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Staff Capacity
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I’ve personally found smaller staff work on games where the culture is to tend to crowdsource plot/story trajectory to players to run without a lot of staff oversight and management.
Definitely pros and cons to both methods. Games that want to centralize and keep a tighter leash on plot get to set the pace and keep story to what they imagined, but then it adds a gate wherein everyone has to cross to move story around, and it becomes a wait-and-stare game for staff to drop the next pieces. I’ve played on both types of games myself and experienced upsides and downsides to either style.
Letting players run more freely with things releases its own beasts but can free up staffers, and they can concentrate on more egregious things like responding to system mechanics, more major theme plot missteps, or creepy people creepin’.
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@SpaceKhomeini said in Staff Capacity:
Also OOC masquerades are often laughably dimwitted and flimsy.
Yeah, I see you, obvious Nosferatu. You wrote up that character at 3 am on a fucking Dennys napkin and me pretending to not know what this is makes us all a little dumber.
The curse of the infinite bar scene.
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@kalakh said in Staff Capacity:
@SpaceKhomeini said in Staff Capacity:
Also OOC masquerades are often laughably dimwitted and flimsy.
Yeah, I see you, obvious Nosferatu. You wrote up that character at 3 am on a fucking Dennys napkin and me pretending to not know what this is makes us all a little dumber.
The curse of the infinite bar scene.
You sit down at the crowded bar next to the only other empty stool left.
He finds an empty table in the shadowy corner inexplicably open. He sits down and opens a book.
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1 day later his player posts a MUSH peeve about being ignored in a scene.
The circle of life. It moves us all.
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Ain’t nobody got time for small-chat/meeting for the first time in a bar. We already know eachother and get to ‘yes, and’ how the first couple times went.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst Ahh yes, I see. Off-camming the first two dates so you can get right down to the TS.
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@Roz said in Staff Capacity:
@Jennkryst Ahh yes, I see. Off-camming the first two dates so you can get right down to the TS.
Off-camming the initial meeting and starting the scene mid-TS.
Cobalt@Under the Stars
cob.alt@Discord
Cobalt#3811@mas.to -
@Cobalt said in Staff Capacity:
@Roz said in Staff Capacity:
@Jennkryst Ahh yes, I see. Off-camming the first two dates so you can get right down to the TS.
Off-camming the initial meeting and starting the scene mid-TS.
I have skipped the TS and gone strait to the exhausted, goofy post-coital flirty time before, you don’t know me!
It’s just the initial meeting clashing with my inner introvert that is the problem.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst said in Staff Capacity:
@Cobalt said in Staff Capacity:
@Roz said in Staff Capacity:
@Jennkryst Ahh yes, I see. Off-camming the first two dates so you can get right down to the TS.
Off-camming the initial meeting and starting the scene mid-TS.
I have skipped the TS and gone strait to the exhausted, goofy post-coital flirty time before, you don’t know me!
It’s just the initial meeting clashing with my inner introvert that is the problem.
App’ing a married person on a roster game so you can skip the first meeting altogether, is also a good alternative.
Cobalt@Under the Stars
cob.alt@Discord
Cobalt#3811@mas.to -
@Cobalt I just keep apping in widowers so I can go directly to the grieving process.
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@Roz said in Staff Capacity:
@Jennkryst Ahh yes, I see. Off-camming the first two dates so you can get right down to the TS.
let’s get down to business
to defeat
those buns -
@Jennkryst said in Staff Capacity:
Ain’t nobody got time for small-chat/meeting for the first time in a bar.
But what about all the professional barfly characters I want to play that are based on the old bar people from Shaun of the Dead?
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I’m a big fan of a right-sizing the staff to the players, or the players to the staff. If you can keep getting staffers that you trust and who can work together, keep gathering in players; but if you can’t keep finding staff that you trust, limit your playerbase.
I’m also a big fan of “Current Adventure” pages like we used on The Savage Skies: a page that details the current metaplot, with links to subplots or concurrently-running plots, descriptions of common allies and enemies, a map if appropriate, some plot hooks to start scenes or plots, etc. It keeps players and staff on the same page, lets players run their own scenes, and gives one place for everyone to look for information about what’s going on at the time.
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I am/was/will be running a small supernatural urban fantasy game in FS3 that is explicitly not WoD.
