Once upon a time, in a far-away mush that has now sunk itself into the deep waters of infamy, I was the Changeling staffer. I had a player that was rude and disruptive, ignoring theme left and right and generally making enough of a nuisance of herself that the rest of the sphere was pretty much going out of their way to ignore and avoid her, and had lodged several complaints about her. I pulled her aside two or three times to explain that she needed to get her act together.

I may possibly finally have solved that situation by bribing a player to blow up a building on the grid while she was in it, and then had to have the discussion with her about why the Regeneration merit wasn't going to let her come back from 15 or 20 concurrent points of agg from the combination of explosive material and building falling on her head.

Conversely, some of you may possibly remember Sandraudiga from City of Hope. (Yeah, yeah. CoH. Grain of salt. Salt block. Whatever.) For those who aren't familiar, she was Pure Breed 5 Get of Fenris kinfolk with gnosis and some other crap who apparently let herself into the Umbra for giggles to go kill banes. But she was simultaneously clueless about Garou culture; we (I had an all GoF pack going) found her wandering in the forest talking to herself, out loud, about where the caern might be. We spent a while trying to educate her, teach her the Litany, etc, etc, etc, but ultimately she was more concerned about being the ultimate bad ass than playing anything remotely approaching a canon character (she was in essence a walking Veil breech, given her behavior) and despite numerous complaints about this behavior, staff did absolutely nothing. (But again, CoH.)

I still have days when I regret not drowning her in a bathtub filled with her own blood.

TL;DR : unless it is a real sandbox game, staff needs to be willing to draw some lines in the sand. I'd suggest that first line lies where the breaking of theme is seriously damaging other people's playing experience. And sure, a conversation or two with the person of issue is certainly in order, but sometimes the only way to cure it is with a couple hundred tons of concrete and rebar.

Yeah, Asherat did share one page with me, because she was confused, upset, and hurt by the demand that she apologize to the entire player base because some people got involved in one scene, and a bunch of other people didn't. And yeah, that kind of pissed me off, because the reaction a few of the people who didn't get picked had amounts to a temper tantrum. Ragequits, nasty @mails to people, and a lot of OOC badgering for various reasons.

Accusations of favoritism... because this was a specific scene that had specific requirements and someone didn't pick their closest IC friends to participate. Accusations of abandonment... because people who did get picked were trying to keep it quiet because what happened IC is and will remain a secret, and did things like left their +1s at the party while they went off to possibly die in the snow.

But let me tell you a story.

This scion power plot started some 2+ real life years ago, as a small but critical part of the much larger Black Cross metaplot. A bunch of NPCs were assassinated; murdered in a specific ritual fashion so their blood could be collected. A few PCs were even attacked for that same reason. This went on over the course of several months, so that players could have the chance to investigate and maybe interrupt what was going on. And investigate they did, but at the time the player base was tiny and not enough was done to stop it.

So some NPCs did a magic ritual and severed this magic connection between the peoples and the angels... which had the net mechanical effect of rendering an entire group of 5 point merits completely useless.

In the 2+ years since this happened, resolving this issue has been an on-going THING. It was never set aside by staff, it was never forgotten, they've just been trying to let players figure it out and resolve it.

Hey @Sunny, remember Dark? He had a character on KD who worked on it for a while until he flaked out and wandered away.

One character took a bunch of others on an international treasure hunt trying to find a magic book that had a spell that would help to undo the problem, but for various reasons they were unsuccessful. (Wasn't my plot; I didn't get invited; didn't get involved; don't really know the details other than that it didn't work and staff had to come up with a backup plan.)

In the meantime, we had the Flatlands war arc, which took another bunch of PCs off the grid for about 7 months. Of real time. Which naturally caused a lot of attrition because the pocket realm RP was a bit light and all of the battles were handled via +job for logistic reasons and because nobody ever really requested or showed an interest in RP'd combat. At the end of the last battle (which stomped the army, by the way) we holed up in and around a city and 'found' an old temple. I rounded up every last PC who was still out there, all the ones that had been there from the beginning, and we had a scene where we went and explored it. And, wonder of wonders, found an old book that none of us could read and a weird old bottle that some dude was trying to burn to keep away from us.

