@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:
While there are absolutely players willing to run their own stuff (and I love them), they are the minority. There are also a lot of players who are gunshy about participating in PrPs.
Because we have made this not fun. That was my point. The PrP system was created to put some mechanical controls on things that players were doing anyway but complained that the rewards people could invent for themselves were unfair to others who ran similar plots but didn't get the same goodies.
PrPs came from D&D and Shadowrun games, where systems monetizing the risk/reward cycle were much more researched; I had a lot of push-back when explaining why PrPs wouldn't work for WoD because they obviously worked so well elsewhere.
Before the introduction of the PrP to WoD games, people would run whatever, whenever. Even I, one of the worst STs you could have the misfortune of running something, could feel comfortable saying, "Hey, let's go out into the swamp and kill some ROUSes!" Now? Forget it. I'm not sticking my hand in the blender of bureaucracy.
My last few games have all but begged players to run PrPs and empowered them to do a lot, but the number of people actually doing so is tiny.
Quelling the willingness of people to do things on their own didn't happen overnight, either. You can't expect people to trust you personally when the experience has been quite different elsewhere.
As much I abhor a certain member of the Arx staffing team, they lead by doing, not by telling people to do, and that's the other problem with PrPs; it was designed so that staff didn't have to be involved in the storytelling portion of the game.
So PrPs:
- Tacitly turned RP into a monetized activity
- Turned the reward system of doing things into a bureaucracy
- Removed staff from a key position of running of their own game
No, I don't believe that "The Players" are at fault. It seems like blaming Millennials for being poor; reversing cause and effect. I don't buy it.