Posts made by Arkandel

@Orange At least in my mind (I'm sure that's not universal though) consent-based games tend to be somewhat diceless, or at least keep mechanics around to see if specific actions succeed or fail or how powers work.

How are the WoD mechanics implemented there in that regard? For example you state that you "would so completely and severely lose to just about anyone who'd been there longer" but how can you lose if loss has to be consensual? Or what happens if you're in a PrP, you have all but two boxes of aggravated damage filled and an NPC rolls and scores 3 damage on you? I'm not sure if the limit of consent here is PC death (I haven't read the entire thread), what happens if you win the contested roll for Obfuscate vs Auspex so you start spying on someone but they say they don't want to be spied on?

Consent-based MU can be quite a lot of fun, I'm just not sure how the implementation works for the WoD.

@Pyrephox said:

@Arkandel said:

Those are not great returns for an evening's work - not in XP, not in RP, not in anything. At least in my book, >people's milage may vary.

I think the 'in my book' thing is relevant here. There are a number of people who I know, who much prefer the social scenes over the combat scenes - hell, half the time I do, although that's more that combat scenes are very easy to run poorly, and a poorly run/played combat scene is both boring and actively frustrating, while bad bar RP is only boring.

While I agree completely - that's why I put the disclaimer about my preferences there in the first place - I never said anything about combat scenes. I don't even like full-combat PrPs, they take too long.

What I'm arguing is actual plots in PrPs versus not having them at all. A social confrontation or investigative challenge versus having a party of whatever sort.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

But if you have someone with a limited amount of time to RP, are they more likely to sign up for the 4-5 hour dangerous combat scene or the party event where they can grab an extra Beat for just hanging out and socializing for an hour or two? If you stop rewarding for those mundane social events, then you're DEFINITELY going to see more of the HM deal where people felt they could never possibly compete with the 900+ xp dinos.

True, but I don't think that's a good solution for this particular problem.

About the the basic part of that argument, every game lacking a catch-up mechanism which rewards activity in any way will end up with dinos given enough time. There's no avoiding that, it'll happen. Any approaches toward that issue can't be solved through adjusting Storytelling rewards.

For the other part, you asked a rhetorical question but I don't agree that the obvious answer to it is the one you're (I think) implying. If I have limited time in my day to play games - and I do! - then the last thing I want to do with my evening is to sit at a mundane party where nothing happens. I'd want to invest those hours into something with meat in it that can change my characters, help him bond with his pack/coterie and create RP hooks to use in my actual mundane socialization scenes when there's are no PrPs happening.

You know those bar talks where we have nothing to talk about except the weather? Well, they get so much better if instead I get to pose going over to the other person and go "hey, so there are Brood everywhere in those catacombs, did you know that?! They nearly took my head off!".

Compare that to the vast potential of walking up to that same person and going "uh, so I had pizza last night". Those are not great returns for an evening's work - not in XP, not in RP, not in anything. At least in my book, people's milage may vary.

@Miss-Demeanor Activity has to be balanced against playability though, right? You don't necessarily want people to cruise through and have the same rate of advancement as someone who actually puts effort into their characters (or you end up with TR where having a veteran PC meant nothing) but also you probably shouldn't let someone who lives online grow into demigod status compared to others. That's why periodic caps or diminishing returns are installed to keep things sane.

In Eldritch's case it means the first six months are pretty much a gimme. Even someone who doesn't play a lot will get to build a pretty decent mid-range character able to do at least one thing pretty damn well and possibly more if they plan their spends ahead of time. But after that the power curve will start to favor active oldbies a lot more, so even though whether that's a good thing or not depends on the kind of game you want, it's still something to consider.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Doesn't the book itself suggest offering a Beat just for participation in an evening's activities, though? Granted, a 24/7 MU* doesn't have to grant a Beat for every day... but not every TT session is going to be some big danger or cunning riddle or whatever, either. Sometimes its just gathering information or schmoozing up an NPC or something else fairly rote/mundane.

Absolutely. I personally rarely run 'dangerous plots' per se (in the way that 'danger' translates to 'roll initiative') other than for the cultivation of a plot arc or because it really suits the story at that point. Adversity comes in many forms other than an axe aiming for your face, and social or investigative challenges are quite fine in my book.

Just not pizza parties, dammit.

@Sunny said:

Laundry. I just washed you, shirt. Why do I have to wash you again? Sigh.

And bath towels! When you use them you are literally the cleanest thing in the house, why do they need to be washed!

