Player Ratios
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@Tez said in Player Ratios:
I’ve also considered the angle of giving people tokens for running story which they can cash in for Insert Incentive Here. I’ve toyed with the idea of the incentive being staff attention, but I very, very, very much want to kill the idea that staff attention is better than player attention.
I’ve tried this, and a surprising thing happened: the people who ran stuff almost never asked for their tokens (I was using FS3 luck, which had a pretty wide variety of benefits you could spend it on). Not //never// asked, but it was far more rare than you’d think.
I don’t think that’s really what motivates people to run stories, honestly. I still like it as a way to offer something to people who do, but I don’t think anyone ever said ‘I’m gonna run a thing to earn me some luck’. I think the actual rewards are things like seeing their friends have fun, making a real impact in people’s stories, seeing the stuff they do matter.
I think the most effective thing in getting people to run things lies in two things: making it easy and making it matter.
Making it easy is NOT about ‘do whatever you want.’ In fact, I think that often makes it harder, because people are uncertain about what’s feasible. It’s more about building support.
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Have different levels of ‘running things’ available. GMs have to walk before they can fly - even experienced GMs need to practice with the basics of a new system. Have a way to run basic, repetitive encounters that add spice to RP, the sort that require almost no rules or guidelines beyond using the system. If you do ‘plot in a box’ type things, make sure some of them are really basic ‘smash x’ or whatever your theme’s equivalent is. Something you can run in a single evening.
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Build a community where people are polite and supportive of GMs even when they kind of suck. At least in public. No groaning about dice, everyone says thank you, and if you’re frustrated or annoyed, do it in private. Make it safe to try stuff.
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Have different types of running things available. Some people will never run combat, but they do a killer party or make up really cool holiday traditions.
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Support people doing bigger stories. When they want to run one, get them on a private channel with STs, or a go-to ST, so they can ask questions. Be proactive about talking through their plan. Tell them it sounds great but they might need an extra day for everything they have planned, or did they think about involving NPC X because that might be a cool tie-in to meta plot. Be a partner. It’s still less work than running something yourself, and next time they’ll need LESS help.
Making it matter is mostly about taking the stuff they do into account - but the last bullet about being a partner to player-GMs can help a lot, too. Honest to god, sometimes we were able to straight up let players GM a thing we were struggling to find time to do, because we could slide certain things so easily into their plans and they were usually pretty excited (I think!) to be allowed to do it. BY ALL MEANS run that scouting scene we know we need but don’t have the spoons to run. SURE, pass on this useful info! ABSOLUTELY make up a town and let it get destroyed by the enemies we want to feel scary.
I don’t have great concrete thoughts about ratio of STs to players because I think that has a lot of variables about activity and game type and and and, but I apparently have many thoughts on building a game where people GM stuff.
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Basically, what Tat said.
Additionally, however, I’ve always been an advocate for gating entries. Don’t have enough staff to deal with the number of players, be that administratively, storytellerly, energyly, whateverly? Stop letting players in. This is perhaps easier when staff are split into teams, a la the traditional WoD sphere/splat-based divisions, but I always support the idea of having a pause or moratorium on applications until things become managable. So if you’re looking for external permission to have such a policy, this is it. It might not be a TTRPG, but it’s still your metaphorical table to manage how you need to.
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I wish I knew how to incentivize prps because when I want to run I find it so fun and when I don’t want to run I feel terrible trying. I think the biggest hurdles for me are feeling comfortable enough in the playground to mess around – if I know the theme or system will be way more inclined to tell stories than if I actively know I am guessing or full of shit. But the validation I want for running story is people having fun with it or maybe seeing my story having impact on other people’s – I don’t know if there is a way to incentivize that.
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Lots of good stuff here.
I do wish you’d said ‘actually, I find incentives totally work great’, though. I want there to be an easy answer.
@Pavel said in Player Ratios:
Additionally, however, I’ve always been an advocate for gating entries. Don’t have enough staff to deal with the number of players, be that administratively, storytellerly, energyly, whateverly? Stop letting players in.
200% agree on this, but at the same time, I’ve always struggled to implement it. I’m not happy with just closing the gates on people, and wait lists are an imperfect middle ground. That’s why I’ve been kicking around the idea of a predefined storyteller : player ratio and letting people in based on that – and yeah, being a storyteller or bringing one along can be a way to skip the line.
