The Metaplot
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Man, if I had $100 for every time I got accused of favoring/handing something to my "friend", when it was someone I (A. did not know at all or (B. actually OOCly disliked, I would...well, I'd be on vacation right now.
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And as I said before, yes...many players who are not so great and/or who are extremely stingy with involving others but are willing to shoehorn themselves into every scene or who constantly are dogging admin via all ways (vs the channels you are "supposed" to) often are extremely involved in metaplot.
It is very hard when metaplot access and advancement can only be tracked by one or two staffers on a large game in particular, if they have no external organization. Even a staffer with no life outside of the game can get overwhelmed and burnt out having to answer everything. Yet answers even to little snippets can be a real encouragement to the individual player. They're not much fun to do when you are the staffer having to write similar things or respond to 50 of the same question.
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@mietze Man, I remember this time I was on FC and there was a metaplot, it kind of went like this:
- Metaplot is announced and asks for players to mail requesting involvement.
- I send mail.
- 3 days later I get added to a mailing list and it looked (dramatization) like this:
"Hi, this is <insert name of overbearing player character> and I've been asked to coordinate the investigation plot with the players! I want to send out feelers about who wants to involve involve themselves and how, but first let's update everyone on the current status of what's been done so far!"
- MY character has:*
- Done all of the computer investigation
- Arranged to personally handle all of the lab work
- Has gone to the scene of the crime and done all of the intelligence gathering
- Questioned all 5 witnesses
- Arranged 1on1 meetings with all 3 suspects
- Has a bow and arrow that rolls 45 dice and does an auto 300 agg damage and have already pre-rolled 3,000,000 successes to make sure my PC goes first when the inevitable combat happens
...what would YOU like to do?
THIS^^^^* is also a big reason metaplot fails on MUs. Because there are always super eager beavers who want to do all the things, list out everything they want to do without sharing the investigation, and/or try to funnel the metaplot towards their character in a way that doesn't involve sharing.
In fact, I can vaguely remember mails from players saying things akin to: My character doesnt communicate well with other characters. I want to be involved but to be involved I need you to give me things that he can do alone, one on one, with staff STs
Constructive Suggestion: Keep control of how much one PC can do in a time period. I don't care if you have to have signups for X segment of the plot requiring Y number of players. Treat it like a signup for a potluck if need be, but control the likelihood that one player will overrun everyone else's fun.
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@Ghost see, I don't necessarily have a problem with delegation (though having been a delegation/tasked with sharing PC, it's often a fool's errand, and even more frustrating than being plotstaff, which I have also been).
If things are kept moving, then no problems for me, unless that player is oocly nasty or something, which IME is rare. (annoying != nasty).
But without outside documentation at least for staff sometimes it is really hard to track who was told what when, what scenes have impacted what and how info should change, etc. it's understandable to lose the thread if it's all mostly in one or two people's heads. I think it's simple to set up a (not always joyfully fun, it's paperwork!) info tracking/synopsis system. It is just rarely done when staff is excited about the plots, and only becomes an oh shit remedy when things have devolved and it's overwhelming to think of setting it up.
Further complicating things: for better or worse we have moved into mushes not wanting restrictions or coi protections for staffer's PCs. So staff folks may want that fun of discovery and so they don't want to be part of metaplot processing.
I think for multi-cultural/sphere places you really do need a large team for helping metaplot along, answering jobs and mails, weaving people in, running scenes large and small, etc. but that really won't help if you don't have some way to organize your information/activities/timeline/synopsis of what's been done and to what impact outside of the mush (like a website board or trello, etc.)
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I HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT METAPLOT.
I'm going to frame them by talking about a game I consider the best thing I was a part of in my MU career: Battlestar Cerberus (I was Hydra there, hi). It's also, in a lot of ways, the thing I'm most disappointed in myself about, but oh well you. Love hurts, but is worth the cost, or something.