There was some combat, but another PC (not mine, thanks) basically jumped into the fire to save the book.

The book and the bottle got sent back as quick as humanly possible to the ONLY character I OOCly/Reynard ICly knew might have any clue what to do with. The only other person with that particular distinction was... scrolls up ...oh hey, that dude Dark, who quit playing over a year previously. Fantastic. (Un)fortunately, this character is... yes. A staff alt. Whose existence as a character predates her player's involvement as staff. (I guess I could have sent it to an NPC instead. Clearly that would have been so much better...)

And then ALMOST an entire IC year passed. (The Longest Night is at the end of December; we got back in February... so 10 IC months.)

In the meantime, a new PC popped up who had the skill set to help with this book thingy popped up. The PC who actually saved the book from the fire managed to find out about that skill set and pointed her at the character who I'd given the book and bottle to.... in spite of me never having told him who it was. Is that PC a staff alt NOW? Apparently. But she certainly was not when she got involved in the plot.

Now that there was another PC involved, not just the staff alt, things moved again. Again, I don't know what they did, or how they did it. Wasn't my thing. I was off hunting Skaldi, killing pirates, whatever.

The treasure hunting group came home, empty-handed, in IC November. Pretty sure nobody really knows IC what they were off doing, just that they were gone for a long ass time.

The Longest Night finally rolled around. It's a big deal ICly; the single biggest celebratory night on the calendar year. The entire city has parties. @Sunny stepped up to run the big ball at the palace, which is technically supposed to be a masquerade - everybody would have been anonymous, in masks, and skulking around the city looking like a duck wouldn't have been obvious.

Unfortunately, it wasn't a masque. And this scene people are upset about was scheduled at the same time as the party at the palace, so it was REALLY OBVIOUS when some people left and went somewhere else. Should it have been scheduled for a different time? Probably. But from the complaints that have been made, the people that are upset that they were excluded would still be upset that they were excluded. Instead of continuing to have their party and getting hit with a wall-of-emit about how their phenomenal cosmic powers were suddenly working again (which happened instead on Sunday, at the other half of the Longest Night party, to the apparent joy of THOSE people) people brought the drama and brought that event down in flames. In the 2 hours it took to do this one specific scene, the ball completely imploded.

Awesome.

TL;DR: people are super upset because they didn't get invited to a scene, because despite all being veteran RPers, apparently we haven't learned that not everybody gets to be involved in everything. When has that EVER been the case?

There were limited slots at that table: one for each Angel. Because it was and is a huge IC secret, because magic. Literally. It took magic to break the connection, it took magic to fix it. In this setting, magic is not very common. Nor is it something you advertise if you possess it. But that's the nature of the setting: people are superstitious and distrustful of it.

You want to know what you missed by not getting to go? Missing parties and taking 3-4 lethal.

You know what you didn't miss? Getting your scion powers back. Getting a whole new tree of boosted scion powers.

The people who have the best claim to being annoyed that they didn't get involved in this scene are the ones who spent A YEAR off the grid on their treasure hunt, and I'm pretty sure none of them ragequit over it. In fact I've RP'd with three of them this week alone and they didn't even seem upset.

Is this the first really public plot thing staff has run in a while? It wasn't meant to be that public, but hey, OOC knowledge and gossip and people crying favorites because they were apparently not special enough. Is this result going to encourage them to run more things like this? My guess is... no.

Embrace the fact that the first draft will be utter crap but you can't fix what's NOT* on the page.

Also, Butt In Chair Time. Carve out a section of time, every day, park yourself in front of your keyboard with nothing to do but stare at your word processor of choice. Bonus points if you can turn off everything else: turn off your internet, get one of those blocker programs that lets you lock yourself out of Facebook/Twitter/email/whatever else, and then for your allotted period of time (20 minutes, 2 hours, whatever) you can either write, or you can sit there and stare at the blank page.

