Plotted versus plotless scenes
-
A lot of MCM plots these days feel like they're being run to make one or two players look good or cool while everyone else is going through the motions. There's never a problem finding RP but it feels hard to find RP with stakes and that feels like it'll matter in the long term, that aren't just vehicles to make someone look good.
@Arkandel - these days I only really scene on MCM but that atmosphere has definitely shifted away from categories two and three towards the first one. A few months ago, when I was more active elsewhere with MUSHes that had +scenes or +schedule commands, everything was plot-related. Of course, I'd say the latter two categories are diminishing because of those commands but that's an entirely different topic.
I think I agree with you that social scenes can happen organically but multi-part plots can't.
-
The amount of work that goes into making a big 'social event' scene into something more than a yawn-y spam-fest is just as much work as goes into running comparable plots. Running a plot has the advantage that everyone present is generally interested and ready to participate in This Thing, This Way. It's Doing Something. People put forth a lot of effort. In a 'social event' scene where you're juggling 20+ people and trying to ensure that everyone gets involved, it takes a considerable amount of planning, a whole hell of a lot of attention, and a ton of effort. It all equates out to be about the same amount of work, it's just where it's frontloaded and where that work comes in and what forms it takes, they're different. Very different.
But oh my god, to run an actual engaging 'social event', it's seriously just as hard as running comparable plots. I do both. I also have run plot scenes for 15+ people at the same time, so I'm a lunatic, but that's neither here nor there.
Edited because I do actually speak English, honestly.
-
This thread, on the whole, is extra fascinating on a really weird level -- namely, the 'the kind of games we all come from/are used to' shines through in a big way. (This isn't a bad thing.)
I've actually had a handful of plots emerge organically in the way @ThatGuyThere and @Ganymede mention. They have tended to be things that don't tread into 'requires elaborate permissions' territory, for the most part, or were things it was pretty simple to just ask, 'Hey, can I... ' in a job to a member of staff I knew I could effectively communicate with. (Note: not a 'buddy' or similar, just someone I know I can effectively communicate the idea to clearly, and know they'll ask me the right questions if they have any, etc.)
The more a game can facilitate this, the better, IMHO. The only way these work, though? It isn't so much about the staff, unless the staff are amazingly draconian and don't allow players to do anything at all, ever. It's about people being willing to pick up the ball and toss it back and forth.
You just have to think local pick-up game scale, not world-altering national championships, for the most part, and it will generally all work out just fine. Not everyone's satisfied with 'local pick-up game' scale, and generally that means they'll need more support/approval/etc.
-
Personally, the plots I like best and the ones I cherish as tributes to the sheer amazing ability of a MUSH to tell stories are ones that grew organically. Plots that result more like an improvised theatre session than a DM running something.
There's one plot that I always look back on in particular as my most successful. It comes from MCM, about two and a bit years ago.
I was playing the Master Chief and doing a lot of improv coded PVP combat. Due to luck of the system, Chief won every or almost every coded combat scene to the extent that people really wanted to be the one to stop him. We came up with a small plot idea - several members of the antagonist faction decided to lure Chief into a trap, where they ambushed him, grievously wounded him, and stole Cortana. Weeks went by with the Chief doing stuff in the aftermath - investigations, trying to bring down the people who ambushed him, and so on - which eventually culminated in him infiltrating their grid HQ and escaping. It led to some epic rivalries and, eventually, something of a grudging respect epilogue between the Chief and his principal antagonist.
But it's been so long since managing to do anything like this because the idea of a plotted scene these days feels like everything needs to be pinned down in advance, including who is involved, and so everything just feels so railroady. It's something I encountered in other places I dabbled in - this idea that if a scene is 'plotless' (that is, not related to some approved plot) then it is pointless and that's always annoyed me.
