Posts made by Sunny

This is an edited version of one of my working drafts; these are some storytelling definitions we're using, and perhaps they will help with shared understanding.

Type of plots:
Metaplot -> Chapter -> Multiple Global Factions -> Local Faction(s)/Global Faction -> Personal

Metaplot: Background plot of the game, created, maintained, and run by Blue Rose. At this level are things that include the greater world outside of our area, the big bad background story which will offer hooks for the chapter plots. There are no rewards for running this plot level.

Chapter/Season: This would be the 'main' plot of the game; run only by staff, these are the major plot arcs that carry the game's metaplot forward. These will be formal, and typically should last between 3 and 4 months. All storytelling staff's chapter plots will be related to the metaplot, and they must involve two or more global factions. There are no rewards for running this plot level.

Multiple Global Factions (2+): All plots of this level require staff approval. They may or may not be connected to the chapter plots; their duration is not tied to the seasonal system. Most of these will be staff run plots; it is unlikely that Blue Rose will approve a player run plot that falls into this category due to the inclusion of different racial factions (much more likely with several global factions that are not racially divided). These are plots that cross factions; crime and vampire, immortal and mummy, werewolf and hunter, crime and high society, and so on. The scope of these plots is very large, and they should be designed with a beginning, middle, and at least two potential end conditions. There are no rewards for running this plot level, though in special cases it may be treated as a series of lower level plots.

Local Faction(s)/Global Faction: These plots may or may not require approval (see below list); many should be review-only, so long as they don't include an item that requires approval instead. Anyone can run a 'crime' plot, or a 'vampire' plot, or a plot for their pack or coterie. Single global faction or multiple local faction plots can be run by anyone. Running these plots earns 1 player point per scene; max of 2/week earned this way.

Personal: Almost always review; few things run for a single player require prior approval.

And these are helpful too, likely:

Story/Plot: Any plotline that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It can be anything from one scene up through as many as needed

Set: The location roleplay is happening, or the condition of that location; establishment of what's around, what people are around and what they're doing, what time it is, and other factors that might need to be established.

Scene: Any roleplay between two or more characters with a set, a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Session: One month real life time

Faction: Any group of 3 or more characters with a significant IC connection either through who or what they are, or through their relationships with other characters

Global Faction: Game-wide faction, such as high society, law enforcement, or vampire

Local Faction: Character created factions, such as households, businesses, coteries, packs, freeholds, and so on.

@Thenomain said:

@Sunny said:

Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that I refuse to reward staff with advantages over other players. They're there to facilitate RP, not benefit themselves.

On the other hand, we as a group demand so much of them—especially on bigger games—that we are having problems finding people willing to staff under these conditions.

The answer is to change the conditions, but that merely sounds easy. Gaining acceptance to it may prove troublesome and even then we can't be sure it will work. We can either try without knowing our chance of success, or not and continue the status-quo, waiting for someone else to do the hard work of effort/success/failure.

Oh dang, I think I missed answering this one (thank you all, btw, you did save what was otherwise going to be a shitty afternoon; this talk has been fantastic). I am attempting to change the conditions on my game to ask less of staff because I agree -- we demand way, way, way too much of staff, and we burn people out faster than we can attract new people. The particular aspect of the conditions that I'm working on targeting right now is the expectations I have of staff, to translate out into the expectations they have of themselves.

Essentially, everyone can do X and get the reward for it. Only staff can do Y, and there's no virtual-material reward for that.

Edited to add: I know, I know, correlation != causation, but I'm just going to throw this out there anyway. I've had more offers to assist with Storytelling on the staff level in the last day or two than I have in the months leading up to it. People are excited about the whole thing. It's nowhere near the disaster people seem to think it is. If I were having a shortage of volunteers that would be one thing, but I'm absolutely not.

@Arkandel

You haven't missed my answer; I don't think I gave one. No, my plan is not. I will be giving an incentive (not XP) to players who run PRPs. Staff are players as well; they are welcome to run player run plots as a player as much as anyone else. But only staff is able to run game level plot. It cannot be done by players, for a reward or otherwise.

Edited to add a little clarity.