@Coin said:

@Arkandel, @lordbelh, I guess the real question becomes: if you ask him to fade to black, does it still count as having banged him like a screen door in a hurricane, or does the lack of actual sexual content influence his IC decisions?

If it's the latter he's a creep the kind of whom deserve a special mention by name right here in these hallowed threads.

@Coin See, it might be harsh, but I even think the basic 1 Beat for participation should be done away with. Maybe it's my peeve talking though, so take the following with that particular grain of salt.

Any rewards offered in a game should be incentives toward some kind of behavior that benefits it in the long term. So grinding XP through faux-PrPs is not a desirable trait to begin with even though ues, one Beat isn't much compared to say, the three you can get in a more involved scene - but it adds up because it's so much easier to 'run' a birthday party than it is to do a murder mystery.

It comes down to the game's philosophy and other interrelated systems of course. On say, TR other than the afforementioned Tier issue all this is irrelevant since everyone ends up with the same XP regardless of effort, but on the new generation of 2.0 nWoD games where Beats are generated largely (or exclusively) through character activity giving people something for literally nothing seems to go against the overall direction. In other words sure, Bob went and risked his life against the Brood in a foul basement - get .8 XP! Yay! But... that is what Jane got for going to four parties.

Yeeeah I probably stress the importance of XP a lot in a thread that mainly discusses Storytelling but these games have a lot of moving parts and many of them are dependent on each other to some degree, you know? Which is why I made the disclaimer about the kind of MU you want to run; if the emphasis is on socialization and just having free-style engagement - maybe a Harry Potter game for something - it'd be less important to consider the dynamics of balancing rewards and activity than a nWoD one focusing on participation and character growth through risk and adversity.

@lordbelh said:

His NPC king was one of those NPC leaders whose good side you get on by TSing him a bunch. Of course it's a Kushiel game so you might think that's just a given. (I never even heard of the books until after I joined.)

It's been forever since I read the books (man those are a lot of House names, I remember thinking I should keep notes or something) but yes, that sounds about right for the setting. Nepotism and sex were legitimate ways to get ahead.

Somethingsomething real life.

@il-volpe said:

See, I think that should happen /sometimes/ but not /every/ time. 'Cause not everything that's on-screen on the MUSH should be on-screen if it was a teevee show.

I don't know if it first happened on TR or if it's just that I hadn't noticed it before (probably the latter) but it became really evident after Tier 2+ characters were introduced to the game there.

For those just joining us, TR had 'tier XP' awarded to Storytellers in exchange for regular plot running (2-3 a month) which weren't included in the normal tally which otherwise normalized the XP curve for the rest of the game. So some people started applying for these positions who then justified them with... well, bar scenes. I remember being invited to a FC pizza party - used by such a Tier character as one of their scenes - where literally the only story they told was to have that pizza delivered. Well, that was exciting.

See now, I readily acknowledge it's one of my big pet peeves but it seems to happen in every game where PrPs are rewarded somehow a lot more than in those where they are not. So while @il-volpe is right, not every scene should have something spectacular occur, there should be some excitement, a pivotal point, a cause for characters to grow, a puzzle... something prepared by the ST. Not goddamn pizza delivery.

I'm quite pleased by the system @Coin is implementing on Eldritch about it so far, I think it's a vast improvement over what we've been using so far.

@il-volpe said:

Haha. Yeah. It's a sort of peeve of mine when people expect every wedding/festival/ball/whatever to also include something totally unexpected and probably violent.

My experience has been pretty much the exact opposite. Someone makes an +event that seems so very ordinary that I expect something cool to happen. It's like... "beach party!". So, okay, I go, and since this is a game of personal horror I figure hey, maybe zombies will come out of the black waves, or maybe an amoeba-formed human-shaped abomination will start absorbing the flesh of horny teenagers.

And, no, it's just a beach party. People pose coming in bikinis and then an hour later everyone idles out. I guess that's a form of personal horror.

I'm also moving away from big events that involve as many players as possible for multiple reasons.

For starters, the factor mentioned here - that the story ends up spread thin so it means less to the people actually involved - is true, but I think I like the chance to personalize things a bit for the specific players involved. That's something simply impossible when you decide a cinematic blockbuster event.

As usual that creates some issues. Players with a smaller social network might end up being disconnected from things if they're not among the in-crowd who benefits from all this, and that's not cool either. I'm afraid I don't have a good answer to that.

