Game Handing Overs

[Third Eye]

I think game hand-overs from head wiz to other fellow staffers that the head wiz knows very well and trusts can work. I don’t want to totally bag on the idea.

That said.

That’s usually not what’s happening when players ask a head wiz for control of the game or a copy of the DB to effectively just restart the same game when things close. It always feels like a very visceral ‘I don’t want my personal RP to end’ reaction. And while that’s human, it’s not a good reason to run a game, I don’t think. And frankly the people staff would WANT to continue the game are rarely the ones that have this impulse.

IDK, I think it’s OK for games to end and close. I think it’s OK for things to have endings. My own experience is that I look back more fondly on things that have a period instead of an ellipsis in terms of closure.

[hellfrog]

It’s the worst when a headwiz hands a game to another staffer and you THINK you can trust that new staffer to destroy everyone with meteors

but then they don’t

top ten anime betrayals

[crawfish]

@hellfrog I giggled.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Third-Eye

There’s handing over a game and then just becoming ST staff and killing off the headwiz’s character and then he stops logging in

[Herja]

@hellfrog If people are expecting it, then it really loses some of the shock value. You have to slowly allow people to gain a little confidence that it won’t happen. After all, it’s only a joke, haha, surely Herja would never REALLY drop a meteor and then-

[mietze]

@Third-Eye yep. I do think it’s one thing when it is internal and done after a transition of key sharing.

To me “handing it over” means an decision is made to close the game, and then someone convinces someone else to give it to them instead because some of the players say they’re not ready to move on.

I think even transitions can be tricky. Maybe handing over wholesale can work too. In all the places I’ve seen (game closes/runner done, gets asked for the keys by sad parties and is allowed them) it just does not end well. I think for the main reason you articulated. The desire to run the game in full isn’t there, its an emotional action to not want the story to end for their character.

[Gashlycrumb]

The game I ran that was a succes was a hand-over, and an absurdly random one at that. But it came with one or maybe two active characters (more came after I got it) and we rebuilt it completely at another site after a few months and had everyone re-create their PCs.

[mietze]

I think in my brain a wipe of all pcs except for 1 or 2 sounds more like a reboot or something to me.

I know that sort of happened with code and the like sometimes by design and sometimes with great drama (what was that WoD place that lifted everything from the other one without permission when someone got asked to leave? Iirc that happened a few times).

I had not really thought of that as a handing over either but you know, especially back in the old days I think it probably was.

[Warma Sheen]

@Faraday said in Game Handing Overs:

(Which is why in the real world “right to have private data deleted” is a thing, and - as mentioned - why I’m trying to add that to Ares.)

Could you add something to each player bit that they could toggle to approve their information transferring? Anyone who doesn’t toggle it gets wiped by default? The person handing over the game would give a time frame by which everyone would need to set that before the switch is made. Random suggestion from someone who knows nothing about coding. Cheers.

[Gashlycrumb]

@mietze Yeah. It was a dead game with one or two PCs who were still showing up and started to play when I got a handful of new folks to join after I got it. One or two who stayed in spite of the fact that the game-owners had handed over the reins to me, a completely random person who’d showed up and was chatting to the headstaff, who just offered it to me for no reason. The whole thing was weird and weirder still that it worked out to be a pretty good game.

ETA Part of the reason we rebuilt it on another site once a sizable-ish group of players were invested was that the original headstaff had site privileges and I was a little uncomfortable with that given the whimsicality.

[Arkandel]

@IoleRae said in Game Handing Overs:

I’ve seen it work a couple of times, but mostly it fails – all of the successes had the game lead handing it off to somebody who was already involved and invested on staff side, so it was just a case of changing who wore the pointy hat. Or a game had a triumvate or similar and that structure changed.

I concur.

Usually it’s either a very natural, organic transition where the new person in charge is essentially a no-brainer, or it’s all downhill from there.

There is usually little in between.

[Faraday]

@Faraday said in Game Handing Overs:

FWIW, I’m making an admin command for Ares that will clear out private info, similar to what’s done when a char idles out or goes on the roster. The pragmatic issue though is how someone would reclaim their character after the wipe - how would you know who was who if everything got wiped.

Just to follow up - this ended up not being a command, per se, but a set of instructions/guidance in the game management tutorials: Transferring a Game.