The Metaplot

[mietze]

@WTFE

That's not really what I meant by player response not mattering. If you do not have a staff that is proactively willing to ping players and pay attention when the group of responders is getting smaller and smaller, or who will automatically file any mention of not feeling hooked in or being able to participate as "oh, well, if they were good, proactive players then they wouldn't have a problem. Activity must be falling off because they suck/only want to fuck each other," then that's already an insurmountable problem.

[Apos]

@mietze Yeah but if it's by degree. If you you have 300 active players that have logged in the past 30 days, and 250 put in jobs about something , and of that like 125 show up to plots about the responses to those jobs, I don't think it's unreasonable if like staff figure that the 50 that never respond aren't interested imo.

[Thenomain]

@Apos said in The Metaplot:

@mietze Yeah but if it's by degree. If you you have 300 active players that have logged in the past 30 days, and 250 put in jobs about something , and of that like 125 show up to plots about the responses to those jobs, I don't think it's unreasonable if like staff figure that the 50 that never respond aren't interested imo.

I think at that point, if you're concerned who does and doesn't care then you have far too much time on your hands.

Personally, I think the "does not care" summary too generic; people have lives and interests that are not your own. There are a lot of reasons why someone decides not to engage fully with someone else, even if they are the people who initiated it. @WTFE is more on-point with "player response". The above numbers are more "good enough for me" than "they must not care".

I also think that diving into it further a purely voluntary event. (Funny that, this being a hobby and all.) The above numbers are more "good enough for me" than anything, really. That's a fine way to run a game, I suppose, though at those numbers you're further from knowing why these players don't re-engage than you are in the smaller player base.

[Sparks]

@Thenomain I think the problem Apos is referencing is when people either don't act on the responses to their requests or don't put in requests in the first place at all, then complain they aren't involved.

I think part of the problem is that people sometimes view "the staff is GM'ing a scene for me" as the only sort of involvement with metaplot that matters. Which is deeply unfortunate, because staff on most games doesn't have time to run complex GM'd scenes for everyone; requests and such are likely to give you the plot hooks to run with and involve others in order to get a plot to the point of group GM'd scenes.

[Thenomain]

@Sparks said in The Metaplot:

@Thenomain I think the problem Apos is referencing is when people either don't act on the responses to their requests or don't put in requests in the first place at all, then complain they aren't involved.

On one hand:

• What about what they were offered wasn't involving? How do we know?

On the other hand:

• Eh, if that's the way they feel.

I think part of the problem is that people sometimes view "the staff is GM'ing a scene for me" as the only sort of involvement with metaplot that matters.

It's unfortunate that only staff has the secrets of metaplot, so they do have a point. It's not a complete point, but there's really few things that players can do to overcome it, and most of them involve interfacing on an OOC and Plot-Running level with staff. Staff has to be involved, but @Apos' example was staff being involved, at least in one aspect.

The last quality one comes from echoes of metaplot. An explosion happened over here, so let's react. A god is dead over there, so let's react. Staff may get bits of mail that make them scratch their head a little, as they've lost control over the metaplot, but to me this is what you want. They'll just ("just", he says) ask for clarification and continue with the Staff/Plot-Runner interaction mentioned above.

I'm not disagreeing with you, I just think the conversation is limiting and a hair defensive from a player view or a staffer view, and so I think we'd all benefit from a wider good-for-the-game view.

[Apos]

@Sparks said in The Metaplot:

@Thenomain I think the problem Apos is referencing is when people either don't act on the responses to their requests or don't put in requests in the first place at all, then complain they aren't involved.

I think part of the problem is that people sometimes view "the staff is GM'ing a scene for me" as the only sort of involvement with metaplot that matters. Which is deeply unfortunate, because staff on most games doesn't have time to run complex GM'd scenes for everyone; requests and such are likely to give you the plot hooks to run with and involve others in order to get a plot to the point of group GM'd scenes.

