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Metaplot: What and How
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@Tez Asking for specific examples really hits me in the warm-fuzzies.
On GH, the metaplot was “small town supernatural sandbox causes psychic trauma to residents.”
We attempted to reinforce it it by running weirdo stories and scenes, usually with the goal of being simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, and by establishing as part of the core concept a way that people could play with the supernatural elements without needing staff intervention (Dreams).
Specific examples included a long-term story about the proper disposal of the bones of a serial killer, our primary plot-dispensing NPCs being a blob fish (occasionally in costume a la a bridal veil or monocle) and Juno from Beetlejuice, and one-off scenes like a Christmas party that gets trapped inside a snow globe.
On ODW, the metaplot is “playing in a version of Anne McCaffrey’s world of Pern where the book canons left things in a sad state and the PCs are rebuilding a better future (and also we ignore the stupid parts of Pern canon).”
I’m implementing it by recreating the iconic Pern moments as on-camera moments while flat-out ignoring parts of canon that are stupid, and by highlighting story moments that lean toward positive momentum.
Specific examples include on-camera Threadfall scenes where PCs get to flame Thread and take injuries, running a Hatching where nobody has to fill out an application first (with future plans to hold a colorless Hatching; IYKYK), and telling stories that mix typical Pern themes like a Lord’s son standing for Impression with stuff that just sounds fun like the possibility that his family has been cursed for centuries.
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@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:
That is, talking about it in big picture way. I’m more curious about the actual direct implementation of how people do it.
I’m not really sure what sort of implementation details you’re looking for.
A metaplot is fundamentally the same as any other plot. It has an overall story arc / direction, and then the individual events that happen along the way. Some events may happen off-screen and some may be more passive (PCs get to react but not necessarily change things). But to keep PCs the most engaged, you’ll need to provide them opportunities to feel like they’re able to influence the metaplot in some way. Otherwise they feel railroaded. It’s a tricky balance to have engagement without running the whole metaplot off the rails.
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@KarmaBum your examples give me warm-fuzzies. I saw your Pern game and got HARDCORE nostalgic.
@Faraday I think broadly most of us agree about what metaplot is, and largely we all agree that in the ideal world it would be nice if all players can contribute.
But I’m not really curious about the ideal. I want to know where it gets messy, and where it gets real. That’s why I’m mostly curious to know examples about how people are dealing with it. What their metaplot is and how it is enacted.
Maybe I should have just said HOW for the thread.
I’m always trying to solve for the issue that there seem to be more people who want to be in stories than people who want to run stories. Picking over the how of other people helps me refine my thoughts.
she/they
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@Tez Fair. I don’t think there is some magic “how” that will work for all games, because I don’t think all games share the same goal.
For example, on B5 MUSH, the whole goal of the game was to play out the events of the show (with variations). That carried implicit limitations on who even could be involved in the metaplot and what they could accomplish. It was a heavily-FC-driven game. You could still be involved in the metaplot as an OC (mine was) but it was a lot harder, and there were never any promises made to the contrary.
On the other end of the spectrum are TGG and BSGU. Pretty much every big metaplot event was open to everyone, and varied schedules included off-hours folks too. But this only worked because of the design of the games. The metaplot was war, the PCs were all soldiers, and the events were all battles. It was super easy to involve everyone.
Neither is good or bad - in B5 it was fewer PCs / more influence and in TGG/BSGU it was more PCs / less influence. But if you want PCs to be involved, you’ve got to design a metaplot that they’re going to have reason and ability to be involved in.
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@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:
I’m always trying to solve for the issue that there seem to be more people who want to be in stories than people who want to run stories.
Hey, if you solve this, can you post it all over the internet? TTRPG groups the world over have been trying to solve this since the 60s, and the best we have is cool ranch Doritos.
On a serious note, I’ve not done it on MU-scale, but I have designed plots (both meta and non-meta) for MU groups, tabletop, published works, etc. @Faraday is correct in that there’s no one size fits all: What works for you and your group won’t work for me and mine. But I can offer some design-related advice:
Start with themes rather than story beats. It’ll feel a little mad-libby at first, but write out something like Tez’s Super Awesome Game is about <genre> with <mood> and <tone>. For myself I’d say “Pavel’s Super Awesome Victorian Vampire Game is about personal horror with dread-filled tension and sardonic nihilism in the face of bleak futility.” Then you take that and expand upon it here and there, while throwing your ideas at trusted people. Not players, but cheerfully underpaid co-authors like Roz. Because:
Don’t write it by yourself. You need editors, critics, and people to tell you that they love you but your idea sucks because… If you keep it inside, (a word document only you ever read counts as inside) it’ll be shit, and you’ll stew in it, and you’ll come to resent it, and then you’ll throw it away only to discover it ten years later in a Dropbox folder…
And always remember that your metaplot isn’t important. A metaplot may be, depending on the game, but the metaplot you have now and the metaplot you end up with when the game closes are not going to be the same. It’s going to break, twist, bend, flip, translate itself into Greek and then Portuguese before finally settling on an Anglo-Sindarin creole. And nobody is going to remember the handful of events that ran long because you had to think things up on the fly, but they will remember slaying the dragon and meeting up at the tavern after for a pint.