Cerb had what I consider a pretty solid metaplot. It was definitely a metaplot the game was very hardcore about, whatever anyone else's feelings on it. Polaris, the head wiz and writer of it, was kind of a genius and he poured a fuck-ton of enegy into it. Highly detailed Cylon mythology that was actually documented on the staff wiki, an outline of several smaller plots that comprised a "season" while feeding the larger story (the 'season' structure is, indeed, a great way to do things) and, for awhile, pretty active plot staff and player GMs. When it was good, it was pretty great. It probably also felt rail road-y at times and was in many ways alienating to new players. Certain trade-offs in accessibility were made for story. I don't think this was right or wrong. Polaris made very deliberate choices about the kind of game he wanted to run and the rest of us in the staff corps agreed with them. I wouldn't want every game to be this but - for about a year and a half - it worked for what we wanted it to be.
It was also a fuck-ton of work. I was an ST staffer and experienced a high level of burn out. While the game allowed PrPs, the amount of emphasis put on the metaplot didn't encourage them, and left the staff STs without much time to encourage smaller side stuff. That meant there weren't many breaks of release valves for activity that help alleviate burnt out on other games. Also, at a certain point, real life happened and that loose outline for plots we'd had came to an end, and we got into an arc that was far more thinly-sketched. We sort of arrogantly assumed we could wing it but that wasn't how we'd been running, so things became both over-complicated on the planning end and under-served on the actual making-scenes-happen end, and it became a sort of tangled mess. This coincided with people going to grad school, people changing jobs, people moving from one continent to the other, etc., so carving out time to sit down and untangle the tangled mess just didn't happen, and the game just kinda died. A different kind of game could've handled a couple months of downtime while we figured shit out better, but that wasn't the particular monster we'd created.
I still feel bad for not giving that place a proper ending (all apologies to the players). It was great for awhile and deserved one, it just seemed too daunting, and the metaplot was probably a large reason why. On the other hand, it gave the story a framework that makes me remember the RP I did have there as some of my favorite I've managed in this weird hobby. So I don't know. Metaplot is great when done well but also really hard, is what I learned, I guess, which is not a revelatory statement.
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@mietze Oh delegation is fine, I was more referring to the "I've picked the list clean of everything I've wanted to do myself, and everything else you guys can do for yourselves"
If you allow one person to BusyBeaver their way into doing all of the fun stuff alone and leave tablescraps for everyone else, it will happen.
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From an administrative angle, what I've done is a bunch of internal tools to help sorting it. We keep track of all the private plot type notes for PCs and it has a searchable index with tags for a dozen different categories of special things about the characters, and then can cross reference with the plots they are involved in, all the story responses they've gotten, and so on. And we have an extra alert for any player that hasn't ever gotten any form of GMing, so we can keep weaving in new players.
some fucking idiot who people only like because he's good at taking credit for the work of everyone under him, just like every other fucking L&L headwiz.
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@Apos I'd say it's also worth calling out that you also have the Action Points system, where you have to spend AP to do metaplot things and thus no one person can do all the things themselves. AP thus encourages you to bring others in to involve them with whatever metaplot goals you have.
I can't do an investigation on my own unless I take a very long time or blow all my AP on it every week; if I want a timely answer I thus would be well-served to involve others. Things like that do hopefully encourage people to reach out and involve others.
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@Apos said in The Metaplot:
I think just rephrasing the question makes it self answering. When someone asks what a metaplot is, and it's defined as, 'overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity', then I think it just becomes, 'do you need an official continuity?' And the answer to that is, 'I want to run a sandbox where people make their own fun' and one is unimportant or, 'I want all the stories bound together' and one can be very important. I think the metaplot question almost can't be separated from, 'do you want a sandbox or an interconnected world?'
Sandbox is used as a perjorative and I think that's stupid and mostly just done by people that would never really be able to run a non-sandbox themselves for any length of time. It's really just the kind of game you want to have and the energy you're willing to invest into having it.
These are solid points. I do think there's something sort of in between Metaplot and Sandbox though it might just be how I interpret the world. Metaplot to me means what you said, an overarching storyline that binds everything together, it's the staff's vision for what major events will be unfolding and what they have to do with one another and thus what the world is built around. Sandbox is people using the setting and the game tools to do their own thing, whether they do big stories and PrPs or just their own interpersonal conflicts or whatever. Somewhere in between them is a place of 'There are plots and the staff run them but they don't necessarily all go together, rather they are one thing for a bit and then another thing for a bit and then yet another." Several games I've played on are in that in-between place, there's definitely staff run plots that are fun, but one ends and another begins and they don't all relate to the overarching "Will our team be able to stop global warming as the story progresses from 1900 to now". They take a little less staff investment than the cohesive Metaplot, but staff still run stories and make things happen, its not just the players coming up with their own stuff and having nothing else to do.
