Storytelling

[Misadventure]

I'm pretty sure you are the only Geist Sphere Lead I worked for. Anyhow neither of us remember the meat of the conversation, so ...

carry on!!!

[Coin]

@Misadventure said:

I'm pretty sure you are the only Geist Sphere Lead I worked for. Anyhow neither of us remember the meat of the conversation, so ...

carry on!!!

No. It was @Arkandel. You're just remembering a different interpretation of the plot.

I didn't run that at all. I set up the new Underworld sectors.

[Insomnia]

I generally go with the "You will think of 10 things the players will do, and they will come up with an eleventh you didn't think of." approach to storytelling.

[Faceless]

I had a few more of my own personal rules pop into my head. Wrote a song about it! Wanna hear it?! Hear it goes!

1. Be consistent. Storytelling isn't just about telling a good story, it's also about being fair. Never do for one what you are not willing to do for another. Whether it is in rulings, addressing a player, resolving actions, or anything else - be consistent. People get shanked sometimes for being inconsistent in the pen.

2. Be patient, but not too patient. You're running a story/plot/event, you are the leader. Understand that at times emotions can run high even for the player of the character, so don't take anything personally. Likewise don't allow yourself to be walked over. You are volunteering your time for the good of yourself and the game as a whole. Staff should be consulted if things get out of hand.

3. Pay. Attention. I repeat, PAY ATTENTION. How frustrating is it for you when you're participating in a scene and the Storyteller is clearly trying to run a plot, play their four characters, and very likely responding to their mother via text on their phone? Don't shut out real life of course, but make sure that you're diverting a good deal of your online attention to your audience.

4. Be concise or verbose, pick one. Either path you choose, make sure that you are adequately explaining the world you are painting around the players. For myself and I imagine others, nothing pumps the brakes on a story like being confused about the setting. How often have you watched someone pose still being in the bar and addressing the group when clearly the Storyteller and other players posed now being outside the bar four rounds ago?

5. Take a break. You've just ran seven plots in a five days? Take a few days, a week, or however long you feel you need to recharge your batteries. You don't carry the game on your back and you're allowed to take a break; you are a volunteer after all.

6. Leave your own personal ego at the door. You are not a god. You're nothing more than some old dude/chick sitting around a campfire, telling a ghost story. You'll face criticism at some point, so handle it with grace and remain humble. You'll look awesome and they'll look like an ass.

7. Take care with "mystery plots". These plots can quickly devolve into "confusion plots", where no one understands what it is you're trying to explain. This is where details come into play. The more detail, the less likely your players will be met with confusion during your mystery. This is a good resource for mystery plots in my experience: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/essay/RPGmystery.html

8. Try not to recycle plots that you ran on previous games of a similar genre. But why, Faceless?! Because our community isn't vast and the players involved may recognize it. You want things to be surprising, you want to build suspense, and you want things to be fresh. Would you want to play in a plot that you know someone ran four months ago on another game? It feels like you're the runner-up. You're the friend who gets to hook up with your crush, but only after he or she got shot down by their crush. So don't do that to your players.

9. Lose the snark. While you may be a playfully sarcastic person at heart much like myself, text doesn't often convey the playfulness of it. When dealing with people who aren't your close friends and don't know your personality, you look like you're just being a jerk. So play it safe, ditch the snark.

Edited for clarity.

[Derp]

So, let me try and respond to some of the points that have come up here:

@Ganymede said:

I probably am not being clear on channel. What I mean to say is:

"I'd like to RP with you, in one way, shape, or form. I'm willing to run scenes to do this, and am willing to run anything that I feel I'm capable of doing. All you really need to do is respond to this message."

What's frustrating is the silence. I may not be the best storyteller out there, but I really cannot do it if no one tells me what stories they would like to be a part of. And what kills me is that many players cannot even tell me that.

I'm one of those players that will respond with silence. Not because I don't want to RP with you or anything, but because I absolutely am one of those people who doesn't wish to participate in all the things all the time, even if some of the people that I like to RP with absolutely are those kinds of people. I invented entire character hooks as reasons to back out of / not get into certain things. I like certain types of scenes. I don't expect anyone to cater to those things. They aren't the kinds of things that really require an ST, for the most part, anyway. They are exactly the kind of social things that some of the previous posters have distinguished as NotPlot.

