Storytelling

Coin

@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.

This doesn't sound retarded. It just sounds like you do in a notebook what other people do on their wiki talk pages or something. I have a whole friggin' wiki now for my game's plots. >.>

Misadventure

XP isn't just a poor idea, it's a dead end idea. Yes people like rewards, and power, but this actively makes less and less of the stories people can tell available to them.

Story happening, character change, setting change, these are the things that give you something to RP about. Yes, some improvement can be done and played through/about.

Arkandel

The way I see it @Misadventure is that the argument about XP being a bad idea for MUSHes sounds similar to that W. Churchill quote - 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.'.

As an approach to represent character growth or incentivize whatever it is a game wants to see more of XP is, of course, deeply flawed. I won't go into the reasons here. However even so, we've been historically unable to come up with a viable alternative which actually works better - most of the better approaches are hybrid systems which either reward or control how XP is spent differently rather than actually replace them.

Even some of the ones which don't use XP basically are, just under a different name for all intents and purposes.

Having said that, I'd love to be proven wrong. We can have a thread to discuss that.

Derp

@Arkandel said:

The way I see it @Misadventure is that the argument about XP being a bad idea for MUSHes sounds similar to that W. Churchill quote - 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.'.

As an approach to represent character growth or incentivize whatever it is a game wants to see more of XP is, of course, deeply flawed. I won't go into the reasons here. However even so, we've been historically unable to come up with a viable alternative which actually works better - most of the better approaches are hybrid systems which either reward or control how XP is spent differently rather than actually replace them.

Even some of the ones which don't use XP basically are, just under a different name for all intents and purposes.

Having said that, I'd love to be proven wrong. We can have a thread to discuss that.

I doubt you will be. You either have character growth and development, or you have character stagnation. Stagnation will kill a game fast. And if you're going to have any form of timed character growth, you have to decide on how incremental that growth is, which is just... experience. Like, you can dress it up any way you want to, but it's XP. You control how it's gained, how fast it's gained, or how/how fast it's spent. Even if you just put it on some form of timer system, you're talking about incremental gains over a period of time, which gives it a value system.

So that's a dead end right there. People might dislike xp, but unless you're playing short-term expendable characters over and over, it's never going away. Kind of like money.

Arkandel

The issue of how to incentivize plot-running came up in a different thread. Since it's one of the matters I'm interested in I thought to move it here for a more generic discussion of methods to coax more stories out of people.

So I'll try to organize it so we can discuss it in a way that's not terrible to keep track of. If someone has a better structure please go ahead and propose it.

a) Is incentivizing important?

There's a school of thought that says it's not, as people who have PrPs to run will usually do so anyway whether they get rewarded for it or not. Another is that people have been known to game the system by running throwaway scenes which are 'plots' in name only so they can reap rewards.

Arguments against it include that by not rewarding the practice we penalize it, as the default is for the ST's own alt to not participate in their plots, thus they're missing out on opportunities to gather either XP or meta-awards (Renown requirements, for example) by running things. Another is that if someone's on the fence (or even can be lured by the promise of shinies) it's still a gain for the game.

b ) How would you incentivize plot-running? (please note this could include rewards for things other than PrPs, something I know I've discussed with @EmmahSue before without coming up with any bright thoughts at the time)

So I'll list some of the ways I can think of. Obviously if you have others please, by all means add yours.

XP. The most common one and for a reason; it's how many games reward people for things. It's easy, easily used, quantifiable and trackable.
Recognition. We've seen that most commonly in "ST of the week" type of messages during log-in. In my opinion those tend to be counter-productive since they promote competition instead of collaboration but that might have been the implementation. I'd be quite interested in seeing if we could come up with a better system that doesn't simply come down to a string people see in a MOTD or some random board, the benefit of which probably suffers from diminishing returns since after a few weeks the novelty of seeing their name somewhere would wear off. So, thoughts?
Non-XP mechanical benefits. This can be any number of things - lower spend cooldown times or eased up stat-raising requirements, for example, things which XP can't buy.
Meta-benefits. Things such as not being counted against caps for things like rolling a character in a sphere or how many people can take part in a PrP. The latter seems fair to me - if you're dedicating your time running scenes then even if a PrP is capped for 4 people, you get to go (without taking anyone's spot, as a 5th participant if the scene's ST is alright with it).
Other. How would you do it (if you'd do it) ?

