The limits of IC/OOC responsibility
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Personally I feel that there is really no benefit in conflating IC authority with OOC authority at all.
If you make the ICly senior person for X group/organisation/area associated with providing RP, helping people, etc then it 1) Means that they have additional burden which will likely reduce their impetus to continue doing stuff. 2) Make people feel obligated, OOC, to them. They are the provider of RP, they are the avenue of communication to staff, etc. That is likely to stifle rebellions, unrest, etc. Even in a situation like say Arx where each 'tier' (complaints about there being a rigid tier system aside) is only about 40% stronger than the one below. 3) Make them feel obligated to other characters and players. They should probably not kill Unruly Duke X because that would suck for their player, etc.
Edit:
The probably flawed approach I am working with for the new Fading Suns games is, simply, to charge people for stuff in character generation. Being a Knight is 10 points, a baron 30, being a Count is 50 points. Actually controlling a barony looks to be 100-160 points whilst the example counties I have made so far were up to about 250 points. The thing is that you have to pay for this and (for example) a 50 year old character gets 445 points whilst a 20 year old gets 300. Being a generic well rounded NPC knight with the skills to do your job but nothing exceptional costs about 150 points.
The idea is that the full cost is for a 'secure' fief whilst a border benefice or one where there exist serious rival claimants might be half price. Still, landed nobles are likely to trend toward being not terribly competent youngsters or middle aged people who are competent rather than heroes. Basically if you are a secure landed noble, bishop or wealthy guilder, then you are going to be a quest giver rather than the person who engages in epic adventures and who needs other PCs to work for them to achieve things.
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@packrat See, I think it's staff's job to be quest-givers. Not players'. Players can spread RP, sure, but staff is where the first impetus should begin in regards to plots/quests.
Now, if we're talking politics, and affiliations, I would agree, which is why I like your system. I want to be Juan the Dervish, vassal to Lord whoever -- for the highest bidder -- rather than having to do it all. It's good to take characters that champion the niche you want to play.
It's also good that Lord Mischievous Decados isn't the best at technology in the world despite having a duchy spanning 3000 acres of genetically engineered weed or something.
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@packrat You could arguably break that down further, really. Instead of the flat cost for the secure holding, give an example of a standard secure holding (and the cost for that), with a breakdown of the things that make it that way, or what benefits it provides.
For example, maybe the 'secure holding' is 20 points; that's composed of the following: 5 points in loyal 'armed guards', 5 points in 'strategic/defendable location', 5 points in 'good will of the serfs', and 5 points of 'defensive weaponry'. Then let people pick which things they want to scale down -- or up -- from there, with a general example of what each 'point' purchases of that thing.
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@surreality That is very much the idea, here are some examples of baronies I have put together whilst working on the system:
Added: Bolded 'income types' are the two sorts of strategic income that sort of benefice gets at half cost, each benefice also has a speciality, which is basically something that it does about twice as well as might be expected otherwise. If this is a type of strategic resource then it means that the benefice holder can exchange their own resources for this type at double the normal ratio. Of course people can trade their resources between each other which is almost always more efficient, Manpower cannot be just traded to another person outside of slavery though.
More Added: This is very much not limited to nobles or bishops, here are some guild benefices for comparison:
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@lithium said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
@thenomain Sometimes 'Play the Game' means Bad Shit(tm) is going to happen to your character.
As long as it's done with everyone on the same page.
A lot of games...
...No, strike that, almost every staffer and player are understandably shitty about this. They're shitty about accepting this, yes, but they're also shitty about thinking about preparing people for this.
This is why it's so important that staff be capable of explaining to people what they expect for the game. This has never not been true, but a lot of people use your exact language to tell people that they're wrong to be upset at something that happens.
While staff isn't wrong about what the game is about, it is their game to decide this after all, they can be ham-fisted anti-fun monsters when enforcing it.
Play the Game and expect only good shit to happen to you is when you get people playing fanged and furry super heroes on a WoD/CoD game.
The /game/ is dark, the /setting/ is dark, the whole /world/ is dark.
If enforced, sure. If not enforced, WoD is the superhero game many people play, and when someone comes along and demands that everyone play it dark and gritty then they're the one who's wrong. And by everyone, I mean everyone up to staff whose responsibility it is to enforce theme.
And people in charge of factions have a responsibility to enforce the theme of that faction.
A game is what people agree to play, regardless what's written.
On some games 'Play the Game' means 'Understand that bad shit can and will happen to your character.'
As long as this is what they've said it is, which is what I've been saying for years.
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There's really a reason why expectations was the word I kept going back to. It goes to leadership and activity level. It goes to conflict and fairness. Pretty much everything, really.
Setting and communicating expectations, and similarly calibrating your systems and staffing to actually meet said expectations, is pretty much the single most important thing you can do staff wise that pretty much most games fail at. Games will boast that players can change the world... but how much? Almost always there's some kind of implicit boundary, often for very reasonable reasons ('if we let you do X we'd have to totally rewrite theme and the game would just be too different for everyone') but these are often not or poorly communicated until it's far too late.
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Belatedly so apologies if I missed this previously stated in the comments...