Eventually you'll write. Maybe not the first day, maybe not the second, but eventually. And it gets easier. Maybe the 5th day you'll write 50 words, but by the 10th day you might be up to 500. It's like exercising, and that particular writer's muscle starts out super weaksauce.

Somebody way smarter than me explained it like this: you can't wait for the muse to show up, but when she does, you damn well better be sitting there waiting for her, because she's not going to look for you, she's going to move on to the next guy.

(*Edited because, uh, you can fix what IS on the page.)

Liana and I spent quite a while deciding Things about the wedding. Let's face it, weddings are about the single most boring Big Group Scene setup that exists. GRRM offered some helpful suggestions but since there was already a poisoning at the last big Royal party, that was out. A Dothraki wedding could have been entertaining but isn't really thematic for d'Angelines. In the end, we settled on something a bit more... hmm... Disney.

Parliament is set for Wednesday night and sadly will suffer from some of the same general sorts of issues, though it's more interesting if you get a good seat. (There are rules for Parliament about when you can pose openly, so most of the conversation happens via tabletalk.) However, it is an excellent excuse to go and meet some people and to get in on some quiet politicking, in this case about the war we're about to throw.

For anyone who is paying really close attention, we're planning to invade and liberate the recently conquered Flatlands. It's roughly the equivalent of France marching into Germany to free it from the martial and religious oppression of Crusader Russia. In the fall. Possibly through the winter. I realize this sounds like a terrible idea. Skaldia and I went back and forth on the timing for a while and decided that the IC consequences of the timing were better to deal with and easier to gloss over than waiting for a better season (like late spring early summer) because probably the player base of a game like Kushiel's Debut would not be able to sustain interest in Impending War for six more months RL.

Sunny isn't the only one looking for people. There are XP bonuses being offered for nobles from several provinces, and three open Ducal seats (one of which is the rival she was talking about, and one of which is a Sovereign seat but absolutely has to be held by a female PC.) Some Balm courtesans wouldn't go amiss with the upcoming unpleasantness, either, nor would members of the perpetually lightly represented clergy, though I would strongly recommend against playing a Cassiline.

There's several Very Official positions that have opened up as well, many of which wouldn't require noble backgrounds. Openings for Commander of the City Guard, Master of the Treasury, and Foreign Exchequer have all been outlined on the wiki recently, if you want something requiring less specific know-how about the religious portion of society.

Alternatively, while I don't need a giant Babadook there......

@Sunny,

I didn't say you sent nasty mails. I said people did.

Numerous people have talked to me - and staff - about the grief they've been given over their participation in that scene, giant heapings of guilt for being included where other people got left out.

Things could have been handled more gracefully on both sides. Instead there was a drama bomb.

Did I contact you on Facebook? Sure. Have I known you for like... 15 years and did I think you might handle things differently? Absolutely. I guess that's my fault.

End goals are very much dependent upon individual player motivation.

While it's true that there is not likely to be a civil war or a bloody coup or anything of that nature, that is partially (but not entirely) because nobody appears to play that way, or to desire that particular outcome. It certainly is within the scope of theme for a very politically savvy character to dramatically shake up the board; in the books there were a few arch villainesque characters that were almost successful in that sort of thing, foiled of course by the plucky heroine and so on and so forth.

Very recently there was an attempt to poison the crown princess and her unborn child which was somewhat narrowly foiled; circumstances pointed to the king's mistress as one of the key figures in that and she's been executed for her crimes.

Currently there are two formerly sovereign duchies that have been demoted, their former subordinate provincial duchies elevated instead for Reasons, all within the past two IC years. It's a bit Game of Houses, but the kind of thing someone from one of those families could decide they wanted to fix.

