Plot session duration
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@warma-sheen said in Plot session duration:
That's an extreme leap, man. Feels like you're trolling me.
Is it? Even after my examples of situations where the situation can be sped up without relying on the kindness of strangers? Isn't it possible that we're approaching the issue from different angles? I feel like you're dismissing my post in order to be offended but eh, you do you.
I'm the last person that would disengage from the game system
I have no idea who you are, really. Mentioning FS3 explains a lot, though, because FS3 players tend to be a lot more laid back about "winning" (i.e., it's not the goal). I would never code something without backing up that trust with system checks--trust, but verify. I would honor it if that was the game culture.
The entire purpose behind the practice is to be able to spend as much scene time as possible engaging in the game system and the game theme together in RP.
In scenes that I've participated in, the ratio of prep vs. RP tends to be inversely proportional. (c.f. "different angles".) In a scene with that much prep-work, I want to get in, roll the dice, and get out so that I may RP about it later. I personally would be happy if it was, "I attack, swish, man my character just slipped on the slime hahaha" and then de-construct the scene after the fact, but I realize this is my Tabletop RP showing and not what most Mushers want.
The best way I've seen has been:
- ST announces who is up first.
- ST announces who is up next.
- ST and current player negotiate action.
- ST announces who is up next.
- Current player poses their action.
- GOTO 2.
It's kludgy, but is equal parts tabletop-system and equal parts roleplay-pose extravaganza. It still takes a long time, but it narrows down the scene as best as I've seen it.
I know it can be better.
But I also know that unless it happens naturally people probably won't do it, so spending time on the tools is pointless.
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To answer the original questions, I like a scene to run 3-6 hours, depending on how "big" the scene is. I don't mind spending 6 hours on a huge, metaplot-important scene -- I enjoy it even -- but a monster-of-the-week scene? I prefer 2-3 hours.
I also love handling prep-work before the scene. I've also started doing Flashbacks during scenes (the idea was stolen from the Leverage RPG). Each character gets a single flashback, which they can use at any time to have done something previously that has an impact on the scene currently. For example, if they run into a guard with a dog, one character may have previously snuck into the kennels and dosed the dogs with sleeping pills, causing the dog to either fall asleep on the spot or the GM to alter the last pose to have the guard patrolling alone, without their dog.
I agree with @mietze that a tight rein and active leadership by the scene-runner can make what would be a 4-5-hour plot into a 3-hour plot. I think that after a little practice with a system, a theme, and a playerbase, a scene-runner can get within a 10-20% estimation on time.
I don't want to break up the larger scene if I can help it, but if I have to, I want to break it up ICly as well as OOCly. Give an IC break where people can be shuffled into and out of the scene (a pause between offensives where squads get mixed and broken up again, etc).
I totally allow focus to shift away from characters whose players have to leave. Maybe they keep fighting NPCs, just off-screen, or maybe they fall back to do a rear-guard action, or whatever.
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I think a tight rein on management (keeping the action order moving along, giving cues to players that need it, ect) allows the group to settle into a rhythm that can extend attention span (I've certainly has scenes go over 4 hours) and allow (perhaps counterintuitively) for more player/PC creativity and thinking outside of the box.
When I have seen scenes/plots fall apart into confusion and boredom (either ones I've run, because I have made more than my fair share of mistakes/misjudgments, or ones that I have participated in and then regretted wasting my time in doing so) it's usually because the scenerunner is stressed (for time, for player behavior, for whatever) or intimidated to provide direction or leadership (usually because they think providing direction or leadership means taking away player/PC agency. Even though in my experience it's exactly the opposite. No boundaries or guidance tends to result in player flailing or people devolving into OOC scattering.)
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@thenomain said in Plot session duration:
Is it? Even after my examples of situations where the situation can be sped up without relying on the kindness of strangers? Isn't it possible that we're approaching the issue from different angles? I feel like you're dismissing my post in order to be offended but eh, you do you.
I'm not offended. I'm surprised. I'm not used to you being so hyperbolic. I want to spend as much of the scene time using the system to play rather than to prep... and you ask why not throw out the system. Seems like it quickly moved past anything constructive.
Maybe it is just different approaches. You might be approaching it as a staffer. I've generally always run scenes as a player. So I can't always see player sheets or verify their stats. So trusting players is already a given in order to run scenes for other players. Trusting them to prep isn't much more than that. At least not in my weirdo crazy opinion.
@seraphim73 said in Plot session duration:
I also love handling prep-work before the scene. I've also started doing Flashbacks during scenes (the idea was stolen from the Leverage RPG). Each character gets a single flashback, which they can use at any time to have done something previously that has an impact on the scene currently.