Oh, right! Thanks, @Ganymede.

@Coin: The advantage comes in in that staff has access to a ton of background information to mine for plots. They have hooks, and in some cases I'll be doing all the development and then sending them forth. They are not having to do nearly as much work for the Game Plot stuff as people have to do for PRPs.

@Coin said:

If it were a tabletop-style game? I would agree. Because my mindset going in would be different, the game would be different, etc. But I don't staff as an ST; I ST on top of staffing. They're different things.

It's a fundamental difference in perspective, yes, plus staff storytellers are, as @Miss-Demeanor has noted, going to be a thing. I'm no longer asking pure STs to handle jobs or applications, or job monkies to run plots. It isn't an 'and you do this' it's a 'you can do this but don't have to' sort of deal.

I'm not making a single member of the staff team act as storyteller (unless they're signing on purely for storytelling). We have no sphere leads. We have no division on those lines. Everything is being developed and managed as a single unit, rather than breaking it up. So I have no Sphere Lead that I expect to be running plot for their sphere. I have no sphere admins.

Instead, I have several storytellers who signed up specifically to run the bigger picture plot. stuff. Plus me. I can actually do a ridiculous amount of storytelling all on my lonesome.

Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that I refuse to reward staff with advantages over other players. They're there to facilitate RP, not benefit themselves.

@Thenomain said:

@Arkandel said:

Why are those two things mutually exclusive?

They're not. Maybe I missed the entire context of what Sunny said, but I don't read anywhere that's saying this.

What I'm reading is that he's saying Staff has made this a reality far too often.

Theno has it dead on.

@Arkandel

Let me clarify; staff stopped running staff plot. It took it off their plates to worry about. It's not the only reason; it's one of the many reasons.

@tragedyjones said:

Anyone who says 2nd Edition rules are worse is either an Idiot, A Jerk, My Brother, Spider, or a combination of the abover. :neckbeard:

Wait, Spider is your brother?

@ThatGuyThere

I am so blowing up a volcano at some point, I guarantee it. Unless one goes off around here for real. Then it will probably be too soon.

@Coin You're right. I'm not sure how to express it. I do feel like it's unethical, but I recognize that according to other value systems it is not unethical and I have accepted your value system as just as valid as my own, so I don't think you're behaving unethically precisely.

Everyone else:

Time spent reading applications, processing jobs, chatting with players about concepts: all of these things require staff time and attention that they could use for their characters' advancement. They could be doing things to earn themselves XP, too.

The reason that I feel it is unethical is that someone would be benefiting from staffing in a virtual-material fashion. On this game, there is a line between staff run story and player run story. Players do not have access to the staff material and will not, because while I do believe that the OOC masquerade is stupid, I do not think everyone should be privy to the game's story for the benefit of the people playing it.

Staff will be given pieces of the plot to run. They will have access to my metaplot and tons of hooks / ideas that the rest of the playerbase does not. Therefore, staff have a potentially easier time running plots than the rest of the game. They are now getting a virtual-material benefit from staffing that is not available for other people.

What I hope to accomplish with this system is reducing the advantage staff players have over other players. I want the game itself to have a distinctive story/plot that even our player storytellers can participate in and have fun with. The game needs to be about something, which means that there is a chunk of the plot that staff has to run.

As well, again, there is a not-insignificant difference between what players run and what staff runs. If you run a PRP do it from your character. It's a PRP. If you're running game story, there isn't going to be a reward for that. If the only thing someone is interested in is running player-level story, they don't need to be staff to do that. I would encourage them to re-evaluate why they want to be on the team, because they're just shooting themselves in the foot with it.

@Arkandel
1: I am aware. This is why I am overstaffing on storytelling. Most of the people I currently have working with me are not people I have to worry about bailing on me. I've got a group of people I've been online tabletopping with for a while.

2: I appreciate the sentiment behind it, but I know what I'm signing up for. I ran a beast of a game myself for several years: Ashes to Ashes. I'm the one responsible for having approved the toe-ring of doom. I've learned a ton since those days, and I'm ready to implement it. My staff structure is going to be different than the traditional model, and I hope to solve a lot of the RL-exploding burnout-inducing-overwork issues with it.

