Encouraging Proactive Players

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@faraday
Oh, yeah, that's entirely fair, and I'm never a fan of rules that are specifically designed to work around bad or stupid behavior that players just shouldn't engage in in the first place. I do think it has other utility (specifically if there's a notification feature, which only the participants would want to get), but I can certainly understand the cost/benefit analysis not working out for something like it.

[Auspice]

@three-eyed-crow said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

@faraday
In my experience, unfortunately, you'll get more complaints and bad feelings about "exclusion" if a private event is posted publicly where everyone can see, than you will if who can see it is locked.

Which sucks and is another player-behavior problems, rather than a tool problem, but it does make me hesitant to post smaller-scale stuff on a public events calendar.

This is my concern, too. Like, plot I'm running now really is geared towards one faction. It fits best for them, they're the most interested and proactive towards it. I don't want to close it off, but I think I might have to?

I have one single player outside that faction who has kinda sorta showed interest. And I've gone to him with some possible hooks. I have tried so hard. This person is even a friend of mine.

'Hey, would your character...'
'No.'
'Would your character's shop...'
'Probably not.'
'Has your character ever...'
'Nah.'

...I'm about to just say look, man, I don't think I can hook him into this one. I know you want to, but you have shot down every single hook I've given you. Your character has hooks into the one-offs I've been doing with other PC. I will probably be running stuff in the area your alt is in on my alt down the road. I think we need to give up on this plot.

I feel bad doing it, but at the end of the day, he is giving me nothing to work with and he's the outlier.

But people, there is a point where it is not the ST's fault anymore. And I feel like there is a lot of weight being put on STs. Too much, in many cases. There's only so much we can do. It is up to the player to have some agency (a lot of agency). It is up to the player to think of reasons to be in a place at a time. It is up to a player to be flexible. If I am already juggling eight people and working on hooks to get everyone in and I have offered you 3-5 of them and you shoot down every single one... I am probably going to walk away.

[mietze]

I don’t think proactively making a coder put bells and whistles into a thing will make it more utilized if it’s not already busting at the seams of being used.

+event code doesn’t really create (or IMO even reliably indicate) activity. It might even suppress it a little! Think of all the no shows in signups (including scene runners). I think sometimes it’s more of a show off tool.

It is super nice to have if it’s how your brain is organized (I love it, I love the reminders, I love being able to check at a glance in one place for event time conflicts) but that’s just because I’m me. It flusters others, and a lot of folks don’t bother to check to see if they’re scheduling major events on top of each other.

If an events organizer wasn’t being adequately used by a majority of people then I wouldn’t sink resources into it either as staff, no matter how much I personally benefit from them!

[3543thrh67]

Arx has a neat system for events. THe events 'private' get a little tag that indicates it as such and only shows to those invited to said event.

[Ganymede]

@seraphim73 said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

... I would like to hear thoughts on how to find, cultivate, and encourage proactive players. Whether this is from a Staff perspective ("I was on a game and Staff did X and it encouraged players to be proactive") or from a player perspective ("When a game does/has X, it encourages me to be proactive"), I'm curious and interested.

Staff's Perspective:

Be responsive to +requests and @mails. Make suggestions on channel. Help link new PCs with old PCs. Keep your spheres small and cozy. Provide tangible rewards for desired behavior.

Player's Perspective:

Be responsive to my +requests and @mails. Help me start or complete your helpful suggestions on channel. Help me link my new PC with old PCs, and then help others link with my PC. Keep your spheres small and cozy. Provide tangible rewards when I do something you like.

Overall:

Staff proactivity encourages player proactivity. Cultivate player proactivity by knowing your limits, and ensure your staff can meet the demand for staff attention. As a player, be patient and follow the clues; where the hints are too subtle, ask what staff would like to see.

Also, staff needs a vision as to what they want to see. Players generally are smart enough to follow.

[Darinelle]

@auspice said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

Sadly, on most games, those running plot rarely get to participate in plot and because there's so few plot runners left, they often get overwhelmed until they burn out for a while.

