Staff Capacity

[Tez]

@Jennkryst said in Staff Capacity:

Or a WoD setting started up with FS3. Or or or…

Arguably, we have seen this. There have been a number of urban fantasy / shifter games which hit the same broad niche and have drawn some of the same players.

[Pyrephox]

@Tez said in Staff Capacity:

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Staff Capacity:

It’s also my impression, though, that the main issue with WoD and other tabletop-to-mu* games is the oversight needed to keep the story on track. Tabletop games are designed to be 5-6 people against the world. It’s a lot to oversee when it’s actually 5-6 groups of 5-6 people – or more.

I agree. There are ways that Keys is set up that other games aren’t which allows you to manage the staff overhead by delegating storytelling. With WoD/CoD/everything else, all of the systematized tabletop mechanics in the world aren’t going to also automate the storytelling, which is actually what I would expect is a large chunk of most staff brain.

You know, when it isn’t just people-management, be it managing other storytellers as @Apos mentioned or the ever-present player issues.

Although, I will say that I think other games could do more ‘leash-loosening’ by giving up the need to keep some things “secret” that don’t actually NEED to be secret. Make some organizations/factions/characters OOCly public, complete with character sheets and goals - let people take that and run with it. “Here’s the West Side Butchers - they’re a gang of 25 teenagers and a few ‘upper level’ gangsters running operations in X neighborhood. Here’s a lookout’s character sheet, here’s a basic member, here’s the ‘powerful’ ones and here’s what they’re trying to do in X. Run any scene you like using these stats, compatible with X, that you’re willing to post publicly.”

Ah, but people will take advantage! Some will, yeah. And then you kick them from the game. Because games don’t actually need cheaters. In fact, removing people who will abuse ambiguity is a better strat (I think) than trying to create rules that will ‘hem in’ abusers.

And you don’t have to do it with everything. You can lay all of the above out while still not mentioning that the Butchers have a demonic patron who will benefit if they can complete their goals in X…and who will get pissed if they can’t.

[Jennkryst]

Real ideas now.

So I think a way to cut down on some of the overhead is to have a Plot Bible somewhere, so when, say… the Changeling Staffer quits and a new person shows up, they now do not need to write a fresh metaplot. You have all the notes from the last one right there. You might want to change some details, but the Plot, as a whole, remains.

A Plot Staffer can also exist solely as a go-between with people when they run PRPs. How does it affect the metaplot? How does it affect NPCs? Will breaking in to rob this one house actually give them a cleverly concealed macguffin nobody new about before?

Edit for spelling, waugh

[Pyrephox]

@Jennkryst And that any staffer can access if they need to check on something that touches on the Changeling metaplot. Staff should not have ‘personal’ or ‘secret’ plots that they’re doing that other staff don’t know about!

[Jennkryst]

@Tez Yeah, but how many go ‘this is not just vague urban fantasy, this is WoD with the triat and mummies and Cain-pires and shit, just no dice’?

[Tez]

@Jennkryst said in Staff Capacity:

So I think a way to cut down on some of the overhead is to have a Plot Bible somewhere, so when, say… the Changeling Staffer quits and a new person shows up, they now do not need to write a fresh metaplot. You have all the notes from the last one right there. You might want to change some details, but the Plot, as a whole, remains.

A Plot Staffer can also exist solely as a go-between with people when they run PRPs. How does it affect the metaplot? How does it affect NPCs? Will breaking in to rob this one house actually give them a cleverly concealed macguffin nobody new about before?

Edit for spelling, waugh

I definitely agree about a plot bible. For all its many, many flaws this was something that Firan at least BEGAN to try to address in my time there by putting SOME of the secrets / stories on their wiki, behind wizlocks.

Some.

Mostly they were still bad at it.

I know that this has killed multiple major plotlines for people on Arx, as another GM-intensive story game with secrets, when a staffer left and as a result plots ended up suspended because of that.

Documentation is hard and more work, of course. Always. For everything.

I heard someone say nice things about Shattered plot documentation recently. CALLING ON @Tat and whoever else does that IDK. TAT WHO DOES THAT.

[Faraday]

People point to the staff tools and FS3 design in Ares as like: “This enables folks to run games with fewer staff,” and while that’s true, it’s backwards. Ares and FS3 were designed the way they are because games, including my own, were having trouble finding and keeping staff.

