@Iron Wolf
I feel like you're not quite...
seeing the issue people have. I'm going to try to explain.
See, the thing is, most of us believe we're playing a simulationist game in which the consequences of an action are supposed to be at least plausibly correlated with the way we'd expect people to behave. From that perspective, if we sent 20 explorers and 20 of the relatively combat-heavy Rennies to Ittick-ka space, and the Ittick-ka react like they're being invaded,
that is not a gotcha.
It's like, we
know the Ittick-ka are isolationist and xenophobic, we
know they expect alien powers to attack and betray them over and over. We
know they have an ideological opposition to trusting us and wish they could just conquer the universe so that they could finally be safe. We know all this because you told us so.
And knowing all this, we can see how the Ittick-ka could tolerate one or two of our ships being in their capital system- but they'd watch those ships warily. We can see how they'd tolerate a scattering of our ships in and around their space- but again, they'd be watching for tricks, making sure their own ships were in a position to intervene in case of treachery. Because
that would be in character.
And if we nonchalantly said "oh, we have forty more ships coming," it would be
in character for the Ittick-ka to react with at best extreme suspicion that they were about to be attacked. The personality you have carefully built up for them aligns
exactly with that prospect. If we did that and the Ittick-ka freaked out, it wouldn't be some kind of unfair "gotcha" built into the mechanical rules of the game.
...
It'd be the kind of foreseeable consequence you get in a D&D game if your party decides to attack the king in his throne room during the 'king gives you a quest' scene. You can DO it, you can maybe even get away with it, but it's going to derail things and shit's gonna get weird and rough for a while.
Now imagine a game where the DM says "no, if you rolled attack rolls on the king when he's sitting on the throne, all that would happen is that I'd say "welp" and the king and whatever bodyguards he has personally present would fight you. There would be no further consequences because there's nothing in the D&D rulebook that says there are any non-mechanical consequences for winning a fight."
That would seem...
weirdly disorienting, from a player standpoint. Because if actions don't have the consequences that you would
narratively expect... Well, how do you engage with the game as a narrative story? It becomes nothing but a tactical wargame at that point, and a lot of D&D players would stop playing if they thought it was
only a tactical wargame.
...
The idea of diplomatic Starfleet task forces makes sense only because in Star Trek, Starfleet has spent a very long time establishing itself as trustworthy.
Even then many powers do not fully trust it, and watch it closely for signs of treachery. Because their national security is at stake, and they act accordingly. Narratively, this makes perfect sense.
And narratively, it would be
expected that while a small power is fine with one or two warships from a foreign empire visiting at a time, it might not be entirely fine and happy with the idea of 10 or 20 ships doing the same thing. If the small power behaved that way, it's almost as if it's the equivalent of one of those NPCs in video games that exists only to wave to you and say "welcome to Villagetown!" when you enter the town, and will never do anything but greet you repeatedly. Because there's no thought process or ability to react ot what you do, it's just a simplistic, zero-depth stimulus-response thing.
So far you guys have done a beautiful job with
plot. The plotted stories and events have done more to keep us coming back to this game than anything else. That goes for you co-QMs, too, I bet- if Oneiros hadn't done such a great job writing dramatic events and captains' logs in which people (including non-Starfleet people) behaved in exciting, realistic, three-dimensional ways, we wouldn't be having this quest.
We love plot. We want plot. Game-mechanical actions have plot consequences, plot actions have game-mechanical consequences. The game mechanics are ultimately
FOR supporting plot, insofar as this game is anything other than a big dry exercise of
Rule the Waves in space. Which is admittedly part but only part of what it's about.
What I'm saying is, the movement of very large fleets has plot consequences, or should. The movement of small fleets would have much lesser consequences, for reasons that are obvious if one puts oneself in the shoes of a space polity's leaders and exercises a bit of empathy and understanding.
But just because you guys drafted a specific rule for task forces, and didn't
specifically say that there would be mechanical consequences for sending an intimidatingly large task force to do something... That doesn't mean that you're somehow bound to behave as if there would be no consequences, instead of adjudicating the consequences in a manner that is at least quasi-realistic.
