Storytelling Advice
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Also when you respond to a player (character? sometimes the distinction is unclear) doing something stupid by introducing consequences for it, you often enrich the plot. Not everything that's IC bad is a bad thing.
Also also, What STs - especially new ones - should probably avoid is introducing situations where the entire plot is destroyed if the PCs don't do a specific thing; keeping things flexible in that regard, or having backup options to deliver critical information can be a very good idea.
A classic example is very important but thinly detailed NPCs - maybe the guy your entire story is based around is supposed to be this cool, shady guy for whose development you have so many amazing plans about, but whom the party decides to murder in cold blood when they first see him because he's all shady and stuff. Plot armor can be frustrating but there are ways to introduce contigencies without being heavy handed about it.
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I don't run +events or public plots but I do run a lot of small ones for folks I know
To be that is the key to my storytelling, know your audience, which is the players as much as the characters. You don't need to know their real life of that sort of thing but know what they like in rp, and most importantly know what they hate. A good scene can turn bad quick by including something that a player hates to deal with. -
There are a lot of discussions about how to be a ST, and many of them tell you to avoid the patterns that STs and players tend to fall into anyhow.
A common example is the ST who has a single story path laid out in their mind, and keeps the players from getting off it. This is a terrible thing if your players want unpredictability, and to be able to make choices that change where the plot goes (this is called Agency).
HOWEVER, if your players aren't proactive, if they want to have the story fed to them, or just have a chance to show off their awesome strengths and quirky weaknesses, or other interests, then this may be a good fit for them.
Know your current style. Write up how you do things, and what folks can expect. Post links to other logs where you ST'd.
Players may benefit from knowing many things:
How do you prefer to handle information flow, do you hand it out in plain text and OOC questions and answers, or do you want it all in sets and poses both going from you and from the characters?
Do you want players to ask to apply a skill or merit, or are you going to assume they do so unless told otherwise?
Do you assume the players will do whatever is the safest, or with the best payoff, or that they have deep knowledge of the setting and rules so if they make a dumb choice you know they are doing so knowingly and with a character based purpose (their own character, or perhaps for the benefit of another character or player), and so on.
Do you like quick and furious, or prefer careful investigation and interactions with NPCs and contacts and so on?
Are the character heroes in the story, or just protagonists? Superheroes?
Do you prefer questions for the ST to be in a +job, pages, OOC chat, or emails?
Will you have regular nights to run the stories?
How do you feel about absenteeism?
Do you prefer to place the events in the current timeline, where delays in scenes mean time passes in the story? Or are you okay placing the events in a nebulous IC time/date until they are resolved?
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@Misadventure said:
There are a lot of discussions about how to be a ST, and many of them tell you to avoid the patterns that STs and players tend to fall into anyhow.
A common example is the ST who has a single story path laid out in their mind, and keeps the players from getting off it. This is a terrible thing if your players want unpredictability, and to be able to make choices that change where the plot goes (this is called Agency).
HOWEVER, if your players aren't proactive, if they want to have the story fed to them, or just have a chance to show off their awesome strengths and quirky weaknesses, or other interests, then this may be a good fit for them.
This is a good point, which brings up another thought for me: sometimes players aren't particularly proactive, but sometimes players are actually lost and just don't know what to do. In which case, give them more to go on. It's awful as a player to sit there and you've read all the stuff and you just don't know what you're supposed to do next and the GM is kind of just waiting for you to figure out the magic action. Don't do that.
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This is the single best summary of running plots, not just scenes but whole plots, that I have ever seen.
@Seraphim73's is good for scenes, a way to note how to make it interesting.
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@Roz said:
@Misadventure said:
There are a lot of discussions about how to be a ST, and many of them tell you to avoid the patterns that STs and players tend to fall into anyhow.
A common example is the ST who has a single story path laid out in their mind, and keeps the players from getting off it. This is a terrible thing if your players want unpredictability, and to be able to make choices that change where the plot goes (this is called Agency).
HOWEVER, if your players aren't proactive, if they want to have the story fed to them, or just have a chance to show off their awesome strengths and quirky weaknesses, or other interests, then this may be a good fit for them.
This is a good point, which brings up another thought for me: sometimes players aren't particularly proactive, but sometimes players are actually lost and just don't know what to do. In which case, give them more to go on. It's awful as a player to sit there and you've read all the stuff and you just don't know what you're supposed to do next and the GM is kind of just waiting for you to figure out the magic action. Don't do that.