Having a metaplot isn't really meant to be about giving people a shot to beat it. To me it mainly means giving characters the opportunity to hook their own stories into a common central theme and a source for plot seeds. It's a framework, not a goal meant to be resolved.

@Rook Not saying this is necessarily an answer to that particular problem, but since Eldritch specifically allows for people to play mortals even now, before the supers' spheres open, why not start someone to see if you can get a handle on them then have an IC Becoming for whatever they are meant to be?

It's effortless in case of a Cover; you'd simply take over with your Demon. Or they could have an Embrace or First Change, boom, done. Then again if in a few weeks, before that happens, you decide a different direction than you initially thought works best... just change it. So if he ends up looking more like a Carthian than Ordo Dracul, there's nothing to stop you, you know?

When it comes to reactive passive players there are no ways to deal with it any more than there are ways to deal with a below-average Storyteller; you either learn to avoid them or they get better. I'll be happy to design my plots to include people who're not terribly assertive but I won't carry them past a certain point.

At this point I'd like to ask you all how you deal with a phenomenon in particular - schedule management. When it comes to smaller scale plots it's not that difficult because we tend to all know each other and that means we're compatible time-wise, but as the number of moving parts increases I've personally had rotten luck trying to get people to organize themselves.

Is it efficient enough to tell people "this is when I can be on, talk among yourselves and tell me when you want the next scene ran"? Is it more or less fair than that to start the next scene with an +event at some time convenient for the ST and whoever can make it may come? Or is it reasonable for players to expect the ST to go a step further and organize them?

@Cobaltasaurus said:

2. I also rarely fully stat out NPCs. I will if staff need them.

I do the same thing, and it drives some staff nuts. Oddly enough I haven't ever had a complaint from a player though.

3. I try very hard, and sometimes it seems like it doesn't come across that way, to let PCs shape the plot. If someone comes up with a brilliant "AH-HA!" moment that wasn't what I had planned but they feel amazing about figuring it out,

My problem with that is that, while some players are brilliant, creative and proactive others are not. So I often have to do considerable amounts of hand-holding until they feel confident enough to make decisions and guide the plot, which means pre-concieved resolutions must have been thought out in advance.

Now if they do something to change things (SUCH AS DRIVING AN SUV INTO MY NOBLE GRYPHON) I roll with it and it's fun for everyone - but I think a plan B is needed for the plot to not stall in the absence of decisive PCs.

@Pyrephox said:

3. The purpose of plot is player fun. In other words, the focus should always be on the PCs and what they are DOING about the plot, not about 'hiding' the plot from the PCs or what NPCs are doing. Corollary: PC actions should be the focus of every scene. If an event absolutely must happen that the PCs cannot affect, then it should happen in the first or second pose, and the rest of the scene should be how the PCs deal with it.

I quite agree with you. Sometimes you see NPCs who are basically PCs in all but name and they steal the spotlight unnecessarily; the PCs need to be the driving force, not just the catalyst.

Other than attention-grabbing it's also important to put characters in charge because what they do scales. Especially in a large plot it's impossible for a ST to be on enough for everyone to have regular access to every NPC or even major event that takes place - but the consequences of what happened should be out there. One of the healthiest signs for a story is it taking a life on its own outside of direct ST supervision by having PCs go out and proactively meet up, plan actions, recruit help, start research +jobs and generally get involved.

My process goes roughly something like this, and I'll give spoiler-free examples taken from the latest plot I ran on SHH since it's more fresh in my mind.

1. Who is the plot aimed for? This can be one character (the hardest thing to do, especially if I'm not familiar with the PC and/or they well established) or multiple spheres. In my case that was "Lost and Mages", so the first I had to come up with reasons for PCs in these spheres to be in it together.

2. What themes will I involve? This is the fun part - exploration, mystery, high adventure, horror, whatever it is I like to keep it consistent. This is usually where I try to get inspired because if I get bored with whatever I pick over the course of running the story it'll be hard to change and it'll be reflected in the plot. So on SHH I borrowed a page off of The Walking Dead in its Governor arc - two cities competing over depleting resources, and lace it in mistrust, half-truths and paranoia.

3. How long do I want this to be? Well, I'm not much for short arcs, but the KISS principle applies well; the more straight forward it is in the conceptual stage the better the chance it won't grow too hard to follow after PCs leave their fingerprints all over it. I opted to go for an ambitious two arcs, with a potential maybe third in the near future, but when it started out I really only knew very sketchily what would happen in the second one.