-
@Gilette
That's part of why I brought up my anecdotes at MVC.When I ran Beast Wars: Transmetals MUSH, and Megaman X MUSH, and was staff at a number of others in my heydey (mostly Transformers games), I think there was more of an impetus to 'do cool shit' rather than just the equivalent of bar RP, and so we had open lines of communication from players to staff who wanted to do stuff, or staff with access to setting information to build on/into. And in many of those instances, we had a 'setting bible' for lack of a better term that we could give players access to (we did this on M3 when I was Civilian staffer, and I shamelessly stole it for MMX), and Transformers Genesis did that as well (since they had such a complex merging of parts of different TF themes) to give them guidelines and places to insert their ideas.
A lot of it I think boils down to staff being willing to facilitate non-staff plotted scenes, and make sure the tools are there to allow them to do so. It's something I'm striving for with Houses, to have a setting document available to the public saying 'Okay, here's the base setting, build within it to your hearts content and refer back to here as we add stuff from player and staff-developed shenanigans'.
-
@Ganymede said in Plotted versus plotless scenes:
I mean, it's really as simple as "Shrike is an Arrow that enacts street justice! Come join!" And we get our kicks by just playing pretend.
Cannot upvote this enough.
I miss it when people don't recognize this. So many meaningful yet "plotless" things can happen when you stop relying on "plot".
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Thenomain It's the improv factor, to some extent. People have gotten out of the habit of it to some extent.
I dunno. The games I 'grew up on', there were no staff plots, or were never any I was involved in at all. I never ran out of stuff to do, or failed to have fun based on that particular lack -- if I had I wouldn't be doing this at all, still.
So a lot of this is somewhat alien to me, instinctively, I think.
Oh fucking well.
-
@Ganymede said in Plotted versus plotless scenes:
@Arkandel said in Plotted versus plotless scenes:
... these kinds of social scenes can happen organically but plotted multi-part stories absolutely cannot.
Why not?
On Fallen World, I'm running a local drug ring's take-down. It doesn't have shit-all to do with the game, but it's an opportunity to meaningfully RP. Sometimes I'm running the scene; sometimes it's someone else. We pass the time pleasantly, and recently pulled someone else into it.
It's organic because it just happens. It's plotted and multi-part because it is.
I mean, it's really as simple as "Shrike is an Arrow that enacts street justice! Come join!" And we get our kicks by just playing pretend.
As an aside, you are doing an excellent job.
-
@surreality said in Plotted versus plotless scenes:
@Thenomain It's the improv factor, to some extent. People have gotten out of the habit of it to some extent.
I dunno. The games I 'grew up on', there were no staff plots, or were never any I was involved in at all. I never ran out of stuff to do, or failed to have fun based on that particular lack -- if I had I wouldn't be doing this at all, still.
So a lot of this is somewhat alien to me, instinctively, I think.
That's pretty much exactly the vibe I'm used to, and I think there can be a disconnect there in so much that a lot of people are used to scheduled events and clearly defined plots they can slip into. I mean they aren't wrong, it's purely a preference thing and I can see how ooc communication for that is even more vital, it's just a bit foreign to my experience and I'm taken aback when they don't see things with clearly defined boundaries and take that to mean that plots aren't developing. So I just have to be careful to accommodate that particular style without stomping on the kind of organic things I really love.
-
Plots often feel like filler, you will progress through, there will be an end, it won't matter who was there, nothing is learned, nothing changes. Needing to include anyone, and everyone, means its not likely to have anything to do with anyone.
I prefer a central story progress, and if its going to be for many people, then arrange ways they can make the story have effects in ways that will let their character grow and change (not in power, fuck that).
I have a waggish sense of humor.
-
Central Story is exciting, but not the bread and butter of Mushing. When I've seen it work best, the central story is part of the setting, part of the history, not part of the day to day. When you're paying a tabletop RPG, your characters may be participating in the main world events, but it's just as exciting when they are just trying to get through a tough situation. If that situation is a side effect of the world and its problems, then you are participating in the central story as much as someone trying to Fix The World. Hell, the best settings can't be easily fixed that there is a plot for it.
