Becoming Staff: Privilege or Punishment?

[Zz]

I have never staffed on a game I’ve made (beyond a sandbox or two), but I have staffed on quite a few and whether it is a burden or a gift depends on the boundaries you set up between you and ‘the work’. In my early staffing days, I wanted to be the biggest help - take the most on. And that’s incredibly burnout inducing.

I think it’s unbelievably necessary to work as a team, set out tasks to peoples skills, and delegate and communicate what is going on with the team. If you see a problem, address it, and it persists - get out. You’re only losing a game.

[Pyrephox]

@junipersky said in Becoming Staff: Privilege or Punishment?:

I really, desperately, completely want to tell stories. I’m at the stage in my life where I want to tell stories for others, because //I// want to be surprised by the endings also. Being able to do this really is something that ends up smacking hard because those endings sometimes clash into theme. If you’re staff, you’re golden (mostly) and can make decisions on how to move forward with those stories. (Insert a bit here about communicating with fellow staffers, staying in theme, being ‘realistic’ etc.) If you’re not, then at times the story comes to a crashing halt so you can rope in someone else for that permission to go.

I like that side of staff privilage.

Dealing with the OOC side of staffing? I feel like that’s the cost of being able to drive story. It’s sure as fuck not always worth it. I was in the same staff group as @tsar and @KarmaBum and it fucking //sucked//. People were convinced we were attacking them personally over what felt like every little thing. It was exhausting. In that case, the cost way way outweighed the story benefits.

This is all a good point.

I’m an enthusiastic (if scattered) GM. I’m a reasonably good one, too, with decades of experience at this point. I like being a GM.

But I do not like staffing. And a whole lot of it comes down to the OOC side of things. I don’t have patience for players who look at me as the enemy because I tell them no - even for incredibly minor things. I don’t consider myself a ‘customer service representative’ and I don’t want to be, especially in my hobby time. I want everyone to have fun - including myself - and I don’t have the energy to wrangle people whose fun seems to only come at the expense of others. And no one lets me kick players who aren’t necessarily doing anything WRONG, but who are just exhausting and unpleasant to deal with.

And they probably shouldn’t. I’m just not cut out for staffing.

[hellfrog]

@Pyrephox I actually disagree that you shouldn’t be allowed to kick people for being exhausting. But, the notion certainly meets with pushback. And no small amount of vitriol from non staff, lol

[Wizz]

@Pyrephox said in Becoming Staff: Privilege or Punishment?:

But I do not like staffing. And a whole lot of it comes down to the OOC side of things. I don’t have patience for players who look at me as the enemy because I tell them no - even for incredibly minor things. I don’t consider myself a ‘customer service representative’ and I don’t want to be, especially in my hobby time. I want everyone to have fun - including myself - and I don’t have the energy to wrangle people whose fun seems to only come at the expense of others.

Uggghhhhhhh, 100% this.

I can’t even say how many times I’ve gotten extremely excited about a game concept, written tons of documentation and even gotten the basics done for hosting a game, before remembering…oh yeah, I fuckin’ hate management. I did it for six years as part of my job and I was okay at it but absolutely miserable the entire time.

Imagining doing it alone, in my free time, stops me every single time. It just holds no appeal at all, and that’s a hurdle I genuinely don’t know how to overcome.

[Pax]

But I do not like staffing. And a whole lot of it comes down to the OOC side of things. I don’t have patience for players who look at me as the enemy because I tell them no - even for incredibly minor things. I don’t consider myself a ‘customer service representative’ and I don’t want to be, especially in my hobby time. I want everyone to have fun - including myself - and I don’t have the energy to wrangle people whose fun seems to only come at the expense of others.

@Pyrephox This, all of this.

And no one lets me kick players who aren’t necessarily doing anything WRONG, but who are just exhausting and unpleasant to deal with.

I think they should. It’s a game, it’s your free time, you’re doing a little extra work with your game free time for the sake of everyone else’s fun. You don’t have to suffer on behalf of someone else. It’s okay to say, “I don’t enjoy this communicative dynamic, and I regret how difficult it might be to hear, but I’ve chosen to address this directly rather than risk resentment or burnout.”

I’ve had direct conversations like that with players where I’ve just candidly explained to them how what they were doing and the manner in which they were going about it put a psych drain on Staff, and it’s about 50/50: sometimes people take umbrage and let themselves out the door, which is fine, the problem has solved itself, and others have taken a step back and gone “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize” and made an earnest effort to course correct their behavior. No one’s a mind reader and this hobby doesn’t exactly attract people who are over-invested in social stats.