This is perhaps easier when staff are split into teams, a la the traditional WoD sphere/splat-based divisions
While I don’t have traditional WoD sphere experience, Firan did something a bit similar – in theory – with having a very structured staffing hierarchy. I’ve toyed with building out something similar for storytellers – breaking them out across factions, clustered around main storypoints – where teams can work together.
@Yam accuses me of dreaming of a corporate bureaucracy of staffing.
she/they
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@Tez I do think managing player load via storyteller numbers is an interesting idea from a sustainability perspective, particularly if your STs can be self-aware of their own boundaries and not pathologically incapable of saying no.
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I wonder if a shift in expectations is also in order. Big, multi-scene plots that have a lot of people involved are exhausting. Sometimes the fun outweighs the effort, but it still IS a lot of effort and so many of us are at a point in our lives where we’ve got other things to do.
I wonder if there’s a way to encourage and promote people doing player-run-scenes first, and then for those who discover they enjoy it, build up into longer plots. But really, just having self-contained scenes that have a bit of excitement or plotty goodness to them can do a lot to excite people. And they might be less intimidating.
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Tangentially related but I thought we kinda’ figured out that gating/limiting/waitlisting wasn’t ideal. As in the people that generally got waitlisted were more or less uninterested after several months passed.
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@Tez said in Player Ratios:
I’ve also considered the angle of giving people tokens for running story which they can cash in for Insert Incentive Here. I’ve toyed with the idea of the incentive being staff attention, but I very, very, very much want to kill the idea that staff attention is better than player attention.
What about cashing in the tokens to be able to make plots that actively change the world without having to go through ten layers of bureaucracy?
That, I find, is a big impediment to players running stories. So if you’ve proven yourself with smaller plots (like, say, plots personal to a specific character), you earn the right to just go with something that changes the world?
Wanna blow up a building? Two Story Tokens. Have a major political figure assassinated? Three. A war? Four. World-wide apocalypse? Five.
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@STD said in Player Ratios:
What about cashing in the tokens to be able to make plots that actively change the world without having to go through ten layers of bureaucracy?
If somebody has a cool idea to change the world in a way that fits with your game vision, why would you require them to have OOC tokens to do so?
Conversely, if somebody has a terrible idea to change the game world in a way that wrecks the game, who cares how many tokens they have? It’s still not something you want.
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@Yam Yeah, I don’t really like waitlisting, but I don’t have a great solution for the storyteller to player ratio problem. If you have more players than storytellers, then instead of a waitlist at the entry, it’s a waitlist for staff attention: put in a request and wait two years because there’s 150 players on the game.
@STD said in Player Ratios:
What about cashing in the tokens to be able to make plots that actively change the world without having to go through ten layers of bureaucracy?
I see your point, but I totally agree with Faraday here:
@Faraday said in Player Ratios:
If somebody has a cool idea to change the world in a way that fits with your game vision, why would you require them to have OOC tokens to do so?
Conversely, if somebody has a terrible idea to change the game world in a way that wrecks the game, who cares how many tokens they have? It’s still not something you want.
I want players to be able to tell big stories, personally, without feeling like their tokens entitle them to remake the scope or scale of the game. Then again, that comes back to expectations too, so maybe Pyre’s right here:
@Pyrephox said in Player Ratios:
I wonder if a shift in expectations is also in order.
It’s really just about setting expectations and being clear about them. Like, yes, you can join this game, but we have a limited number of storytellers and thus–.
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@Faraday said in Player Ratios:
@STD said in Player Ratios:
What about cashing in the tokens to be able to make plots that actively change the world without having to go through ten layers of bureaucracy?
If somebody has a cool idea to change the world in a way that fits with your game vision, why would you require them to have OOC tokens to do so?
Conversely, if somebody has a terrible idea to change the game world in a way that wrecks the game, who cares how many tokens they have? It’s still not something you want.
It was mostly just a way to prejudge storytellers so that constant permission wouldn’t be necessary. The whole “fits your game vision” is the problematic bit; someone who has run a few dozen smaller scenes can just go ahead with whatever big idea they have without having to bother staff.
I donno, it probably wouldn’t work. I was just spitballing without really thinking it through. OP wanted some sort of inducement system.
Alternatively, maybe tokens would be equivalent to spaces. Like… there can only be one big world-changing plot active at any one time and tokens are used to reserve those spaces. The effort involved in gaining those tokens might reduce flake-outs.
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@Yam said in Player Ratios:
Tangentially related but I though we kinda’ figured out that gating/limiting/waitlisting wasn’t ideal. As in the people that generally got waitlisted were more or less uninterested after several months passed.
