More importantly, how come you’re not involved in an endless love/hate relationship with one of the other crew members? You need to find a chick that you can hit on between missions.

Star Trek Online’s character creator is built on the same ridiculously flexible customization engine as the one found in Champions Online, so those of you who like making exact in-game duplicates of your favorite actors are free to do so; similarly, those of you who like making really, really weird-looking aliens are also free to do that if you wish.

The innate skills of STO characters is tied to the species you choose; Humans, for example, get Leadership and something else by default. For the character I use in this story, my species is technically “alien”; I wanted four engineering abilities, and making a custom alien gets you whatever abilities you want, so I just made an alien that is, in every measurable aspect, Human.

I also opted to use the uniforms from the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series, rather than the new ones they designed for STO. I did this primarily so I’d be immediately recognizable as a Starfleet Engineer, rather than as some guy wearing mustard-stained black armor. (Or, in other words, hi Mom!)

There are some portions of the game I’m simply going to ignore in this series, like the Player-vs-Player mode and anything having to do with Bridge Officers. (Bridge officers are basically my bridge crew and my away team; they won’t really add anything to the story I tell here, but I reserve the right to completely change my mind later.) I’ll also ignore skill point allocation.

Hopefully my promotions will fall in natural places in the story, so I’m not given a promotion for helping a Bolian swamp cat get down from a tree (as opposed to, say, getting a promotion for saving a planet from attacking Bolian swamp cats). I’ll probably play my narrative as if that’s the case, regardless of whether it happens that way.