Yeah @Sparks pretty well nails it. Like we have a lot of very shy, introverted people in the hobby. To a degree we have to be built around that, with reaching out to them and giving them nudges and trying to give them a lot of low pressure ways to get involved. If those aren't taken, then you're at the point where any more outreach becomes downright intrusive. Sure, someone can find anything they get as insufficient, or they just don't care for it, or they don't like the story or any of a hundred reasons and that's fine, but I think if it's accessible fairly evenly to players across the board and at least a large segment find it engaging and fun, then it works. And for a larger game even if we had the time to reach out to the 1/6th or whatever that give it a hard pass, I dunno if it's a good idea to do it, since the answer might be, 'I just wanna RP with my one friend here, why are you bothering me'.

So I mean yeah make it as accessible as possible but after a point trying to get people involved becomes downright pushy and is fun for neither party and actively detrimental.

[WildBaboons]

@Apos said in The Metaplot:

So I mean yeah make it as accessible as possible.. is fun for neither party and actively detrimental.

To paraphrase from Apos above... making it accessible is HUGE. Huge... but making it accessible in a way that is fun for both staff and players is big too. I've run into a couple of situations personally where to get into metaplot on games you had to have a staff run scene or two to teach you the secret handshake, bath you in demon blood, or what have you.. but the staffer that gets assigned that duty has had to do it a few times already and they aren't engaged anymore. To the player it's new and fresh, but not so to the staff.. and so it gets put off. Days, weeks, up to six months in one case for me before I just gave up, meanwhile the assigned staffers are running plots and scenes that they find enjoyable.

[Thenomain]

@Apos

Then we agree on the point: It's more than a matter of scale. Scale is important, but so are a lot of other things touched upon. As long as the reason for that is not that they "don't care", because a lot of people who give it a pass do, as per @mietze's post.

[Arkandel]

@Apos However it is also known in the hobby there is a type of player who wants to have the pie and eat it; they want to be playing with that-one-friend-there but also enjoy the benefits of establishing an IC foothold in the game's niches.

For instance on TR I remember this person who held rank... I want to say it was in the Circle of the Crone but I could be mistaken. He was always behind closed doors, but kept buying up Status every chance they had, and was running for every rank available for the Praxis based on the aforementioned Status; when he finally attended a meeting required for that position and he confronted with "uhm, who are you?" he pointed hard at the +sheet merit points to justify his contributions.

So the question of how inclusion into the metaplot depends on a player's personality, the character's achievements or coded traits does still exist. Which combination of those should exclude someone from participation? At which point do I come out of nowhere and tell the GM I want to go north of the Wall with Jon Snow to capture a wight and get told I can't because none of the squad knows me?

This is not a far fetched scenario at all - it's in fact quite common in many games even for 'regular' everyday PrPs, where PCs show up in the middle of an +event series without taking either OOC or IC effort to figure out the plausibility of their inclusion causing the person running it to make an awkward call.

[bored]

Obviously there's kind of a balancing point on the 'players who will not bite no matter how hard you dangle bait' (insert crude humor as appropriate) and 'anyone who can't figure out the precise right stuff to +request and expresses frustration clearly doesn't care enough so fuck them.' The former behavior is very common, but so is the latter attitude in staff, and both are pretty shitty.

I think it is important to take player feedback about inaccessibility seriously, especially if its being actively expressed to staff. Most willing to actually say something instead of just idling into obscurity is probably at least somewhat willing to be involved, and struggling with the how. The overall involvement culture of any MU tends to become impenetrable within a month or two if you're not there on day one, and the difficulty of busting in is one of those things that tends to put every game on a pretty dramatically ticking clock of viable lifespan.

[Thenomain]

@Arkandel said in The Metaplot:

@Apos However it is also known in the hobby there is a type of player who wants to have the pie and eat it

Why do we suffer these people?

My answer: Not all games have a large enough playerbase to wave them off. Whether or not this is because we suffer these people is, honestly, something I don't think we can easily answer.

I just watched a group of people I was interested in RPing with join a game out of excitement then leave it relatively soon after because they felt the staffer was snarking at them. These people are patient, reasonable, intelligent people and they left because they weren't being treated right.

This is the wall I hit every time I try to play a Mu* with others, or think about this problem. I don't think it's a Catch-22 but in my mind it's a Catch-22.