@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
This sounds very interesting in principle. I can see the overall gist of using a version control paradigm but I have a harder time seeing how to efficiently break up a plotline in a way to make it easy for players to branch and merge without a lot of manual management. Could you give some example of how this could work, in practice?
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Griatch
Right now things are so sandbox-y imo since the lack of tools heavily contribute to an environment that makes it extremely difficult for any individual storyrunner, even staff, to tell what other people have done/are doing in most mushes. It's largely relying on the memory of players and staff as they become aware of plot elements that might contradict previous things, and (this is a little outside my experiences so correct me if I'm wrong), probably creates hard feelings as someone runs a plot and then is retconned later after the fact by a staff member that suddenly realizes it contradicts something else. So for examples:
Currently- someone wants to run a plot that happens, as a side note, to include interaction with the chief of police of their sleepy town in Maine. It's revealed during the player run plot that the chief's a supernatural creature. Plot goes on for a month or two, and then second hand another player hears about the plot and mentions he ran a plot a few months ago that also mentioned the chief of police, but as a mortal hunter of the supernatural. Staff realizes it and tells group A that it no longer works, and it's retconned in progress to the annoyance of all involved. There's a lot of suggestions like, 'keep the amount of storytellers small' specifically because the games are basically reliant on everyone just to remember what happened and talk to each other for clarification, without really anything to refer to.
What I'd propose- a web form that has list of all story plots that have happened and are on going, searchable and collapse-able, with very brief summaries (maybe a couple sentences), but more importantly discrete plot categories. In the previous example, someone filling a web form for their proposed plot would plug in 'police' as a category along with vampires, some crime family, and any other story element categories. They could click an element, bringing up a list of previous plots involving it, and examining the elements would show that a plot six months ago has a note of, 'Police: Chief of Police's secret identity', letting them know there is a potential conflict, and alerting staff briefly overviewing plots for approval that there is a potential conflict.
So in comparison to a version control paradigm, it's extremely useful for players and staff to be able to tell what story elements are currently in play and present conflicts when being modified as a branch of the overall story. It would still need a lot of manual management, but in going back to the version control paradigm the current situation is more everyone doing their own thing in the dark and just hoping it works out.