ThatGuyThere

For me incentives do not matter, but then I only run prps for characters i know that I can craft a specific meaningful story for. I would not run a +event hey everyone come play type of thing. I have in the past with mixed results but that was mainly to help out staff that i had a long standing ooc friendship with.
I think incentivizing will in general encourage more people to run more open to all PRP while those then ten to run private play style prps mainly would do it either way.
Also to me xp is a horrible incentive, for personal reasons I always have a done unspent if I am more then a month out of cgen, so it would rarely motivate me.

Roz

I find incentivizing at least at the level of being super supportive of your PrP GMs is important if only for the reason that running PrPs demands time and energy and the general player populace is often not great at expressing gratitude about it. I've been on games where staff was just really unsupportive of PrPs (in one instance, my friend, a long-time GMer and really great plotter broached the staff of a game with some early-stage ideas for a PrP and their first response was along the lines of "but who would ever want to play that?") and it makes it so that even people who enjoy running plots just -- don't. There's a lot to be said for just making sure that people who are interested in running PrPs are given a generally supportive atmosphere in which to do so and to set a good example about it to the game at large. Well-run PrPs are a precious commodity, and they're needed on a lot of the types of games I staff in order to keep things alive. My perspective is also coming from experience on generally non-statted or stat-lite games where concerns like losing out on XP in the time you're GMing aren't an issue.

Bobotron

I never saw this type of thing on MUSH before coming to the WoD circuit starting back on WORA. If you staffed, you ran plots unless you were specifically hired to do one thing; end of story. I come from a different arrangement of MU*s back in the day though, where stats were just apped and in general, you could app for staff changes but didn't get XP like a TT system-based game does.

I never started seeing incentives required for staffing until I started playing with the Mind's Eye Society/Camarilla, actually. In that, they reward the volunteer staffers with Prestige, which tallies up to consistent rewards across all characters that you maintain for the lifetime of your membership, barring having these things stripped for bad behavior.

Seems like something that could be adapted to a hypothetical 'MU* staff reward' thing. X prestige = 1 MC increase, and starting XP and stuff in the MES is tied to the MC. It doesn't work perfectly though, but it's something that could be mined for ideas.

Roz

@Bobotron It doesn't sound like the question is incentivizing staffing, but rather incentivizing non-staffers to run plots.

Bobotron

@Roz
Ahh. I misunderstood then; the other thread seemed to be focusing a lot on 'Staff stop running plots because their PCs don't get anything from it' while normal players get <X> XP per the PrP award policy'.

Roz

@Bobotron Haha I might have also assumed in the wrong direction; I wasn't reading whatever other thread this spawned from, but saw TGT's first response talking about PRPs. If that's what the content was, you're probably right and I'm wrong! I do see how it might be frustrating if players end up being given a super tangible reward for running a plot, but.

Bobotron

@Roz
No worries. I think both approaches really matter in general, and so dialogue on both is something that should be brought up.

Arkandel

My question is about plot-running. From my end I don't differentiate who runs it, as long as it ends up getting ran - so how do we get more?

Bobotron

@Arkandel
Make it easy to do so.
Make clear rules if there are things that can't be run.
Give opportunities to do things.
Have a snippets database for people to snag like, one or two sentence descriptions.
Be open to ideas from all parties.
Enforce staff to run them, particularly metaplot stuff.

I don't think incentives are necessary myself. If necessary, just give them a baseline of like... I dunno, 1 XP or 2 XP. Make this consistent across the board no matter what.

I think certain types of games are easier to come up with general plots for as well, particularly when staff oversight isn't completely necessary. A game with some inbuilt conflict or necessity for conflict makes things easier to do. Territory grabs, raids for resources, funny stuff.

