/STG/ - Star Trek General

I Didn't Check The Picture Edition

Previous Thread: >A thread for discussing the 'Star Trek' franchise and its various tabletop adaptations.

Possible topics include Modiphius' new rpg 'Star Trek Adventures', WizKids miniatures game 'Star Trek: Attack Wing', and Gale Force Nine's board game 'Star Trek: Ascendancy', as well as the previous rpgs produced by FASA, Last Unicorn Games and Decipher, the Starfleet Battles Universe, and the Star Trek universe in general.


Game Resources

Star Trek Adventures
-Official Modiphius Page (Rules, FAQ and Player Resources)
>modiphius.com/star-trek.html
-PDF Collection
>mediafire.com/folder/0w33ywljd1pdt/Star_Trek_Adventures

Older Licensed RPGs (FASA, Last Unicorn Games and Decipher)
>pastebin.com/ndCz650p

Other (Unlicensed) RPGS (Far Trek + Lasers and Feelings)
>pastebin.com/uzW5tPwS

Star Trek: Attack Wing
-Official WizKids Page (Rules, FAQ and Player Resources)
>wizkids.com/attackwing/star-trek-attack-wing/

Star Trek: Ascendancy (Rules and Player Resources)
-Official Gale Force Nine Page
>startrek.gf9games.com/


Lore Resources

Memory Alpha - Canon wiki
>en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Portal:Main

Memory Beta - Noncanon wiki for licensed Star Trek works
>memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Fan Sites - Analysis of episodes, information on ships, technobabble and more
>pastebin.com/mxLWAPXF

Star Trek Maps - Based on the Star Trek Star Charts, updated and corrected
>startrekmap.com/index.html

/stg/ Homebrew Content
>pastebin.com/H1FL1UyP

So, what’s the setting difference between an Array, a Canon, and a Bank anyway? I’ve heard all of these terms before.

>Arrays
These aren’t actually single emitters. These are long “strips/stripes” across the ship (you can see them on Starfleet saucers all the time) that basically can focus the weapon’s energy along any point of the strip, giving it the capability of shooting in multiple directions and multiple angles, which is pretty useful in space.
>Bank
These are lots of small emitters, looking like real-life turrets or “lights” on the side that have relatively limited directional firing capability (usually in a basic arc in front of them), all lined up in a “Bank” of emitters that fire all at once. It’s a cruder version of an Array, though some stuff says it’s more powerful then one because the energy is less diffused.
>Cannons
Dedicated straight-firing energy weapon. These are usually depicted as much more powerful then other weapons (you see Klingon cap ship Disruptor cannons dropping or massively draining the Enterprise-D shields very quickly several times).
Mostly Starfleet seems to avoid using cannons on it’s ships, preferring torpedos for heavy firepower. The Defiant is a notable exception.

They're all just various arrangements of phasers. Cannons are not like arrays and banks though. Arrays and banks are phaser strips, phaser cannons are, well, they're cannons. They fire bursts of energy. Phaser strips fire the beams in later shows. I believe that arrays and banks are differentiated entirely by their angle of fire and their location on the ship, but I'm honestly unclear as to where each one is or what they do differently from each other.

Cannon = Defiant, Klingon Birds of Prey. Basically energy projectiles. Most powerful.
Bank = TOS Enterprise. Small groups of emitters limited to their own firing arcs. Most reliable.
Array = TNG Enterprise, Voyager. Strips of emitters all linked up together allowing for shared and combined power usage among all of them. Most flexible.

Banks are usually older then Arrays.
You see Banks mentioned more in in TOS and the Movie era, while they begin to more commonly refer to them as Arrays in the TNG era, at least on Starfleet vessels.

Are there any books that go into what happened to the remains of the Enterprise D? I had an idea for the saucer, since it was mostly intact, being repurposed as a base for a story I came up with

Since the Veridian system was home to a pre-warp civilization, it would've been removed from the crash site to avoid contamination.

"Ship of the Line" has the Ent-E's science station, forward support struts and officer's lounge table salvaged from the Ent-D herself as a form of continuity, but don't reference the rest of the wreckage. "The Return" has the Romulans attempt to pillage the wreckage for intel gathering purposes, leading to Riker triggering the saucer's own self-destruct. That said, "The Return" is also Shatnerverse and therefore non-canon to the broader novel EU.

...

