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Roadspike

@Faraday Very much appreciate the compliment, but it wasn’t always this way. I’ve been accused of spotlighting my own characters and she’s been accused of running scenes just for my characters. It’s been a learning process to get to the point where we feel comfortable running scenes that we have (or our partner has) a character in again.

I agree fully that staff should play their own game (as long as they want to) and that it’s a net benefit for them to do so. However, staff need to be careful not just about the actuality of improprieties when playing their own game, but also the appearance of improprieties.

It’s very easy for it to seem like a staffer is running scenes for their own character (or anyone else’s) if that character does particularly well in a scene, has an expertise that suits the scene (even if it’s just because the staffer is running a scene of a type they like playing in, which is why they play that type of character), or the character is connected to the scene in some way (even if other characters are too).

That’s another reason to be active and approachable and engaged on your own game, because even if no one will tell you directly if you’ve overstepped the bounds of reasonableness (but get yourself some friends who will tell you this), you can get a feel for the game by playing it and often recognize when you’ve stepped outside of the perceived realms of good behavior in running your own scenes. This does take some self-awareness that some don’t have, of course.

MisterBoring

@Faraday said:

On a good game with a decent staff, you can trust staffers to remain fair even for their own characters.

Funnily enough, I don’t suggest this based on fairness, though that’s an additional benefit of it. I suggest this because playing a PC in a scene at the same time as one is staffing a scene can add to burnout at a faster pace. While fairness is one part of it, I have noticed that staff who run scenes they’re PCing in seem to, in my experience, burn out faster than those that keep a separation between the two activities.

L. B. Heuschkel

Ideally, every staff member should also be a player. However, not everyone is very active RP-wise, and that’s okay. What’s really important is that they’re active in the community, that they’re visible. Whether they RP, or prefer to hang out on chat, or are always around for questions – that’s not so important which one it is. What really moves things is that players see them, hear them, and get to know them.

Staff that is essentially faceless authority figures invite abuse and fuckery from players who don’t identify with them as fellow hobby nerds. Staff that have faces and are the next guy over – not so much. At least not from the ordinary types – there’s always the occasional malignant creep, and no amount of good PR fixes those.

MisterBoring

My thought is sure, staff should be able to play on their own game with some caveats:

I agree with @gashlycrumb that all alts should be identified OOCly so that a lot of unethical behavior can be stopped at the pass, especially where staff is involved.
Further to that, I believe that no staff member should act as staff for a scene involving their own PCs. So if Staffer A is playing their PC in a staff run scene, Staffer B is responsible for running the scene and making any rulings on the scene.

If a staff member doesn’t want to have a PC on the game, that’s okay too.

Third Eye

@Meg
It’s kinda just whatever. I might wonder why they were running a game they didn’t want to play but if they weren’t engaging in weirdo behavior on their NPCs who were exempt from a lot of PC limitations idk that I care.

Kestrel

@Meg said:

So, what do you guys think about staff not playing the game? Would that raise any red flags? I know the immediate thought is from people saying ‘oh, staff shouldn’t play’! But if staff legitimately did not want to play any characters, would you find that a warning sign or anything?

It’s not a red flag for me in the sense that I’d be reluctant to play a game where this were the case, but it is a nuisance on the level that I’d tolerate from a friend whilst bitching about it to my other friends.

Wizz

I’ve seen plenty examples of both extreme ends of the scale – where staff doesn’t play and stays uninvolved but winds up treating PCs as dolls they mess around with like…I dunno, Sid from Toy Story, and on the other end staff who center the entire plot around their personal characters and expect everyone to constantly gas them up and give them the spotlight.

I think choosing to play or not choosing to play are just different ways to engage with a game you make, each with their own unique challenges and pitfalls, and aren’t inherently problematic or better on their own.

Meg

So, what do you guys think about staff not playing the game? Would that raise any red flags? I know the immediate thought is from people saying ‘oh, staff shouldn’t play’! But if staff legitimately did not want to play any characters, would you find that a warning sign or anything?

Third Eye

Sure.

I can’t imagine having the motivation to staff if I didn’t like playing what I was running, but also I think not playing your own game as a PC doesn’t really accomplish anything and is performance/optics rather than an indication of anything. I’ve seen staffers who technically don’t play do far more abusive things on NPCs than they could’ve done on PCs.

L. B. Heuschkel

Yes, because we made the game we wanted to play. If it had already existed, we’d be playing over there. But it didn’t, and now it does, so why should we be punished for making it happen?

Also Kestrel’s reasons above.

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