The Desired Experience

TMR

And then the shopkeeper is going: "I can't get any RP around here."

And I'm thinking: What the hell do you expect? Nobody's taking your shopkeeper to the Dungeon o' Doom...why'd you even make a shopkeeper? You're free to make a shopkeeper but why wouldja do it???

What also happens (ask me how I know) is that a player asks "what kinds of characters are needed?" because they have no fixed preference. Then the staff says, "well there's an important shopkeeper role in town we've been wanting to fill" so the player does so.

And then gets no RP.

And then complains about not getting RP.

And then quits the game for lack of RP.

So while all the advice about making clear what you want is very good, sage advice, keep in mind, too, that this only works as advice if you don't lie to the players (and likely yourselves).

Arkandel

@tmr I feel like that's not (entirely) on staff.

What is the expectation here? You can offer someone a role for their character and provide them with some hooks into that role.

Being a shopkeeper is one additional reason for other PCs to interact with theirs that someone coming in 'blind' wouldn't otherwise get. If they rolled a dancer, for example, the onus would be on them to find a club or studio looking to hire - it's a proactive search. But as a business owner others have a reason to go to them.

Is that reason compelling enough? Powerful enough? I'd argue it shouldn't be. But it's something.

Ultimately finding scenes and establishing oneself requires some degree of effort. To put it a bit differently, I've seen creative people before (who I didn't know before then) join a game where they know no one, assume a role without any hooks at all, and before long they are movers and shakers.

Pyrephox

@faraday said in The Desired Experience:

Agency in the sense of "doing stuff that matters in the world" isn't everything, either. Take TGG for instance. In most of the campaigns, the PCs were grunts. They couldn't impact the war. They couldn't choose their missions. The battle code could kill them at any moment. BSGU was in a similar vein, though not as hard-core.

People want different things. There's no one perfect recipe for a game to be successful.

I think rather than "the world", agency should look at "my world". In TGG, PCs couldn't change the course of a war, no, but they could do things that affected their own trajectory or those of others around them (I assume - caveat that I did not play the game). A nurse could save a life. A soldier could pick a target and have a chance of bringing them down.

The whole world/setting doesn't have to be up for grabs for players to feel they have agency - and, honestly, these days I think you NEED to firmly define some setting elements as 'these will not change' or else players tend to get anxious and overinvested in reworking the world to be more fair/just/equitable and then get overwhelmed by the enormity of that task (or frustrated when staff point out that even an amazing success on a single action or skill check can only bring about incremental and limited change, because culture has inertia, or that goal is just Too Big).

Give people some parameters around the kind of agency they can expect, I think, upfront and in clear language. Don't dick around with, "Well, maybe, if you work hard enough..." because that tends to kick Gamer OCD into high gear, and suddenly someone's spending eighty hours a week on the game trying to grind to their fantasy utopia or whatever, and /miserable/ but unable to make themselves stop because that brass ring feels very shiny.

reversed

As far as "agency" goes in a game, I find that I'm generally satisfied if I'm playing a tree, and I fall in a forest, I make a sound.

Which can mean a lot of different things based on the game, the game OOC culture, whatever. But I think most people can make do with being a grunt in the trenches -- what will turn most people off is being a grunt in the trenches who is invisible, inaudible, and no matter what they try, leaves no trace in the minds of anyone that they were ever there.

Ganymede

@arkandel

If staff does not intend to service a particular concept, then they shouldn’t allow that concept as a PC.

It is an easy fix for this problem.

Pyrephox

@ganymede said in The Desired Experience:

@arkandel

If staff does not intend to service a particular concept, then they shouldn’t allow that concept as a PC.

It is an easy fix for this problem.

In KB/AM games, one of the things I really appreciated them doing is having a sheet for 'wanted' character concepts, and then also listing character concepts that they considered 'overdone' for the setting, and then also closing character concepts when they decided the game had enough, or that the concept wasn't appropriate for this particular game. More games should do that, I feel like.

faraday

@ganymede said in The Desired Experience:

If staff does not intend to service a particular concept, then they shouldn’t allow that concept as a PC.

Why? If somebody understands that their concept isn't geared towards the central 'action' of the game and decides to play anyway, why stop them from having fun?

Someone had a lot of fun with a cook character on one of the BSG games, even though they never got involved in a single central plotline. To each their own.

@il-volpe said in The Desired Experience:

@faraday That's a matter of scale. The biggest thing the grunts can do is win battles, right? That matters in their world. So in BSG Abelard saves the team and makes the objective with minimal losses and Brigid does a good job wiping down the mess hall.

It's also a matter of perspective. There have certainly been people complaining about not being able to be a "mover and shaker" in various games.

One of the campaigns was WW1 trench warfare. It's hard to imagine much 'agency' when you're cannon fodder. One of my more memorable scenes from the game was a couple of medics cowering in the hold of a transport ship being attacked by a U-Boat, wondering if they were going to survive while there was literally nothing they could do. All players have agency over their characters' actions in any given situation; that's just the basic nature of RP. (I mean, short of mine control I guess.) That's different than having agency to affect the world in any meaningful way, and sometimes that's okay. Sometimes that's a selling point.

krmbm

@pyrephox said in The Desired Experience:

In KB/AM games, one of the things I really appreciated them doing is having a sheet for 'wanted' character concepts, and then also listing character concepts that they considered 'overdone' for the setting, and then also closing character concepts when they decided the game had enough, or that the concept wasn't appropriate for this particular game.