I personally experienced too many cases of staff blowups or abandonment through the years, some of which harmed relationships with friends. So for the last decade or so, I run games myself. That means not only do I need tools to support that (see: Ares and FS3), I need game design to support that. So generally I stick to single-sphere, PVE, narrowly-focused games. ETA: Also with de-centralized storytelling like @L-B-Heuschkel described.

[Tez]

@Faraday said in Staff Capacity:

That means not only do I need tools to support that (see: Ares and FS3), I need game design to support that. So generally I stick to single-sphere, PVE, narrowly-focused games.

Highlighting an underlooked but super important aspect that I super agree with bc upvoting you isn’t powerful enough.

[Jennkryst]

Someone DM me later about kit-bashing WoD into Dresden FATE because I just had a dumb idea.

Back to staff capacity fixes, we could also, and this is a dangerous idea here… trust players won’t metagame too hard with the knowledge of secret behind the scene machinations.

JOKES ASIDE

I’m still hyped on Roster Games, because it addresses something a lot of MUs, and even some TTRPGs, forget: character creation is supposed to be a collaborative process. MU NPCs are not tailor built to the players (they can’t be)… but there should definitely be a ‘how can you connect to the NPCs or other PCs in the world?’ process that it feels like most games eschew, beyond the Wanted BB.

And rosters come with baked-in connections and plot hooks and goals.

[Tez]

@Jennkryst said in Staff Capacity:

Back to staff capacity fixes, we could also, and this is a dangerous idea here… trust players won’t metagame too hard with the knowledge of secret behind the scene machinations.

I don’t think it’s about this, even as a joke. I don’t want the knowledge, as a player. I want to engage with secrets and discover secrets. Playing an open hand game isn’t my idea of fun. Early Arx alpha/beta hype was a huge dopamine rush of discovery BECAUSE of the lack of knowledge.

[Pavel]

@Tez This. I don’t even like being able to see other characters’ sheets.

[Faraday]

@Jennkryst said in Staff Capacity:

And rosters come with baked-in connections and plot hooks and goals.

They totally do - but also some people (like me) dislike them intensely Same as what @Tez said about in-game secrets. Or my way of doing PVE games. Or FS3.

But that’s OK, because no game is going to appeal to everybody. You just have to pick the right tools for the kind of game you want.

@Jennkryst said in Staff Capacity:

Technically, you don’t need a plug in for that. You could just have a diceless WoD for the lulz and see where that leads.

There have been Ares games using the Generic RPG plugin. It uses PDF or text-based sheets and a generic dice system (where you roll 5d10 and manually interpret the results).

There are many levels between fully diceless and fully automated, and the complexity of the plugin is going to depend on where you set that dial.

[Pavel]

@Faraday said in Staff Capacity:

You just have to pick the right tools for the kind of game you want.

Amen. If you make your game for everyone, it’s not really for anyone. Least of all yourself.

[junipersky]

I’m too old for the bullshit that cones with staffing any more.

Edit: except here. You people are generally good at not breaking the rules, and Pyre and Tez are like lighting.

[Livia]

@junipersky said in Staff Capacity:

I’m too old for the bullshit that cones with staffing any more.

In my recent playing of CoD games this has basically been the overwhelming response. I saw games note that they need staff pretty badly and mostly just got ‘nah, I don’t wanna’ from the player base.

Plenty of folks willing to run stories and one shot scenes and all that, people are happy to ST, but very few seem to actually want to be staff anymore.

Seems to have resulted in a lack of CoD games, I’ve been tinkering off and on with a tinymux CoD setup of my own, with making an Ares plugin for CoD (which I do think would be good to have out there; for me personally the ‘WoD/CoD-but-not’ games for some reason just do not interest me much), but having the time to continue such projects remains an issue. Which is probably why there’s no one willing to staff these things, heh!

[Tat]

@Tez said in Staff Capacity:

I heard someone say nice things about Shattered plot documentation recently. CALLING ON @Tat and whoever else does that IDK. TAT WHO DOES THAT.

