you modify your character’s rank as part of the join process.

Content Guidelines

The Endeavour is rated 111 on the RPG Rating Scale, which is intended to be suited to members as young as 13, the minimum age to be a part of Bravo Fleet. This means that references to violence, cursing, and sex should be no more graphic than shown on Star Trek: Enterprise. 

Participation in our RPG

Everyone who joins is expected to follow our activity plan and if they are unable to keep up, they should speak to the GM as soon as they can. We encourage both solo and collaborative writing. It is vital though, for consistency and enjoyment, that everyone follows the guidelines further on.

How to write on Endeavour NX-06

Perspective and Point of View

Perspective and Point of View are closely related, both referring to the point from which a reader is viewing our stories. The Endeavour, as stated in the general rules, is written from a past perspective (as in the events that happen in a post have already happened by the time it’s published), with a limited omniscient point of view (as in from one character’s narration for each post).

  1. With the exception of content framed as a personal or official log (and obviously within dialogue), posts should be written from a past perspective, not a present perspective, i.e.,
    1.  “The Endeavour opened fire,” rather than “The Endeavour opens fire.” or “Captain Campbell had come aboard in the middle of the night” rather than “Captain Campbell has come aboard in the middle of the night.”
  2. Each post should be written from one point of view, generally the point of view of the first character introduced in a particular post. This is the most effortless style of writing for audiences to read. 
  3. This style is opposed to the types of posts where every character’s thoughts and feelings are indicated directly in the text. The POV character has no idea what the internal thoughts of other characters are, so it’s up to you as you’re replying to a tag to describe how a character is acting and how they appear from the perspective of the POV character. 
  4. Combining these two ideas, it’s bad form to spend time explaining where your character was before answering a tag. For example, if they are tagged on the bridge, it is assumed that they are already there, so there’s no need to describe their trip from wherever they were to the bridge, as this breaks the point of view and slows down the narrative.
  5. These rules are designed to make the stories we create easier for others to read; bouncing between 10 different characters’ thoughts is jarring and amateurish. 

Collaborative Writing

Also known as a joint post, we encourage our members on Endeavour to collaborate to enjoy the character interaction, as that’s one of the points of an RPG! 

If you want to write a joint post with a fellow player, please ask them before starting a post. Essential story posts created by the GM will sometimes not follow this rule.

Avoid situations where you write an entire conversation, leaving blanks for another author to 

respond to, as this is extremely rude and presupposes answers for the other person. In the same vein, avoid tagging someone into a post just to say “yes sir” or “no sir” when you could ask that person on Discord if it’s an appropriate response. 

After leaving or responding to a tag on the BFMS, please tag the person or people who need to respond on Discord in the tagging channel. Please do not use the @everyone tag unless everyone on the server is in a particular post.

Tagging

When ‘tagging’ someone, it’s best to use these guidelines to assist other members in being consistent across the game. Tagging is the practice of indicating that you are leaving room for someone else to respond. An open tag is open to anyone in the post, and it’s not obligatory for everyone in that post to reply to it. A closed tag is open only to a particular character or a limited group of characters and must be addressed before the post can be submitted.

Tags should be placed in square brackets, with either “Open” or “Everyone”, a character’s name/position title, or a selection of appropriate position titles for a response when the post involves more than two people. As a courtesy to your fellow authors, it’s good to put tags in bold so they are easy to spot in a longer document. For example,

[Tag Campbell]

[Everyone]

Language, Style, and Formatting

Proofreading is vital to ensure everyone understands our stories and makes them accessible to the broadest possible audience. It is highly recommended that you use Grammarly or a similar proofreading aid as you write. 

  1. Everyone will respect regional spelling variations. Still, a post should be consistent, so if it starts in UK English, make sure it continues throughout the post across various authors’ tags. 
  2. It is appropriate and expected that the primary author of a post or the GM would edit it for spelling, style, etc., before posting. Please do not be offended if a tag you submitted is cleaned up for spelling and grammar; the content of your response will not be changed, though.
  3. Avoid unnecessary line breaks, especially two or three between paragraphs. Some word processing programs will add this when pasting into the BFMS, so be sure to go back through and remove extra spaces. 
  4. Do not start your post with a location/time tag. Put that information directly into the post’s Location and Timeline boxes. The location information can be as simple as “Endeavour NX-06, in orbit of Earth”, and the timeline information should be the date (e.g., “Monday 16th May 2157”). 
  5.  Do not finish your post with a tag that states your character’s full name (including rank), position and the name of the ship. Your character is already ‘tagged’ by BFMS when you allocate them to your post.
  6. Repeated instances of excessive errors will result in a player being removed from the game.

Specific Era Golden Rules

Endeavour is set in the mid-22nd century (after Star Trek: Enterprise), so there are certain technologies, events and other things to remember that make our RPG different to 23rd/24th/25th century RPGs.

  1. Technology – technology in the 22nd century is far different and this is where many mistakes can be made.
    1. Engines – Earth ships are limited to warp 5, they have yet to break anything near to Warp 7.
    2. Weapons – It’s phase cannons and phase pistols, not phaser arrays or phasers. It’s photonic torpedoes, not photon torpedoes. 
    3. Defence – there are no shields, just hull plating that is polarised. 
    4. Communication – though the Universal Translator is helpful, it is still in its infancy, hence the need for a communication officer/linguist. 
    5. Computers – most of the ship’s systems use actual touch buttons; there aren’t many touch screens, and there are no advanced holographic displays. PADDs and Tricroders do not exist either. They are referred to as tablets and scanners, respectively. 
    6. Medicine – there are no dermal regenerators, instead, medical devices like the imaging chamber is used to help with treatment or the odd osmotic eel!
    7. Other tech – the ship’s transporter, though useful, is not always used, and shuttlepods (not shuttles) are the standard choice for transportation between a ship and a planet. There are no tractor emitters on Earth ships; instead, they have the grappler system.
  2. Organisations / Institutes / Political States – There is no Federation, and there’s no Starfleet Academy (yet). Earth’s government is referred to as the United Earth Commonwealth in BF Lore and is a member of the Coalition of Planets (the precursor alliance before the Federation). Starfleet Training Command (or STC) is where members of Starfleet get trained. Though Earth is at war with the Romulan Star Empire, no one has seen what a Romulan look like. 
  3. Other phrases to be aware of: Away team/teams are referred to as ‘landing party/parties’. There is no coloured alert system (e.g., red alert, yellow alert, blue alert); there is only ‘tactical alert’. 

Reading these BF Wiki Articles under the 22nd Century category will further advance your understanding.