It'd be amazing if there was an ST's ST out there.

This is my MO when I'm running non-gamewide arcs based on specific players, yes.

[Apos]

I still have kind of an outsider's perspective when it comes to this, since I've only been on MUs for a fraction of the time as most people on the board. I see high energy, really enthusiastic proactive players often in conflict with older, more experienced players and it really took me aback, since I didn't really see why they would come in conflict. From my perspective, a lot of the really older players are very good at developing the RP they want, only the RP they want, and are intensely protective of that and are not inclined to welcome things that could disrupt that. That isn't great for fostering environments that's welcoming and encouraging players to be really proactive.

I think you can kind of look at helping proactive players from two angles- giving them the tools they need, and giving them an environment they need. And then you can break it down further.

1. What does someone need to get started.
2. What does someone need while running and coordinating a story.
3. And how do they feel afterwards that makes it a satisfying experience that they could then do it again.

What for the first part, someone needs to be very easily to get any kind of information to run a story. Easy access to theme, easy access to specific questions about the world, how to make it consistent with the game, what kind of rules there are. All that needs to be very easy, and that can be tools to very easily access it, and an environment that encourages someone to do so. Brainstorming is part of this. How easy is it look at other stories that happened in the game? How easy is it for someone that is new to build off existing stories, and cross reference stories? How can they find out about PCs, and their hooks and goals, and make things meaningful to those PCs on a personal level? How do they know what people want, what stories they can create that will be rewarding? All these kind of brainstorming elements can have tools created to facilitate them and an environment that fosters asking that. People build off shared creative energy- you see a ton of drive in creating a game because it's new and fun, and not a whole hell of a lot in keeping a game running. Because the former is more of a shared creative experience. So it has to be fun. And that means encouraging interaction that makes it fun.

With the second part, that means making it incredibly easy to get people together, roleplaying, with as easy to use and convenient tools possible for running a story as can be realistically done and an environment that makes it fun. For tools, this has to be very accessible, something intuitive or easily explained, and not feel like a ton of work with the ability to make mistakes without it being a disaster. Communication tools in particular are huge since MU players are mostly flakes, and the more things that can easily get them together and on the same page the better. But I do think the environment being fun is more important.

All it takes is staff tolerating a single negative, whiny player that shows up to stories and makes unreasonable demands. If they tolerate Negative Nancy or Whining William, that proactive player's drive is dead. And staff not saying, 'Sorry, you don't fit in here, best of luck to you, William' means that you are saying, 'We are keeping William, and it's okay if he drives off Driven Dave or Proactive Paula'. So all the tools in the world are worthless if staff and players are unwilling to enforce an environment that keeps a high standard of behavior.

Now for the third part, making sure someone feels appreciated I think is vital, and I think for a whole hell of a lot of STs, they might get 1 or 2 thank yous, but then they might see 10 people making sadface emoticons of how no one loves them and takes them to plots, or bitching that one person on their plot got a shiny, or someone whining that Proactive Paul gets to go on every story and on and on and on. Again, if those kinds of things are tolerated, I do not believe almost any proactive player's enthusiasm will survive in the environment. Honestly you can give a proactive player all the xp in the world and it won't matter if they get one super negative player that gives them sadface pages every time they do something.

Stomping on the last behaviors of people complaining about exclusion or mad someone else got something I think is vital. I don't think any game can sustain a proactive environment without policing that. In fact, from older players, you see them become more and more insular. Someone whined about how their public event went? Well fine, they do private events for their friends until the game shuts down. It takes someone that is unbelievably hardcore to just blow off dipshits calling random things favoritism and keep doing public events and creating for RP and ignoring people desperately trying to dump sand on the fire of their enthusiasm. I think there's probably no more than one person like that in a couple hundred.

For most, the moment they get pushback or a complaint, they are done. So reduce the pushback and complaints, and the latter is harder, because it's from players, not staff.