So something I'm not getting about some people's reaction to the last episode of The Orville:

Why do people think that the Doctor unjustifiably murdered two people? It was absolutely clear self defence in both cases, especially when she shot the dude who was clearly going to jump and murder her to eat.
Seriously I've seen people claim that she shot him to take a blood sample and I can only wonder if they were actually watching? And the first dude clearly kidnapped her, and his intentions were plainly not good the moment that he denied her the communicator and importantly locked her in that room from the outside.

Thankfully it seems like a minority but still, wtf?

Honestly, I get the strong feeling that I’d actively dislike and avoid so very many of these people raving about either Orville or Discovery that I’m very close to ignoring everyone’s opinion but my own.

I genuinely wish I was less aware of how shitty this fandom is.

It's not just this fandom, it's every fandom. Every fandom is terrible since that's the nature of the internet: the reasoned and calm voices get drowned out by the incoherent frothing of the masses. It's inevitable with internet proliferation. If you think it's bad now, wait 5 years. It's gonna get a lot worse.

In any other Trek I'd tell SF in a heartbeat but STD SF are the kinda guys that'd dissect me, fuck that.

The counterpoint is that I really don't think I'd care if Starfleet Medical decided to get edgy and live dissect any of these people.

Not unjustifiably, hypocritically. She had no problem killing those two guys, but then at the end she's all "don't take it off stun, they may not value human life, but we do" when she was in just as much danger then, with those hundreds of guys going for the shuttle, as she was in the previous situations.

I've been quite liking how Isaac has turned out to be more than just Not-Data. Kinda like Bortus quickly turned out to be definitely not Worf despite early superficial similarities, he's definitely his own character through and through.

It's a subtle difference but it works in that he wants to learn more and understand people, but doesn't want to be human as it would be one hell of a downgrade. It's a weird kind of relationship because of still having respect and interest in those he sees as lesser being. I guess the closest thing I can think of is stuff like animal keepers at zoos or presenters on wildlife documentaries. It'd be easy to imagine Isaac as making a wildlife documentary in the british style, just calmly explaining various complex social dynamics and activities over footage, illustrating the attempts to mimic said activities in order to better integrate and gain further understanding.

>It'd be easy to imagine Isaac as making a wildlife documentary in the british style, just calmly explaining various complex social dynamics and activities over footage, illustrating the attempts to mimic said activities in order to better integrate and gain further understanding.

That really sounds like an episode synopsis. Hire this man, Seth

The key difference being that, once back at the shuttle, she had access to a reliable, non-lethal option. Before hand she had a hand gun with limited ammunition. Had she been carrying a... I have no idea what their weapons are called. Energy Pistol? Let’s go with that. At any rate, had she been carrying an energy pistol for those other 2 confrontations, she would no doubt have used the stun setting.

I love how some people are whining that Orville just seems like “Trek fanfiction”.
Because high-budget edgy teenager demographic-appeal bullet-point fanfiction is somehow so much better then regular fanfiction just because it has a higher price tag attached to it.

Some people will buy into anything as long as it’s expensive. Plus I honestly think Fox selling The Orville as a comedy hurts it’s viewership at times.

It's basically just Data's Day.

Yeah, Fox needs to stop saying the Orville is a comedy show because it really isn't. It's occasionally humorous but that's different from being a dedicated comedy show.

And yeah, I don't get why shitty frat show fanfic is better than regular calls-back-to-the-original fanfic. Don't look to me to explain that shit, I got nothing.

You're both right. The hypocritical statement was probably driven by the guilt of being a doctor but having to use deadly force in a survival situation and not wanting her son to desensitized to killing at a young age.

Sometimes hypocrisy in a character isn't a mistake on the part of the writers

Forming your own opinion is always the best option.

And basically this .

That. Still, good to know the Doc can follow in the fine tradition set by Bev Crusher whilst still being better than her. Yeah it's only been 8 episodes and I am still happy to claim this doc better than Crusher.

Now if I could remember her damn name without looking it up then we'd be doing really well. Still, better than Enterprise where half of the crew has a 'T' name. Trip Tucker. T'pol. Travis T'Archer. T'Phlox...

Data's Day minus Keiko getting married.

Don't forget Mayweather and Chinky.

>Don't forget Mayweather and Chinky.