The point is, it should be okay to advocate for your own fun and general mental wellness as Staff, and I think one of the main reasons people groan at the prospect of Staffing a game is because that’s not the baseline. People too quickly expect and adopt a customer service mindset. If you treat your game like a product, expect your players to act like customers, and come with all of the attendant entitlements and bad behaviors as well.

Imagining doing it alone, in my free time, stops me every single time. It just holds no appeal at all, and that’s a hurdle I genuinely don’t know how to overcome.

@Wizz Alone is the operative word here. And I don’t know if there is a way to overcome that hurdle alone. I hate doing HR. I am occasionally, randomly blessed with the disposition of being great at it (probably after taking no less than three-quarters of a joint directly to the dome when I am in a flow-state of calm and ego death), but in general, I feel that stewarding OOC problems, player issues, conflicting personalities, and all of the administrative human-work that comes up just eats away at my bandwidth at an accelerated rate.

At one game, we lucked out and had a designated person who Had the Hard Talks because she had an extremely capybara, zen-like disposition, she was good at de-escalation, and it didn’t sap her energy. Amazing! But obviously those people are few and far between, and that sucks, because it’s not like the issues are few and far between. Managing people is a grind. But if you find a capybara, that’s like, better than having a coder.

tldr: The idea of facilitating other people’s fun is exciting to me. The idea of managing other people’s problems is draining to me. So I don’t prefer Staffing, because at any game of size, it seems to be more of the latter than the former.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Pyrephox said in Becoming Staff: Privilege or Punishment?:

And no one lets me kick players who aren’t necessarily doing anything WRONG, but who are just exhausting and unpleasant to deal with.

In the magical world where I’ve got enough core people to start the heavily-GMed MU I’d like to make, I want to set it up so that GMing has a lot less of the admin-type tasks and more player-like rightsish-things, and you can.

Tentative scheme: There are GMs for Player-driven stuff, you’re assigned one when you’re approved, this is your ‘homeroom’ who handles it when you do ‘+request My character is going to try to break into the zoo’. There are GMs who run outside-forces driven stuff, you sign up for the plot, they deal with your actions regarding it. No doubt some people do both. If you, as a player, don’t like your home-room GM, you can switch to another if they’ve got an open slot. If you, as a GM, don’t like one of your home-room players, you can reassign them. And you can switch around for the hell of it, so long as it isn’t too frequent. You can also assign a -list status to a player (GMs included) — I never want to deal with this person, I’m okay to play alongside this person but want to avoid most direct interaction, I want this person on my team, I want intense RP partnership with this person. Something along those lines. To prevent people passing along a difficult player to somebody else who doesn’t want them, and to help GMs facilitate great playgroups and spend more of their time with the players who are fun for them.

I wonder if it wouldn’t also nip a lot of traditional MU problems in the bud, if admin monitors it well. “It’s not fair, but so many people here don’t want to deal with you or want to deal with you only on a superficial level that it’s hard to fit you into anything. You’re not likely to have fun,” is a legitimate and honest reason to show somebody the door, as is “You appear to actively dislike most of the people here.”

[DrQuinn]

It’s a privilege that can often feel like a punishment. I’ve done everything from applications to building to plot master to headwiz and I love, LOVE seeing people having fun and getting involved in things. I loved doing apps too, not only to help people really get what they were going for, but I think I called every problem player we ever had from their initial application/reaction to being asked to tweak things.

But it’s work. And I don’t know what’s popular now, it seems to flip flop back and forth, but I was always a firm believer in if you became staff you didn’t get XP for the stuff you ran. You could participate in things with your PCs and get XP, but unlike how PRP or volunteer GMs could be rewarded, that incentive went away when you ran things with your staffbit and you shouldn’t be running things on your PC at that point. The real reward was getting buy in from other players and getting them involved! And of course being able to dig into people’s sheets or backgrounds or plot notes or metaplot outlines or whatever that weren’t available to the general public.

While dealing with problem players is never, ever fun and no matter how hard you try there’s always going to be people that think you’re treating them unfairly, I still lean that it’s more privilege. It’s just the best feeling to entertain a grid full of players who keep coming back for more of your stories. To know that people are enjoying themselves and see them growing their own stories from seeds you threw out there or chasing a mystery that you put in a post one day that no one noticed for months. It’s just fun and when you have the time and bandwidth for it, worth the headaches that come with it.