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@faraday I think this gets back to Apos' summation that it comes down to "Are you running a sandbox or a plot-heavy/thematic game?" If you claim your server is the former, don't pull the rug out from under your players by suddenly making it the latter.
@Ghost This ties into xp bloat. "Oh, there is a metaplot? Well, why should I care, since superman will save the day anyways?" If one person has all the skills and stats to solve all of the problems, it's hard to create a plot that requires group effort. It's like playing the Pandemic board game but giving one of the players three of the role cards and four extra actions. You have to ask "Why are there other players in this game at this point?"
Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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@Ominous said in The Metaplot:
This ties into xp bloat. "Oh, there is a metaplot? Well, why should I care, since superman will save the day anyways?" If one person has all the skills and stats to solve all of the problems, it's hard to create a plot that requires group effort. It's like playing the Pandemic board game but giving one of the players three of the role cards and four extra actions. You have to ask "Why are there other players in this game at this point?"
While I understand this to an extent, it's kind of mystifying to me. To me the idea of not being able to design stories for someone is so alien I just don't understand it. Sure they might be more difficult to challenge but unless a character is literally a bag of stats with no personality, goals or interests it really ain't that hard to make a narrative they'll find interesting.
some fucking idiot who people only like because he's good at taking credit for the work of everyone under him, just like every other fucking L&L headwiz.
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@Apos said in The Metaplot:
@Ominous said in The Metaplot:
This ties into xp bloat. "Oh, there is a metaplot? Well, why should I care, since superman will save the day anyways?" If one person has all the skills and stats to solve all of the problems, it's hard to create a plot that requires group effort. It's like playing the Pandemic board game but giving one of the players three of the role cards and four extra actions. You have to ask "Why are there other players in this game at this point?"
While I understand this to an extent, it's kind of mystifying to me. To me the idea of not being able to design stories for someone is so alien I just don't understand it. Sure they might be more difficult to challenge but unless a character is literally a bag of stats with no personality, goals or interests it really ain't that hard to make a narrative they'll find interesting.
I think, in this case, it's less about "is this an interesting story" and more "what point is there for my character to be here, when Character X has 5 times my XP and thus can do everything I can do, but better, AND can do five other things that I can't even begin to do?" Which is, unfortunately, often a problem - some people share spotlight well, some people do not. And if you have a massively ICly competent character who just /cannot/ imagine not using every ability they have to its fullest extent every time, then it's pretty common to have a scene that is "The Awesome Adventures of Character X (and some other guys)."
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@Pyrephox So what's your solution to that?
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@Apos Sure, I can write a story for Superman too. That's not the problem. The problem is when the Green Arrow and the kid from X-Men 2 who can change the channels on TV by blinking go with Superman on a mission. How do I provide a plot that will adequately challenge Superman and not vaporize the other two let alone allow them to contribute to the resolution?
@Kanye-Qwest This is a general response, not a specific one directed to you or Arx. Address xp bloat. Enforce niche protection. Create enough Superman-level plots to keep Superman busy so he doesn't have the time to sneeze hard in the direction of the Green Arrow-level plots, literally blowing them away, and run plenty of Green Arrow-level plots too, so Green Arrow has something to do.
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@Kanye-Qwest said in The Metaplot:
@Pyrephox So what's your solution to that?
I think that depends on the genre and theme of the game, to be honest. Most XP systems are simply not meant to handle progression across years of play, especially in a persistent setting which also includes newbies. I'm not a big fan of 'catchup XP' a la The Reach that tries to address the issue by turning all PCs into XP-laden monsters. I think I would like to see some experimenting with alternate methods of progression - things to sink XP into that provide one time benefits or non '+ to success' benefits. On an OOC level, you /could/, if appropriate for the theme and setting, basically set OOC boundaries on certain plots and adventures - this is appropriate for people with less than 50 XP, or more than 500 XP,. The AP system on Arx does an interesting job of it for 'off screen' actions - everyone only gets the same AP and +storyrequests, so that helps some of it. I'd like to see more games put in a currency like that that limits the ability of any one character to dominate ALLLL the things.
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@mietze said in The Metaplot:
I don't really count player response to metaplot here, because I'm not sure it's that important.