Yesss.
One of the things I've tried to implement (after too many years of being too damned clever for my own good), is to ensure that at the end of a GM'ed scene, I KNOW what the PC plans to do next, and their motivation for it. I also encourage players to let me know if they're stuck or lost or out of ideas, and I'm happily willing to rattle off a group of possible courses of action, without forcing the player to choose any one of them.
My purpose, after all, isn't to "beat" the player, or to give the player an exam on How Good They Play, but rather to make something that's enjoyable for everyone involved.
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@darksabrz My only piece of advice is this:
Be. Fucking. Flexible.
Shit will not go to your plans. You will have ideas about how things will go down, and then a character will do something you didn't see coming. It's always better, in my opinion, to let a character /try/ something, anything, if they wish to try it. Let them reap the consequences. If it throws off the story you had written in advance, then so be it.
Letting the players interact and even guide the story is a huge part of what engages people into the stories that we tell but not every group is going to be proactive and in that case you need to have a plan to fall back on, or at least the ability to make shit up on the fly really fast.
Unless I am playing a game where the players have a specific dungeon to go into, or a specific building with a specific floorplan to break into, 9 times out of 10, I am making stuff up as I go along. As long as you are consistent in the environment and reactions (when reactions should be consistent) then it's all good.
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@Lithium said:
As long as you are consistent in the environment and reactions (when reactions should be consistent) then it's all good.
This could have been its own post entirely, it's so important. Everything in the plot should be internally consistent, and consistent with the overall theme of the game. NPCs should never make decisions just because it fits where you want the plot to go, events should not just "happen," and if something has been set up as being one way, it should never appear to be another way (unless there's a consistent explanation for it).
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Speaking for myself, I love losing. There's some saying somewhere about how it's not your successes that build character but what you fail at. Even more fun than losing is a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, you won. Congrats. But look at the cost.
But win, lose or somewhere in between it needs to not have been predetermined to be fun. Are there are scenes in a larger, longer plot where the bad guy needs to get away? Maybe? But if the players are kicking ass (and I don't mean because they're only just posing that way in a diceless system but being clever and doing things 'right' beyond punching minions) let him be captured. Maybe his 2nd in command continues the Plan instead. Maybe he planned for his capture and needed it to happen. Maybe it was a double and the real one was off doing something while you wasted time on the diversion. Even of the GM hadn't planned any of the above, incorporate things like that.
Caveat: easier said than done and it's one reason I absolutely SUCK at running things.
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@TNP said:
Speaking for myself, I love losing. There's some saying somewhere about how it's not your successes that build character but what you fail at. Even more fun than losing is a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, you won. Congrats. But look at the cost.
But win, lose or somewhere in between it needs to not have been predetermined to be fun. Are there are scenes in a larger, longer plot where the bad guy needs to get away? Maybe? But if the players are kicking ass (and I don't mean because they're only just posing that way in a diceless system but being clever and doing things 'right' beyond punching minions) let him be captured. Maybe his 2nd in command continues the Plan instead. Maybe he planned for his capture and needed it to happen. Maybe it was a double and the real one was off doing something while you wasted time on the diversion. Even of the GM hadn't planned any of the above, incorporate things like that.
Caveat: easier said than done and it's one reason I absolutely SUCK at running things.
is this why you enjoyed playing Kyle in my plots? cuz you always lost?
[ducks]
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@TNP said:
Speaking for myself, I love losing.
Another of my Olde Grandpa Woes is that "people" (by which I mean a significant percentage of players but not necessarily a majority) have started to become unused to and uncomfortable with losing. Personally, I like to lose/have my character stymied 30-40% of the time. Much less than that (like the "never" that seems common in PrPs these days) and I feel like there's no risk involved at all. Much more than that (unless you're playing a character specifically designed to be comic relief/rescue-bait/an antagonist for all the WhiteHats) and I start to get frustrated. But while 25-60% loss rate is acceptable, I think that 30-40% is the sweet spot.
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This is also why I like it when all my significant XP expenditures come with some plot on the side. I like for at some point to finish the plot and have it not reallyt make sense for me to buy that stat because I totally fucked it up and now I need a different way of getting what I want...