4. Absolutely and without question, get staff on my side. Get them involved early, keep them up to date. The stupidest thing to do is to run things staff has reservations (or holds anything but both-thumbs-up) about, I'll always cancel or change everything before I run something not fully authorized in advance if it's somewhat big.

With these in mind I build the overall story. Who are the major antagonists, and what are their motives? Are they interesting people? It's important (to me) that an enemy will make it personal for at least some of the PCs involved in order to encourage their growth.

They shouldn't fight An Enemy Mage, they should be fighting the guy who experimented and twisted stolen former pets, who twisted noble Arcadian Hedge Beasts and turned them into horrific monsters. The PCs shouldn't want to defeat their opponent, they should need to. I need to find their buttons then push them, which isn't always easy if I don't normally hang out with them.

Once this is done I think it's important to keep some cards ready to play and a few under my sleeve.

• How is the story introduced? This is critical since right at first the plot is very vulnerable; no one has committed to it and there's zero momentum. I am personally shameless in introducing the initial plot device - if an NPC comes in with a yellow question mark over their head, well, so be it. That doesn't mean the whole story has to be presented then (it shouldn't) but there should be something substantial and hopefully specific for the PCs to do right away. Do not let them walk out of the first sessions with any ambiguity, there must be a blueprint for the first few sessions. We're building IC cohesion here and the characters aren't committed to the plot yet.

• What are my contingency plans if the plot stalls? If it lasts for any semi-significant amount of time it is going to stall, that's a given. People will go AWOL, someone will neglect to follow up on obvious IC obligations, so it's important to keep proactive ways of pulling PCs back in when they are getting lazy. (Note that if they do that too much I will lose interest but that's a different issue). It pays off to have some threads you can tug to liven things if they slow down.

• What is the right format per scene? This is highly experimental since it depends on my players so I have to keep fiddling with it. For instance on my SHH plot I fucked up by opening an otherwise successful social confrontation scene too much; with 8+ people all wanting a say the impact and spotlight of each individual person was diminished and some were frustrated. Future ones had to be more controlled and their structure more layered to avoid it devolving into spammy blocks of text.

• Keep an array of hooks to pull people in after the plot starts. Sometimes the PCs themselves are that hook (they'll grab friends to bring in, which I am happy to accommodate) but if I get cold-paged by someone going 'hey, can I get into +event 26?' I really want to be able to answer 'yes' without making them magically show up with no plausible explanation. Baking such hooks into the plot ahead of time works much better than coming up with them on the spot.

• Finally, and this ends up being my top priority... I really, really want to let the PCs be at the center of the plot. They decide where it goes, they're not just witnesses and in for the ride, so once the pieces are set on the board and the story is in motion I aim to get out of their way and just fill in the blanks. Where they go, I react, but they need to be the heroes - when the NPCs are driving the story it's a bad sign.

There are also some personal touches.

• I am not great with mechanics. My knowledge is good but pretty specialized, so I need to recruit help early. I tapped Ruin and Corruption often to answer questions on my behalf (which doubled as staff approval as per (4) above) and if needed I'd pull friends to watch a combat scene and help out. There's no shame in accepting help.

• A wiki page with a brief summary and each log so far linked is really handy to have. It lets newcomers jump in and helps people who forgot what's going on catch up.

• About combat, I tend to be conservative in what I throw at the PCs. There's usually a wide range of power levels and spent XP (some players twink, others barely spend theirs) and I like to make PC death mean something - if they just die in turn 2 just because I shoved five mooks at the two non-combat characters that's meaningless and lazy storytelling. Challenge should be intimate, the product of hard choices, not just more dice.

Those are just some notes, but I think overall they've served me well.

So I was reading this over lunch: http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/main-forum/the-new-world-of-darkness/werewolf-the-forsaken/465188-so-story-tellers .

I think it could be constructive to discuss Storytelling, not so much in the context of this particular thread's specifics, especially since it's not MU-specific, but if the STs among us might want to share their process or whether players who enjoy PrPs had any input on things they like versus what they don't about such processes it could be useful.

If possible I'd like this to be about building blocks, methods and tools relevant to plot making rather than in terms of people ('Bob is amazing!') since otherwise there just isn't much you can do if you aren't Bob. But tips and ways to write engaging interactive stories could be borrowed by potential STs... maybe.

What do you think?

@ThatOneDude Yes. I always thought Apple-things were at their best when submerged in deep waters.