ETA: tl;dr: Stop. Collaborate. And Listen.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:
@Roadspike TSS, I get. With Fifth World, can you talk more about your metaplot and how the politics and stuff were in relation to it?
Certainly! I’m (almost) always happy to talk about The Fifth World.
So the overarching metaplot there was a regularly-occurring and long-anticipated invasion from mysterious-ish forces on an outer-system planet with an elliptical orbit around an inner system with several inhabited and connected planets ruled by knights-in-space.
There were invasions in particular areas, and updates on the state of the conflict, but with that as a backdrop and a shaping force, there were also politics between the noble houses for power and influence within and over the war effort. Some houses thought that the war should be handled one way, others thought it should be handled another. Some people just wanted power. There were also Citizen-based (non-noble “commoners” but with many, many, many more rights) Senate elections that had an impact on how the war would be prosecuted. There were efforts to raise morale from the home front. There were alliances that were built and fell apart. There were efforts to advance the science and technology for fighting against the invaders.
But all of these were caused by and had effects on the invasion. That’s how I divide between metaplot and ways to access and effect the metaplot.
@Pavel said in Metaplot: What and How:
Start with themes rather than story beats. It’ll feel a little mad-libby at first, but write out something like Tez’s Super Awesome Game is about <genre> with <mood> and <tone>. For myself I’d say “Pavel’s Super Awesome Victorian Vampire Game is about personal horror with dread-filled tension and sardonic nihilism in the face of bleak futility.”
Yes! I’m always a fan of starting every game with a Mission Statement. This tells you and your fellow staff what the game is going to be about, and is something to refer back to throughout the process of building the game (“Should we add flying motorcycles to the bad guys?” “I don’t know, does it support or take away from the Mission Statement?”). And then when you’ve refined the Mission Statement and readied your game and you open the game to players, it’s their first introduction to the game, what helps them decide if they want to play there.
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@Pavel said in Metaplot: What and How:
@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:
I’m always trying to solve for the issue that there seem to be more people who want to be in stories than people who want to run stories.
Hey, if you solve this, can you post it all over the internet? TTRPG groups the world over have been trying to solve this since the 60s, and the best we have is cool ranch Doritos.
lmfao yeah, I’ll make sure to let the world know when I solve it. I almost made a crack about it being the fermat’s last theorem of RP.
@Roadspike said in Metaplot: What and How:
@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:
@Roadspike TSS, I get. With Fifth World, can you talk more about your metaplot and how the politics and stuff were in relation to it?
Certainly! I’m (almost) always happy to talk about The Fifth World.
So the overarching metaplot there was a regularly-occurring and long-anticipated invasion from mysterious-ish forces on an outer-system planet with an elliptical orbit around an inner system with several inhabited and connected planets ruled by knights-in-space.
There were invasions in particular areas, and updates on the state of the conflict, but with that as a backdrop and a shaping force, there were also politics between the noble houses for power and influence within and over the war effort. Some houses thought that the war should be handled one way, others thought it should be handled another. Some people just wanted power. There were also Citizen-based (non-noble “commoners” but with many, many, many more rights) Senate elections that had an impact on how the war would be prosecuted. There were efforts to raise morale from the home front. There were alliances that were built and fell apart. There were efforts to advance the science and technology for fighting against the invaders.
Welcome to me intensely digging for more details. Were the invasions handled as GMed scenes? How did you make the politicking real for people? Was it jobs and rolls? Was it all staff run?
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@Tez The conflict between order and chaos works as a metaplot / backdrop because it’s a backdrop – and because anyone who wants to GM can do so.
That means players designing stories within the framework that they want to pursue. And because they design the realities they want those stories to happen in they
- get to decide which rules apply there
- what the theme/setting is
- whether this is a oneshot or a brick of a novel size plot
and nothing they do there can affect the main setting (besides the characters themselves). This way, we have a buffet of stories and a diverse cast of stories. But most importantly, we don’t have anyone sitting around waiting for storyteller-type GMs to make shit happen when they’re around and remember to include them.
Is this the solution to everything? Nah. But it does help with the ancient quandary of not enough GMs. Obviously, not everyone wants to GM. But a lot of people feel comfortable running a scene or three for a few people at a time, without taking on an official mantle and having to run everything past staff.