[fortydeuce]

I'd like to think I'm the "high energy, really enthusiastic proactive" newbie player you mentioned, @Apos. I don't think I've had OOC conflict with the older, more-experienced-at-Arx people, but I will note that I feel like there's a whole slew of people I don't know and never see around publicly. Which is okay! But I can see myself, maybe a month or two further down the line, wondering why the PCs I never see on-grid are still never on-grid, and wondering who else to hook into. I've met a lot of the heavy-hitters, to my knowledge, but there are folks out there, in a 300+ character MUSH, that I'm simply never going to meet -- despite my PC having a push to meet everyone (and that being honestly one of the main reasons I took him).

So those private events? I've been to all of one, that I started. If there is a whole bunch of private RP going on that I don't see, then I worry about that potentially bottlenecking. Again, I'm talking out of my hat here, but just thinking this through in terms of "how to encourage interaction between the two sides."

[Roz]

@fortydeuce I mean, of course there's going to be a whole slew of private RP going on that you don't see. It's a huge game, and there are lots of rooms on the grid that aren't marked public to show up on +where. I don't know that "meeting everyone" is really a realistic goal in this instance.

[fortydeuce]

@roz I know that. I'm just bringing up that point as something that may bottleneck down the line as the playerbase shifts here and there.

[Apos]

@fortydeuce Ya one thing we have eventually coming is essentially a huge GMing system to link people's goals together and nudge people together based on their character desires, what stories they are involved in, and the plot hooks they get. That sort of thing.

[Pyrephox]

Didn't one of the Amber games have programmed objects that were essentially 'plots in a box' that people could take and run with without a dedicated GM? I never played there, but I remember hearing about it, and thinking just how fantastic that sounded. While there's a fair amount of front-loaded work, that work is something that people can do on their own time, and then players can just meet up whenever for it.

[Ortallus]

@auspice said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

Although, I'm probably not the best person to critique PRPs, I largely don't participate in them for all the reasons listed above. If I thought that a PRP would be a meaty thing that really gave me something to sink my teeth in and RP about, though? If I knew there would be follow-up and the plot wouldn't just disappear after a random scene or two? I'd be all over that in a sec.

I've tried running these on a couple places, including having legwork available. Ironically, what I see is people wanting to get involved in one scene for RP, taking their rewards, and never attempting any amount of legwork, or even signing up for followup scenes.

If I actually try a bboard post to the effect of "this will be a series of 3-5 individually run PrPs that multiple people can participate in, @mail me for interest" I might get -1- response. So these sorts of things tend to just fizzle before they start.

[WildBaboons]

@pyrephox said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

Didn't one of the Amber games have programmed objects that were essentially 'plots in a box' that people could take and run with without a dedicated GM? I never played there, but I remember hearing about it, and thinking just how fantastic that sounded. While there's a fair amount of front-loaded work, that work is something that people can do on their own time, and then players can just meet up whenever for it.

Road to Amber has Packets and Quests that are essentially this. Multipart plot lines/ideas that you need to RP out with other people.

[fortydeuce]

@apos Sounds good! It's just I know there are people out there who would have things to hook in to mine, but I'm uncertain where to find those who aren't super-public on grid. And with @rs continuing to have a weird sense of humor (got my first repeat customer on only my fifth @rs!), who knows when I'll encounter them? Something that aligns plots and the like would be pretty cool.

[ThatGuyThere]

@three-eyed-crow said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

@faraday
In my experience, unfortunately, you'll get more complaints and bad feelings about "exclusion" if a private event is posted publicly where everyone can see, than you will if who can see it is locked.

Not only that but most people don't like to be exclusionary but sometimes the tools point that way, for example I will occasionally run short plots. My participation limits for them is a hard max of four in a scene. that is just my limit for what I manage in a scene without it feeling stressful as hell. If you put up a +event with a max signups of four i have found two things happen, it tends to get filled quickly and then you catch a lot of why can't i be in your event too, and then on the night of the thing you are lucky if you have 3 of the 4 who signed up on. So I tend to not use +events but @mail to do the scheduling which then limits it to those I know well enough to personally ask.