And one of the problems I had was people coming in with expectations that they were going to get to play WoD characters that they’d dreamt up for WoD games that didn’t exist. People who didn’t understand that I didn’t want to learn WoD because I’m not running a WoD game.
We also have the issue of all staffers being cripplingly ADHD, which means that the game owner disappears without response at times because he can’t plan his time well enough to allot for GMing. (And also, RL has been cruel over the last 5 months in particular.)
We almost drowned in an influx of players at one point, and I shut down chargen for awhile.
See, it’s a little like wedding invites. Not everyone you invite shows. Not everyone who doesn’t show RSVPs properly. So because not everyone you invite plays, you invite more than you figure will actually play. This isn’t a problem unless they all show up to play.
What I ended up doing was empowering a bunch of players to tell any story they liked, so long as it was documented somewhere. And since it’s Ares, I let them all have permission to see backgrounds with the caveat that I trusted them not to look at things they shouldn’t or didn’t want to know.
Treat backgrounds like they have spoiler tags. The information’s there, but you don’t need it, so you don’t look.
Anyway, I’m going to go take a nap. I’m exhausted. You’re exhausted. We’re all fucking exhausted.
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@Roadspike said in Staff Capacity:
I’m also a big fan of “Current Adventure” pages like we used on The Savage Skies: a page that details the current metaplot, with links to subplots or concurrently-running plots, descriptions of common allies and enemies, a map if appropriate, some plot hooks to start scenes or plots, etc. It keeps players and staff on the same page, lets players run their own scenes, and gives one place for everyone to look for information about what’s going on at the time.
All this is something that I think would be really helpful in other places. It takes the entirety of burden off of staff and spreads the responsibility for people’s fun more evenly on everyone’s shoulders. Less burden on just a few people means less stress on them and more fun for everyone.
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Well, it doesn’t entirely take the burden off of staff, though it is a different kind of burden that they may find difficult or not. Keeping up to date plot documentation in a concise format easily accessible to new players is it’s own kind of work. It is often work worth doing, but it does require a lot of upkeep.
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@spiriferida Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I meant that instead of all the burden of creating RP and running scenes being on the staff, the players are empowered with what’s necessary to easily take on some of that. In this way everyone on the game isn’t solely dependent on staff to keep activity going. That responsibility is spread around more evenly.
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@Warma-Sheen said in Staff Capacity:
I meant that instead of all the burden of creating RP and running scenes being on the staff, the players are empowered with what’s necessary to easily take on some of that. In this way everyone on the game isn’t solely dependent on staff to keep activity going. That responsibility is spread around more evenly.
I’m not sure it works out that way in practice, though. My games have been “run what you want, just don’t break the game” since the early 2000s. Now I’ll admit I haven’t always executed it perfectly, but the games were nonetheless a series of good-faith efforts to empower players to tell their own stories.
Even with action-oriented settings, automated combat (which was also optional if you just preferred rolls), and various attempts at plot hooks and scene prompts, I still had to run most events myself.
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Part of the issue I have with ever staffing again is that I’ve had such bad experiences with other staffers on TR, FC, HM. It can be a very weird, very cliquish experience where everyone that gets a sliver of power thinks they have a say on every little thing that happens. This always gets compounded when players are also staffers and have IC problems with other staffers.
Headstaff in particular has a problem with this, and also the disappearing for months at a time thing only to come in and give a swirly to the staffers outside of their TS/Discord groups before poofing into the aether once again for six months and not approving literal years-old jobs before doing so.
Or worse, the dreaded system of HR approval in some games where every staffer was able to add input even outside of their spheres. I am very glad for games like Liberation who don’t even let other staffers outside their spheres see unrelated jobs for this reason. These kinds of jobs become grudge matches where reason goes out the window and people fight because their character bits had a spat a decade ago.
It’s really quite annoying and not conducive to a good experience as a staff member especially when ‘job monkeys’ and ‘general staff’ become a thing; doubly when those staff members don’t pull their weight and only get online to talk shit on staff channels and post negative stuff on jobs that they have no business reading at all. This combined with obvious favoritism killed most of the games I staffed. In actuality, this problem is exacerbated when spheres and games have TOO MUCH staff, not too little.
Too many cooks, and none of them are actually cooking–just standing on the line, judging the way you cut your onions.
Why would anyone want to be a staffer after OOC experiences like that?