Any pronouns. Come to Chincoteague. We have ponies. http://keys.aresmush.com
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@L-B-Heuschkel That’s a great set up for that kind of play. I’ve mentally filed that kind of thing under ‘Stargate games’, and I think it can work VERY well for games set up for it.
I’ve tried similar things on games I’ve run, although less as a literal portal to other universes structure and more as in there is a homebase and people can go out and run missions on other planets. (Because my bias was scifi rather than fantasy. You could call them portal games too!) The idea being that the distance should empower people to freely do what they like. I think Spirit Lake played with the portal thing too.
The problem I’ve run into is that players don’t necessarily feel that it connects back to the metaplot if there aren’t changes to the homebase region or overall story. Is that just out of the scope for your game?
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@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:
The problem I’ve run into is that players don’t necessarily feel that it connects back to the metaplot if there aren’t changes to the homebase region or overall story. Is that just out of the scope for your game?
Can’t speak to LB’s game, but that’s how it was on BSGU. Folks could run missions of their own whenever they wanted. (Also other plots connected to the war, though folks rarely did so.) But they couldn’t affect the overall trajectory of the war without staff approval and coordination. This was spelled out in the game policies, so if that was a deal-breaker for someone, they could decide that before playing.
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@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:
Welcome to me intensely digging for more details. Were the invasions handled as GMed scenes? How did you make the politicking real for people? Was it jobs and rolls? Was it all staff run?
The broad strokes of the invasion was handled by Staff, based on scenes we ran and our reading of scenes that player GMs ran as well. Players were welcome to run general combat scenes, and if they wanted to try out something particular, we asked that they check in with us first. When they did, we sometimes gave them additional details that they could drop into their scenes to feed into the players’ understanding of what was going on. We determined what happened with the course of the war through how things went in the various scenes (Staff-run and player-run alike), some jobs/rolls, and some narrative license.
The “narrative license” might be called railroading by some, but the idea was that we wanted to see the Good Guys on the back foot for a while before they turned things around, so while the actions of the PCs could win local victories, or lessen the cost of local losses, they weren’t going to turn back the tide yet. The events of GMed scenes (Staff- and player-run alike) changed where the Good Guys would be pushed back or hold back the tide, but not that the Good Guys were going to be pushed back.
The politicking came in two real waves: first a choice of which child would succeed the faltering King, and then who would make up the Crown Council around the new ruler. To be perfectly honest, we didn’t leave things open to too much player input on the first wave, as I recall. For both waves, the questions were presented in GMed public scenes, and then there were House meetings for most of the Great Houses, where PCs associated with that House were able to weigh in on their preferences and make plans to support them while the House Head was NPCed by a Staffer.
The Crown Council politicking we put into play through posts and public scenes, as a couple of the members of the new King’s Council were unexpected, and seemed to tilt things pretty distinctly in one direction of the philosophical differences between Great Houses. After seeding the idea of the imbalance, we held more House meetings to answer some questions, and then people went off on their own to RP about the situation, put in requests, get more information, and make attempts to figure out what was going on. We closed down before we could get to fruition on that story thread, but we had a dozen or so players chasing it and looking to impact which NPCs had power and influence on the Crown Council. That in turn would have impact on how the war was prosecuted, as well as how efficient the Crown was at prosecuting it.
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This is hyper tangential, so I’ll keep it to a single post:
I have an idea that concealing metaplot could in and of itself be a metaplot. An example from one of my notebooks I spitball RPG ideas in:
PCs are living in a community in what looks to be a post apocalyptic setting. They work to build up their community, scavenge the wasteland for helpful lost tech, and fight bandits and mutant creatures to protect themselves. The elders of the community are benevolent, but seem to be concealing something from the player characters, as they seem to suddenly produce vital equipment or knowledge when the community’s collapse is at risk.
Curious PCs would eventually discover that this is not actually a post apocalypse, but instead, an enclosed environment. In reality, the PCs are the latest generation in a project to terraform and restore a region of a world that was part of a planetary invasion from horrible monsters from the stars. The area the game takes place in was rendered a wasteland by biological contamination during the war to drive off the invasion, and the player characters are descendants of a group of people found by the planetary government to be immune to the contaminants. These people were forced into this by the government, and now, the “community elders” are actually officers of the government. They are flighty in nature because they regularly have to leave the zone via hidden tunnel to be decontaminated to prevent their eventual death.
Some of the drama comes from keeping the community going and working on terraforming the landscape, while the other half of the drama comes from the PCs eventually gaining this secret knowledge and needing to decide what to do about it. Do they continue their ancestors forced labor, or try and find an escape to rejoin society?