[Ortallus]

@arkandel said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

But I think it's a completely separate issue than the one discussed here. Maybe someone should make a thread called "proactive staff".

This. So much this. I sort of feel like if there's not some meta-plot going on, that I'm probably going to get bored.

I think @Auspice MIGHT agree with me when I say that a sort of ideal situation is where there's an ongoing meta-plot, wherein PrPs can be run in tandem, possibly associated with, and ultimately affecting said meta-plot.

IE:

The goblin king is moving to siege the city. He's got massive armies at his command. Players could run various plots to thwart the goblin king. Attacking supply lines, harrying pickets, scouting the numbers, hit and run assaults, ambushing enemy scouts... the list really goes on, and is limited only by the creativity of the players.

Now, the end result is that the more players get involved, and come up with ideas, and submit logs, the easier the 'final showdown' is with the Goblin King.

And that brings me to what will be my next separate post later, but that is returning to the original topic.

@roz said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

@faraday I think the disagreement here is whether something that's an OOC scheduled scene means that it's an IC event. Which I don't think it has to be. For me, and I know for a good number of others, +event is just an OOC calendar. Why shouldn't an OOCly scheduled event go on it even if it's not something that's ICly scheduled? Do we just need to change it to +calendar or something?

I think what +event is used for varies greatly from place to place. Some places, such as Arx it seems, are large scale RP events. Other places, Like Tenebrae/Symbol of Ea, use it to announce specific time and day that a GM intends to run a play for 3-5 players of X level.

@auspice said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

...I'm about to just say look, man, I don't think I can hook him into this one. I know you want to, but you have shot down every single hook I've given you. Your character has hooks into the one-offs I've been doing with other PC. I will probably be running stuff in the area your alt is in on my alt down the road. I think we need to give up on this plot.

I feel bad doing it, but at the end of the day, he is giving me nothing to work with and he's the outlier.

This is absolutely the thing. People are often unwilling to meet you half way, and then complain they're not getting enough action.

Sometimes, it really isn't viable for a character to be in a plot. That's fine. But the player should at least say, "Hey, what about this as a hook, would that work?" and then you say, "Maybe not that exactly, but what about this?" "Hey! Sweet!"

When you're throwing gold at a garbage disposal, you lose the motivation quick.

@pyrephox said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

Didn't one of the Amber games have programmed objects that were essentially 'plots in a box' that people could take and run with without a dedicated GM? I never played there, but I remember hearing about it, and thinking just how fantastic that sounded. While there's a fair amount of front-loaded work, that work is something that people can do on their own time, and then players can just meet up whenever for it.

Tenebrae/Symbol of Ea also has a really cute "random plot generator" for PrPs. You pull a lever and it spits something out like, "<Class/Villain type> is doing <thing> and it's pissing off <group> so they've hired a group of adventurers to stop them!"

@thatguythere said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

@three-eyed-crow said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

@faraday
In my experience, unfortunately, you'll get more complaints and bad feelings about "exclusion" if a private event is posted publicly where everyone can see, than you will if who can see it is locked.

Not only that but most people don't like to be exclusionary but sometimes the tools point that way, for example I will occasionally run short plots. My participation limits for them is a hard max of four in a scene. that is just my limit for what I manage in a scene without it feeling stressful as hell. If you put up a +event with a max signups of four i have found two things happen, it tends to get filled quickly and then you catch a lot of why can't i be in your event too, and then on the night of the thing you are lucky if you have 3 of the 4 who signed up on. So I tend to not use +events but @mail to do the scheduling which then limits it to those I know well enough to personally ask.

It's entirely possible to put standby slots for limited signups. The first set is just the first to jump in. Standbys can still sign up for if someone doesn't show. If you're running a set for 4, allow 6 standbyes, and there's a pretty good chance you'll get 4 between the two, and the standbys generally aren't bummed if they don't get included, because they'll know it was a maybe from the start.

