@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.