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Staff and playable pcs
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@Juniper said in Staff and playable pcs:
I think ideally they shouldn’t play because they will benefit from insider knowledge…
Of a MUSH plot. Just to keep the stakes in mind.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Staff and playable pcs:
I don’t think staff should GM themselves to get to have fun on their own games. They should get to actually be Big Damn Heroes in proper RPG fashion.
Though, yeah, if as you say, nobody will ever organize a plot to further your PC’s development, well, that does suck and I wouldn’t hold it against you of you do a plot to showcase your own PC.
I think we’re on close to the same page. It’s just that in the first paragraph you say you don’t think they “should” like there’s some kind of moral or ethical problem with doing so. That’s where I passionately disagree. Some staffers who can’t do it well maybe would be better off not (to @Pavel’s point) but that’s different from a blanket rule that people shouldn’t even try except maybe as a matter of last resort. It’s a pretendy–fun-time game with no real stakes. As long as people are having fun on the game, who cares?
@Juniper said in Staff and playable pcs:
In my opinion the next best thing is for staff characters to be totally anonymous.
The idea that staff alts will stay anonymous is perplexing to me. Even on games where it wasn’t required to be disclosed, it was generally widely known. People just aren’t that good at keeping secrets or varying their playstyle. So all the “anonymity” does is erode trust and encourage people to play guessing games about who’s playing who.
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Whenever I share stories about Silent Heaven, it feels like I’m always doing something different, and yet it works for the game.
In this case, we have a policy for a right to OOC privacy. That is, nobody is required to share their OOC identity, but you can share privately with people you trust.
Staff are marked as staff in the Discord chat, and they, too, don’t have to reveal who they play. I also strongly enforce a rule that staff cannot be on their staff account at the same time they’re on their alt, which eliminates a lot of mischief that could happen. They also have to mark other characters that they interact with frequently on a “conflict of interest” list, which codedly hides all information, notes, jobs, and requests of those characters. This makes it so they specifically give the most RP to the characters they play the least with.
I can’t imagine this would work for every game, but it works exceptionally well for us.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@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.
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To @Pavel’s point, I agree that the problem is perception, but I also think that perception is important. I also know that my own experiences of legitimately having my character in the spotlight and having players call me on it have colored my perceptions.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that staff PCs should never be out in front of a story – I don’t think of myself as a Sith, so less with the absolutes. I wonder if a better description of my position is that staff should be incredibly careful about the dangers of spotlighting or appearing to spotlight. Because as noted, players will notice if you or another staff member runs plots that are well suited to your characters.
If players want to, that’s fantastic, but to @Faraday’s post, that tends to be rare (very special and appreciated, but rare). I think that it’s absolutely reasonable to run a scene to develop your character’s story, as long as you’re up front about it. I also think that it’s entirely reasonable to be one of the Big Darn Heroes, but I don’t ever intend to be THE Big Darn Hero on a game where I’m staffing.
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I’m not sure I have an opinion on whether staff should disclose their alts on any kind of ‘this is good/bad for the game’ basis. I mostly think there’s no point in this kind of secrecy. People will find out, you better believe they will talk about it, so why not be upfront about it? Feels like it just saves time/drama.
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@MisterBoring said in Staff and playable pcs:
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.
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.
However, one very good reason for alt transparency is that indeed, nobody should have to play with someone they don’t want to play with. Letting people try to work their way in with another alt disrespects that. Let Abelard avoid playing with Bridget, and do not make him have to work out that Camille, Dante, Eliphias and Grimwood are all Bridget-player too. How many crap times should the poor bastard have to endure before he’s done dealing with Bridget? And please don’t put him in a situation where he can’t say, “Bridget won’t leave me alone,” because he’s not supposed to know that Camille is the same player and will get in trouble for “breaking the OOC Masque” by figuring it out.
@Faraday said in Staff and playable pcs:
I think we’re on close to the same page. It’s just that in the first paragraph you say you don’t think they “should” like there’s some kind of moral or ethical problem with doing so.
Naw, I’m talking best-practices for a fun game. The only ethical problem I see with this sort of thing is doing it but hiding the fact. That’s a bait-and-switch for players.
I had a lot of fun on Anomaly TrekMUX. The overarching grand big plot was all centered on the gamerunner’s PC, a Chosen One who would save the universe. I did not like this, but I knew it before I apped. I also knew there was Lesser Plot stuff to do, and so.
This didn’t mean that I and other players didn’t roll our eyes and bitch about that plotting-choice all the time. But I don’t/didn’t feel jerked around or fucked with like I do when I’ve been playing a while and am invested and find out it’s The Staff PC Show.
Thing:
You’re GMing. You have friends. Staff teams are often groups of friends. You chat with your friends more than you do with everybody else. You chat about the game. Storylines that suit your friends’ characters occur to you more readily because of this. This is just how it is.
If alts are secret it’s eaasier to just proceed with those storylines that occur to you without thinking about how far you are falling into The GM’s Friends’ Show territory. Just having it be game-wide knowledge encourages you to adapt your idea to less-familiar PCs, or invent something else so you can space things out a little more.
