Yeah, Asherat did share one page with me, because she was confused, upset, and hurt by the demand that she apologize to the entire player base because some people got involved in one scene, and a bunch of other people didn't. And yeah, that kind of pissed me off, because the reaction a few of the people who didn't get picked had amounts to a temper tantrum. Ragequits, nasty @mails to people, and a lot of OOC badgering for various reasons.
Accusations of favoritism... because this was a specific scene that had specific requirements and someone didn't pick their closest IC friends to participate. Accusations of abandonment... because people who did get picked were trying to keep it quiet because what happened IC is and will remain a secret, and did things like left their +1s at the party while they went off to possibly die in the snow.
But let me tell you a story.
This scion power plot started some 2+ real life years ago, as a small but critical part of the much larger Black Cross metaplot. A bunch of NPCs were assassinated; murdered in a specific ritual fashion so their blood could be collected. A few PCs were even attacked for that same reason. This went on over the course of several months, so that players could have the chance to investigate and maybe interrupt what was going on. And investigate they did, but at the time the player base was tiny and not enough was done to stop it.
So some NPCs did a magic ritual and severed this magic connection between the peoples and the angels... which had the net mechanical effect of rendering an entire group of 5 point merits completely useless.
In the 2+ years since this happened, resolving this issue has been an on-going THING. It was never set aside by staff, it was never forgotten, they've just been trying to let players figure it out and resolve it.
Hey @Sunny, remember Dark? He had a character on KD who worked on it for a while until he flaked out and wandered away.
One character took a bunch of others on an international treasure hunt trying to find a magic book that had a spell that would help to undo the problem, but for various reasons they were unsuccessful. (Wasn't my plot; I didn't get invited; didn't get involved; don't really know the details other than that it didn't work and staff had to come up with a backup plan.)
In the meantime, we had the Flatlands war arc, which took another bunch of PCs off the grid for about 7 months. Of real time. Which naturally caused a lot of attrition because the pocket realm RP was a bit light and all of the battles were handled via +job for logistic reasons and because nobody ever really requested or showed an interest in RP'd combat. At the end of the last battle (which stomped the army, by the way) we holed up in and around a city and 'found' an old temple. I rounded up every last PC who was still out there, all the ones that had been there from the beginning, and we had a scene where we went and explored it. And, wonder of wonders, found an old book that none of us could read and a weird old bottle that some dude was trying to burn to keep away from us.
There was some combat, but another PC (not mine, thanks) basically jumped into the fire to save the book.
The book and the bottle got sent back as quick as humanly possible to the ONLY character I OOCly/Reynard ICly knew might have any clue what to do with. The only other person with that particular distinction was... scrolls up ...oh hey, that dude Dark, who quit playing over a year previously. Fantastic. (Un)fortunately, this character is... yes. A staff alt. Whose existence as a character predates her player's involvement as staff. (I guess I could have sent it to an NPC instead. Clearly that would have been so much better...)
And then ALMOST an entire IC year passed. (The Longest Night is at the end of December; we got back in February... so 10 IC months.)
In the meantime, a new PC popped up who had the skill set to help with this book thingy popped up. The PC who actually saved the book from the fire managed to find out about that skill set and pointed her at the character who I'd given the book and bottle to.... in spite of me never having told him who it was. Is that PC a staff alt NOW? Apparently. But she certainly was not when she got involved in the plot.
Now that there was another PC involved, not just the staff alt, things moved again. Again, I don't know what they did, or how they did it. Wasn't my thing. I was off hunting Skaldi, killing pirates, whatever.
The treasure hunting group came home, empty-handed, in IC November. Pretty sure nobody really knows IC what they were off doing, just that they were gone for a long ass time.
The Longest Night finally rolled around. It's a big deal ICly; the single biggest celebratory night on the calendar year. The entire city has parties. @Sunny stepped up to run the big ball at the palace, which is technically supposed to be a masquerade - everybody would have been anonymous, in masks, and skulking around the city looking like a duck wouldn't have been obvious.
Unfortunately, it wasn't a masque. And this scene people are upset about was scheduled at the same time as the party at the palace, so it was REALLY OBVIOUS when some people left and went somewhere else. Should it have been scheduled for a different time? Probably. But from the complaints that have been made, the people that are upset that they were excluded would still be upset that they were excluded. Instead of continuing to have their party and getting hit with a wall-of-emit about how their phenomenal cosmic powers were suddenly working again (which happened instead on Sunday, at the other half of the Longest Night party, to the apparent joy of THOSE people) people brought the drama and brought that event down in flames. In the 2 hours it took to do this one specific scene, the ball completely imploded.
Awesome.
TL;DR: people are super upset because they didn't get invited to a scene, because despite all being veteran RPers, apparently we haven't learned that not everybody gets to be involved in everything. When has that EVER been the case?
There were limited slots at that table: one for each Angel. Because it was and is a huge IC secret, because magic. Literally. It took magic to break the connection, it took magic to fix it. In this setting, magic is not very common. Nor is it something you advertise if you possess it. But that's the nature of the setting: people are superstitious and distrustful of it.
You want to know what you missed by not getting to go? Missing parties and taking 3-4 lethal.
You know what you didn't miss? Getting your scion powers back. Getting a whole new tree of boosted scion powers.
The people who have the best claim to being annoyed that they didn't get involved in this scene are the ones who spent A YEAR off the grid on their treasure hunt, and I'm pretty sure none of them ragequit over it. In fact I've RP'd with three of them this week alone and they didn't even seem upset.
Is this the first really public plot thing staff has run in a while? It wasn't meant to be that public, but hey, OOC knowledge and gossip and people crying favorites because they were apparently not special enough. Is this result going to encourage them to run more things like this? My guess is... no.