Which brings me to:

@ Some Other People said (basically):

Get togethery type things are not plot.

Bullshit. Sorry, but this one really irks me. I mean, I like murder mysteries and bar brawls as much as the next guy, but... oh. Wait. I kind of -don't-, actually. The kind of thing that I like most involves a battle of wits, or a battle of charisma, or something like that. The ST need not provide a challenge for me to find a challenge in it I want to face. I really just enjoy being in a room with other people, working toward my character's goals. I tend to not favor huge scenes because of spam, but this is absolutely plot, and are absolutely character focus. It is a group of people with similiar interests who might not otherwise RP getting together under the direction of an organizer. And I know that I'm not the only one who feels this way. Coordinating <sphere of influence> gatherings tends to be pretty taxing for the one involved, and usually at least some order of business is discussed there. Character development -does- happen there for certain types of characters. Discriminating against this type of thing, and these types of characters, is a huge trigger of mine. There are books and books and books out there where this sort of thing is -central- to the plot. Calling it NotPlot is narrowminded and elitist.

Edit to add: The reason that most of these things probably seem like NotPlot to many people is that the Big Name NPCs are reserved for Staff Use. So if Staff isn't there to bring them, they aren't there, and it feels emptier. But they -could- be there. They, like players who chose not to show, just didn't show. That does not make the scene lesser. It just means that you can't try to sweet-talk the Big Wig because the Big Wig was off doing Other Shit.

[Arkandel]

@Derp said:

Get togethery type things are not plot.

You need both. Uptime and downtime, action sequences and slow burning scenes where characters interact to figure out that they've changed, or how.

Character development -does- happen there for certain types of characters. Discriminating against this type of thing, and these types of characters, is a huge trigger of mine. There are books and books and books out there where this sort of thing is -central- to the plot. Calling it NotPlot is narrowminded and elitist.

See, obviously your mileage may vary but to me the lure of plot isn't in the development which happens during them. I mean it still can in the right scene, but that's not their upside.

As far as I'm concerned the actual benefit of ST-ran scenes is in the fallout afterwards, in the cascading effect of letting the ripples of these big things reach different aspects of your IC existence - letting your friends now, manoeuvring politically to rally support from allies, etc. And it's absolutely in the enrichment of your character's existent through these new events since no matter what great chemistry I sometimes have with others renewal is essential or sooner or later we'll sit down and have that talk again. In a vacuum plot-lines eventually become incestuous, they get recycled. They need refreshing.

The only risk - speaking for myself - in participating in as many things as you can is that in the same long run a character like that has lived a really fucked-up life. After a sufficiently long time fighting horrors left and right, solving mysteries and witnessing the rise and fall of mad gods ... it all begins to blend together. Such experiences take their toll, and that might be counter-thematic to what some people want to play. Me, I usually roll characters for whom such a fate isn't contrary to what I'm trying to do.

[Ganymede]

@Derp said:

I'm one of those players that will respond with silence. Not because I don't want to RP with you or anything, but because I absolutely am one of those people who doesn't wish to participate in all the things all the time, even if some of the people that I like to RP with absolutely are those kinds of people.

You're probably not one of those people that complains about having nothing to do, however. And, so, you are not my target audience nor the target of my ire.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Arkandel
I think I now see why we have such different tastes. Most Action plot scenes even the fun ones then to be the type of things my chars never talk about latter usually cause it would mean revealing that they are in the know.

[Roz]

@Arkandel said:

As far as I'm concerned the actual benefit of ST-ran scenes is in the fallout afterwards, in the cascading effect of letting the ripples of these big things reach different aspects of your IC existence - letting your friends now, manoeuvring politically to rally support from allies, etc. And it's absolutely in the enrichment of your character's existent through these new events since no matter what great chemistry I sometimes have with others renewal is essential or sooner or later we'll sit down and have that talk again. In a vacuum plot-lines eventually become incestuous, they get recycled. They need refreshing.