I personally appreciate games that set down a meta/OOG expectation for players holding positions of authority as part of the responsibility of holding the IG position. These tend to center on minimum expectations of activity. I know some people feel like this gets too close to sticky entitlement issues but I've seen more than one game gridlocked by players with high positions who disappear due to burnout or real life issues or some combination of that and other things going on. There is an element of 'do I really have the time at the pace at which this game moves to do this pretendy thing?' that players tend to evade honesty with themselves about in the excitement of the position that their future self will only see as fuel to stop logging in when the burnout hits. So, games that real talk the player's ability to really give this a shot is worth the otherwise constant churn of the pointy hat in the big chair of the week.
That said.
I've seen games that tack too far into giving the person in a role of big responsibility too much free reign in how they organize their position. There are some iron willed, in for the haul players who find this stuff their absolute jam and game staff tend to love these people because it makes their lives easier. The downside to this though is that when this player stops playing or the PC dies/retires - staff doesn't have a clue what's going on because it's all in the head or the game logs of the outgoing player who may or may not be available to explain or transition any of it and much of the very high level, sensitive, intricate information that is essential to keeping one or more huge secrets in the air and going is now officially a black box.
This isn't the fault of the exiting player and more of a game design flaw.
Relationships - Romantic, Familiar, Otherwise:
I got burned twice in this department. Once pretty badly and once wasn't that big of a deal but it was frustrating to have to RP around it like it didn't happen because I didn't know how to explain it in game. From these experiences, I tend to think that there's a self-responsibility in creating a 'dead man's switch' that kicks in if the other player ghosts or things get ugly OOG. If you keep it simple and relatively blameless(e.g. 'Oh yah, Harriet moved to Cleveland to join a slam poetry society and breed labradoodles- I hope she's happy'), then it makes easier for everyone to move on.
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@arkandel said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
On a tangent I wonder (some of you such as @Ganymede might be able to answer this) if it's the same for theatrical productions. Do actors root for their characters and try to push for them to win? Do they view directors - which I assume is the closest thing to storytellers - as means to get what they want for those characters, or obstacles to their success?
Darling, actors on stage usually have a script to work with, unless you're putting on The Mystery of Edwin Drood. And improv doesn't really involve characters per se or outcomes that aren't purely consensual.
It's not really applicable to the question of "who wins?"
I mean, it's not even what they do in professional wrestling.
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I think it's more honest to say that players can change the outcome of IC events, if not the world itself, if that's the design people tend to refer to.
That said, saying you can change the world or that other characters have, etc., when it clearly doesn't seem to be the case anymore will lead to newcomers resenting the promise that was broken at the onset.
Ultimately, I would love to see a game where the entire structure is dynamic and things can be shaped according to how player characters moved the world. Unfortunately, I think this would have to be episodic/generational.
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I think it’s an interesting problem. Maybe generational could help. The only truly generational game I have had tangential experience with (did not play on it but know many who did and enjoyed) was Firan. Was there more of a sense of truly world altering stuff there?
I think most games I’m directly familiar with, since they take place in 1:1 time, are easy to have awesome shifting events...but the scope of the game is a blip of time and not focused on a very wide spectrum.
But I think it would be interesting to see a wider scope of play. I wonder how easy it would be to incorporate the influx/exodus of players and PCs over time (and the usual issues of new folks feeling like they missed the boat on being able to affect things—though I could also see it be a new opportunity to weave people in as time moved on more rapidly?). Would the usual problems be minimized or amplified?
It would be an interesting experiment!
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@mietze Maybe at the very beginning of Firan. For most of my stint, and I guess many of the others' as well, there was this overall feeling of a broken promise. You could change the world -- if you were one of the chosen few, or if your actions were convenient to what staff wanted to promote at any given time.
Generational is good -- but I think the permanence of 'older characters' in each generation makes the new people coming in on the political/social arena as PCs make staff/the game world measure these new player characters against the still-ongoing achievements of the older PCs. It's why I think each new chapter has to have a complete reset -- the old PCs are put up as NPCs or ancestors who did X things, and the new PCs face a different set of circumstances based on the choices of the olderPCs.
Of course, that would take players willing to give up their PCs to start off as new ones, and that always is met with resistance even at the conceptual level.
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@arkandel said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
@kanye-qwest said in The limits of IC/OOC responsibility:
On a tangentI wonder (some of you such as @Ganymede might be able to answer this) if it's the same for theatrical productions. Do actors root for their characters and try to push for them to win? Do they view directors - which I assume is the closest thing to storytellers - as means to get what they want for those characters, or obstacles to their success?Are there any parallels between the two activities, since that would be a community with some similarities to ours, but unlike it with centuries worth of history we can tap as opposed to this fledgling little hobby of ours that didn't exist two days ago.
100% no. That's not at all how theatre works. Improv is a better thing to look at, because it's built on collaboration to make the best experience for the audience and is built on the rule of "yes, and." That rule at least is one that I think RPers can learn something from.
