Metaplot: What and How

[STD]

I like the definition that a metaplot affects every character even if they don’t realize it. It also typically changes something major in the setting, though that major change may only be seen by specific characters.

An example I can think of is a oWoD MU* years back that had a metaplot centering around Locational Weirdness of a small city and it’s environment.

In specific, every sphere had different aspects of this Weirdness to attend to. For Werewolves, the Wyld and Weaver were best buddies for some reason and absolutely crushing all the Wrym spirits around. Things were still hella imbalanced, but imbalanced in a much different way from normal WoD.

Vampires had to contend with blood bonds simply not working any more. With anyone. This naturally threw huge wrenches into the vamps power structures. And now they actually had to treat their Ghouls well, since they could just rebel and weren’t mentally shackled to them any longer. Tremere were forbidden from entering the area and Sabbat were almost unheard of since the Vinculum just… didn’t work any more, so they quickly fell into infighting. Meanwhile, Anarchs moved in and quickly established themselves due to the massive power vacuum caused by blood bonds failing.

Changelings had to contend with a huge influx of Glamour. The place just glowed with the stuff. The downside is that this meant Bedlam was a constant threat and that all kinds of dangerous Chimera born from the dreams and nightmares of mortals around the place infested it. Some had to search out and purposefully cuddle up with Banal people just to keep the Things and ODing on Glamour at bay.

Mages – both Union and Traditional – made a pact to study the Weirdness. They also both lost established Constructs/Chantrys and there was a mystery there with both; in both places, the resident magi just simply disappeared without a trace. Magic also just… didn’t follow the normal rules where these places stood – the Technocratic Construct was without power and trying to reestablish it always met with failure (sometimes catastrophic), and the Traditions Chantry always treated ANY magic cast in it as Extremely Vulgar, regardless of paradigm. The Higher Ups wanted this thing Solved, so there was an oddly close working relationship between the Union and the Traddies. They met every week in the back of a bookshop/cafe. Donuts were supplied.

And regular mortals got treated to all kinds of bizarre weirdness. Disappearing alleyways in placed they’d been to a thousand times before, odd shadows that didn’t quite match, glimpses of Things just at the corners of their eyes, strange dreams and nightmares, inspiration striking with skills and knowledge they had no practice or understanding of, inexplicable equipment failures… and equally inexplicable equipment successes (“… This car has no engine. How is it running?”).

@Faraday said in Metaplot: What and How:

• Babylon 5 MU basically followed the key events from the TV series, with variations influenced by the PCs.

As a side note, I’d KILL for a Babylon 5 MU*. Sadly, one of the best (if not THE best) Sci-Fi TV series seems to have been mostly forgotten. Sigh.

[Jumpscare]

Someone wrote this on the former board, and I’m sorry that I don’t know who it’s credited to. The topic was what you expect to do as a GM. It covers Metaplot, as well as the plots surrounding it, so I think it’s useful in seeing how the Metaplot interacts with everything else.

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How many people are you able to sustain GMing for? What are you going to do if your game gets 3-5x that? What are you going to do if the inverse happens and you get 3-5x less?

Metaplot: The background high-level long-term plot that plods along that provides a Background Reason for your other plots; the plot that creates the plots you actually run; the ‘history’, behind the scenes, what REALLY happened; the Big Picture – this is the glue that holds your stories together that you don’t interact with very much – the Antediluvian sleeping under your city, the origin of the Hellmouth, the fact that it’s actually the strain of grain that they’re being fed on the space station that’s giving everybody these powers…this is the story behind the story.

Chapter/Season Plots: These are the active day to day staff run “what is happening on this game” that your players can and should be able to directly impact. They should have a start, a middle, and an end. They should have LOTS of hooks for people to run PRPs from. They should give people stuff to RP about. So when you’re deciding on your chapter/season plot, you REALLY need to consider beyond the story itself:

what are my hooks for PRPs?
what will people RP about, in relation to this plot?
what RP will this plot create when I am not around?
What impacts will this plot have on peoples’ day to day RP?
Where are the pain points? What can I do about them? What will stall people’s RP about this?
DO NOT SEPARATE YOUR PLAYERBASE IN YOUR CHAPTER PLOT – THEY TAKE TOO LONG TO RESOLVE

Episodic Plots: This is what makes the game go round. This is all the little things that get run weekly, from parties to monster of the week to scheduled events that feed into the above types. They are typically self contained, and keep people entertained while the Chapter/Season gives them things to RP about. You want to make these REALLY easy to run – give people LOTS of easy hooks into your Chapter, and plenty of info with which to run them. You ALSO want to make sure it’s really clear what they CAN’T do, because people always have an easier time when they know what their boundaries are.