I know that you know this already, but it was a good jumping off point for this concept. The world is screwed up, so what are you doing in your section of it? That's plotless plot.
-
@Thenomain, I stated it poorly, but I didn't just mean The Plot. I mean anything where changes will happen to the setting and the characters. Especially the characters. Trust will be won and lost, opportunities taken and missed, costs and gains will be assessed, tensions will begin or boil over, an era of change will be in the air, new leadership will step up, traditions will be changed or returned, something will have happened to exercise your PCs character, not just their +stats.
I don't need that for your chat at a cafe, or a random social scene.
I do think its a good idea to have going on somewhere.
Otherwise we are just creating second lives, and ones that just have the trappings of fantastical and amazing, yet I feel we often miss out on.
Is it charming to have a Lost rise their magically enhanced social abilities to rise to the top of company, or excessively banal?
-
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!
I find my social scenes run the direction of pre-game, locker-room zeal-rituals. Or something. I like them. I LIKE THEM SO MUCH!
Also, to answer @Arkandel , yeah, I have noticed it. But consider the age of the players, too. Peeps are burnt out.
-
Coffee shop RP is important. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
-
Absolutely. If anything, it's great because it preserves a vague sense of normalcy. If people are just jumping from epic event to amazing event to astounding circumstance, well, things begin to feel less special. In the end, I agree with @Misadventure - it doesn't matter who is there because nothing matters.
-
Yeah, but @Misadventure is a fatalist and a simulationist when it comes to RPGs. (Oh shush, Mis, you know it's true.) What matters is whether or not you have a connection to the character and you feel that character is telling a story. If you are not stopping the end of the world, then who cares? Well, too many people care. Coffee Shop RP is also about planning, connecting, maneuvering, and figuring out what to do next. It matters every bit as much as you want it to matter.
It stops mattering only when all RP stops mattering, which I'll outright say tends to only be when staff stops allowing RP to matter or when players stop allowing their own RP to matter.
I've seen both. Either staff get so tied up in their own approval process that they end up being little more than gatekeepers of fun, or players don't enable themselves to step up and just do things, sometimes random things, sometimes meaningful things.
On the player side, tho, it's as meaningful as you, the player, make it. There is a limit, yes. There's always a limit. But if you're not willing to say to yourself, "I'm going to play the SHIT out of this concept," then you're participating in the second form of Meaning Nothing.
-
Downvoted for shushing someone.
-
I am not sure I am a fatalist, though simulationist of genre I might be.
However, to be very clear, i actually don't care for saving the world plots. I had a tabletop game that in a year of playing we had saved the city, a continent and a plane of reality, and then existence itself. I've had enough of it.
The stakes I most care about are anything as you say, that connects the character to the situation. Anything where the specifics of one characters past and present and being versus another matters.
I think that in the rush to get things done, or to include everyone, you end up with no one and no thing actually being a driver to anything at all. It happens because the ST(s) say it does, not because what someone did was of particular worth.
I also lay a lot of that at the general players feet. They no longer seem to want personalized content, not even from themselves.
Just participation.
I blame video games and television shows for making us passive consumers of event sequences and charged moments, but unable or unwilling to create them at all.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
-
Misadventure sums up pretty well why I avoid +events style PRPs for the most part.
They can be great stories and with the right runner wonderfully fun, but a lot of the time it feels disjointed compared to all the other RP done on that character, since a lot of the time your PC is there with complete IC strangers often doing something with no real connection to your character. To be they become Bar RP with dice. I don't mean that as a negative, as long as it doesn't become the primary thing I enjoy a good Bar RP scene and that can lead to more things but my itself it serves the purpose of an enjoyable scene and that is about it. (Possible new term Quick dine rp?) -
@Misadventure said in Plotted versus plotless scenes:
I also lay a lot of that at the general players feet. They no longer seem to want personalized content, not even from themselves.
Just participation.
I have never met a player that did not prefer personalized content. I can't think of a single case of it. It's just so far from my own experiences I can't relate at all.
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.
