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?

@Gashlycrumb

This is true. The major issues that come up from that are (in my experience):

1. Someone who wanted to touch the metaplot was barred by staff action or simply by not having the right items on their character sheet to be able to touch the metaplot. They get frustrated and bad things happen.

2. (The one I encountered more.) People who go out of their way to avoid any and all contact with any characters outside of a selected circle, and actively refuse to join staff events. The metaplot has a thing happen and it changes the game universally to their chagrin. They inevitably scream some nonsense about not being able to play the game they wanted to play and leave in a huff. This particular dichotomy of people strike me as wanting their own private MU but not having the technical knowledge or finances to build their own.

Metaplots are interesting in MUs because a significant number of players on MUs don’t pay attention to them (which can have interesting results when the metaplot touches them).

That said, to me a metaplot is the overarching plot being run by staff on a game alongside the canon continuity of the universe being played in (for games based on actual TTRPGs or movies or book series or whatever).

I have no issues with metaplot at all, and think they can be great, but I have definitely seen people lose it over metaplot stuff that was common knowledge to most of the players but some sort of world-ending revelation to them.

@Roz Totally. I’m all for people trying to repair relationships, but deception is not the way to make that happen.

Now, if someone came to me and was like, I want to rebuild the bridge and move on from this and in the process offered to make a new character to help push some plot I was trying to push, I’d probably see that as an olive branch.

@Gashlycrumb said in Staff and playable pcs:

When it becomes obvious that Player is a bad actor, what you do is borrow the courage of a bunny and tell them they are no longer welcome and now must leave. Don’t fucking torment them or the rest of the players.

That only works if staff has the courage to tell them that. I’ve experienced the fallout when players try it and it turns out the player in question is in solid with staff.

@Jumpscare I like the idea of a system to track staff conflicts of interest. That definitely sounds like it could help a lot of games with those types of issues.

For me my preferences are this:

1. Staff should be allowed to play on the game.
2. Staff should not be allowed to run anything their PC is involved in. No GM-PC Mary Sue nonsense for me. It only leads to complaints in my experience.
3. On games that allow alts, full disclosure. I think it would help players guide each other into plotlines that work better for their various alts if everybody knows who’s playing who. Also, if it becomes obvious that character X’s player is a bad actor, knowing who their alts are makes it easier for the playerbase to just stop playing with all of their PCs, which can help get them to leave.
4. That said, I’m actually not a fan of alts. I’ve seen way too many people get altitis in MUs, and it really starts to affect their ability to keep up with stuff they’re involved in. It’s a huge peeve of mine because I’ve had multiple plots in games get shelved for months because literally all of the other players (who had many alts each) decided they were taking a break from the specific set of PCs involved in the plot that my single character is working on pushing forward. In one case, it went for so long that the Staff person running the plot gave me some XP for making a fair attempt and then just retconning the entire plot from ever having happened.

Roleplaying is our hobby. It’s a collaborative effort that is only helped by freely sharing information. I’m all for privacy for personally sensitive information, but not the fact that Player X has 14 alts, or that Staff Y is playing PC Z. When I’m playing a game, I could care less if other players know what alts I have, or what’s on my sheet. Where I draw the line privacy wise is situations such as when another player somehow found the email address I use to pay my bills and started sending me messages there to try and sway me to supporting their PC’s push for in game power. (Yes, that’s actually happened to me. It was not fun. I informed the staff on that game and they did nothing.)

Also, I have in two cases in the past, been staff on a game that I had no PCs on. I did that because I was very passionate about the stories I was running and wanted to see the game succeed. And in both cases, I was still trying to run stuff right up to the point they were shuttered.

@Warma-Sheen said in MU Peeves Thread:

So you end up in this weird twilight zone of having this very cool character who will not likely accomplish anything near as interesting as what you had in your head. As a result there’s more than a few people who have made characters they really liked, but then have done little to nothing with them before fading out completely.

This is why I try to write characters who are boring as fuck in their backgrounds. I thoroughly enjoy “random nobody gets drug into a world of whatever and has to adapt” stories.

@Warma-Sheen I feel like there’s a sweet spot for background lengths. The few times I’ve actually written a multipage bg for a character, it feels like the staff totally ignored it. Most of the time I’ll do a bullet point list of major things, and maybe a paragraph if anything needed special justification or clarification. And in most of those cases, I actually got notes back from staff on some aspect of my bg and how they’d like to pull it into the game.

The few times I’ve been staff somewhere and in a position that required me to do approvals and review of characters, I will totally admit that I sort of skimmed any background longer than what would fit in 2 notes on a character bit.

That said, I have met people in this hobby who purposefully write a long background so that they can sneak story elements into the game that the staff may specifically be avoiding. I guess some people choose to take advantage of the fact that staff often don’t read the whole thing.

I got an itch to go actually look at AoA today and well, even without the absolutely crap behavior from staff, this game is far too complex for my tastes.

I always got the vibe that Storypath would mechanically break with anything larger than a normal tabletop group, but I’m interested in this because my tabletop group has had a lot of fun with both Scion 2e and They Came From Beneath The Sea (which spawned my 100% backed by evidence theory that the natural weakness of fishpeople is 1950s era vacuum cleaners).

I sort of want to see a game that daringly chooses to eschew both rosters and OCs and go for a new alternative: purely random generation.

The character sheet and background are generated at random. There would be some level of staff review to ensure that the sheet and background made sense, but other than that it’s push a button and off to the races.

While I have seen plenty of games with random sheet generation, I can’t say I’ve seen one do backgrounds and concepts at random.

@Tez I’m not broken up about it.

Did the fonts used change too?

Aww shucks, I didn’t hate the new layout…

Would that old style be a per user option or a “we all go back to the old style together” situation?

Beyond using this forum, I have no experience with NodeBB.

OMG that’s awesome. Thanks for the pointer.

@Roz Wait, there are skins? Where?

Starting a new thread, for a new year.

First up, and this one hit me hard, David Lynch, legendary director of such weirdness as Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, and the original 1980s version of Dune.

Big fan of the new layout.

I’m a big Star Wars fan, and I’ve played a lot of tabletop Star Wars RPGs. The fact that they’re making Mon Calamari cruisers mechanically identical to Star Destroyers is gross. /end tangent