Posts made by Dragginz

@Misadventure She was. The version we all read was written from the male perspective, but Hermione is the anti-Voldemort, and she shows up that way. Harry is just part of the ritual magic spell that gets rid of Moldy Voldy. Hermione is the only member of the three who has AGENCY.

Your spirit animal is the peacock jumping spider?

(mumbles: Why am I not even surprised....)

@Vorpal said in There's Nothing to Do Here:

Players do need to take the initiative and be willing to create their own content- but what most players get to do is micro-plot. Plot staff often tends to pick up the other end of the deal by working on the macro-plot, the over-arching threads that can make really cool stuff happen by incorporating some of the things going on into a Big Thing.

When plot staff stop being active, things tend to stagnate pretty quickly. Speaking as someone who is playing less and less on his once-favorite MU*, the lack of a good plot staffers can make a place feel more and more like splashing around with your bath-tub toys. You make a splash and then it stops, and that's where it ends.

There are other factors that aren't mentioned in this discussion, due to politeness perhaps. I will rudely name a few. The first is the Plot Barrier Fatigue Factor. The second is the Plot-killer Player Avoidance Factor. The third is the Not A Team Player Factor.

I'm sure you all know of games where the same plot with a few limited tropes, repeated with various paint jobs is run over and over and over and over and over and into the ground. These plots are strip-mined repeatedly until there's no more goodness left. This is Plot Fatigue. A second form is when a complex plot is run that takes YEARS to advance. Getting into and out of the plot, and having an actual effect, is like being a guest star in someone else's giant sized annual. The costs are not worth the investment, or the sense of participation is nullified. This is Plot Barrier. Then they get together and create an unholy spawn.

I'm not sure there's a cure for this. It's something that has discouraged me from play on a number of games where I simply didn't have the time to participate enough to have an effect, because it would've taken more time to do so.

Plot Killer Player Avoidance strikes when someone has hold of a character who has every reason to be involved in a plot, but the player is so utterly awful and unpleasant to play with or be around that you simply avoid them rather than forcing yourself to be pleasant and grown-up. Hey, it's sometimes a GOOD reason. (Unnamed but obvious personages remain unnamed here.) But it can make playing in a plot a bad thing overall.

Not A Team Player Factor - my personal gripe, after being one of the primaries for several teams. We tried to run a few plots for the team. We got agreement from most of the team to do it. Then when time to play the plots came... two of the players have gone off and super-god-moded their characters, one of the players drops and is replaced by someone who doesn't have a compatible schedule, and only two or three show up, and then they fail to interact to the scene in a way that allows it to be interesting. (If they hadn't been playing in four other games at the same time, perhaps they'd've been more involved?)

The basic problem here was twofold. First, scheduling. Second, getting team buy-in and feedback and follow-through.

So, there are other things than lack of initiative and who can plot what. The perfect doldrum has to be built from many blahs.