There's a fairly hush-hush plan to go to the game's version of the Middle East in search of some kind of spell to repair the severed magical connection a lot of d'Angelines have with their founding angels - which may or may not be successful. In the meantime the College of the Occult could probably use some occult scholars of its own.

And there's a great big giant bloody war brewing on the horizon, of the kind that is liable to impact almost everyone.

All of the above have significant player involvement and contribution. Some of it is fall-out from character decisions. (The duchy switch-ups were due to really POOR judgment on the part of their then-rulers.) They may not be sufficient to give you personally an end goal, but it's not meant to be the sort of game that has win conditions, exactly.

Like Sunny said, there's plenty of niches and things interested people can play, and if she can't steer you in a proper direction I might be able to pull you into some things. (I play Reynard, and I'm about >< close to marching the country off to war. That'll be fun! No, really!)

@Sunny said in Kushiel's Debut:

Except that's the point. That's the problem. You both are LONG-TERM OOC friends of Asherat. She has said this a million times. You guys were ACTIVELY INCLUDED in things while other people were being shut out. This was the whole crux of my damn complaint!

Reynard was the only character that Asherat invited to the scene. Or are you referring to some other things that I'm missing?

Again: there were a LIMITED NUMBER of seats at this table. One for each Angel, minus Cassiel, plus Elua. Was the whole game supposed to be invited to this scene? Were reality and disbelief supposed to be suspended so that the entire realm could get up in this business? Should razors have been passed out as party favors at the ball so everybody could donate some blood?

Did you read that bit in Skaldia's (pretty irate) mail wherein neither you, nor Aviana, nor Lanval, made any mention of looking into a way to undo the ritual, which is the only thing that happened at this scene? Seriously, how were you being shut out? The Black Cross is still a problem. Hasn't gone away. There's still piles of things to be done, glory to be won, accolades to be acquired, if people do things.

And you know, you were pretty friendly with staff too up until last week.

@Sunny said in Kushiel's Debut:

I would just like to point out for the cheap seats that both @echx and @deadculture were included in the scene in question. In case that wasn't entirely clear.

Neither of us other suggested otherwise.

In fact Martin is the guy who pulled the book out of the fire, which really makes the claims about PC involvement kind of laughable since we got 'involved' before some of the squeaky wheels were even playing the game.

Alright guys, the Hog Pit is that way. ---->

The decision to overlap those scenes OOCly in that manner was not great. No question.

Should the people who got the "crunchier" scene (whatever that means ) have NOT gone to the party at all? Would it have been more or less of a slight if these people had gone off to their private scene without putting in an appearance at the ball? How about the fact that ICly, there isn't any reason why they wouldn't have been at the party and then ducked out at some point? In fact - again - in several cases their absences would have been extremely questionable. Should the 'secret' scene have been held on another night, and the PCs involved.... what, left the party after a couple of hours RL and then logged out?

When there's a huge ball at the palace and the Crown Princess and her husband don't attend, what does that say about the party? C'mon.

Again, traditionally, the Longest Night ball is a masquerade. That was part of the reason for doing this thing on that night, because it was supposed to give the PCs involved some cover for their covert actions, not just at the ball but on location. This time it wasn't. Not ideal, but hey. It could have generated all kinds of interesting IC gossip, but no.

@Sunny,

I didn't say you sent nasty mails. I said people did.

Numerous people have talked to me - and staff - about the grief they've been given over their participation in that scene, giant heapings of guilt for being included where other people got left out.

Things could have been handled more gracefully on both sides. Instead there was a drama bomb.

Did I contact you on Facebook? Sure. Have I known you for like... 15 years and did I think you might handle things differently? Absolutely. I guess that's my fault.

Yeah, Asherat did share one page with me, because she was confused, upset, and hurt by the demand that she apologize to the entire player base because some people got involved in one scene, and a bunch of other people didn't. And yeah, that kind of pissed me off, because the reaction a few of the people who didn't get picked had amounts to a temper tantrum. Ragequits, nasty @mails to people, and a lot of OOC badgering for various reasons.