This is pretty much my favorite part of RP.

[Arkandel]

@ThatGuyThere said:

@Arkandel
I think I now see why we have such different tastes. Most Action plot scenes even the fun ones then to be the type of things my chars never talk about latter usually cause it would mean revealing that they are in the know.

Oh, wow, I can see that. Y'see I don't play characters who won't go out and spread RP around in some way or the other - I design them that way from scratch. That doesn't mean they're all motormouths who can't keep a secret and/or aren't capable of subtlety, but when plot is thrown my way my initial inclination is to let it make the rounds.

[JaySherman]

@Arkandel said:

As far as I'm concerned the actual benefit of ST-ran scenes is in the fallout afterwards, in the cascading effect of letting the ripples of these big things reach different aspects of your IC existence - letting your friends now, manoeuvring politically to rally support from allies, etc. And it's absolutely in the enrichment of your character's existent through these new events since no matter what great chemistry I sometimes have with others renewal is essential or sooner or later we'll sit down and have that talk again. In a vacuum plot-lines eventually become incestuous, they get recycled. They need refreshing.

The fallout effect was pretty much the entirety of many games I played on in the past, in which there were no STs, period, only players interacting with each other and letting whatever happened, happen. This was pre-wiki, pre-log-posting, pre-board-post-TPS-reports, in which the only way anyone knew what happened was if someone else ICly talked about it. The lack of OOC awareness of plot created much more RP, because scenes such as "report to the crime boss about the shooting down town" was absolutely necessary.

I sometimes wonder if there isn't a psychological disconnect of interest in playing out mundane IC hobknobbing/reporting/manuevering due to the amount of OOC knowledge of what's happened IC. It almost seems as if once people have read the log of Uperman vs Fratman - Destroy Citytown!!, the knowledge is 'out there' and there's a sense of redundancy in investigating it or talking about it ICly.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@JaySherman said:

The fallout effect was pretty much the entirety of many games I played on in the past, in which there were no STs, period, only players interacting with each other and letting whatever happened, happen. This was pre-wiki, pre-log-posting, pre-board-post-TPS-reports, in which the only way anyone knew what happened was if someone else ICly talked about it. The lack of OOC awareness of plot created much more RP, because scenes such as "report to the crime boss about the shooting down town" was absolutely necessary.

It's nice that this was fun for you, but it's not how things work the vast majority of the time in games where no information is available, particularly if you can't be around 24-7 and actually kinda like to know what's going on that you might involve yourself with.

[ThatGuyThere]

I kind of side with Jay on this. While I like the information being more accessible I know it has cut down on rp.
For example if I am playing an underling and reporting to my boss, in the past with that not available i would actually rp out the report, now I would ooc message along the line of I report about this. Mostly I think the change is due to schedules since in college I was on most nights and it seemed like everyone else was too. Now it takes a lot of effort to coordinate schedules for scenes so while the reporting done in person icly but oocly handled by mail gets more appealing.

I have noticed a shift in my behavior though in the early days of my mushing career if I saw a news board post about something my char would be interested in I would put in jobs check rumors try to get involved, now 9 times out of 10 I will just figure, Oh that is someones prp not my business and move on.

[thebird]

@ThatGuyThere
Exactly that.
I used to be on and available for RP basically all the time. Even at work, since I had a desk job for a few years. Now I work retail, have a second job, and my hours fluctuate like crazy. Times have changed, and I miss being able to go do All The Things, instead of having to resort sometimes to an @mail of "Hey guys, my char did this"
It's definitely changed the way I RP and what I consider to be worth my time, too. When you only have about two hours of RP time before the majority of people have to bail for sleep, you do what you have to do.
I think a lack of OOC awareness did generate more RP in my earlier years of RP, but I suspect for many of us, that's just not much of an option anymore, if we want to get anything done IC.
The trick is finding that happy medium somewhere.

[Arkandel]

@thebird What I've found works for me quite well is being networked IC. It's not possible (or even desired) to be part of all things, but the cascading effect from that? Yes, please.

