Player Ratios
-
Points make me think of keeping score, and days of PvP. I like the modern vibe of games where we’re all on the same dysfunctional team together, telling the stories, and we survive it or we don’t, but. we’re doing it together.
Once we start tracking points on something that’s a spare time pretendy collaborative writing game, that loses the creativity and story-driven side of it - at least for me. I maintain that the only thing needed for an active, involved game is an understanding of your scopes and limits, and letting the characters who want to write and play in it do just that.
We’re all adults. We don’t need every scene to have story-tellers, or every piece of plot spoon fed. We can figure it out pretty well by just asking each other for the scenes we want, and saying yes when they pitch back at you and it sounds like fun.
Is it important to have a vague expectation of how much official ST plot your playerbase needs? Probably.
Is it important to look at bribes and rewards just to figure that part out? Probably not.
But. I’m also super low crunchy. I rarely look at dice outside the wondering of hey, this is iffy, am I able? Even as a ST, I rarely ask for rolls unless something isn’t natural and normal to the character. Most of the time, just letting them do their things with their words while I steer the plot part doesn’t need it. They usually all write good mixes of both wins and losses, and the few who miss that vibe usually are super fine with it once they’ve been politely paged.
I think getting bogged down into mechanics of things makes it lose some of the magic. And I think that goes double when the opposite side is lets bribe people into making sure there is RP, the thing they’re here to do and should be mostly able to manage on their own.
And, if folks WANT bribe games, like, sure. Build them, have fun, and that’s ok. Not everyone likes everything. I’m just not sure why bribe mechanics are the main topic on a thread about how many story-tellers are needed per average number of players. To me… Bribe mechanics aren’t what tells or even shows there were or are good stories. They’re entirely separate. And if a game is relying on the bribes to ensure there are stories getting told… That seems more game issue than ratio problem.
-
@Jenn It’s just not for very-low-crunchy lots-of-PrP games. If you can rp happily along and your pc affect the world as much as anybody else with no staff-ST, it wouldn’t make sense to bother.
Generally people kinda like points, even ones that don’t really do anything like the cookie count. Perhaps especially ones that don’t really do anything. Dr. Skinner can explain.
This is relevant to the ST/Player ratio because what’s wanted is the ratio that doesn’t leave players underserved or (STs burned out). And relevant to the thread because the OP brought up giving people tokens for running PrPs which could be exchanged for staff attention, in one of the top two posts.
ETA:
@Jenn said in Player Ratios:
And you’ll always have the folks with two jobs, or kids, or sick parents who may only be able to go to one single social scene a month. And they’re not earning points, and even if they were, they wouldn’t know how to spend them. But they chat a few minutes every day on chat while they commute, and answer questions,
This person is earning (unspendable) Carnegie points all the time for answering questions, and never getting (also unspendable) Emmy points, so their ratio would alert the staff-STs to try to give their character a major role in something next time the player has an afternoon off. It seems fair to me that somebody who does a lot for the game but hardly RPs ought to get a leg-up to the Important Stuff if they want it, even if they don’t have friends who are STs.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
Agreed. It was mentioned early on. I wasn’t a fan then, but it was early on, so figured I’d give it longer, and read more.
More folks agreed with points.
I still think they’re weird. Games that I’ve played that use them, and especially rely on them, usually they’re not the best games I’ve been on.
The best games, in my opinion, have been ones where people don’t keep track. They just write. The majority is PrP with staff support/guidance on questions, but where story-tellers weren’t NEEDED for any scene, though, when able would host events or dole out new plot trickles or whatnot. But. In between, folks are just responsible for telling their own things in ways that makes sense to the characters and game themes.
If you and others see relevance or want to tie rewards to stories for whatever reasons, feel free. I’m just a player, I’m not gonna stop anyone from doing what they’re doing. But to me? They’re not at all the same. It’s apples and oranges. Sure, they’re both fruits and you can store them in the same bowl. But if you do… The apples rot faster and the oranges dehydrate.
