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Pyrephox

@Flitcraft OMG EDDIE. It’s good to see you again! I was Thomas at Darkwater. Not playing anywhere now, but glad to hear you’re doing well!

Pyrephox

Another random thought:

PCs should not be at the highest levels of power. There are a few reasons for this, mostly related to the nature of players.

The people who most want to be “in charge” of other PCs are generally not the people you actually want to have that power. And often, they want it as an achievement…and once they get it, they disappear.
If your game relies on themes (like, say, conflict between factions or internal societal tensions) then you should not rely on PCs to enforce those as leaders. Most players won’t enforce theme, and the ones who do often end up burning out and miserable because they’re thrust in a position of “fun police” that isn’t actually very fun (ask me how I know).
“Good” leadership is actually not great for the game part of the game. Leaders who try to make friends, decrease tensions, and set up long-term successes push things towards stagnation. PC leaders who lean into creating thematically-appropriate conflict often catch whole loads of shit from other players. NPC leaders only have to make decisions that are aimed at making the game fun/exciting/tense for everyone - PC leaders often make decisions based on what they feel will make other players like them, or just get off their back.
Likewise, absent or rapidly rotating leadership makes it hard for players to have continuity of play, and PC leadership positions usually exist in a state of either functionally absent or flipping through PC leaders like a rolodex as new people show up, burn out, leave.

Pyrephox

I am not going to live up to @Roz 's praise of me, but I do have thoughts. So many thoughts. I will not share them all.

But I will say that I absolutely agree with what was up above - you need to distinguish what matters to you about a L&L game. I want a political game, and my biases are towards systems that promote and perpetuate a political game. The degree to which lords, ladies, fancy balls, or fashion are involved is very irrelevant to me. In fact, one of my never-gonna-happen “would love” MU* games is a political game centered around a free city with power split between elected citizens, powerful merchants often from outside the city, crafting guilds, and the mercenary forces the city needs to keep from getting eaten by outside powers. Balls and parties would probably still be involved, but they’re not the draw to me, even though I know that they are the primary draw to a lot of other folk. The Prince/ss fantasy is real and valid!

That said, my other bias is systemic - I absolutely think you need a mechanized system for political play so that people can risk actual (in game) resources on their goals, and gain or lose those resources. But if you’re looking to make a sustainable system, it also has to be cyclical and avoid either the death spiral where a character can lose everything and have no way of getting it back, or the dominance spiral where someone can amass enough power that they effectively will never be able to lose enough power to fall off the top spot. Players are going to naturally try to accumulate all the power and influence they can in a game, and while some folk absolutely do play “for the story” and will set themselves up for major losses or reversals, those folk are not a large enough segment of the population to keep a power structure from stagnating.

There are a lot of different ways to build a system - dice are easy, but it doesn’t HAVE to involve dice. But my three principles for it are:

There has to be meaningful in game stakes involved that PCs have influence over. (Maybe not sole influence, but PCs need agency.)
There has to be scarcity in resources so that no one PC or group of PCs can be self-contained.
There has to be mechanics to resolve meaningful conflicts and the loss/gain of resources.
There should be mechanics built into the system that make it hard to maintain dominance or be stuck in perpetual failure. Floating somewhere in the middle should be relatively easy for those players who really want to just play fantasy rich people and hang out.

The specifics of what those things LOOK like? There’s five million ways to do it, you just have to think about what conflicts you want to promote and what resources you want players to focus on.

Pyrephox

My preference is one + empowered mortals (can be supernatural, can just be political/police power in a setting where that has teeth and matters), but a small, selective duo or trio of spheres can be fine if you genuinely have support for those spheres.

Tez

@Roadspike said in Metaplot: What and How:

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.

How often did you get players running things? If you made it a percent, how much was staff-run vs. player-run? I like the idea of seeding things with player-plots by giving them tidbits to include, but I wouldn’t say I’ve been very successful at it yet.

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.

Respect. It sounds like you had a lot going and I’m curious how it would have played out if you were able to continue. Did you get a feel from players or any feedback as to how the political side worked for them?

@Warma-Sheen said in Metaplot: What and How:

Respectfully, IMHO, that’s because that example doesn’t really sound like a metaplot. That just sounds like a setting.

LBH’s definition of a metaplot may be different, but it clearly works for them. I’m interested in the whys and hows of different approaches. Keys has found a formula that works well for them. I tend to think of metaplot as a season or series arc and individual plots as being episodes, but I’m interested in how others do it.

Clarity of scope / meaning / etc. is obviously important. @L-B-Heuschkel and @Faraday have noted it, among others.

ETA so I don’t double post:

@Roadspike said in Metaplot: What and How:

I think that this is an important point: setting and metaplot are different.

Not everyone agrees on this point. If you look at how Wikipedia defines it, they talk more about what you would call setting. I think metaplot as you are using it more of a TWOP definition. That also tends to be how I think of it.

Tez

@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?

Tez

@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?

Tez

@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.

Tez

@dvoraen There’s a place to put feedback related to the change. If you actually have feedback on things that are broken, they can go there. If you have any amount of searching to figure out how to fix it, that’s even better. Roz found the solution to the layout issue and posted it in that thread so I could implement it.

I do not get paid to do this. I’m not just an unpaid volunteer, I pay for the privilege of volunteering. I assumed you were joking and responded in that fashion, because the idea that you were being serious was too wild to contemplate. If I was wrong, and you were serious, then yeah, it was in piss poor taste.

Tez

@L-B-Heuschkel YAY NAMES AND EXAMPLES

I’m really wanting concrete examples, tbh. I think a lot of what we’ve talked about so far in this thread is the meta of what you consider a metaplot. That is, talking about it in big picture way. I’m more curious about the actual direct implementation of how people do it.

Like if your metaplot is a never-ending conflict between order and chaos, how does this manifest as something players can engage in? It obviously works well for you guys.

@Raistlin That’s a great example, and how I’ve often run things on games in the past. Totally understand what you are doing there.

@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?

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