Also Travis is Mayweather. He's that forgettable his name is right there and I still had to stop and think if I'd missed him.
T'Hoshi though, ah such a waste, they actually made some decent use of her early on then bam, Uhura'd.

Westly is significantly less annoying then the Internet makes him out to be.
So far, he’s most annoying during the absolute weakest season of TNG, and he’s genuinely not even the worst part of the weakest season of TNG.

His acting gets worse as the series progresses. The First Duty is a top-rate episode brought down by Wheaton's stiffness.

The First Duty wouldn't have worked quite as well without Wheaton being so stiff and awkward though. Something about him being off was important to the episode quality.

This is a decreasingly controversial statement. He's still not great. And would be a hell of a lot better if we'd kept Pulaski as CMO.
But he's no Adric from Dr. Who, who was basically Wesley the way people remember Wesley.

Yeah. His worst outside of season 1 I'd honestly say is Journey's End, but then it's complete character sabotage as he suddenly decided 'fuck starfleet' and metaphorically fucks off in a dubious looking space-van with a seriously creepy guy.

Oh noooooo you reminded me Adric existed. What an utter shit head. I felt nothing when he sacrificed himself.

, I strongly suspect Wheaton likely got less and less interested in playing a character he initially wanted to play and everyone hated him for playing it when all he did was follow the shit script he was given.
Avery Brooks was pretty off during the first DS9 season too when he didn’t like the writing and he got more on-point as time when on and the writing improved.

It’s not really an exaggeration to say that if you give less then a fuck about the acting job that it will affect your effort, the same way it often affects and other job you might not really care about if you do or you don’t.

Fuck Pulaski. Really didn't like her character. As for Wesley, yeah, Journey's End is easily the worst episode he's in. When he was a regular, he actually tried since he kinda had to. He wasn't good, but he tried. With First Duty and Journey's End, he wasn't a regular anymore and didn't really have to try. He just showed up, did a meh job, and moved on. Pretty shitty.

>Avery Brooks was pretty off during the first DS9 season too when he didn’t like the writing
It wasn't that he didn't like the writing, and in fact the writing of the pilot is the only reason why he agreed to the role, it was that they intentionally wanted him to look and act differently from Hawk. It wasn't that the writing improved in later seasons (it did but that wasn't the reason), it was that they decided fuck it and started playing to Sisko's strengths.

Pulaski was clearly there to try and add a traditional “Logic vs Emotion” rivalry akin to McCoy and Spock.
Of course in true Trek tradition, the executive order got shit all wrong and didn’t understand why it worked in the first place, as McCoy and Spock were able to snipe back and forth and Spock gave as good as he got, albeit in an extremely dry way.
Pulaski’s mocking of Data just seemed like a very smart person constantly verbally attacking the worth of a socially awkward person who genuinely didn’t understand why he was being verbally attacked or what her problem was, so she just sort of came off as a bitch to him for no reason when pretty much everyone else on the Enterprise treated him as an equal and a friend as well as seemingly quite a few people in Starfleet since Data won quite a few honors and medals during his service.

Honestly, he DID seem a lot more comfortable as take-charge, cocky-ass Sisko who definitely didn’t take anybody’s bullshit.

I think Pulaski would have worked better as a mentor to Data, trying to help him come to terms what being human really meant, since Troi obviously never bothered.

And that's why I didn't like Pulaski: the writers couldn't do her justice. On paper, she was a good idea, much like how Wesley could have worked out on paper. Didn't turn out that way though.

Counterpoint being the writers didn't really do much of anything justice the first two seasons, and had she stayed on for 3-7 her character would've been better written like everyone else's was.

The fact she had no relevant input in Measure of a Man was criminal though, if there was any episode for her to start turning a corner it would be that one.

I mean, you make a point. And she should have said something more in Measure of a Man, probably during Data's going away party instead of arguing with Worf pointlessly. She kinda argued with everyone endlessly. I wouldn't have minded if the writers turned that shit down a few notches.

That was the direction they ended up going with though. By the end of the season she was all up in getting Data to do things like play games with that strategist dude.

It's only early in season she doesn't respect Data, from there it's a very clear arc of development.

She was the only person that would really stand up to Picard and would call him out on his bullshit when he got too sanctimonious.

Why is SFB not in the OP?

Why do the Trill hosts accept the symbionts? I really don't get it since they already live lives before they get their space work and even compete for them.