I addressed my goal up above.

Fair enough, but I'm curious as to your reasoning. Did people think "oh, I'm going to get XP for this crap? No way - I'm done here!" and stop running plot?

No. Staff teams essentially said 'whew, the players have mostly taken over storytelling' and stopped.

@Arkandel @Coin

Games did just fine for storytellers (even player storytellers) prior to the introduction of XP for plots for staff. Really, there's been a significant decline in staff storytelling since the introduction of it, really. I'm sure this could be an example of correlation not equating out to causation, but I don't think it is.

The fact is, people will plot and run plot because they want to. I am sure this will work; I've had a number of people volunteer to ST after they were made aware of the fact that we were going to do this. Caused by this policy? Probably not. Willing to step up and show me that people I respect as ST staff will work as ST staff with this policy in place? Yep. I still have a great team. I understand that there are people that don't agree, and that's fine. While I do maintain that I feel that it's unethical (that's never going to change) I recognize that other people don't agree, and I'm not judging anyone for the opinion itself.

There's an established way of doing things that did not used to be done , and I think that while it was certainly a grand experiment, it doesn't work. I'm going back to the way it was.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

The biggest flaw in your logic is that staffing is not a job. It is a volunteered activity.

It's a volunteer job. It isn't serving at a soup kitchen and that's not a great example, but it is absolutely a job. We fundamentally disagree on this level. If they're not doing it for the love of the game, I don't really want them.

@Coin said:

Except from what I understand, she's doing exactly that: if you storytell from your staff bit, you get no XP; if you do it from your PC bit, you do. So it's going to generate exactly that dynamic, as per the HM example.

There's a layered plot system in place. Player level plots should be run by players; staff should generally be focusing on staff plots. There are very distinct differences.

@somasatori: I'll take you up on that.

Since I was asked!

If you're really not interested in participating in real-time discussions but you still are interested in assisting with the development process, feel free to send me a PM with the account name you'd like and an e-mail for me to send a password to, and I can set folks up with access to the staff wiki. We have a list of topics up for brainstorming, and as time goes on there will probably be more of them. I'm not going to pass out access like candy, because there's Plot Stuff on there, but if you're genuinely interested in helping with development but not interested in logging into the game itself, let me know! This is good for those of you who don't have a whole lot of time to just hang out.

No, I just don't think staff should get perks for being staff. I think it's ridiculous and unethical and it was a bad idea when games started doing it, and the fact that it's causing games problems now that it's been in play for a while is something that should have been self-evident when people essentially started paying people to staff.

We have a metaplot!

It is going to be awesome.

I am not going to post details because spoilers, but I am crazy excited about it.

@surreality said:

Working on methods. Will poke when viable and functional! (Still working on prefs things, it just now works... )

You are doing amazing, wonderful things.

@Arkandel

Brilliant. Thank you. I wish I had some big long reply, but just thank you. I'm going to chew on it for a while. If you have any other brilliant ideas, I am all ears.

@Arkandel said:

@Pyrephox said:

I think that sounds wonderful. The biggest thing to make sure of, though, is that there's follow through on the part of staff. If you set up the expectation that hey, here's a thing that will help you get involved in the plot, and then don't follow through, players will feel more put off than if you offered nothing at all.

Yeah, this. Very often staff vastly underestimate the amount of work things like this take. The idea is sound but scales up very poorly.

I agree that it scales poorly, and it would certainly be something I'd need to revisit and readdress if the game blows up. I'm trying to think of a better way to handle this. I mean, I have a single person already who has decided that their entire focus as staff is going to be integrating new characters into the story and game, but it can't be something that all falls on one person.

The sort of things I am thinking about:

...grew up in the Bay City Lighthouse.
...once found a cursed artifact of some sort while exploring the island.
...is the great grandchild of Marcus Armadon.

Then based on that we'd give them little pieces of the metaplot so that everybody who chooses one brings something to the table, so to speak.

Does anybody have any thoughts as to how we might be able to manage the overhead on this without insanity? Totally just brainstorming here. I want this to work, but I suspect my game might not stay tiny for forever. -.-

Correct.