My experience with trying a waitlist was largely negative, it’s very counter to the way players behave and engage with MUSHes even though it’s easier on staff in a lot of ways, but it was a suggestion by someone who couldn’t get in during a ‘come everybody’ open window and I’m not sorry to have tried it. I’m still pretty pro some kind of population limitation, even if I don’t have the perfect system for it.
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@Third-Eye I can accept it as something rough but necessary. I recall putting a TON of emotional attention (unwise on my part) into getting through that window, and missing it meant I was pretty much out of RP with my pals for several months. Not really sure where I would’ve gone from there, but as an ST that has been thoroughly fried, I definitely understand.
Back to ratios though, I agree with tez that 5 players per ST is a decent number.
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@STD said in Player Ratios:
It was mostly just a way to prejudge storytellers so that constant permission wouldn’t be necessary. The whole “fits your game vision” is the problematic bit; someone who has run a few dozen smaller scenes can just go ahead with whatever big idea they have without having to bother staff.
Well I can only speak for myself, but I don’t care how good of a storyteller you’ve been in the past. Anything that has the potential to knock the game off its axis should go through staff first.
I’m also more lenient than most, though, in what you can run without any staff permission, so YMMV.
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I agree with a lot of what @Tat, @Faraday, @Pyrephox, and others have said. One incentive that I think can help get people interested in running PrPs is to have Staff weave references to the actions in their PrPs into larger metaplot scenes.
Did they stop a pirate ship from taking a merchantman? The important plotgiver for the next metaplot scene happened to be on that merchantman and is effusive in their thanks.
Not only does this let players know that player-run-plots matter, it provides a thank-you to player GMs, shares a little spotlight with all involved, and might even make it easier for player GMs to feel more comfortable taking on bigger plot ideas.
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@Roadspike said in Player Ratios:
One incentive that I think can help get people interested in running PrPs is to have Staff weave references to the actions in their PrPs into larger metaplot scenes.
Another idea that Staff could do in this regard is build frameworks for PrPs for common events that PCs would likely try to intervene in. For a generic D&D style fantasy game, maybe the area the game takes place in is known for regular bands of bandits preying on the towns because of the machinations of some evil arcanist, so the staff builds a framework for how bandit incursions look in the fiction of the world, and provide some ideas on how to put spins on them.
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@MisterBoring We did something like this on The Savage Skies: each adventure, we had a list of area hooks, common antagonists, common allies, current plots, and any specific resources (like Staff Notes that were of particular use for the adventure) to help player-GMs find their footing. It worked okay, we had a few people run some stuff based on that information. We definitely could have provided more of the “what,” “why,” and “how” for the antagonists along with the “who.”
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@Tez said in Player Ratios:
I’m not happy with just closing the gates on people, and wait lists are an imperfect middle ground.
Unfortunately, there’s the rub. Or one of them, at least. You’re going to have to do things that feel sucky, that’s part of the burden of being in charge. Do you want a solid game of fifteen people or a shitty game of a hundred and fifty? You don’t like saying no. I get that. You will have to do it anyway.
To that end, there’s no ideal storyteller-to-player ratio. It depends entirely on the quality of the storyteller, their activity level, how many different groups of players are involved, etc, etc. If you’ve got Steve over there specifically telling long-running stories exclusively for his little cadre of were-mages, but you’ve also got Candice over there doing one-shots with all and sundry, they don’t math out to be equivalent.
So I would recommend that one establishes what it means to be a storyteller before looking at ratios. Not that you necessarily want to set minimum number of scenes or any of that, but it’s very likely more of a vibe-based idea.
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We don’t have storytelling staff in the first place. We have a plot that is very easy for players to tell stories in – and we expect them to do so. They do. There aren’t any rewards besides the joy of storytelling itself.
Of course, this works because no one expected our game to ever become more than a small handful of friends hanging out and telling their stories to each other. Keys is a sandbox, a framework for people to go off playing plots and stories of their own making and then returning to the central hub to interact and catch up. It probably wouldn’t work with a very large playerbase – we’re typically sitting around 30-60 active characters at any given time, so we’re hardly taking over the hobby here.
In short, I agree with others above: Players should help drive story and entertain each other. You don’t have to leave it all to them – but even if you were paid to sit online 40 hours a week, storytelling, you wouldn’t be able to keep up with everyone. It’s not unreasonable to expect people to perceive the hobby as a two-way street.