Think of it like an implant that gives you a fuckton of new skills and knowledge of all kinds of shit. The only downside is that it comes with a bunch of personalities.

It's really just a USB filled with memories.

Yeah, just watching through DS9 (specifically the episode where Dax gets stolen by the other Trill) and now I think I get it. What I don't get is the transfer of personalities, as in does the symbiont have its own personality, or do the accrued personalities just sort of meld into one being? It seems like you sort of sacrifice your own being to become part of a weird biocomputer.

That's the impression that I just started to get.

>It seems like you sort of sacrifice your own being to become part of a weird biocomputer.
You are a weird biocomputer tho and there's a continuity of consciousness.

You don’t really “sacrifice” your own consciousness at all, it’s just sort of added to collective experiences of the symbiotes. Jadzia is still Jadzia for example, she’s just also Dax.
It also seems like there is some really strict standards for actually gaining a symbiote, and most Trill don’t actually have one. You need to have both a high level of skill in different areas of interest (because if you bring nothing to the table then the symbiote gains nothing) and and a strong existing ego (because if your sense of identity isn’t strong then the symbiont both dominates the blend and then later brings your frailty of personality into later blendings).
In some ways the symbionts take the place of Trill’s “Halls of Fame” or “libraries of Congress” or other important records kept by human cultures, because they only select their best and brightest to be blended so that their skills and experiences are forever immortalized in the symbiote itself.

t. body snatcher

That makes a lot of sense. Now I want to know how the practice started.

>because they only select their best and brightest to be blended so that their skills and experiences are forever immortalized in the symbiote itself.
This kinda makes sense to me.
I guess an existing example is if you had one person in modern day with the collective knowledge and skills of Martin Luthor King Jr and Albert Einstein and whoever else brings a lot of repeated direct benefits to global society.
Jadzia is even already like that: she’s a brilliant scientist who also has the mind of other brilliant scientists inside of her who is also a great warrior who fought the Klingons and won enough to gain their respect and was also an excellent diplomat.

It’s the kind of person that would make a near-perfect advisor just due to the sheer depth of experience and knowledge that they can draw upon.

The same way someone way long ago decided to cover a sharp stick in ink and stab themselves over and over with it, or someone decided to let milk sit out and salt and age the chunky bits, or wear the flayed skin of an animal.

Really, these things are way worse off for not adopting the Trill method because the symbiont pretty much gains the collective experiences and skills of every single exceptional individual who it ever joined with, meaning their society advances extremely fast and extremely smoothly because they have a host of nearly perfect advisors with an extremely broad set of skills.

These parasite aliens basically just used humans as cars at best.
We don’t know, but we know there’s some pretty strict rules involving it.
Apparently about half of all Trills can blend, but they avoid releasing that knowledge because that might make the population fight over the 300-odd symbiotes there are.
We also know that symbiotes can have friends and acquaintances from past lives but aren’t supposed to associate too heavily (as in marriage, romance, kids) with acquaintances from past blendings to avoid creating an aristocracy of people who just pass their symbionts to the next kid in line, though the public reason is that if they spend too much time getting caught up in past lives in new hosts the symbiont gains no new experiences. They also seem to avoid taking overt leadership positions for the same reasons, to avoid just making all Trill leaders blended and turning them into a “ruling class”.

"thog bet ogg won't"
"ogg will. hold mammoth steak and watch this."

>cover a sharp stick in ink and stab themselves over and over with it
No clue
>decided to let milk sit out and salt and age the chunky bits
Cheese was a result of people storing milk in calf stomachs and the milk curdling. Aged cheeses were people getting really hungry and eating fresh cheeses that were left out for a while.
>wear the flayed skin of an animal.
Animals live in cold without heating -> fur is warm -> wear furs.
None of those are as insane as using a creature as a memory bank and passing it along from person to person. I can only think of the symbionts being an artificial creation made to enhance some sect of Trill that were just batshit insane.

>300-odd symbionts
Now that's even more odd. Do symbionts reproduce? The symbiont ruling class was a thought I had, now that sounds like a cool idea for a fantasy kingdom.

I for one wont bow to the symbiont agenda.

I wonder what Trill think of Earth marsupials.

