“Familiarity breeds contempt,” is a — familiar — saying for many. The suggestion is that as you come to know a person and their foibles well, you lose respect for them. However, familiarity also breeds trust, understanding, and community. One of the major complaints of the current military promotion structures is the need to throw officers from one assignment to the next, checking boxes; but the most successful militaries of the world had lower officer:enlisted ratios and these officers remained with their cadre for extended periods on time. They knew each other and trusted each other. 

Building in familiarity to a new set of characters is difficult. Players are usually trying to figure out what the role of the character is in a group — fighter, cleric — or optimizing their characters to maximize their effectiveness (and figuring out that most difficult of things…a name) rather than how these characters fit together. There are a few games that attempt to jump start these relationships — Alien has the buddy/rival mechanic where you choose how you interact when the chips are down. Legend in the Mist has the “Fellowship” theme card to decribe how your characters work together, what their combined weakness it, and what they are seeking, but it also has a listing for each character to define the main relationship between the other characters: love, rival, respect, whatever…

When we started our Star Trek Adventures game (actually started in the old Decipher Trek rules), one of the conceits was the ship and crew had just come out of the Federation-Klingon War. Because two of the players were not highly familiar with any of the series, they chose to come in as lower decks officers so they could grow over time. The other two characters were senior officers that had served on the ship through the war, and due to loss, danger, and camaraderie were very tight. They needed to be familiar with each other, as much as the newbies needed to be — well, outside that circle. To start, we built out what the relationships were, what some of the key events were, and what they knew about each other.

The captain was a hard woman who lost a lover in the war, and was driven by a desire to be “exceptional” and by spite. She had saved the life of the ship’s doctor, and vice-versa. He was exceedingly tied to the Andorian notion of honor, and saw her as family. Their Saurian ops officer — who would move up to executive officer, then captain of his own ship later in the campaign — was the first of his race to be an officer and had been mentored by the captain’s paramour. Shared loss. She had taken him on as her protege.

The Saurian officer, Olaf, understood his captain’s foibles: she was stubborn, spiteful, and driven to succeed — especially when the odds were against her. She knew him to be careful, technically proficient, and prone to look for peaceful options even when the outcome was unlikely to succeed. On Day 8 of RPGaDay, we showed how these traits worked to occasionally create tension. The captain and the doctor had a romantic tension that was mostly one sided, and her loneliness led to her making some idiot decisions that he had to help her maneuver. They stand by each other even when the political ramifications of their actions could be “non-career enhancing.” The characters argue, they don’t always agree on the right course, but in the end — they support each other.

That familiarity eventually extended to the new officers. They learned how to do their jobs a certain way, how to approach problems and how to avoid the errors of their superiors. One recent moment in the campaign, the hot-shot pilot learned from Olaf to think first, to worry about his people first. Olaf learned that taking a much more aggressive stance toward a threat was sometimes appropriate. The captain learned to let her anger go. They learned from each other — both what traits to emulate and resist.