So for instance I let some of the madness @Derp's character runs into eventually catch up to me while I'm working on my own stuff. Eventually the PCs get together, talk about it, propose alternatives, go have a couple of adventures together where he gets shot, take off again to do their own things, catch up again, etc. This way there's a degree of synergy there between things I don't necessarily come into direct contact with - maybe my PC is introduced to someone from a different path of life though so his network expands further, etc.

The only things that don't work are apathy and introversion. The first is an actual flaw and the second, sometimes, is simply 'bad' character design - by which I mean it's a perfectly valid character approach but one which ultimately shoots fun in the foot.

[Derp]

@Arkandel said:

The only things that don't work are apathy and introversion.

Actually, I tend to manage these two things quite well.

My RP circles are relatively small. This is why I tend to favor things like Pack/Cabal/Coterie/Ring/Whatever RP over 'hey let's get together with ten random strangers and go find a body on the beach'.

Um. No. Why? Because I am generally apathetic as to why there's a body on the beach, or what those ten random strangers are up to. I already found a group that I want to RP with, tell stories with occasionally, etc. If I can't get that, I will surely go fill in RP elsewhere, but neither of those are unworkable concepts.

[Ganymede]

@JaySherman said:

I sometimes wonder if there isn't a psychological disconnect of interest in playing out mundane IC hobknobbing/reporting/manuevering due to the amount of OOC knowledge of what's happened IC.

I attribute this to the movement of games away from rewarding players for just being out and RPing. Most games have opted for a flat-XP increase, with activity-XP increases based on PRP involvement and running.

I also attribute the aging/maturing of the hobby's participants. After a full day of work, my mind would like a little break. With kids, my patience is limited. So, there are fewer people willing to gin up NPCs, PRPs, and other plottage on a nightly basis.

[Arkandel]

@Derp said:

@Arkandel said:

The only things that don't work are apathy and introversion.

Actually, I tend to manage these two things quite well.

My RP circles are relatively small. This is why I tend to favor things like Pack/Cabal/Coterie/Ring/Whatever RP over 'hey let's get together with ten random strangers and go find a body on the beach'.

Um. No. Why? Because I am generally apathetic as to why there's a body on the beach, or what those ten random strangers are up to. I already found a group that I want to RP with, tell stories with occasionally, etc. If I can't get that, I will surely go fill in RP elsewhere, but neither of those are unworkable concepts.

Being selectively extroverted isn't the same as being introverted. I believe I mentioned this earlier but there's more than one way to spread RP around - your character doesn't need to spill his guts to everyone they meet. As long as they're not a stopgap where RP threads go to die it works just fine.

As for scenes... does my current main PC care about a dead body in the woods? Not really, but it's been getting me semi-regular RP with a curious ghoul who was there also.

Or for a more detailed (and, again, real) example: Did Daniel care about some truck driver who almost ran him over? Not much, but it generated the circumstances where our characters bonded - and got the ball rolling on some Demon weirdness when another PC's player (who was being proactive) sent a friend to recruit my character. That in turn made Dan go talk to one of the participants from the original scene. Original scenes: 1. Follow-up new IC relationships formed: 3-4. Scenes directly generated since? Without counting ones with your PC, close to seven by now for me, with I got one on the back burner almost two months later.

That ain't bad for one ST's initial investment of a couple of hours, is it?

[Arkandel]

This post is deleted!

[JaySherman]

@Ganymede said:

I attribute this to the movement of games away from rewarding players for just being out and RPing. Most games have opted for a flat-XP increase, with activity-XP increases based on PRP involvement and running.

I also attribute the aging/maturing of the hobby's participants. After a full day of work, my mind would like a little break. With kids, my patience is limited. So, there are fewer people willing to gin up NPCs, PRPs, and other plottage on a nightly basis.

This is likely the case. Curse those RL responsibilities.

I realize that the ability to be on and investigate crap 24/7 is not the case any longer for the vast majority of RPers. I suppose my motivation to gin up RP out of anything and keep IC exploration/interaction going, even when it's only a few hours a week, has remained a habit.

This is going to sound pretty retarded but I have a small notebook where I'll jot down things like 'Talk to Captain Bargle about his first mate plotting to kill him' and then just get to that whenever I have time online.