I think maybe part of this is you think I’m talking to you specifically, @Gashlycrumb. But other than this specific comment, and the one where you asked me a direct question, I was just replying to the most recent end thread.
It’s absolutely fine that for you, that’s a mechanic that would be interesting and might work out. If it would, I really do hope that you and others who enjoy that same reward points make it work and have amazing successes! Not every game is for every player, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that.
It’s just, that at least for me, they’re two separate things, and I only enjoy one of them. My dislike of the other is strong enough that it would ruin my fun and I’d personally find the games where that isn’t true to be weird. But weird is just different from how others see it, not wrong or bad. It makes the vibes off, for me, that so many folks are I guess ok with the concept of it, but. Again. It’s ok that a lot of us like and enjoy different things.
I’m not trying to wrong fun anyone here, and I’m sorry if it came across that I was. I’m just having different fun as my opinion on it.
-
@Jenn said in Player Ratios:
The majority is PrP with staff support/guidance on questions, but where story-tellers weren’t NEEDED for any scene, though, when able would host events or dole out new plot trickles or whatnot. But. In between, folks are just responsible for telling their own things in ways that makes sense to the characters and game themes.
This is probably the best model for generating player fun for less gamerunner time, and the best bet model for opening a game that’ll work.
But I do like dedicated GMs and flinging dice about.
-
@Gashlycrumb said in Player Ratios:
Generally people kinda like points, even ones that don’t really do anything like the cookie count.
Some people like points. Some people don’t. Some people fucking crave points and the associated validation like their lives depend on it.
If you’re using it as a metric as in your example:
@Gashlycrumb said in Player Ratios:
This person is earning (unspendable) Carnegie points all the time for answering questions, and never getting (also unspendable) Emmy points, so their ratio would alert the staff-STs to try to give their character a major role in something next time the player has an afternoon off.
Then it doesn’t need to be public information, or even information available to the player themselves. At which point it becomes out of sight and out of mind for the vast majority and simply becomes a metric of player opportunity.
Otherwise you fall foul of Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
-
@Pavel said in Player Ratios:
Otherwise you fall foul of Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Related to this, I think folks are vastly underestimating the level of toxic behavior that can result when players don’t get the points they feel they deserve, or don’t have the points to do what they want. Just look at why +vote/+nom systems fell out of favor. I even stopped using the completely useless (nothing but a public ‘attaboy’) +cookies on my games because of the complaints about so-and-so always getting all the scenes, or cookie-voting circles, or people feeling bad that they never made the leaderboard, or whatever. (There’s a reason they’re a plugin on Ares and not standard in the core code.)
Like @Jenn said - if someone wants to make a game like that and feels they can make it work, knock yourself out. I just don’t think it’s a good idea, and a game with systems like that would be a hard pass for me.
-
If you think players act entitled to plot now just wait until you introduce a point system lol my bet? You’ll burn out STs even faster this way.
-
I could see a point-like system working if it were a staff-vision-only automated metric of some kind to identify people struggling to either find time or social energy so that staff can make a point of drawing them into things, but as even as a useless shiny-shiny it has too much potential to attract (or promote) competitive behaviour that so easily turns toxic.
I don’t know how one would implement the former and we’ve all seen versions of the latter go bad.
-
@Pavel said in Player Ratios:
metric of some kind to identify people struggling to either find time or social energy so that staff can make a point of drawing them into things
I don’t think it’s that hard to spot these players without a point system and if they already don’t have the time or social energy to play why would they want to be drawn into things?
I certainly don’t have the time or social energy to play right now and the last thing I’d want is a GM to single me out and be like YOU THERE, HERE’S PLOT because then I feel forced to spread that plot and I don’t have the time or social energy to do that and bye I’m done lol
-
@Faraday said in Player Ratios:
Just look at why +vote/+nom systems fell out of favor. I even stopped using the completely useless (nothing but a public ‘attaboy’) +cookies on my games because of the complaints about so-and-so always getting all the scenes, or cookie-voting circles, or people feeling bad that they never made the leaderboard, or whatever. (There’s a reason they’re a plugin on Ares and not standard in the core code.)