I don’t know what exactly they’re referring to, honestly. We use the built in Ares plot functionality (kind of poorly, if I’m honest), try to keep a very basic ‘high points of the plot’ Story So Far page somewhat up to date, and have pages for One-Shot Adventures that folks can run as well as a page outlining what types of plots need to be fuller PRPs and how to get one approved.

The two former are aimed at helping new folks know what the big points of story are.

The last two are aimed at enabling player GMs.

[Apos]

@Tez said in Staff Capacity:

I don’t think it’s about this, even as a joke. I don’t want the knowledge, as a player. I want to engage with secrets and discover secrets. Playing an open hand game isn’t my idea of fun. Early Arx alpha/beta hype was a huge dopamine rush of discovery BECAUSE of the lack of knowledge.

I have so much stuff planned for a relaunch and it’s like, ‘man those I think will be really fun mysteries and I should probably write them somewhere that’s not just in my head for when I get hit by a bus’

[Wizz]

@Tez said in Staff Capacity:

I want to engage with secrets and discover secrets. Playing an open hand game isn’t my idea of fun. Early Arx alpha/beta hype was a huge dopamine rush of discovery BECAUSE of the lack of knowledge.

lemme just…one sec…

kay, lol: this just doesn’t work as intended in a public MU environment, unless staff has a strong ability to keep the rate of plot exposure at least relatively the same for all the players.

I have a similar fondness for that style of storytelling and I think around a table of people who personally know and trust each other it’s a lot of fun, but as someone who did come in after few years, the intense focus on secrecy was an enormous turd in the otherwise mostly pleasant soup of the game’s culture in exactly the same way OOC masquerade made many WoD games huuuuge pits of toxicity.

expecting hundreds (or even just tens, to be real) of virtual strangers in this community with – to borrow phrasing someone else used here once – all the attendant social anxieties and mental health issues we have to keep huge fundamental gameplay/plot secrets from each other while the exposure gap just grew wider and wider was just…wild to me, in retrospect, and lead to some of the most deeply unsettling and very, very unfun player-to-player experiences I have ever had in the hobby.

I get that that was sort of a by-blow of the completely unintentional population explosion/popularity of the game, and that I’m not saying anything new necessarily? but like, I’ve been and will continue to be disappointed to see other games try to copy that specific part of Arx’s formula.

[icanbeyourmuse]

I feel like players are the reason why a lot of people nope out of staff. Not everyone but once you get that bad egg, it can spoil the experience for being staff.

This is a me part to why I am not willing to admin on most games: documentation. Help on commands (a lot of games have ‘hidden’ commands from my experience because not documented), relevant info for players, lack of plot documentation. To me, staff side at least, plots should be fully documented so that if, say, JennyStaff decides she doesn’t want to be staff but leaves her balls on the floor for someone else to pick up JonnyStaff can pick them up and with a bit of ease continue where Jenny left off. Jonny might not do things exactly as JEnny had envisioned but he can pick it up and it not feel like something new is being thrown out when stuff feels unfinished. I might be a bit of a hypocrite here since I don’t ‘plan’ anything I GM out but I am very open about my plans for things in an over all sense. If you couldn’t tell, documentation is a big thing for me. I would rather slog through a bunch of info in the news/theme/setting info/help/plot details than try to remember this ‘well known thing.’

I would happily be admin who’s purpose is to make sure documentation is fully available for everyone, to appropriate people, and not be involved in anything else (unless wanted). I hate the unwritten rules and the unwritten ‘common knowledge’ stuff so many games do. If the rule is important, make it in your available info! IF it is theme info, make sure it can be found in your theme.

I went on a bit of a rant. Didn’t mean too.

[Cobalt]

@icanbeyourmuse said in Staff Capacity:

I feel like players are the reason why a lot of people nope out of staff. Not everyone but once you get that bad egg, it can spoil the experience for being staff.

I shut my last game down because of the bad eggs. I sometimes regret it and think about re-opening, but I have another idea I have been working on. And I’m wanting to be a little more organized this time.

Plot information more available, some points written down so I have responses available faster, more of a back story, factions better fleshed out,etc.

I know it’s controversial but I’m planning to use ChatGPT to help make my writing clearer and help just get the stuff that needs out for people to read available. Not let it generate the stories mind you but clean up my thoughts and shit.