It might be helpful to think of what kind of role you see yourself or other staffers filling, since that can kind of suggest the game you want. A head storyteller, where you are creating plot everyone can join in? An arbiter, where people are all making their own stories and you help curate them? And so on.

I think trying to think of how you want to spend your time running your game can help shape the game you want to create and how it plays.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Tez You want names and examples, so, I’ma toot that horn.

On Keys, the metaplot is a never-ending conflict between stagnation and flux, order and chaos. The metaplot overlaps heavily with the setting in our case – we use it to create numerous storylines that have conclusions (as opposed to the metaplot which will not be solved because, well, it’s never-ending).

Our setting, on the other hand, is the small town island of Chincoteague. There’s ponies and a lot of swamp grass. And a secret community of people who spend a fair bit of their time fighting back against increasing stagnation, and try to preserve magic across the multiverse. And get a decent cup of coffee.

The two are different because the metaplot (law! chaos! drama!) triggers the many storylines whereas the setting is the anchor for those storylines. Whatever happens, in this reality or another, you always go home to Chincoteague in the end.

[mietze]

It’s never been important to me to have One Big Story, as a player. I think for some particular runners/staff teams it is fun for them and helps them structure what they want to do, which I think is great and fully support. I enjoy playing in metaplotty things. But I would be just as happy playing various one off or short term stories too. The truth is I am too dumb to remember a kind of long term plot where I need a whatever that app was where you kept track of all these different tendrils of things, anymore. But I can be an enthusiastic participant in things that catch my notice, and I enjoy plots that aren’t metaplots. I’ve started to get better about organizing, but I can only sustain it for relatively simple/short term stuff. Luckily people (staff and not staff) dont seem to mind terribly, or at least, not enough to tell me to go away to my face.

As a player what’s most important to me is that staff do what makes them happy, and be willing to sometimes thump me upside the head if it’s clear I’m clueless and making it not fun for them. (If I’m pursuing a stupid red herring, I am TOTALLY okay with course correcting with someone is like hey mietze, you are a hoot but that’s getting way off track. PLEASE tell me that rather than feeling obligated and bored and distressed!) But I totally understand why staff don’t do that, because I’ve seen the epic tantrums that sometimes people have. BuT my CHaracTeR WOULd do tHIS!!!1111!! Ugh.

I know some people think of that as railroading, and I suppose I have met a very few STs who were extremely rigid and angry about people not getting things right, but usually there’s clues way in advance that I’m not going to be the best fit for that staff/ST so I can see myself out.

I just want staff to enjoy what they’re doing most of the time (it’s never fun ALL of the time when you’re dealing with people). Whatever they need to do that is fine with me.

[Gashlycrumb]

@MisterBoring said in Metaplot: What and How:

Metaplots are interesting in MUs because a significant number of players on MUs don’t pay attention to them (which can have interesting results when the metaplot touches them).

This is probably because metaplots, very often, “touch all the PCs” but it is far, far less common for all the PCs to be able to touch the metaplot.

[Juniper]

To me, story hooks and avenues to distribute information is so important.

My experience with metaplots is that a big mystery will open up, a bunch of players will put together a PRP to touch the plot, it will utterly bounce off, and then the plot will go underground with the player it was always meant for and I’ll never hear about the mystery again. Then a new mystery pops up, repeat ad nauseum.

You really need to be honest with players about how they can get involved and actually be open to them doing so. And if you rely on hearsay for information to get around, a lot of the time that simply won’t happen.

[MisterBoring]

@Gashlycrumb

This is true. The major issues that come up from that are (in my experience):

1. Someone who wanted to touch the metaplot was barred by staff action or simply by not having the right items on their character sheet to be able to touch the metaplot. They get frustrated and bad things happen.

2. (The one I encountered more.) People who go out of their way to avoid any and all contact with any characters outside of a selected circle, and actively refuse to join staff events. The metaplot has a thing happen and it changes the game universally to their chagrin. They inevitably scream some nonsense about not being able to play the game they wanted to play and leave in a huff. This particular dichotomy of people strike me as wanting their own private MU but not having the technical knowledge or finances to build their own.

