OBorg:
and some bloke I met in the canteen called Bernard.
Truly the greatest threat that the Federation has ever faced. Along with the decision to refit Riker's ship with high back chairs and the writers of Picard Season Two.
Although now I'm just wondering how many Federation standoffs have been resolved by the Federation captain putting two pencils up his nose, his uniform briefs on his head and convincing his opponents he's crazy and they should do what he says before he starts lobbing his jettisoned warp core at them.
Nerdy jokes aside, I think the concept of an Academy game has potential but you've got to avoid a couple of potential pitfalls if it would work, because you run the risk of coming up against three issues:
- The first is going to be pleasing and scheduling different player types against one another. For some people, an Academy game is all about hijinks and pranks, for others it's about steamy dorm romances and for others it's about adventures off campus and uncovering mysteries, and that's before you add in the fans who want to play specific character archetypes and races and really lean into the canon.
As such, you probably need to be clear about what's happening when because it's very hard to schedule that sort of a game effectively if you've got some players finishing the school day and clocking off for some Vulcan meditation, while others are farring their ponns, and others are neck deep in uncovering a changeling cell in the depths of the Academy.
- The second is going to be about pacing more generally, because as Siran points out, a single day could take 6 months IRL, and while some players will have patience, others will potentially want to be out in the stars sooner rather than later and having more of the classic Trek experiences of strange new worlds, new civilisations, and bridges with consoles which go boom about 30 minutes into any given episode to show it's the denoumont. And that can cause some conflict if you're not careful.
- The third is more specific to a Trek game, because you also need to ask yourself how much drama you're going to get in a Trek game if you're leaning heavily into a Rodenberry-flavour utopian future where everyone is largely pulling from the same direction to graduate - it's not to say that you aren't going to get drama, but there's maybe a question about both how much internal conflict you're going to see which feels natural, and indeed how many plot threads you can pull out from the Academy outside of the 'Wes and not-Parris' flying accident' and the 'there's an elite group of cadets being used to false flag earth' from DS9. And that's before you ask whether it's going to be PG rated or ADULT?
One thing I did try a few years ago was effectively having a small team of recent graduates/final year students being allocated to a small, dead end base on the quiet edge of Federation space and given fairly hum-drum roles as basically customs agents as a punishment for various issues at the Academy (so poor scores, political bias etc.), and where a minor refugee issue quicly spiralled and they had to prove themselves.
That approach or something similar would potentially give you a lot of what you want and limit the amount of work you have to do - the scope is a bit more manageable than 'Earth is in peril' and you can still have the different dynamics in play (the base hijinks, some romance, some conspiracy and some action) and you're both on the edge of Federation space but also having that 'young people finding their way' dynamic which can be good fun.