Also, with the standbys, it somewhat allows you to fill a party's needs, if they have them. "Oh, we've got 3 physical characters and our social didn't show. Well, here's 2 socials and a brain, and the other 3 standbys are physicals. I don't think we need any more of those."

[mietze]

We do really ask a lot of non-staff scene and/or plot runners.

*if they don’t want to be overwhelmed with a large scene that rapidly turns into an observational rather that active one, we ask them to have to say no to people who want to join in, and have to deal with belligerence.

*we ask them to mediate for players that may be inattentive/belligerent towards them or other people in the scene.

*they’re often at the mercy of staff attention/involvement for any physical/monetary reward for the participants.

*many times they don’t have access to a job like thing to keep tabs on who’s done what/asked for what/at-a-glance info showing what’s been said to each participant in a way that allows them to keep individual responses blind to other members of the group.

*there are often very few runners, so they don’t have the same opportunity to play their pc, and they’re competing against the rest of the mush for signups that they might want to participate in.

*rarely have I seen thanks given publicly or any kind of specific positive feedback given (I really liked x about the story. Boy, y sure was a twist I didn’t see coming? I felt like my pc really got to use their strengths/things I rarely get to use but have always wanted to, I really appreciated that! Wow, thanks for keeping everyone organized and enforcing timeliness, I know it’s extra work on your part but I felt like my time was really respected. Etc.)

I honestly think that the last one, player to runner and runner to player can make a huge impression. I try to do both (unless I am the runner of a huge impersonal scene) feedback wise and it’s been well received. I know that I always felt a little glow if a ST noted to me privately something they appreciated as a player, so I try to do the same for others.

[Auspice]

@mietze said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

Wow, thanks for keeping everyone organized and enforcing timeliness,

I can actually recall a scene where I thanked a player for this specifically. I gave the PCs two directions they could choose to go in. I had options planned out for each. And all but one person spend two rounds just figuratively sitting on their hands. Even the PC 'in charge' ... wouldn't make a decision. No one would OOCly make a call. No one would ICly make a call.

Despite me asking. Despite me nudging. Despite me giving them all the details and hints and going hey, this is for you guys. This is for your fun. Either direction works, just pick one; each has fun stuff to do!

Until one player finally went 'Guys, let's just go this way. We can't keep just sitting around wasting time.'

I thanked them profusely after.

Seriously, be the person who takes initiative, even OOCly. Take a poll. Nudge people. Be the helper to page the person that's still learning to help them out. Your ST will love you for it. They are juggling story and NPC/monster sheets and dice and...

[Ortallus]

Okay, so here's my thoughts:

If you want to encourage proactive players:

1. Be a proactive staffer. Give them something to work with.

2. Reward them. Flat out reward them. If you're a BG requiring MUSH, then every, say, 3-5 plots that someone runs, try to skim their background for a plot hook, and run a scene for them based on that. It'll not only reward them for running plots, it'll reward them for having to write a background.

3. Involve them. Let players interact with the world. I know this has been said before, by myself and others, but it's a big deal. It's a rewards of a delayed nature, but give a list of potential plots that players could run (Thus taking the onus off of staff) but that affects the meta-plot.

4. If the player regularly runs stuff, work out a token system of some sort for buildings. Players love owning shops, houses, etc. Every 5 plots run = token good for 1 room. (Vary numbers to your needs)

5. Again, this has been stated, but: Keep on top of jobs/rewards. Players and ST alike are a lot more likely to jump at the chance for a plot if they're not waiting for the rewards from the plot they ran 3 weeks ago. 72 hour turnaround should be most people's goal. If you're not meeting this, get more staff. (Hint: Those proactive players that are running stuff might also be willing to handle the occasional job -so long as they're getting attention from higher ups in the form of aforementioned tokens and custom plots)

tl;dr: If you want to 'encourage proactive players'... reward them!! Make it worth their while.