When I played on Beast Wars Transformers, the staff were pretty good about working with players to make sure stuff didn't break theme but didn't control every detail. We ran a whole lot of plots, small stuff to large stuff with minimal staff oversight.

When I was running Beast Wars: Transmetals, we had a plots board that staff kept stuff posted to, stuff we were planning to run and just general ideas. We had a lot of players contribute to that board and a lot of players run plots in general, sometimes with staff oversight but mostly just 'okay, here you go, don't break theme'.

When I played on Megaman MUSH, we did very much the same; I can recall small plots ranging from construction to raids for resources to a concert put on by a Sharon Apple expy Maverick character that we all RPed through.

Arkandel

@Bobotron said:

Make it easy to do so.

How?

Make clear rules if there are things that can't be run.

It sounds reasonable. I think many places have a list of things which can't be used because they're not thematic ("No Brood without pre-approval"), and it never seemed to create too many issues if it's not a draconic one.

Give opportunities to do things.

How?

Have a snippets database for people to snag like, one or two sentence descriptions.

This, too, has been done. Usually the problem is that it's not enough; either people already know what they're going to run (and need no modular things) or they require significant hand-holding, especially in terms of mechanics.

It is however something of a common request for some time, getting pre-determined modular plots to try and entice new storytellers out of their shells. The hard part is enticing them to start at all.

Be open to ideas from all parties.

How? What does that entail we haven't been doing enough of?

Enforce staff to run them, particularly metaplot stuff.

How? Quotas? Because at some point we'll dwell into the question of whether it's easier to catch flies with honey or not, and that's been a touchy subject as of late.

I don't think incentives are necessary myself. If necessary, just give them a baseline of like... I dunno, 1 XP or 2 XP. Make this consistent across the board no matter what.

For starters this thread isn't just about incentivizing through XP, there are other methods proposed. But also, since the number seems adjusted for oWoD/nWoD 1.0, can you put it in some context? What would it be comparable to?

Derp

@Bobotron said:

Make it easy to do so.
Make clear rules if there are things that can't be run.
Give opportunities to do things.
Have a snippets database for people to snag like, one or two sentence descriptions.
Be open to ideas from all parties.

Eldritch has all of this stuff in place. Clear incentives, clear guidelines, anyone can do basically anything via news files and such. We still don't have a TON of plotrunners, but there are some.

Enforce staff to run them, particularly metaplot stuff.

We have staff that run things. We have staff that don't run things. From experience, I can tell you, you absolutely do not want every staffer to run things. Some of them are just bad at it. They're great coordinators and administrators but terrible storytellers for one reason or another. Making this a staffing requirement will only limit what you have available. A better option might be to specifically hire storytelling staff, but then you get into the area of staff incentives, and that lights a whole new fire under people's asses. The status quo, where some run and some don't, came about specifically because it's the happiest middle ground we currently have available in a lot of instances.

I don't think incentives are necessary myself. If necessary, just give them a baseline of like... I dunno, 1 XP or 2 XP. Make this consistent across the board no matter what.

Storytelling in the WoD is -hard- man. Real hard. Especially if you're running open +events where every splat and their weird cousin can sign up. That takes a lot of game knowledge. People burn out real fast if that's all they ever end up doing. I would disagree that these things are unnecessary. Eldritch uses: The ST gets the amount of beats that the highest-earning player got, capped at 5 per scene and 2xp per week. It seems to be working nicely.

I think certain types of games are easier to come up with general plots for as well, particularly when staff oversight isn't completely necessary. A game with some inbuilt conflict or necessity for conflict makes things easier to do. Territory grabs, raids for resources, funny stuff.

We gots a system for that too, and it's still hard.

Ultimately, until someone can come up with something that works better than what we have now, I'm not sure that going back to the thing that caused us to diverge out here in the first place is a workable solution.

Bobotron

@Arkandel

Make it Easy - How?

For me? I think making it easy to do involves giving people the appropriate resources to do the job effectively: have all of your guidelines posted and there for people to follow. Not just 'here's the levels of involvement that require a staff approval' but give guidelines for, say, how much XP to give to antagonists; general guidelines for what antagonists should be used; assistance from staff directly when someone asks for help; pointers to past plots that might intersect with their idea.

