Takmari

From RPGnet
Jump to: navigation, search

Name: Takmari

Species: Risian (completely human appearance except for a gold dot on their forehead)

Environment: Homeworld (Risa)

Upbringing: Artistic and Creative (Accepted)

Rank: Lt. Commander (can drop this to Lieutenant to be more in line with a smaller ship)

Assignment: Ship's Counselor

Traits: Risian

Base Stress: 8

Attributes: Control 9, Daring 7, Fitness 7, Insight 12, Presence 11, Reason 10

Disciplines: Command 4, Conn 1, Security 1, Engineering 1, Science 4, Medicine 5

Focuses: Persuasion, Psychology, Xenoanthropology, Xenobiology, Composure, Diplomacy

Values:

(Upbringing) Can't We All Just Get Along?

(Academy) First, Do No Harm

(Beginning Career) Honesty Is The Best Policy

(Late Career) There's Always A Better Way Forward

Talents:

Open and Insightful: Risian open, and often frank, discussion of problems and personal opinion enables conversation and understanding when working in a team. Whenever a Risian assists another character using Insight or Reason they may re-roll a single d20 in their dice pool. In addition, if the lead character succeeds in the Task using Insight or Reason, they gain 1 bonus Momentum.

Advisor: Whenever you assist another character using your Command Discipline, the character being assisted may re-roll one d20.

Insightful Guidance: Whenever you Assist a character, who is in a Social Conflict, using your knowledge of psychology or emotional states, that character is considered to have an Advantage in addition to the normal benefits provided by your Assist.

Psychoanalyst: When you use the Medicine Discipline during a Social Conflict you may increase the Complication range of your Task by a number of steps. For each step you may ask a single question as if you’d spent Momentum on Obtain Information. Any Complications generated from this Task results in the individual you are interacting with becoming offended or upset with being “analyzed.”

Ship's Counselor: After succeeding at a Task to determine the emotional state or intent of another living creature, the ship's counselor gains one bonus Momentum, which may only be used on the Obtain Information Momentum Spend.

Equipment:

Uniform

Communicator

Tricorder

Phaser-2: Damage 7. Charge, Size 1H

Species/Environment/Upbringing:

Takmari was born and raised on Risa, his species' homeworld, famed throughout the Federation as a popular resort destination. During his formative years he absorbed their distinctively open and understanding perspective about the world. At times, he observed that visitors to Risa didn't always display the same level of emotional intelligence that many Risians had (occasional badly-behaved tourists), and this puzzled him. He started looking into the reasons behind how different peoples behaved, and why they were the way they were. Later on, Takmari became a skilled playwright/director. This improved his ability to get along with others, his insight into their natures, and his ability to coordinate the actors' various efforts.

Starfleet Academy:

Takmari wanted to help people get along better. Not just by drawing them together through the shared fiction of his plays, but in an even more direct way. And things were already pretty good on Risa in that regard. If he truly wanted to help improve cross-species interactions, then he'd have to do it off-world. So he applied to Starfleet Academy, and was accepted. He chose the Science track, with a major in Medicine, focusing on counseling. The rigorous academic climate honed his mind; the medical training taught him the ethics of medicine and the anatomy & physiology of non-Risians; and the psychology focus improved his insight into others' minds and cultures, and how best to work with them.

Career:

It's only after graduating as a lieutenant junior grade, and being assigned to a ship for the first time, that Takmari could begin putting his career focus into action. Only indirectly at first, however: without being highly ranked or experienced enough to be a true ship's counselor, his efforts in this regard were more often informal, and shoehorned in as a tangential element of whatever his official assigned duties were. He assisted medical staff in sickbay, but with a greater emphasis on bedside manner, and the patients' mental health, than most full-time nurses. He was put in charge of on-boarding and orienting new crew members. He handled HR complaints, and helped arrange morale-boosting activities, on behalf of the ship's counselor. He reviewed crew personnel files and duty reports on behalf of the ship's counselor, as a second pair of eyes looking for things of psychological interest or concern that should be brought to the counselor's attention. Overall, he found that being tactfully open and forthright with others produced the best results in the long run.

Career Event: Death Of A Friend

Being part of a starship's crew can be dangerous. Be it a result of hostile action, or simply the inherent dangers of space exploration, one or more of Takmari's friends and fellow crew members died on an important mission. Takmari did more than just mourn personally. He led a series of group therapy sessions afterwards, in order to help the other crew members process their own grief, in addition to helping himself. The sharing of deeply personal feelings within the context of a safe space gave him more insight into the inner lives of others, and even helped him manage his own feelings in general to a greater degree.

Career Event: First Contact

Takmari was eventually promoted, and due to his interpersonal skills, was selected to be a crew member on a ship bound for the outer reaches of Federation space, responsible for duties of exploration and first contact. He played a key advisory role in the captain's efforts to establish peaceful relations with an important newly-encountered species. This assignment, by chance, happened to keep him largely out of combat during the majority of the Dominion War . . . although the war effort did affect the nature and quality of the ship's duties. The ship took a larger role in providing additional security for that sector of space than it might have otherwise (more patrol and escort duties), as well as developing an unspoken bias toward seeking out new civilizations for first contact that had the potential to become new allies in their fight against the Dominion.

Present Day

Having a proven counseling record, as well as previous experience on missions of exploration, Takmari felt qualified to accept the promotion to full ship's counselor on his new ship, and was looking forward to the mission into the Shackleton Expanse. His efforts in the past have led him to be very optimistic about life in general, despite recent historical events, and about the difference that he and the rest of the crew can make in others' lives.

To prepare for the greater responsibility, he made sure his understanding of xenocultural theory was up-to-date, and that he was ready to comport himself with the proper decorum that a higher-ranking officer should possess. While ensuring that morale-boosting activities occur is an important element in the crew's overall mental health, Takmari is wary of not being taken seriously as a Risian, since Risa has a reputation for being a "party planet". Therefore, when he does instigate morale-boosting events, he'll try to make it occur as a result of someone else taking the lead and sharing their passions with others, rather than doing it himself ("Oh, you like books/dancing/poker? You should start a book club/talent show/poker night! I'm happy to help you set it all up."). Failing that, he'll instead delegate organizing it to a junior crew member, and then give that crew member all of the credit for pulling off the event. ("Happy First Contact Day, everyone! And it's all thanks to the efforts of Ensign X, here. Take a bow, Ensign!"). Takmari will try to voraciously keep updated on local news, as well as the distant news from all the crew members' home systems, in order to stay aware of any outside factors that might influence individual crew members' morale or mental well-being.

Additionally, perhaps unlike how a stereotypical Risian would be perceived to act, Takmari is planning to remain celibate for the duration of the mission. Two reasons for this. First, he's shy of crew members joking about what kind of "therapy" a Risian has to offer, or that he's not "keeping his Horga'hn to himself". And second, becoming romantically involved with anyone would preclude him from offering that person clinically detached, ethically unambigous counseling. Since there's no telling which members of the crew will need his help the most in that regard, in the long years to come, the safest course of action is to just stay warm-but-professional with everyone.