Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?

[Bobotron]

@Gilette
We code census commands; I wonder if there's value in having players set, say, short plot hooks they're interested in on themselves that can be seen by a +census-style command?

[Apos]

@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

This sounds very interesting in principle. I can see the overall gist of using a version control paradigm but I have a harder time seeing how to efficiently break up a plotline in a way to make it easy for players to branch and merge without a lot of manual management. Could you give some example of how this could work, in practice?
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Griatch

Right now things are so sandbox-y imo since the lack of tools heavily contribute to an environment that makes it extremely difficult for any individual storyrunner, even staff, to tell what other people have done/are doing in most mushes. It's largely relying on the memory of players and staff as they become aware of plot elements that might contradict previous things, and (this is a little outside my experiences so correct me if I'm wrong), probably creates hard feelings as someone runs a plot and then is retconned later after the fact by a staff member that suddenly realizes it contradicts something else. So for examples:

Currently- someone wants to run a plot that happens, as a side note, to include interaction with the chief of police of their sleepy town in Maine. It's revealed during the player run plot that the chief's a supernatural creature. Plot goes on for a month or two, and then second hand another player hears about the plot and mentions he ran a plot a few months ago that also mentioned the chief of police, but as a mortal hunter of the supernatural. Staff realizes it and tells group A that it no longer works, and it's retconned in progress to the annoyance of all involved. There's a lot of suggestions like, 'keep the amount of storytellers small' specifically because the games are basically reliant on everyone just to remember what happened and talk to each other for clarification, without really anything to refer to.

What I'd propose- a web form that has list of all story plots that have happened and are on going, searchable and collapse-able, with very brief summaries (maybe a couple sentences), but more importantly discrete plot categories. In the previous example, someone filling a web form for their proposed plot would plug in 'police' as a category along with vampires, some crime family, and any other story element categories. They could click an element, bringing up a list of previous plots involving it, and examining the elements would show that a plot six months ago has a note of, 'Police: Chief of Police's secret identity', letting them know there is a potential conflict, and alerting staff briefly overviewing plots for approval that there is a potential conflict.

So in comparison to a version control paradigm, it's extremely useful for players and staff to be able to tell what story elements are currently in play and present conflicts when being modified as a branch of the overall story. It would still need a lot of manual management, but in going back to the version control paradigm the current situation is more everyone doing their own thing in the dark and just hoping it works out.

[Thenomain]

@Bobotron said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

@Gilette
We code census commands; I wonder if there's value in having players set, say, short plot hooks they're interested in on themselves that can be seen by a +census-style command?

Did want to note: It is trivial to let people set their own attributes and have some code read them (@doing for WHO, anything for +finger), it's collecting and collating that information that's not. What if one person enters "Grind the Goblin King to dust," and someone else enters, "Attack the Green Menace"? They may both refer to the same thing, but the code will need to be told how these relate or you'll have to have someone whose job it is to collate this into something more actionable.

I am assuming—perhaps erroneously—that we're still talking about tools to collect plot information and updates. I see the idea as a nice idea but a potential headache on all staff involved.

[Griatch]

@Apos said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

I see what you mean, I guess if one codified the overarching metaplot enough - into locations, characters as well as critical story elements like "the plague" or "The murder of X" one could track their use using such a system.

So to follow the VCS analogy, do I understand you right that people sort of "check out" story elements that they intend to use in their plots and "merge them back in" once they are done? With the added feature (going beyond VCS) that people could also find out what is "checked out" at any given time ...?
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Griatch

[Apos]

@Griatch Right, that's exactly what I was thinking. In so much that right now on most mushes, people would be doing the, 'Hey we're running a Player Run Plot about <X Story Element>', and often people have no idea what's going on with that same story element or what has gone on before, so there's these big breaks in continuity and conflict in the current world state, so it could follow a VCS format of say, merging that story element back in to an overall world state continuity and updating anyone else wanting to run that plot, and letting every storyrunner/staff see what's going on with any particular story element at a time. So yeah, pretty much what you were thinking.

Right now the same thing is basically done by hand and guess work and memory of players/staff on mushes, which creates all the problems you can think of when it's human memory and players not knowing they have to talk to one another.

[Arkandel]

@Apos The tricky part will be the implementation; most users aren't technical and most players already have so much to absorb on a brand new game - different commands, limitations, abilities, procedures.

This approach sounds promising and it can absolutely work but only if it can be done in a way that at least regular players (you can probably afford a bit more complexity for the Storytellers' interface) can use it very, very easily.

How to know if the implementation is easy enough: If they pop up the helpfile for it and the list of arguments scrolls the screen it is not.

[Apos]

@Arkandel Yeah I agree 100%, I mean if a tool is too complicated then at best it won't be used, at worst it'll discourage people from not even trying to PRP since it'd turn them off from it.

[Griatch]

@Apos said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

@Arkandel Yeah I agree 100%, I mean if a tool is too complicated then at best it won't be used, at worst it'll discourage people from not even trying to PRP since it'd turn them off from it.

It sounds like a prime candidate for using EvMenu actually.
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Griatch

[Thenomain]

@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

@Apos said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

@Arkandel Yeah I agree 100%, I mean if a tool is too complicated then at best it won't be used, at worst it'll discourage people from not even trying to PRP since it'd turn them off from it.

It sounds like a prime candidate for using EvMenu actually.
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Griatch

Do you have any links to same? Thanks.

[Griatch]

@Thenomain said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

@Apos said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:

@Arkandel Yeah I agree 100%, I mean if a tool is too complicated then at best it won't be used, at worst it'll discourage people from not even trying to PRP since it'd turn them off from it.

It sounds like a prime candidate for using EvMenu actually.
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Griatch

Do you have any links to same? Thanks.

Yes, sorry - EvMenu is the name of Evennia's in-game menu builder tool: https://github.com/evennia/evennia/wiki/EvMenu . People use it for everything from NPC communication trees to character generation, custom login menus and other in-game interfaces.
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Griatch