Give Opportunities - How?

The big one I think is to let players play off of staff plotlines or the aforementioned big list o' staff plots. If staff run something, make sure the outcome is clearly posted so that people can play off of that in small or large ways. Give leeway to play out things, or at least ask for their base idea so you can give constructive criticism. I'm very much a 'yes, and...' or a 'yes, but...' kind of Storyteller when it comes to this type of thing.

An example from my Transformers days. On Transformers: Genesis they ran a plot where an Alternate Universe Rodimus ended up on the game's Earth. I played a medic and the staff had part of the plot be 'the Matrix gets a crack in the crystal and the energy is driving Rodimus insane'. So I asked staff 'Hey, I'm a medic, if I wanted to repair this, does this sound reasonable? <list of stuff>' The response? 'Yeah, go to town, here's some info you can put into the plot to seed further stuff'.
The outcome? I organized people to go beatdown Rod to get his Matrix, then interfaced with it, then found a crystal with the right resonance/frequency (which led to a nice space excavation and Decepticons trying to steal the crystal event), then transferred the energy and fixed it. The plot continued from there with info that I was able to seed and give further back to the game from the plot.

But staff being open and giving the opportunity to do stuff with it, was a godsend to keep the plot running even without staff directly doing something with it.

Be open to ideas - how?

Be a 'yes, and...' or a 'yes, but...' storyteller is a good way to do so. Not that you aren't, as I've never played under you that I know of, but being open to ideas (to me) means letting a player give you their full input on their idea, however baseline it may be, and then be willing to help them refine the idea.

Another example from my Transformer days: I played a sonic weapons specialist on the first Beast Wars game. One episode involved the Maximals getting stuck in animal brain mode after having to be in beast mode for a long time. I presented to staff 'Hey, I think this would be fun; how about a sonic weapon, stuck in the Maximals ship but hard to find, causing them to be unable to transform due to energon issues? Thus giving OC Maximals a taste of this, and Preds an in-game advantage' Staff helped me refine the idea and it led to a long term arrangement of plots (build the devices, test the device on Preds, attack on Maximals to insert the device, as the player who wrote the plot working with staff and Maximal PCs on finding the object, the final fight with another Maximal to get the frequency codes to turn off the device after they failed to find it).

Or a more recent anecdote: we have a player playing a dhampir in the LARP, who is using Merits and some powers to mimic being a Neonate Kindred in Vampire society. His idea? 'I want to play an Obertus experiment on the run from the Sabbat'. Staff's response after going over the viability of the idea? 'Cool. And, here's our thoughts...' and he took it and built from there for the character, and we're working with his backstory for plotlines to coincide with that.

Enforce staff - how?

I think 'enforce' isn't the right word I should've used there. I guess 'encourage and cultivate' the culture for staff to run plots that tie into the metaplot by giving them what you've given the playerbase at large for other plots: guidelines, timeframes, the theme head's goals for the metaplot and a stable of ideas.

And example from my history of M3. We ran a plot as staff where the Stardroids (space alien robots) judged the Earth to be unfit to continue to exist, and the timeframe was loosely set, and plot stuff was presented to staff that 'the Stardroids can be challenged and beaten, let the players get creative' and given some guidelines. So the staff (whose staff bits were the Stardroids, which were semi-IC at that period of time, this was yeeeears ago) went out and made plot with those guidelines. We were given a lot of free reign by staff to play with the players, and it worked out really well with us advancing the 'metaplot'. Same thing happened when the game ran through its own version of the Megaman X4 plotline.

Incentives - numbers?

