@il-volpe said in The Metaplot:
as it has screwed you up when you were trying to RP something that interested you more?
This complaint genuinely baffles me. Not targetted at you, but I've seen other people make similar complaints over the years.
"I just want to play X, not be forced to deal with Y, ugh!"
Okay...go do your thing in the corner if you can find other people interested in it?
The problem arises when people expect the entire game around them to cater to the thing they want to do, and they get mad when it doesn't.
Now, aside from that.
I don't think anybody can flat out say metaplot is good or bad. There's plenty of bad ways to implement it. There's also plenty of good ways to do it and wind up with it not mattering.
And now on to a tangent.
Now the idea of a metaplot is, I think, generally to get players involved in the game and give them a reason to be doing things.
The problem here is metaplot doesn't really matter in that regard in my experience. Once upon a time, it might have served the purpose of being the lure to draw people to a game and get them interested in it, but those days appear to be 100% past us, IMO.
Giving players things to fight over (titles, territory) or having a culture where they can kill each other (thus fuelling the need to do a bunch of BaRP scenes and 'make allies') seem to be the two most important things to getting players "involved" and interested in "doing stuff".
Metaplot alone doesn't do the trick. Unless you are willing to invest a metric fuckton of time into running 3+ event-type scenes regularly a week. And even that might not do the trick. Because without 'titles' or something "on the line" to reward players for playing a game, they just will do absolutely nothing between your metaplot scenes and eventually lose interest in them, regardless of how amazing an ST you may or may not be.