[Pavel]

@MisterBoring 3. People exist outside of staff’s availability, so don’t have the opportunity to join staff events. The metaplot has a thing happen, and it changes the game universally without the input of those unable to participate. This requires either empowering player GMs/DMs/STs to influence the metaplot with their PrPs, or having staff available for larger swathes of time.

[mietze]

I always appreciate it when staff don’t schedule all metaplot or staff plot scenes in the middle of the weekday my time, but I guess by now I’m used to having to alternate my availability/sometimes get up super early/stay up super late to be able to participate. But unless there’s STs from different timezones or work times there’s just a limit to what can be done, that’s not really anyone’s fault.

Flexibility doesn’t yield the results it should, a lot of the time, in my observation. Just getting people to respond promptly to WIG or other stuff like that to try to schedule things, and the amount of chronic no shows, I’m not sure if I would recommend to a staff that they put themselves out in a very stressful or inconvenient way to maybe get somebody to possibly show up at a off time. It’s different if the person is proactive in suggesting times and reliable though, so I guess it’s fine to give it a try–but I’ve seen an awful lot of staff and STs really try to do everything “right” and then get pretty bummed out when people don’t show up and are back to complaining about how there’s never anything available to them the whole time.

I do like it when staff use requests/jobs as a way to get involved/get info that can be used to RP vs. just via scenes. Some genres are easier than others when it comes to this, but getting to have an impact even on advantages/setup/cleanup from live scenes is pretty nice, especially when one can get RP outside of ST scenes.

[dvoraen]

Here is me, trying to summon @Apos to dive in on this subject, for reasons that should be obvious to many of us who were on Arx. (inb4thisisnotanArxthreadreee)

For myself, I consider metaplot to be “a story that’s going on that directly affects (or will affect) the state of the world and the players.” Metaplot should not only be fluid, because of player involvement/actions, but multithreaded, because there’s no one story that meets the definition I gave, let alone the outcome(s) of that story which could spawn other metaplot(s).

I’m keeping it generalized, because I have not been a game runner, and I sure don’t make any claims to being a plotter/storyteller outside of my own head (i.e., my personal fiction that lives in there for non-MU* writing). But, that is how I see it as a player, and Arx had a great deal to do with arriving at that definition.

[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?

[KarmaBum]

@Tez Asking for specific examples really hits me in the warm-fuzzies.

On GH, the metaplot was “small town supernatural sandbox causes psychic trauma to residents.”

We attempted to reinforce it it by running weirdo stories and scenes, usually with the goal of being simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, and by establishing as part of the core concept a way that people could play with the supernatural elements without needing staff intervention (Dreams).

Specific examples included a long-term story about the proper disposal of the bones of a serial killer, our primary plot-dispensing NPCs being a blob fish (occasionally in costume a la a bridal veil or monocle) and Juno from Beetlejuice, and one-off scenes like a Christmas party that gets trapped inside a snow globe.

On ODW, the metaplot is “playing in a version of Anne McCaffrey’s world of Pern where the book canons left things in a sad state and the PCs are rebuilding a better future (and also we ignore the stupid parts of Pern canon).”

I’m implementing it by recreating the iconic Pern moments as on-camera moments while flat-out ignoring parts of canon that are stupid, and by highlighting story moments that lean toward positive momentum.

Specific examples include on-camera Threadfall scenes where PCs get to flame Thread and take injuries, running a Hatching where nobody has to fill out an application first (with future plans to hold a colorless Hatching; IYKYK), and telling stories that mix typical Pern themes like a Lord’s son standing for Impression with stuff that just sounds fun like the possibility that his family has been cursed for centuries.

[Faraday]

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

That is, talking about it in big picture way. I’m more curious about the actual direct implementation of how people do it.

I’m not really sure what sort of implementation details you’re looking for.

A metaplot is fundamentally the same as any other plot. It has an overall story arc / direction, and then the individual events that happen along the way. Some events may happen off-screen and some may be more passive (PCs get to react but not necessarily change things). But to keep PCs the most engaged, you’ll need to provide them opportunities to feel like they’re able to influence the metaplot in some way. Otherwise they feel railroaded. It’s a tricky balance to have engagement without running the whole metaplot off the rails.

