First off I'll say I'm not going to address @Miss-Demeanor's points. Not that I don't agree with her in some areas, but she's not on my staff or my development team, and she's speaking of the topic in general, rather than how it relates to my game specifically. She doesn't speak for me; her conclusions and her input is her own. Now mind, she'd be more than welcome to the team if she wanted to be, but she's not speaking here as a game representative. I am, @ixokai is, and a couple of my other staffers may or may not poke in and participate.
I'd also like to point out that I do not agree with 'if you're running it, your PC can't be there'; it's not one of our rules. That's a separate issue. If I trust you to run it, I trust you to be in it. People aren't going to want to play in a PRP you're running if you run it about yourself, so misbehavior discourages itself. I will probably include this as one of my 'approval' guidelines; if you expect your PC to be involved, I'll need to look the plot over first. That's the extent of what I'd require, though.
@Arkandel said:
@Sunny said:
Alright, do you care to go over that point? I think the vagueness is caused by this:
@Sunny said:
Staff are players as well; they are welcome to run player run plots as a player as much as anyone else. But only staff is able to run game level plot. It cannot be done by players, for a reward or otherwise.
So functionally, there are two types of storytelling. Personal, and game maintenance. Metaplot and game plot arcs (key there: game) being game maintenance; everything else is personal. to some degree or another. Players are not responsible for game maintenance, for functions that are part of staff's baseline duty. If you are running game maintenance, it is part of your job as staff, and you get nothing for it. If you're running non-game-maintenance stuff, it should be run from the player side. If folks want to run a huge plot that impacts everyone / the entire city as a PRP, it's not off the table. It will probably be treated as multiple lower level plots because of the scope, which really ends up being a benefit rather than a drawback.
Game plot is something that advances the game's story itself. It does not belong in the hands of someone who is sitting on the other side of the ST screen.
fillers or one-shots to keep players going between long staff-ran arcs
I do not view player plots this way at all; I view them as not part of game maintenance/running/etc.
Nor are (or should) staff-plots always be enormous spectacles with a dozen people fighting to save the galaxy
One person or twenty two, the line isn't size. It's scope and whether it's advancing the game's story. Story, in my context, does not equal scene. You accomplish your goals as a staffer with game story far far far far far easier by spreading it out between little groups of 2-3 anyway. Then not only do they have the plot for playing about, they now get to get together with all the other little groups of 2-3 to trade peieces.
But neither is inherently superior or even preferable to the other.
Nope. They fill different roles. Different, not greater or lesser.
So alright, you don't want to incentivize it for staff due to ethics, which I disagree but can work with, and you don't want to use XP as an incentive which is an argument that has been made before, since you attribute the decline of staff-ran plot to player-ran stories being rewarded, although that seems like an empirical correlation since it's happened on some games but not on others.
This is not what I said. Or probably more accurately, that's not what I meant. I'm not rewarding anyone's plot stuff directly with XP; we're using a different system for that by design. You can still get XP with what you do get. I do not attribute the decline completely to rewards, at all. It did contribute.
What I'd be interested in here is seeing the alternative you plan to use in order to incentivize plot-running
System is still in basic stages of development, alas. We're using a 'player point' model; these points will be spent on a variety of things, including buying a certain number of beats in any given week. This is for a lot of reasons that have nothing at all to do with the discussion at hand.
since historically alternatives to XP haven't yielded very good results
I can't say I agree with this; games without stats still get PRPs pretty frequently.
XP has its flaws but it requires minimal staff resources, can be quantified and it's easy to keep track of or adjust over time.
Agreed. I have no problem giving people XP for running plots; I think it's a great model. I'm not using it, but it's a great model.
@Thenomain Agreed.