Accusations of favoritism... because this was a specific scene that had specific requirements and someone didn't pick their closest IC friends to participate. Accusations of abandonment... because people who did get picked were trying to keep it quiet because what happened IC is and will remain a secret, and did things like left their +1s at the party while they went off to possibly die in the snow.

But let me tell you a story.

This scion power plot started some 2+ real life years ago, as a small but critical part of the much larger Black Cross metaplot. A bunch of NPCs were assassinated; murdered in a specific ritual fashion so their blood could be collected. A few PCs were even attacked for that same reason. This went on over the course of several months, so that players could have the chance to investigate and maybe interrupt what was going on. And investigate they did, but at the time the player base was tiny and not enough was done to stop it.

So some NPCs did a magic ritual and severed this magic connection between the peoples and the angels... which had the net mechanical effect of rendering an entire group of 5 point merits completely useless.

In the 2+ years since this happened, resolving this issue has been an on-going THING. It was never set aside by staff, it was never forgotten, they've just been trying to let players figure it out and resolve it.

Hey @Sunny, remember Dark? He had a character on KD who worked on it for a while until he flaked out and wandered away.

One character took a bunch of others on an international treasure hunt trying to find a magic book that had a spell that would help to undo the problem, but for various reasons they were unsuccessful. (Wasn't my plot; I didn't get invited; didn't get involved; don't really know the details other than that it didn't work and staff had to come up with a backup plan.)

In the meantime, we had the Flatlands war arc, which took another bunch of PCs off the grid for about 7 months. Of real time. Which naturally caused a lot of attrition because the pocket realm RP was a bit light and all of the battles were handled via +job for logistic reasons and because nobody ever really requested or showed an interest in RP'd combat. At the end of the last battle (which stomped the army, by the way) we holed up in and around a city and 'found' an old temple. I rounded up every last PC who was still out there, all the ones that had been there from the beginning, and we had a scene where we went and explored it. And, wonder of wonders, found an old book that none of us could read and a weird old bottle that some dude was trying to burn to keep away from us.

There was some combat, but another PC (not mine, thanks) basically jumped into the fire to save the book.

The book and the bottle got sent back as quick as humanly possible to the ONLY character I OOCly/Reynard ICly knew might have any clue what to do with. The only other person with that particular distinction was... scrolls up ...oh hey, that dude Dark, who quit playing over a year previously. Fantastic. (Un)fortunately, this character is... yes. A staff alt. Whose existence as a character predates her player's involvement as staff. (I guess I could have sent it to an NPC instead. Clearly that would have been so much better...)

And then ALMOST an entire IC year passed. (The Longest Night is at the end of December; we got back in February... so 10 IC months.)

In the meantime, a new PC popped up who had the skill set to help with this book thingy popped up. The PC who actually saved the book from the fire managed to find out about that skill set and pointed her at the character who I'd given the book and bottle to.... in spite of me never having told him who it was. Is that PC a staff alt NOW? Apparently. But she certainly was not when she got involved in the plot.

Now that there was another PC involved, not just the staff alt, things moved again. Again, I don't know what they did, or how they did it. Wasn't my thing. I was off hunting Skaldi, killing pirates, whatever.

The treasure hunting group came home, empty-handed, in IC November. Pretty sure nobody really knows IC what they were off doing, just that they were gone for a long ass time.

The Longest Night finally rolled around. It's a big deal ICly; the single biggest celebratory night on the calendar year. The entire city has parties. @Sunny stepped up to run the big ball at the palace, which is technically supposed to be a masquerade - everybody would have been anonymous, in masks, and skulking around the city looking like a duck wouldn't have been obvious.