>Now that's even more odd. Do symbionts reproduce?
This is a tricky question because of the circumstances; there's only about 300 to 500 available because the rest are ALREADY blended with a host, and therefore they can’t be removed until the host dies because once they’ve blended removal is fatal to the host and most likely to the symbiote as well. They do procreate naturally, but they need to be “in-between” hosts (which they usually are not) and even then it seems fairly rare that this happens. This makes a fair degree of sense as it seems they biologically live a REALLY long time; the Dax symbiont remembers all the way back to the Enterprise era for example.
It seems that this isn’t a major imperative for symbionts, because it’s mentioned that while Hosts fall in love and have sex and have children with people, symbionts just sort of take it as yet another experience they had and is added to their collective memories.
It’s possible that symbionts who are “newborn” don’t have nearly as much of a personality as long-term ones because so much of what the symbionts personality is is the sum of it’s memories and experiences, much like with us.
I’m guessing the requirements for joining with a “young” symbiont are still pretty strict anyway just so that the first personality the young one blends with isn’t a useless dick or whatever.

They think they're gross just like every right-thinking sapient race in the universe.

So I’m new to Trek, but I’m really enjoying it after my GM introduced me to it using the Star Trek Adventures game. I think my GM is on here sometimes, the guy doing the USS Murakumo game.

Anyway, my question is about psychic abilities in Trek, and if humans ever get them. That’s a real common thing in sci-fi stuff, especially the kind of stuff written in the area Trek was originally written in, and I’m curious if that’s the case in this universe.

>Anyway, my question is about psychic abilities in Trek, and if humans ever get them. That’s a real common thing in sci-fi stuff, especially the kind of stuff written in the area Trek was originally written in, and I’m curious if that’s the case in this universe.
Humans get them but they're rare to the point that it's never discussed after a single TOS episode which focuses on them, though it could be the reason Kirk was able to contact Spock in TMP and how Riker and Troi communicated telepathically in TNG S1E1.
Generally only Vulcans and Betazoids get psychic powers, and that's limited to touch-telepathy in the case of the former and mind reading in the case of the latter.

The classic way is to run through the galactic barrier around the Milky Way. It causes your esper rating to go through the roof. Though this fact is likely classified by Starfleet if how they treated the Genesis project and Omega Directive.

Oh, and Deltans, but like human psychics they're confined to a major role in one movie, cameos in two others, and a passing reference in an ENT episode.

>Anyway, my question is about psychic abilities in Trek, and if humans ever get them.
This is an interesting question, the closest to which we have an answer is “sometimes, maybe”.
The Federation apparently has “aperception tests” people can take that can measure a human being’s POTENTIAL to become a psychic given the correct stimuli, but other then that there’s really no reliable examples that say humans are born with psychic powers. Different races treat psychic powers differently too; Vulcans are telepathic for example, but in their case it seems to almost basically be a skill they’ve mastered rather then an actual biological ability (since Romulans display no such psychic abilities and they would likely love to literally read minds). Betazoids are naturally psychic, usually getting their powers sometime during puberty, and unlike Vulcan telepathic skills they are always “on”, though there also seems to be an element of teaching themselves to use it.

It's actually touched in one episode. Trill goverment likes to pretend that there is hard work, good mental state and very rare biological compatability involved to get assigned a symbiote in Joining. Turns out the biology part is actually a lie as nearly half of Trill population can take a symbiote without no ill effects. Even the strong mental state is dubious as one of Dax earlier hosts was a insane murderer, who only killed one or two people btw not a serial killer which the writers forgot in later series.

, , , In addition to all this, stuff like telekinesis seems pretty much unheard of, at least in species that aren’t already super-powerful space gods (and there’s a truckload of those guys in Star Trek).
Some of that might simply be special effects limitations, but for the most part there isn’t a single race in Trek that uses psionics the way say....the Protoss use them, as in incorporating them into every piece of technology they have.

All this talk of symbiont standards but lets not forget that Curzon chose Jadzia because he thought she was pretty.

Actually, he FIRED her at first because she was pretty. Then he chose her again later because she genuinely was legitimately the best choice and didn’t just quit permanently after washing out like most folks Dax grades on being worthy of joining.

That makes me wonder, was Jadzia a turboslut before joining or was that after?

Probably before. Ezra seems to have still been neurotic, shy and nervous after getting wormed. So the current hosts personality remains the dominant one.

>USS Gagarin
It was doomed from the beginning.