Daww, this is a nice compliment. Thank you.

Even with that: there's a subset of players that logs in to ask, "What concepts do you need?" When we link that page, about half of them go, "I saw that, but what should I play?" Because they are not a typical player, who can just select a concept off a list available to the unwashed masses.

MUSHers are just weird. You could tell all of us exactly what your game is for - we are here to RP family-friendly MLP sim - and at least one person is gonna show up and ask if they can play a Pokemon and explain how it totally works with your theme, promise.

Ganymede

@faraday

Because my experience tells me that too few people are happy being just the cook to risk the headache of folks who also want to be Steven Seagal.

Arkandel

@faraday said in The Desired Experience:

It's also a matter of perspective. There have certainly been people complaining about not being able to be a "mover and shaker" in various games.

Thanks for reminding me.

There is definitely an expectation, whether voiced or implied, from players who want to play 'movers and shakers'.

The issue here is, not everyone should and not everyone can be that. Especially in smaller games.

faraday

@ganymede said in The Desired Experience:

Because my experience tells me that too few people are happy being just the cook to risk the headache of folks who also want to be Steven Seagal.

Fair enough. Personally I don't mind the cook-turned-navy-seal types as long as they're willing to put in the work to get involved in the action But I can understand just not wanting to deal with the complaints at all.

Ganymede

@faraday

You attract great players. We in the World of Darkness are not always so lucky.

faraday

@ganymede said in The Desired Experience:

You attract great players. We in the World of Darkness are not always so lucky.

I mean, I've also had the biker gang who overran my coast-guard-in-space game, so... it definitely doesn't always work out, even outside Wod

reversed

@faraday said in The Desired Experience:

Personally I don't mind the cook-turned-navy-seal types as long as they're willing to put in the work to get involved in the action

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Carma

This post is deleted!

il-volpe

@carma This has happened to me so often that I pretty much expect it, especially when the desired concept is very specific.

I've also repeatedly made characters where staff have warned me (as they should) that my concept doesn't fit what's they're doing and they're not sure what my character would do, yet had a great time and flung fun about like it was ten tonnes of hippopotamus shit dumped through a jet engine.

@arkandel said in The Desired Experience:

Ultimately finding scenes and establishing oneself requires some degree of effort. To put it a bit differently, I've seen creative people before (who I didn't know before then) join a game where they know no one, assume a role without any hooks at all, and before long they are movers and shakers.

Same player can perform the same moves elsewhere and get nothing. Except told they're an idiot for joining a game where they know no one.

TMR

@arkandel said in The Desired Experience:

@tmr I feel like that's not (entirely) on staff.

We can agree to disagree then.

What is the expectation here? You can offer someone a role for their character and provide them with some hooks into that role.

The expectation here is that if staff says that a given character is, and I quote, "an important shopkeeper role" that there might be something about that shop that brings RP there and gives its proprietor a little bit of the thin end of a wedge into the game's RP.

In this specific case I'm thinking of it wasn't. The shop was never visited by anybody (including the staff's own characters—the same staff who recommended it as an important role). Hell, most of the characters were off out of the town the shop was in doing things and almost nobody was ever actually in the town. Where the "important shopkeeper role" was.

That's on staff. They're the ones who said the shopkeeper was an important role specifically in the context of a question that boiled down to "which characters will best be able to find RP?" What really happened, I suspect, was that they wanted to expand on the town-side RP so thought suggesting a townie was a way to do that. Only it wasn't because smart people (or at least people familiar with the game) knew that the town was Deadville in RP terms. Only stupid newbs who actually asked got shafted.

(This was well over a decade ago. Maybe even two. Yes I'm still bitter over it.)

Being a shopkeeper is one additional reason for other PCs to interact with theirs that someone coming in 'blind' wouldn't otherwise get. … But as a business owner others have a reason to go to them.

They just didn't.

il-volpe

@tmr said in The Desired Experience:

they wanted to expand on the town-side RP so thought suggesting a townie was a way to do that. Only it wasn't because smart people (or at least people familiar with the game) knew that the town was Deadville

This is classic, and I've fallen for it a good handful of times.

I will even notice that the area is deadsville and yet be extra naive about it, assuming that staff's attempt to grow that area will include making it attractive. Later, if I bother to inquire, I'll learn that staff feel there aren't enough players for them to bother giving the ones who exist something to do, and are mystified that players walk instead of waiting indefinitely.

Ominous

@arkandel said in The Desired Experience:

There is definitely an expectation, whether voiced or implied, from players who want to play 'movers and shakers'.

The issue here is, not everyone should and not everyone can be that. Especially in smaller games.

I think you meant to say the opposite, or, if you didn't, that's incorrect. It's easier for everyone to be a mover and shaker in a smaller game than a larger game. If a game has 15 noble houses vying for influence and there are 15 players, it sounds like everyone that wants to be the head of a noble house gets their wish.

silverfox

I just want to have silly scenes.