Speaking as one of the people who can sometimes feel kind of terrible in the world of public cookies, public <3s, and public votes, thank you for making this change. It was never rational on my part, but it feels better to me when there isn’t a leaderboard to chase.
That’s been the case for me a lot, actually, when faced with leaderboard systems. Arx had its modeling leaderboard. It was really fun to do big modeling and have big numbers. But with leaderboards it can always feel like there’s an insurmountable lead, too. I don’t know. There’s always some real fucking +/- with those systems. It’s worth keeping in mind on the balance.
It’s a reminder that helps me see why point-based systems can really turn people off. I do still wish there was a way to reward people for their work on games, from running plots to helping people, but maybe the real reward is the friends we make along the way.
@Gashlycrumb said in Player Ratios:
And how much of a not-drag must a player be to get a seat? Obviously much of the time when a staff storyteller is criticised for cherry-picking who to GM what they are doing is GMing the people who are the most fun for them.
If you don’t have GMing staff, and players running stories for one another is just how your game rolls, you really have no reason to worry about Abelard.
I keep coming back to this idea, and to Pyre, LBH – the piece about expectations. Shifting expectations away from staff somehow. But you can’t really do that without empowering players and giving them the tools to tell stories – and, with a nod to KB’s thread, to tell them in a way that people feel like they can touch the world.
I think people would probably still grumble about it, but damn, people always grumble about something.
-
@bear_necessities I phrased it poorly, but I meant time as in “you staffers only think about American timezones” and social energy as “I don’t know anyone and I don’t like asking for scenes out of the blue…”
-
@bear_necessities I always felt like there should be a way for players to indicate to staff if they wanted to be involved in things or not but I have no real ideas on how to implement it. Like you could do metaplot y/n because there’s always people who are dying to get in on things, then you have people that are just there to do social scenes and never want to know there’s a dark god hanging out at the bookstore, etc.
I am that person that loves to pull people into things, though. Did you take a point of map making on your sheet for a lark? Boom, now there is a plot where you have to read a MAP and SAVE THE DAY.
Though I can see how if you made your map making pc just to romance your friend the explorer, you might be annoyed if the Gnome King interrupts your date to make you go get a group together to save the Kingdom of Butterbright.
-
@DrQuinn said in Player Ratios:
@bear_necessities I always felt like there should be a way for players to indicate to staff if they wanted to be involved in things or not but I have no real ideas on how to implement it. Like you could do metaplot y/n because there’s always people who are dying to get in on things, then you have people that are just there to do social scenes and never want to know there’s a dark god hanging out at the bookstore, etc.
I am that person that loves to pull people into things, though. Did you take a point of map making on your sheet for a lark? Boom, now there is a plot where you have to read a MAP and SAVE THE DAY.
Though I can see how if you made your map making pc just to romance your friend the explorer, you might be annoyed if the Gnome King interrupts your date to make you go get a group together to save the Kingdom of Butterbright.
RP prefs probably help for that. Honestly when I was running games and STing, I would just poke people and be like “hey do you want to get in on this” versus dumping plot into their lap.
Maybe back in the day when games had like 500 players it was really hard to identify the people that were lost to timezones or too shy to ask for RP, but I just don’t think that’s the case anymore. But also it really isn’t my job as a game admin to keep track of your pretendy fun-time points to determine if you’re having enough pretendy fun-time so please just reach out and poke if you aren’t getting plot but want it.
-
@DrQuinn said in Player Ratios:
I am that person that loves to pull people into things, though.
So long as you ask, of course. I have too many not-so-fond memories of staff foisting random “events” onto people who were quite happy doing their own RP thankyouverymuch.