@Derp
My experience is also not a great cross-section of WoD MU*s, particularly the brand of crazy that an ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME game has in comparison to a focused game. Hell, my experience on a game with four competing factions (M3) is still not anything like that. We had people burn out, sure, but that's why you have to be willing to trust the newbies. Sometimes they make the best staffers. After all, we were ALL newbies once..
@Arkandel
If you want to incentivize it for the playerbase and need to do it as XP, it needs to be tailored to the game itself. For example, I have guidelines for TheatreMUSH about the amount of XP that can be handed out for a type of plot that is run by both players and staff. Low-game impact award 1 XP; moderate awards 2; and high game impact (with attendant high risk) awards 3. For GMC, I dunno, do it in the form of 1/2/3 beats or something. This is something that only the individual staff of a game can determine. If you feel staff need to get this reward, give it to them as a reward for their PC as a 'gimme' for running the plot; same as with the player who runs the plot if it's a non-staff run plot. They just gave you effort into doing the thing, so give them a cookie.

As far as staff, here's where my input's probably going to ruffle some feathers, because I really don't believe in incentivizing something that they should be doing as part of their duties as that category of staffer. It's like hiring someone to read and approve character applications and them not doing the character applications without being given a milk bone. If you have to incentivize it, that's a decision that staff of individual games need to make; there's no real way to incentivize in such a way that applies to every game, because every game has different needs and different methodologies and if it factors into the incentive, different systems as well.

Related to the topic of this and staff duties, because that's where this discussion boils down to: do you give people a reward for a job they volunteered for? People can argue 'not a job!' vs 'a job!' all day, but in the end, those you hired for staff are giving you some verbal commitment that they're going to render themselves responsible for that thing you hired them to do It may be often thankless, but they volunteered to do this thing and, if they're a good staffer, should be doing it to better the game for everyone. Incentive shouldn't matter, in my probably extremely off-kilter opinion, because you should be hiring staff who want the game to be better for the sake of the game itself.

But, again, I come from a much different type of MU* background and staffing setup than a lot of people here, from my history with things like superhero MU*s and themed games. There's also the factor of staff who, for wont of a better term, wear a lot of hats vs. a codified, delineated staff. When I staffed on M3, you were hired to do generally one, maybe two, things. Charstaff would do approvals for those factions and work with PCs, generally facheads, as well as theme staff on plots. Codestaff did code. And so on and so forth. Beast Wars Transmetals had a 'staff of many hats' as we all did everything, except 1) only I did code, and 2) one guy didn't do charapps but made up for it in the plot department.

ThatGuyThere

I think the best policy on dealing with PrP is to set guidelines on what is allowed without approval so people know what they can do ans what they need to get permission for clearly.
Also if you feel you might keep track of even the small scale ones do it in review not in approval. I know for me the longer between when i get the idea and run it by the players for a general hey would this interest you. (In a general way such as hey would you guys want to play out a murder mystery hey would you guys want to go on an mission against blah not actual spoilery details to them.) If i then have to wait a week or more to get to ok ot run it, even if I maintain enthusiasm the perspective players start to drift, scenes happen other things get attention and then well plot never happens or starts but never reaches resolution.
Granted a lot of plots never reach an end in this hobby and sadly each one both staff and PrP that never does I know I tend to drift more and more into bar RP, or slice of life RP.

Nein

Have you ever run into players that are content to run things on their own or with their friends, but get hung up on the fact that they are not allowed to do anything other than slice of life or bar RP without having to get someone's nod of approval?

There is another side of the fence on this. I've been among and RPed regularly with people across various MU*s/MOOs who are happy to run things for themselves and others, but have their enthusiasm and ideas snuffed out like a match in a wet napkin by staffers who have, plot-wise, stuffed them into a little box they only open when the ST/GM gets around to running something. (There are those players who don't seem to be able to rub two braincells together to come up with anything to do other than TS and bar RP and wait to be taken by the hand and lead down the garden path to be sure, thus facilitating the need for STs/GMs, so I'm not saying planned plots are a bad thing at all.)

I realize this is a little bit of a sidetrack to the main thrust of the argument, but I always thought the reward of roleplaying is fun. XP always seemed like something you did to gain levels and thus be powerful enough to kill others - fun for some, but generally not fun on a MUSH, especially when it takes more than thinking up a name and grinding levels to get a solid character.

Whenever I see XP systems at the door, I tend to assume that the goal of the game is to gain power/level to inflict my story decisions on others, as this is usually what happens.

I dunno. Perhaps that right there is the crux of the XP problem.