Staff Capacity
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i feel like the answer is just player limits. simple and disappointing, as answers often are.
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@hellfrog Player limits and knowing your own limits. It’s super important that a game runner has the ability to take a break without having to worry about their game burning down while they’re gone.
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@Tez said in Staff Capacity:
The ratio of PCs per staffer is also going to vary based on how much administrative overhead there is. Obvious statement, maybe, but with something like Keys you can get by with a lot fewer staff than something like Arx.
Very much so. The more complex keeping track of plot and faction becomes, the more people you need to do it – and the more people to keep track of that.
@Pavel said in Staff Capacity:
@hellfrog Player limits and knowing your own limits. It’s super important that a game runner has the ability to take a break without having to worry about their game burning down while they’re gone.
Not going to lie, I was worried when I was offline for three weeks this summer due to illness and hospitalisation. But there are three of us and the most dramatic that came out of it all was the care package some of the sweet, sweet players sent me.
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@kalakh said in Staff Capacity:
They’re not designed to have a bunch of PCs playing them at the same time with each other, and while that’d be a delicate balance with tabletop, it’s got to be a nightmare on a MUSH.
With my one-and-only experience playing oWoD being a “all spheres” TTRPG campaign, I am confident in saying it’s just as impossible to balance in TT. (But among friends, imbalance can be less of an issue.)
I think the larger issue is that TT games, by their nature, are adapted for, well, tabletop. Small groups, small GM-to-player ratio, etc. Not just the dice, but the rules, the setting, just… everything. Trying to adapt that to MUs has just never worked all that great IMHO.
What works well on a highly-simulated computer RPG is going to be different from what works on a human-centric MU is going to be different than what works on tabletop with a central GM.
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RfK’s backend was clunky and unwieldy, coupled with systems that were incredibly hands on and very intensive in needing one on one scenes. Not just +jobs and questions answered or resources earmarked for X amount of time. I remember Becca having to spend 1-2 DAYS just doing the spreading sheeting and record keeping for 1 week’s aspirations and getting the xp out for them manually. RfK was great, but some things were just done the hard way.
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I’ve personally found smaller staff work on games where the culture is to tend to crowdsource plot/story trajectory to players to run without a lot of staff oversight and management.
Definitely pros and cons to both methods. Games that want to centralize and keep a tighter leash on plot get to set the pace and keep story to what they imagined, but then it adds a gate wherein everyone has to cross to move story around, and it becomes a wait-and-stare game for staff to drop the next pieces. I’ve played on both types of games myself and experienced upsides and downsides to either style.
Letting players run more freely with things releases its own beasts but can free up staffers, and they can concentrate on more egregious things like responding to system mechanics, more major theme plot missteps, or creepy people creepin’.
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@SpaceKhomeini said in Staff Capacity:
Also OOC masquerades are often laughably dimwitted and flimsy.
Yeah, I see you, obvious Nosferatu. You wrote up that character at 3 am on a fucking Dennys napkin and me pretending to not know what this is makes us all a little dumber.
The curse of the infinite bar scene.
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@kalakh said in Staff Capacity:
@SpaceKhomeini said in Staff Capacity:
Also OOC masquerades are often laughably dimwitted and flimsy.
Yeah, I see you, obvious Nosferatu. You wrote up that character at 3 am on a fucking Dennys napkin and me pretending to not know what this is makes us all a little dumber.
The curse of the infinite bar scene.
You sit down at the crowded bar next to the only other empty stool left.
He finds an empty table in the shadowy corner inexplicably open. He sits down and opens a book.
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1 day later his player posts a MUSH peeve about being ignored in a scene.
The circle of life. It moves us all.
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Ain’t nobody got time for small-chat/meeting for the first time in a bar. We already know eachother and get to ‘yes, and’ how the first couple times went.
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@Jennkryst Ahh yes, I see. Off-camming the first two dates so you can get right down to the TS.
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@Roz said in Staff Capacity:
@Jennkryst Ahh yes, I see. Off-camming the first two dates so you can get right down to the TS.
Off-camming the initial meeting and starting the scene mid-TS.
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@Cobalt said in Staff Capacity:
@Roz said in Staff Capacity:
@Jennkryst Ahh yes, I see. Off-camming the first two dates so you can get right down to the TS.
Off-camming the initial meeting and starting the scene mid-TS.
I have skipped the TS and gone strait to the exhausted, goofy post-coital flirty time before, you don’t know me!
It’s just the initial meeting clashing with my inner introvert that is the problem.
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@Jennkryst said in Staff Capacity:
@Cobalt said in Staff Capacity:
@Roz said in Staff Capacity:
@Jennkryst Ahh yes, I see. Off-camming the first two dates so you can get right down to the TS.
Off-camming the initial meeting and starting the scene mid-TS.
I have skipped the TS and gone strait to the exhausted, goofy post-coital flirty time before, you don’t know me!
It’s just the initial meeting clashing with my inner introvert that is the problem.
App’ing a married person on a roster game so you can skip the first meeting altogether, is also a good alternative.
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@Cobalt I just keep apping in widowers so I can go directly to the grieving process.
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@Roz said in Staff Capacity:
@Jennkryst Ahh yes, I see. Off-camming the first two dates so you can get right down to the TS.
let’s get down to business
to defeat
those buns -
@Jennkryst said in Staff Capacity:
Ain’t nobody got time for small-chat/meeting for the first time in a bar.
But what about all the professional barfly characters I want to play that are based on the old bar people from Shaun of the Dead?
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I’m a big fan of a right-sizing the staff to the players, or the players to the staff. If you can keep getting staffers that you trust and who can work together, keep gathering in players; but if you can’t keep finding staff that you trust, limit your playerbase.
I’m also a big fan of “Current Adventure” pages like we used on The Savage Skies: a page that details the current metaplot, with links to subplots or concurrently-running plots, descriptions of common allies and enemies, a map if appropriate, some plot hooks to start scenes or plots, etc. It keeps players and staff on the same page, lets players run their own scenes, and gives one place for everyone to look for information about what’s going on at the time.
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I am/was/will be running a small supernatural urban fantasy game in FS3 that is explicitly not WoD.
And one of the problems I had was people coming in with expectations that they were going to get to play WoD characters that they’d dreamt up for WoD games that didn’t exist. People who didn’t understand that I didn’t want to learn WoD because I’m not running a WoD game.
We also have the issue of all staffers being cripplingly ADHD, which means that the game owner disappears without response at times because he can’t plan his time well enough to allot for GMing. (And also, RL has been cruel over the last 5 months in particular.)
We almost drowned in an influx of players at one point, and I shut down chargen for awhile.
See, it’s a little like wedding invites. Not everyone you invite shows. Not everyone who doesn’t show RSVPs properly. So because not everyone you invite plays, you invite more than you figure will actually play. This isn’t a problem unless they all show up to play.
What I ended up doing was empowering a bunch of players to tell any story they liked, so long as it was documented somewhere. And since it’s Ares, I let them all have permission to see backgrounds with the caveat that I trusted them not to look at things they shouldn’t or didn’t want to know.
Treat backgrounds like they have spoiler tags. The information’s there, but you don’t need it, so you don’t look.
Anyway, I’m going to go take a nap. I’m exhausted. You’re exhausted. We’re all fucking exhausted.