That's awesome. I'll definitely have to figure out how I can use that in my scenes. I actually got the Leverage RPG Starter at Comic-Con before the full book was out (and got it signed by Aldis Hodge who randomly just happened to be walking by with his fam as I was looking at the starter), but it didn't have that gem in it. Something like that sounds like it can really bridge a lot of gaps in 'planning' since that doesn't always actually happen.
A lot of scenes just involve showing up to a +event at the proper time, killing enemy, then everyone fleeing ooc as fast as possible. Sometimes you're lucky if you can get players to even pose out, much less discuss what just happened.
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@warma-sheen said in Plot session duration:
A lot of scenes just involve showing up to a +event at the proper time, killing enemy, then everyone fleeing ooc as fast as possible. Sometimes you're lucky if you can get players to even pose out, much less discuss what just happened.
That's a player issue though not a plot issue. Even when missions wrap up pretty early and there's plenty of time (OOC) for folks to do things after the mission, nobody(*) does. I've run plots that involve things other than combat, and it's like nobody(*) can be bothered to engage.
(*) Grand sweeping generalization. There are always rare exceptions.
Some of that is based on the audience - I'm sure it would be different in a politically-oriented L&L game - but I think a lot of it is universal. MUSHes share a lot in common with tabletop RPGs, after all, and a lot of those emphasize combat. Fighting and gear often represent a huge chunk of most RPG rulebooks. Combat and downtime are all a lot of people are interested in.
@thenomain said in Plot session duration:
Mentioning FS3 explains a lot, though, because FS3 players tend to be a lot more laid back about "winning" (i.e., it's not the goal).
Lololol. I wish.
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@faraday said in Plot session duration:
Some of that is based on the audience - I'm sure it would be different in a politically-oriented L&L game - but I think a lot of it is universal. MUSHes share a lot in common with tabletop RPGs, after all, and a lot of those emphasize combat. Fighting and gear often represent a huge chunk of most RPG rulebooks. Combat and downtime are all a lot of people are interested in.
can_confirm, it is definitely different in a politically-oriented L&L game. At least in things I've GM'd people will stay long after I've closed the log to do RP, or they'll page me 2-3 days later with RP they're doing about that plot. Even when it's a plot arc like a PRP, not specifically metaplot related. I usually end my sessions with "okay, this is beautiful but y'all need to GTFO my office." or "I'm going to bed, stay as long as you like but I'm done with the GMing part folks." LOL. Player enthusiasm to RP definitely outlasts my ability to be present for it most times. Note that this also includes combat-oriented plots, though they're usually eager to also find a healer when I'm done with them.
No idea why.
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@faraday said in Plot session duration:
That's a player issue though not a plot issue. Even when missions wrap up pretty early and there's plenty of time (OOC) for folks to do things after the mission, nobody() does. I've run plots that involve things other than combat, and it's like nobody() can be bothered to engage.
I think sometimes games unfairly categorize player issues given the rest of their setup.
As an exaggerated example imagine I determine to run a 'political game', yet my CGen and the vast majority of my system revolve around stabbing people in the face. To gain leverage you must have stabbed important people in the face, it's far easier to get stabbing plots approved at whose end you get XP you can spend in face stabbing skills.
But why is no one interested in politics!
This isn't a dig at any current games, by the way, it's more of a sideeffect of using and adopting mechanics meant for table-top in which social situations are really meant to be handled swiftly by an ever-present GM, and if you flip through their rulebooks 80% of the mechanics are about combat.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel said in Plot session duration:
As an exaggerated example imagine I determine to run a 'political game', yet my CGen and the vast majority of my system revolve around stabbing people in the face. To gain leverage you must have stabbed important people in the face, it's far easier to get stabbing plots approved at whose end you get XP you can spend in face stabbing skills.
Yes and no. I mean ... system is only a part of the story. Even if your system is slanted one way, you can still roleplay whatever you want within the setting. There are players who are motivated solely by the system and the rewards, but that's their prerogative, not a limitation of the game.
Take BSGU for example. Sure there's combat, that's a big part of the setting/show, but there were plenty of other avenues to explore. Intercolonial tensions, post-apocalyptic drama, general military issues, I even ran a couple left-field campaigns involving tsunami disaster relief and helping a village that was experiencing a virus outbreak. There's no real XP or rewards system to steer you to do one thing over the other. And yet what did people engage with? Combat, combat and more combat.
On BSP there was an entire civilian faction, 'soft' non-combat skills, and staff trying actively to steer things on that front. And again - what were people into? Combat.