If the majority of your player base isn't even just ignoring the metaplot but actively hiding from it, you probably have a problem in your metaplot. So that's one level of where player response is important.
Then there's the other problem that kills such plots dead: due to staff incompetence (in that they think the plot needs to progress in one specific, rigid way) a key item that would move the plot forward falls into the hands of a packrat player. The packrat player sees the significance of the item and packs it away for "future use" as an attempt to gain leverage. Then, as packrats are wont to do, forgets about it with the next shiny that he stumbles over. The plot languishes because this one McGuffin is needed to move it forward but it is effectively out of play and the staff, being idiots, won't work around it.
You always have to take player response into account when designing your plots, with everything from "why are all the players fleeing?" (in the Marrach storm "plot" people actually finally got so tired of it they froze their accounts--impacting Skotos' already-failing income directly--until the plot was resolved…so for multiple months) to "why are the players overlooking this BLATANTLY OBVIOUS CLUE?" (hint: it probably isn't obvious from the outside) to "where did all the plot-fu McGuffins go? (hint: you need more, stat).
(protip--if "nobody" is getting what you want out of the scene the problem may be your clues aren't as "obvious" as you think!).
Quoted for emphasis. STAFF PLOTTERS PAY FUCKING ATTENTION HERE!
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@saosmash said in The Metaplot:
@mietze Proactive players who actually run with things immediately get branded as part of the staffers' pets' clique, though, so I mean, it's just kind of the nature of the hobby at this point.
Well, if you're getting responses to your @mail, +jobs, etc. and others aren't … sounds like a pet to me. (Not saying that you're the problem in this scenario, note!)
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As an aside, I was discussing with staff on a game earlier today about the problem with XP on... well, WoD games, specifically.
TR/FC's approach isn't bad, per say... It's just not good. It tries to keep a balance so that there isn't a fall to the other end of the spectrum, which is the dino XP monsters who have been with a game for forever, and how that makes it so that newer, fresher players can't have any of the things.
On the other hand, the XP bloat gets to be ridiculous. Suddenly everyone has power the likes of which only the most powerful of NPCs should have.
I barely formed the thought, so it's not fleshed out, but it did occur to me that maybe a good solution would be an adjusting scale for how much XP people get for things (be it plot XP, weekly, votes, etc) based on how much XP they have, so that the older, dino PCs get less XP as they have more, while the newer PCs get more that slows to a trickle after they catch up.
I'm not sure if it would solve the XP bloat. Likely just delay it.
Another thought I had, long, long, long ago.... Was just to decide on a good, high level cap. Every starting character gets that much XP at CG. The choice then, becomes theirs. Do they spend it all in one go, and make some super powerful high-roller for their sphere, or do they parcel it out so that they can progress the character and have them grow in play.
XP regulation vs. accessibility and fun for players old and new is something I am very interested in trying to solve.
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@Arkandel said in The Metaplot:
@surreality Now I want TJ to admit he stole it from me and we just got ourselves a full-on inception.
That'd be hysterical. But it does go to show how the 'game of telephone' principle can sometimes get some pretty neat results when applied to ideas evolving along the line vs. what it's usually used for (confusion and/or gossip) in the hobby!
@Kanye-Qwest said in The Metaplot:
Man, if I had $100 for every time I got accused of favoring/handing something to my "friend", when it was someone I (A. did not know at all or (B. actually OOCly disliked, I would...well, I'd be on vacation right now.
When you get the 'you must be TSing that person!' one, I say let it count for double. Triple if you haven't actually TSed anybody in years... (So. Much. Eyerolly. Sigh.) That's the quick route to the first class airfare, if nothing else.
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21 hours in and whoa there is a very involved discussion going on. So I'm going to answer the original question instead.
@il-volpe asked:
What exactly is one, in your learned opinion?
The events of the greater world which go far in defining that world and much that happens within it. Some people might call that "setting", but the setting is simply where the events take place.
For instance, in one world, "winter is coming" is a meta-plot. It is an event that will be happening, but it's an event so large that it influences even small events within it, such as the event of, "better chop some more wood, then, and by wood I mean kill all Starks."
In another world, it might be "God is in a coma". The movie is not at all about God being in a coma, but the movie happens because of that over-arching condition of the world.