[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.

[Faraday]

@Tez Fair. I don’t think there is some magic “how” that will work for all games, because I don’t think all games share the same goal.

For example, on B5 MUSH, the whole goal of the game was to play out the events of the show (with variations). That carried implicit limitations on who even could be involved in the metaplot and what they could accomplish. It was a heavily-FC-driven game. You could still be involved in the metaplot as an OC (mine was) but it was a lot harder, and there were never any promises made to the contrary.

On the other end of the spectrum are TGG and BSGU. Pretty much every big metaplot event was open to everyone, and varied schedules included off-hours folks too. But this only worked because of the design of the games. The metaplot was war, the PCs were all soldiers, and the events were all battles. It was super easy to involve everyone.

Neither is good or bad - in B5 it was fewer PCs / more influence and in TGG/BSGU it was more PCs / less influence. But if you want PCs to be involved, you’ve got to design a metaplot that they’re going to have reason and ability to be involved in.

[Pavel]

@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.

On a serious note, I’ve not done it on MU-scale, but I have designed plots (both meta and non-meta) for MU groups, tabletop, published works, etc. @Faraday is correct in that there’s no one size fits all: What works for you and your group won’t work for me and mine. But I can offer some design-related advice:

Start with themes rather than story beats. It’ll feel a little mad-libby at first, but write out something like Tez’s Super Awesome Game is about <genre> with <mood> and <tone>. For myself I’d say “Pavel’s Super Awesome Victorian Vampire Game is about personal horror with dread-filled tension and sardonic nihilism in the face of bleak futility.” Then you take that and expand upon it here and there, while throwing your ideas at trusted people. Not players, but cheerfully underpaid co-authors like Roz. Because:

Don’t write it by yourself. You need editors, critics, and people to tell you that they love you but your idea sucks because… If you keep it inside, (a word document only you ever read counts as inside) it’ll be shit, and you’ll stew in it, and you’ll come to resent it, and then you’ll throw it away only to discover it ten years later in a Dropbox folder…

And always remember that your metaplot isn’t important. A metaplot may be, depending on the game, but the metaplot you have now and the metaplot you end up with when the game closes are not going to be the same. It’s going to break, twist, bend, flip, translate itself into Greek and then Portuguese before finally settling on an Anglo-Sindarin creole. And nobody is going to remember the handful of events that ran long because you had to think things up on the fly, but they will remember slaying the dragon and meeting up at the tavern after for a pint.

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ETA: tl;dr: Stop. Collaborate. And Listen.

[Roadspike]

@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.

But all of these were caused by and had effects on the invasion. That’s how I divide between metaplot and ways to access and effect the metaplot.

@Pavel said in Metaplot: What and How:

Start with themes rather than story beats. It’ll feel a little mad-libby at first, but write out something like Tez’s Super Awesome Game is about <genre> with <mood> and <tone>. For myself I’d say “Pavel’s Super Awesome Victorian Vampire Game is about personal horror with dread-filled tension and sardonic nihilism in the face of bleak futility.”

Yes! I’m always a fan of starting every game with a Mission Statement. This tells you and your fellow staff what the game is going to be about, and is something to refer back to throughout the process of building the game (“Should we add flying motorcycles to the bad guys?” “I don’t know, does it support or take away from the Mission Statement?”). And then when you’ve refined the Mission Statement and readied your game and you open the game to players, it’s their first introduction to the game, what helps them decide if they want to play there.

[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?

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Tez The conflict between order and chaos works as a metaplot / backdrop because it’s a backdrop – and because anyone who wants to GM can do so.

That means players designing stories within the framework that they want to pursue. And because they design the realities they want those stories to happen in they

• get to decide which rules apply there
• what the theme/setting is
• whether this is a oneshot or a brick of a novel size plot

and nothing they do there can affect the main setting (besides the characters themselves). This way, we have a buffet of stories and a diverse cast of stories. But most importantly, we don’t have anyone sitting around waiting for storyteller-type GMs to make shit happen when they’re around and remember to include them.

Is this the solution to everything? Nah. But it does help with the ancient quandary of not enough GMs. Obviously, not everyone wants to GM. But a lot of people feel comfortable running a scene or three for a few people at a time, without taking on an official mantle and having to run everything past staff.

[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?