Metaplot: What and How

[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?

[Faraday]

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

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?

Can’t speak to LB’s game, but that’s how it was on BSGU. Folks could run missions of their own whenever they wanted. (Also other plots connected to the war, though folks rarely did so.) But they couldn’t affect the overall trajectory of the war without staff approval and coordination. This was spelled out in the game policies, so if that was a deal-breaker for someone, they could decide that before playing.