I've seen that pattern across all kinds of games, even systemless ones (e.g. old consent games), games that aren't inherently combat oriented (e.g. westerns) and open-ended games with multiple factions (e.g. Star Wars or Babylon 5), so I really don't think it's a system issue.
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@thenomain said in Plot session duration:
, I want to get in, roll the dice, and get out so that I may RP about it later. I personally would be happy if it was, "I attack, swish, man my character just slipped on the slime hahaha" and then de-construct the scene after the fact, but I realize this is my Tabletop RP showing and not what most Mushers want.
This is pretty much my desired form for combats as well, while we are dealing with the mechanics less focus on them, and then once that is done we can make with the pretty writing again.
I will say my favorite and likely best written combat scenes are the ones where we diced it all first then posed up the scene using the diced results . -
As much as I'll run one-offs for people (2-3 hrs max unless there's a lot of players) I far prefer running PrP arcs of 4-5 scenes at 2-3 hrs each. I find that there's more opportunity and creativity in ongoing plot and that players get more involved, can find more to latch on to and run with. You can world-build to a greater extent, and give them something really immersive to interact with.
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@warma-sheen said in Plot session duration:
I'm not offended. I'm surprised. I'm not used to you being so hyperbolic.
Then I apologize.
Also, if 'Thenomain' could have a middle name, which would imply a last name, it would be "Hyperbole".
Let me try again without it:
Having grown up playing and coding for World of Darkness games, I would never trust the greater populace to be honest about their pre-scene rolls. The idea of throwing someone out for being dishonest just doesn't click with me; safety systems aren't just there to stop cheaters, but to keep the game system as consistent as possible. (edit: so the hyperbole logic goes if you're not trying to be consistent, then why try at all? — this is where that statement comes from)
In my experience, trusting people to adjudicate their own game rules goes one of two ways:
- People prove they can work together.
- People find ways to justify their actions to those who disagree with them.
I get unreasonably snippy when I think people aren't trying to push everyone around them toward #1, falling into Black or White, like those two events are all that people are going to do. (15 yard penalty. Fourth down.)
I feel like a <enter political or social jerkwads of your choice> about it sometimes.
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@arkandel said in Plot session duration:
But why is no one interested in politics!
I love it. But... whenever I try to engage in politics in games it is usually treated almost as an afterthought. If I deal with mortal politics in a game with powers, the default response is usually 'okay, you can do that, but it would take X months for the bureaucracy machine to get there. Oh and you'd having to be working at making this happen the whole time so you won't have much time to work on anything else political. Okay, see you next year.'
In games where PCs hold all the positions, I think people dislike politics because it very quickly becomes less about IC manueverings and more about OOC preferences. Who likes who and is buddied up with who. Clique madness or whatever. In games where NPCs hold the highest positions it feels that actions are dismissed in favor of steering the PCs towards the direction of the current plots being run. There's not much change being influenced by PCs, especially if it goes against the current plot threads.
Because politics affects so much of the game, it is a sensitive thing for staffers to let go of. It can easily turn the game into a ghost town if it goes the wrong way, especially when you add in powers. So much mind control stuff out there. So I understand that. That is probably why staff isn't big on freely allowing PCs to dive into politics.
For players, you'd need a full group of mature players who can handle getting backstabbed, manipulated, thrown under the bus, or played as a pawn without causing ooc drama over it. And I would guess most people don't have high hopes for that, so that's why players stay away from politics.
Even knowing this, I can't stay away from playing at politics because I find that to be one of the most fun things to do. I run my head into the wall frequently but its better that than focus on things that don't nearly interest me as much. Every now and then I can get stuff done, but mostly I think that's cause staff has found it easier to give me some thing of little consequence than deal with coming up with reasons to steer me elsewhere.
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@faraday said in Plot session duration:
Take BSGU for example. Sure there's combat, that's a big part of the setting/show, but there were plenty of other avenues to explore.
I think that this is an extended example of the D&D problem. In most D&D books, there's about 2 pages on social skills, and then 250 on combat, so of course the players (in most games, of course, every group is different) gravitate toward combat. In FS3, there's this nifty keen automated combat system, but nothing for social/politics... so people who like using the system (oooh ooh, me me!) are going to gravitate toward combat.
It's not a problem, it's just players recognizing what the game designer has put effort/time into.
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Even WoD books which spend more ink than most game systems on social and political things still have about double the space devoted to combat than they do non-combat.