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@roz A Game Master is the master of the game. Not only do they come up with the stories but they also decide rulings and what rules apply, create houserules and define the metaphysics of the world around you. Not all Staff are GMs in a MU but all GMs are staff.
ST or story telling is but one aspect of this. You follow the rules as presented to you and create plots for other people, if you cannot interpret a roll's results as described with the rules you are given and be able to present representations of that then you should not be in a (to steal some terminology from @faraday ) a gatekeeper or leadership position, as not only do you need to help promote rp but be willing to help create and maintain what your group is interested in.
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@magee101 I'm telling you that that definition isn't actually a MU* standard. Lots of games I've been on have called anyone who is running a plot a GM. I'll agree that someone in a leadership position should have a firm grasp on the game rules and theme, sure. But whether or not they need to be plot creators is very dependent on the game and how plot flows in the game. A lot of my experience is with leadership PCs helping to navigate plot being directed at them by other sources, often staff. They don't need to be creating plot themselves.
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@roz obviously as this a thread about personal ideals I am speaking of what I think would be the ideal candidate for leadership. The facts of what has/had/is happening on games in no way deters what I -think- should be required of leadership pcs
Edit:emphasis on the wrong word
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@thenomain You are 100% correct, what ICA=ICC boils down to is this.
You took an action as a character into the agrred upon In Character world of this game. Thus you must accept that by submitting your choice into the In Character world an In Character response will happen to your Character.
To me it is an agreement that if you TALK about doing something in the OOC area of the game, you cannot be legally hassled in the IC area of the game for something your character has not expressed as an IC part of the game. This also means reversely that if you take IC actions you are not punished in an OOC way (such as being banned or getting xp removed or stats removed from your +sheet) character death is one of those things that borders on affecting a player's OOC of the game but it is also still just a CHARACTER and just because your pc has died does not mean you are in anyway limitied in participating from the game except in so far as creating a carbon copy character.
Now obviously there is some grey area here but every game I have ever played on has a policy system that details to you as a player what is acceptable OOC behaviour, and what IC actions are forbidden for what ever reasons.
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I think the tripping point of people who use the phrase "ICA=ICC" is that they very often ignore that "ICC" comes from people with a far broader understanding of the game world than the character. They have understanding of interactions that never ground in the game, but still affect the game.
Nearly every game I've seen lately has an "ICA=ICC" rule, but what they mean by it is explained in the basic behavioral rules file and almost never named anymore.
Unlike "OOC Masq", tho, this particular meme keeps trying to rise from the grave. I haven't found the magic combination of words to keep it dead.
Now obviously there is some grey area here but every game I have ever played on has a policy system that details to you as a player what is acceptable OOC behaviour, and what IC actions are forbidden for what ever reasons.
These are game rules. These are what we should have. No rape scenes even FTB ones? Okay. No prostitution? Fine. Games are games because they have rules. Without rules, we have Cops & Robbers. ("Bang, you're dead."/"No I'm not!")
What is fantastic is a set of rules for what happens when game rules are broken. Even rough ones—expectations—that start painting a picture, just enough to get people on the same page is fine. (I would like one that reads "staff will never ridicule a player on a public channel" myself, but I've lost that argument since 2001. I mean, how do you punish a volunteer short of firing them?)
I don't think IC/OOC responsibility is a set thing. I think there are checks and balances, and that people with OOC responsibility should provide evidence that they will check themselves, from Headstaff down to Chief Dog Catcher.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@thenomain Aye I have only seen a few games where the 'results of violation' or the policies from staff as to what happens to you when said rule is broken is spelled out and they should be in every game but I think some HS dislike doing it for a multitude of reasons that I will leave unnamed
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@thenomain Maybe it's a culture thing, but when I see ICA=ICC spelled out in game policies, it's usually a shorthand for extreme non-consent. So no, there is no expectation of considering the other player's fun. It's more of a game atmosphere where someone's going to come out on top. "Hey, you rolled a 1. Them's the breaks." or "Hey you pissed off the wrong prince. Enjoy your exile."
Personally I prefer more cooperative games like what you've described as your ideal. But you can't force people to cooperate, and often one person's idea of "fun" is polar opposite to another's. Even on a PVE game, sooner or later you get someone digging in their heels like "Harvey did X and Y is the only conceivable way my character could respond." (Which is usually short-sighted but that's a separate problem.) I have no solution.
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@faraday At least where it comes to WoD there are many aspects and themes within the game itself that are confrontational, GotV in Mage, having PCs be the various tiers of leadership in Vampire, more than 1 pack on the grid in WW. I like what I term 'cooperative confrontation' which is a mix of ooc/ic consideration for conflict resolution and if I pkay a PC in one of these.positions I make my Pc one that has consideration. I play gotv? My pc is going to be the nice probation officer that comes and tries to tell you hey dude dont be doing that and tries to develope a sort of probationer/probationee rp relarionship where we cooperate to not conflict, or if you do like conflict! we can do the 'do you hoodwink me today?' Stuff. If you gotta die my pc calls in the heavy hitters and walks away. Same with any other conflicty role I woukd choose to play.
But that's just me and liking 'light friction/conflict' play over sunshines and unicorns 100% of the time