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@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.
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@MisterBoring Oh, yeah. It’s up to hosts to ask people to leave. If they won’t, ugh, and you’re right.
Making a new character and trying to pass yourself off as a different person because you’ve annoyed people and they don’t want to play with you is a Bad Idea even when it’s as innocent as that can be.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Staff and playable pcs:
Making a new character and trying to pass yourself off as a different person because you’ve annoyed people and they don’t want to play with you is a Bad Idea even when it’s as innocent as that can be.
Having seen a recent question elsewhere about whether or not it’s “ethical” to do this to try and “repair your relationship” with people who don’t like you – big fucking agree.
(Because that idea is, in fact, incredibly creepy and unethical. If people don’t want to hang out with you, just leave them alone!!!)
she/her | playlist
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@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.
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@MisterBoring said in Staff and playable pcs:
@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.
Yeah, I’d at least respect it if someone was up-front with me.
But people also have to respect that sometimes the answer to even a polite olive branch will be “no thank you” and that’s okay.
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I think staff should be fine to have characters in any game, even a plotting one. I think on a practical level it’s not a good idea for the staff character to be taking the lead in a story plot they’re running, if only because in my experience it’s really hard to both GM and actually meaningfully pilot a PC! I’m sure it can be done, but I think it’s hard to do well. ime it’s much more likely for it to be ‘and staffpc was also there in the background’ than ‘this was actually the staffpc show’ but I am not surprised by the existence of the second.
In the hands of a conscientious gamerunner, i think a staff PC is another tool to help build game wide engagement. I think there’s a lot of little things those characters could do to encourage plot involvement that are hard to do with NPCs. A staff PC can “just run into” someone to organically bring them into a plot in a way that more formal NPC involvement could make favoritism, for example. “Passing along” IC gossip from other PCs is honestly a really important function in games so having a character on the ground to do that now and then is probably nice. Though I’m thinking of smaller games where it makes sense for everyone in it to be able to talk to each other.
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Of course staff should play their own game. Not just because why the hell invest so much time into something you don’t get to enjoy – but also to have a first-hand knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.
What kind of GMing can staff do? Any. If you want to run a game that’s essentially about how great your character is and how everyone else are just mindless, fawning minions, do it – you’ll see a lot of tumbleweed and not many players but you do you.
After all, that’s the beauty of the hobby: We vote with our feet. If you feel that a game – or a GM – is pulling a complete Mary Sue and turning you into a member of a forced audience, leave.
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I think staff should be able to play or not play as it pleases them. If they’re open about it, so the people who shit themselves if staff does/doesn’t play (and I’ve seen it go both ways) can make an informed decision.
Staff should also feel free to remove and boot any player who can’t shut up about that. I’m a big fan of staff getting noisy people who can’t accept the policies of the game but for whatever reason can’t leave TO leave so they don’t wreck the environment for others.
Twenty years ago, I often got pretty enraged when I saw staff member PCs (and I agree with Faraday that sorry guys, everyone’s going to know who they are even if you don’t put a tag on it, that’s the way things are) “hogging all the spotlight,” Now, honestly, I’ve gotten to the stage that I just don’t care. If there are things going on that I can participate in, then I will stay and participate until I don’t feel like it anymore. If nothing is available to me but lookyloo, usually I’ll leave sooner. Not with animosity, but just because it’s boring, and I don’t have control over it anymore. I have found that the last case seldom happens, honestly. I’m not in the proper geographic area for prime time for more places, but I can almost always find people to enjoy who at least enjoy me enough to RP with me.
I wish I was better at dual wielding (playing and STing). I could do it pretty well when I was younger, but honestly I just find it super hard to focus that way now for a variety of reasons. So if I ever do do my little glorified tabletop thing, I won’t be having my own “pc” because I’ll have my hands full running STed scenes which involve keeping track of multiple characters even if they aren’t as fleshed out as a PC, and that will max me out. I never assume I am unique in the hobby, so I think that’s why some people also don’t like to have PCs on games that they run (or if they do they are pure flavor side pieces with friends, for funsies).
I think that it’s a good idea for all alts on a game to be public, for avoidance purposes. I don’t think this should have to include all alts in the hobby ever. To some degree there’s some trust involved. I am shit for remembering people’s alts usually. But If I find out that there’s someone who has expressed negative things about me in the past, while I won’t avoid them on another game in the sense of flouncing off on public scenes or crying to friends about how they too should not play with that person (luckily my friends in the hobby would kick my ass if I behaved that shittily, unless the person was a creeper/abuser, but those are rare and usually my friends will spot them before I do), I also don’t seek them out. I also don’t lie if someone asks who I am. I just don’t like broadcasting because I do have two consistent stalkers still in the hobby that will OOCly seek to interact with me if I am publicly known on a game (but they’re both kind of weird and tend to get removed eventually). I wouldn’t be upset if I even interacted with them wittingly on a game (they don’t tend to disclose who they are). I just don’t want the OOC interaction.