Everybody in DS9 was a slut. Even Worf.
My headcanon is that the slugs themselves don't have personality, but just hold the memories. So the host personality is THE personality. Of course, memory is a huge part of a total person, and, especially with your typical young person that gets the worm, the 24 years or whatever is not much compared to the several lifetimes of memories in the worm. Especially for someone with a weak personality of Jadzia; but with someone that had a stronger personality like Ezri or Curzon wouldn't be as obviously affected by the worm.

Sisko is a bajoran prophet
Sisko is a war criminal
All bajorans are war criminals.

Likely before, really.
Curzon was a dirty old man by Sisko’s admission, but as points out, Ezri had none of that at all going on. It’s likely that Curzon was attracted to her because her personality “fit” the Dax symbiont to some degree as well.
>Especially for someone with a weak personality of Jadzia; but with someone that had a stronger personality like Ezri or Curzon wouldn't be as obviously affected by the worm.
The opposite of your statement appears to be true of Ezri. She had a lot of problems early on specifically because she wasn’t really trained and ready for the blending and it gave her confusing feelings about Worf when she was originally attracted to Bashir, and though eventually she did go for Julian it took some time for her to assert herself over the Dax symbionts memories.
Jadzia conversely had all the training and preparation needed to become blended, and even though according to the pilot episode her blending happened fairly recently (as in something like a few days before the pilot episode starts) she is still totally assertive and far more okay with having the Dax symbiont then Ezri was for pretty much Ezri’s entire season.

It’s likely that someone bonding with a symbiont does a lot of “homework” on it’s personality and prepares him or herself mentally for the blending, while Ezri was basically an emergency host getting a crash course on something she never expected to have to do.

>even though according to the pilot episode her blending happened fairly recently (as in something like a few days before the pilot episode starts)
Did Curzon die of natural causes?
Did it ever say?

You could say that.
He had a heart failure while banging an alien played by Vanessa Williams on Risa. According to Jadzia the sex was pretty damn good and Vanessa Williams was sad that he died but also happy that he could go out with a literal bang. I think Jadzia even THANKED her for making his/her last moments as Curzon so nice.

Yet in the pilot episode Jadzia has a flashback to when she was getting the Dax worm and Curzon is clearly alive.

In a Prophet induced vision. Those pricks make half their shit up as they go along.
OOS it’s the slightest of retcons.

>5 Bajoran comfort girls have been transferred to your office

Man the Cardies had it good on Bajor.

Then they had to fuck things up by leaving Skrain “I should have killed them all” Dukat in charge.

>Skrain

That's almost as bad as Sheev

Gul certainly sits better in front of Dukat. It’s a shame, too, usually I quite like the sound of Cardassian names.

Ask the Wormhole Aliens how much fuck they give about your opinion.

>Wormhole Aliens

Prophets, user.

>bajoran gf
More like Bajoran Ex, jesus christ.

Calling them "prophets" always drove me up the wall. I get it because they see the future spookystuff. But I'm Jewish, and somewhat religious, and have a fair understanding of Hebrew; and in common parlance, "prophet" is almost always used to describe a biblical figure.

While a נביא does see the future, that's a thing he or she does, it's not the core function, which is to be a messenger, or perhaps an emissary, for a higher power. The choice of terms used always gives me a little bit of momentary confusion.

So they were telling us from the very beginning that Sisko was a Prophet all along, whoa

Pottery.

I doubt it was so intentional. The Bajorans certainly drew inspiration from Israel, but also Northern Ireland, Tibet, Eastern Europe and the general death of colonialism in Africa/Asia. So I doubt a coherent theme was applied at such an early point in the writing process.
As for the specific terminology, the studio would never have green lit a concept that used more heavily Christian terminology. Using generic, then-non-inflammatory middle-Asian terminology like “prophet” and “emissary” was the most peaceable and relatable option. Could you imagine the rage that DS9 would have incited if they had used “Savior” instead of “Emmisary”? The dual-meanings in a different language are than likely incidental.

Sisko is the Prophet for the Prophets of the Future who live in the wormhole.

...

Holy shit, what an asshole

Is that what he looks like now? I vaguely remember him seeming (relatively) normal from his board game show.

No

holy shit no. that webm is actually misconstrued as a male liberal but it is actually a female to male transitioned individual

I thought Dukat's first name was supposed to be Elmo?

You're either thinking of the actor's name, Mark Alamo, or Garak's first name, Elim.

Skrain is his first name. Gul is cardassan for Captain hence Gul Dukat