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@seraphim73 said in Plot session duration:
In most D&D books, there's about 2 pages on social skills, and then 250 on combat, so of course the players (in most games, of course, every group is different) gravitate toward combat. ... It's not a problem, it's just players recognizing what the game designer has put effort/time into.
I don't really buy that though. I think it's the other way around. The reason there are 250 pages on combat/magic is because that's what the players want to play. Most people don't come to D&D expecting politics and con artists. They want dungeon crawls.
But even in more balanced systems, you'll still find a heavy emphasis on combat because most RPGs inherently have an action-adventure slant. Shadowrun may be all about heists and have rules for breaking and entering, bluffing past guards, etc. but I think every pre-made adventure on the market is designed with at least one big combat scene.
In FS3, there's a keen automated combat system because manually resolving combat for 4 players takes all day. You don't have that problem for a 4-player social scene, so there isn't a need for more complex mechanics or automated system. It doesn't mean combat is inherently more important than any other form of RP in a FS3 game. That comes down to what sorts of scenes you run.
And what sort of scenes you run comes down to what sorts of scenes players show up for. Players routinely show up for combat scenes. Others? It's hit or miss.
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@faraday said in Plot session duration:
I don't really buy that though. I think it's the other way around. The reason there are 250 pages on combat/magic is because that's what the players want to play.
I would argue the main reason players want to play that is because that is what RPG have trained us to expect. If you look at the granddaddy of them all Chainmail (first edition in 1971), which was made by the man who would later create D+D, it was Gygax and his friends doing table top small unit wargames with rules added for progression for the character that survive one battle to the next and adding fantasy touches.
As things have moved on more non-combat stuff has been added but table top RPGs in a lot of ways still mirror the table top wargames they descended from.
I definitely prefer the moves away from pure combat to adding more avenues of play, but the combat first was baked into the beginning of RPGs. -
@thatguythere said in Plot session duration:
I would argue the main reason players want to play that is because that is what RPG have trained us to expect.
I agree, though I don't think it's just RPGs. Look at the media that we base a lot of our games around: Star Wars. Battlestar. Game of Thrones. Avengers. James Bond. These things are rife with physical conflict. There's other stuff too in those themes, of course, but there's still an awful lot of combat.
I think with MUSHes, a lot of that "other stuff" tends to just get handled by players amongst themselves. And that leaves the combat and other epic conflicts to the storytellers.
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@faraday Agreed. But I don't think its just that we expect combat - from everything we see around us. I think the problem is in our ability to agree on how it plays out. That starts at even the earliest ages.
"Bang. I shot you. You're dead."
"Nuh uh. I had my force shield up."
"But my bullets go through force shields."
"No they don't. Maybe they go through a force field, but not a force shield."
And it isn't like there isn't social conflict either, I just think that there is a more finite difficulty with trying to adjudicate what happens in combat that people have more issues with. Social conflicts are just easier to navigate without using so many rules because of how open ended and fluid it is. There are multiple possibilities and so, so, so many interpretations about how someone feels about how someone else acts. So multiple results are acceptable (usually), which means less arguing over how things played out.
But physical conflict is fairly final. I hit you. And it hurts. A lot. You go down. Whether you want to or not. The end. In a lot of ways this makes coming up with combat rules easier than coming up with social conflict rules because there are far fewer outcomes. I've seen a few (and probably missed a lot more) threads about social conflict rules and what they should be and how they are handled on each person's individual basis. I rarely see a large consensus.
TD;DR: Emotions are more complicated than violence. Violence is easier to codify.
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@warma-sheen said in Plot session duration:
TD;DR: Emotions are more complicated than violence. Violence is easier to codify.
I still wonder if a socially based MUSH could be viable (like Diplomacy board game or Mafia/Werewolf social/party game). Simpy because of this, complicated and some way to break it down to the psychology of it. As much as folks want it, I don't think dice will ever be a good replacement for role-playing out social situations including politics. If there was a MUSH that used dice for that too, what then is the point of even role-playing? Throw some dice then pose the results, 'ugh I was brainwashed into voting for other party candidate, my life sucks'?
I'm just a surge protector doing my job, sir.
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@lotherio Also, to bring it back into the context of 'how long should scenes last for', violence is very time efficient. I can stab anyone in the face very believably within seconds no matter who they are, but it could look completely implausible to change the Duke's mind about something huge within the time it takes for a PrP to run.
Hell, introducing NPCs can take a long time. I can produce an Elder y'all can stab to death very easily when all you have to know about her is that she means to drink your blood otherwise, but it would take considerably more for a party to expose her weaknesses and fears then to figure out a way to exploit them in any way that doesn't seem completely unrealistic or over-simplified.
