@Cobaltasaurus said:
@Bobotron said:
Do you want this limited to only WoD games or can we list games that had metaplot outside those genres?
Yes, please!
This answer is ambiguous. It can be responding to either part of the 'or' statement. That said, since Star Trek was used as an example, I'm guessing that this goes beyond WoD.
However, I would also like to point out two things, which I'll elaborate more on later, but summarized:
-
Metaplot isn't 'a big ass plot.' What I like to call 'The Inigo Montoya': You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
-
I personally feel that the use of gamewide plot is both unreasonable and untenable in nearly every situation.
So, first thing's first. I often hear people talking about 'Metaplot' as some giant gamewide plot that's supposed to be taking place, and it makes me wince. Think of most of the stories that you've ever read, or most of the roleplaying games that you've played on a tabletop. How often does the behind-the-scenes things that help to shape the world actually come to the forefront in a really obvious way? Almost never. Typically, this is done by either a) piecing things together after the fact, or b ) presented as having already been pieced together when the current storyline is occurring. The metaplot of a thing is not the current plot that is ongoing in the larger world, in most instances, so much as it is the plot structure within which all these other stories are told.
And that, to me, is what staff should really be tracking. It's the changes within the world that affect the rest of the stories that happen within it. It's the metamorphosis of the known structure of the game setting. And these are things that happen almost exclusively off-screen, not something that players are going to directly interact with at every stage of its advancement. Pieces of this thing appear scattered throughout random smaller plots, which in turn help to flavor the game world, and progress or failure in those things then goes on to further change the world, which then affects what sort of plots can be told within it, because the structure has changed. The metaplot is not there to be 'solved' anymore than physics is. It's there to help determine what is possible within the game you're playing.
And when you're tracking those things, the changes need to be communicated clearly and effectively to the playerbase so that they can take action on it within the plots they choose to run for themselves. Or not. Maybe they like the changes. Maybe they don't. It's almost guaranteed that two different players will have different takes on it, and that's okay. That is what staff is there to help adjudicate who can make what changes with the efforts that they have, and provide them the information that they need in order to help facilitate those changes that they want to see. That should be their primary duty, full stop. Running smaller plots is good, but staff's main function should be a mixture of administrator and information broker, with players and player ST's taking a much larger part in the plots that get run in the game world.
I prefer to use the term 'Gamewide Plot' for the things that people normally call metaplot for this very reason. Which brings me to the second point -- Gamewide Plot is not a reasonable sort of plot to try and have, in nearly every situation, especially if we're talking World of Darkness.
The main problems with it are twofold.
-
It is far, far too big, to the point of offering serious problems within the game world that you're running.
-
It's often done completely backwards.
Running a plot of that size on any game with 50+ characters (not players -- characters)while expecting any characters involved with it to have a reasonable chance of affecting the course of the plot itself requires an incomprehensible amount of documentation, oversight, cross-communication, etc. And that is how staffers burn out, and burn out hard. Players each have their own things going on, and as long as they're all focused on their own piece of the pie, everything can run along smoothly. But when you put out one piece of pie and tell every player that it's there for the taking, you start to run into serious issues.
Let's take, for example, Demon. Demon is a game that a lot of people have been talking about lately, and personally, it's one of the biggest pains in the ass to try and adjudicate out of any game line ever period full stop. If you're familiar with their power Legend, or any of its multiple variants, then you already see what's coming here, but for those of you who aren't, try this thought experiment. Each player has the ability to change one minor 'truth' of the situation that they're in to reflect how they need the world to be in order to move forward -- and each of these things is, in turn, fundamentally true, even in instances where they would normally conflict. This doesn't even have to be anything major -- they can be relatively small things, such as ties they have to local people. But they can change reality in very minor ways to better suit their situation. Which is do-able for one, two, ten players. But then you get fifteen. And twenty. And not only them, you have the players who are affected by this power, as well, the non-demons. Now you're looking at 20 demons each having this ability which can affect 50+ players, and you haven't even gotten past this one minor plot point.
That is what almost universally ends up happening in gamewide plots. Players do things which could easily affect other players, through mundane might or magic, and you end up with an exceedingly complex nightmare of things to try and unravel. If you don't have that, then you end up with something worse -- conflicts along the way which you then have to try and resolve in a fair way to those who are working toward the same, similar, conflicting, or opposite goals.
It's too big. It's so big, in fact, that anything that's done with it in really obvious ways should not only be obvious to the players, but to every NPC around them, which is often detrimental in any sort of gameline that you're playing, whether it be WoD or Heroes. Normal people noticing stuff means that it's so very, very far out there that not only should your PC characters be doing things to it, your NPCs and probably a few foreign and neighboring NPCs should have taken notice as well and come to poke at it.
What should normally happen to allow for more sustainability is to establish your game world, its location, timeline, quirks, etc, and then establish where your PCs are within that game world, and then just build up from there. Track things that happen in the background, yes, but more importantly, track what PCs are doing so you can see how it changes the world that they're playing in, and then report the current state of the world. Rinse. Repeat. Too often, it's handed down from the top down, which is the wrong way to go about it -- this is what is happening, and you can all be a part of it. Except, oh, you're... well, not in a very good spot to see that, so let me try and change it. Which then complicates you, over here. So I have to change this thing, which conflicts with this other thing that I already told Group Y, but leaving that in will exclude Group X...
Thus, why I think Gamewide Plot is unreasonable on games with more than, say, 5-7 characters.