Unfortunately, it wasn't a masque. And this scene people are upset about was scheduled at the same time as the party at the palace, so it was REALLY OBVIOUS when some people left and went somewhere else. Should it have been scheduled for a different time? Probably. But from the complaints that have been made, the people that are upset that they were excluded would still be upset that they were excluded. Instead of continuing to have their party and getting hit with a wall-of-emit about how their phenomenal cosmic powers were suddenly working again (which happened instead on Sunday, at the other half of the Longest Night party, to the apparent joy of THOSE people) people brought the drama and brought that event down in flames. In the 2 hours it took to do this one specific scene, the ball completely imploded.

Awesome.

TL;DR: people are super upset because they didn't get invited to a scene, because despite all being veteran RPers, apparently we haven't learned that not everybody gets to be involved in everything. When has that EVER been the case?

There were limited slots at that table: one for each Angel. Because it was and is a huge IC secret, because magic. Literally. It took magic to break the connection, it took magic to fix it. In this setting, magic is not very common. Nor is it something you advertise if you possess it. But that's the nature of the setting: people are superstitious and distrustful of it.

You want to know what you missed by not getting to go? Missing parties and taking 3-4 lethal.

You know what you didn't miss? Getting your scion powers back. Getting a whole new tree of boosted scion powers.

The people who have the best claim to being annoyed that they didn't get involved in this scene are the ones who spent A YEAR off the grid on their treasure hunt, and I'm pretty sure none of them ragequit over it. In fact I've RP'd with three of them this week alone and they didn't even seem upset.

Is this the first really public plot thing staff has run in a while? It wasn't meant to be that public, but hey, OOC knowledge and gossip and people crying favorites because they were apparently not special enough. Is this result going to encourage them to run more things like this? My guess is... no.

Really? I thought you ran that one too. Huh. Well, I played on the small town one too, until it imploded. Cold Space was still the best of the lot!

Holy wow, Bot! You live!

I was Locke on your zombie game (was that MUSH of the Dead? the one in NYC?) and then Eisley and Andromeda on Cold Space. Man, I miss that game so much.

Once upon a time, in a far-away mush that has now sunk itself into the deep waters of infamy, I was the Changeling staffer. I had a player that was rude and disruptive, ignoring theme left and right and generally making enough of a nuisance of herself that the rest of the sphere was pretty much going out of their way to ignore and avoid her, and had lodged several complaints about her. I pulled her aside two or three times to explain that she needed to get her act together.

I may possibly finally have solved that situation by bribing a player to blow up a building on the grid while she was in it, and then had to have the discussion with her about why the Regeneration merit wasn't going to let her come back from 15 or 20 concurrent points of agg from the combination of explosive material and building falling on her head.

Conversely, some of you may possibly remember Sandraudiga from City of Hope. (Yeah, yeah. CoH. Grain of salt. Salt block. Whatever.) For those who aren't familiar, she was Pure Breed 5 Get of Fenris kinfolk with gnosis and some other crap who apparently let herself into the Umbra for giggles to go kill banes. But she was simultaneously clueless about Garou culture; we (I had an all GoF pack going) found her wandering in the forest talking to herself, out loud, about where the caern might be. We spent a while trying to educate her, teach her the Litany, etc, etc, etc, but ultimately she was more concerned about being the ultimate bad ass than playing anything remotely approaching a canon character (she was in essence a walking Veil breech, given her behavior) and despite numerous complaints about this behavior, staff did absolutely nothing. (But again, CoH.)

I still have days when I regret not drowning her in a bathtub filled with her own blood.

TL;DR : unless it is a real sandbox game, staff needs to be willing to draw some lines in the sand. I'd suggest that first line lies where the breaking of theme is seriously damaging other people's playing experience. And sure, a conversation or two with the person of issue is certainly in order, but sometimes the only way to cure it is with a couple hundred tons of concrete and rebar.

@Olsson said:

2. How much freedom are players generally allowed to make up for story reasons for their character? Can I make up rivals in other houses? Some vendetta they have against my PC? An unfortunate death that caused them to be central in a power struggle between two minor houses?

Also you can ask around; there are often players who could be interested in having a PC nemesis to contend with.