@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.

@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.

@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.

I have always used the old TTRPG definition. As summarized by wikipedia:

The metaplot (also, metastory) is the overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity of a published role-playing game campaign setting, also defined as an “evolving history of a given fictional universe”. Major official story events that change the world, or simply move important non-player characters from one place to another, are part of the metaplot for a game.

So while individual players/storytellers will run their own plots, the metaplot is more like an umbrella plot - an overall direction for the game as a whole.

Some metaplot examples from games I’ve run (or helped to run):

• Babylon 5 MU basically followed the key events from the TV series, with variations influenced by the PCs.
• BSG Unification had an overarching plot of “war progress” with the PCs changing planets and ships.
• Sweetwater Crossing had a metaplot around the range war conflict between the Blake and Cooper ranches.
• TGG had a metaplot for each campaign, following (generally) the major events from history.

My definition differs slightly from @Roadspike’s because I think you can have really big game-impacting plots that are not part of an overarching or connected story. They’re more like episodes. Battlestar Pacifica was more like this. You could connect the Big Plots in retrospect and call that a “metaplot”, I suppose, but they weren’t deliberately planned/connected that way.

@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.

Sorry for double post, missed a part of the thread.

@Roadspike said in Staff and playable pcs:

I also think that a staffer’s PC should never be “out in front” of a story.

@Gashlycrumb said in Staff and playable pcs:

I think that they should not be at the front of their own stories. Writing a “this looks like a job for my PC!” plotline is not a great look.

Unpopular opinion maybe, but I disagree. Again it goes back to the idea that staff is entitled to have fun on their own game. Staff deserve to have their PCs be the Big Darn Heroes sometimes, just like everyone else.

I’ve been staffing for decades and have run hundreds of plots for others, but I can count on one hand the number of times someone else organized a plot to further my PC’s development, or to give them the spotlight. Relying on other people to generate your fun is a losing proposition.

You just need to avoid turning the game into the “staff PC show” where the staff PCs are doing All The Things or getting all the cool stuff, and everyone else is a side-show. Just maintain a healthy balance and most players aren’t going to care.

Unless you’re paying me, it would be insane to expect me to only do all the un-fun “work” parts of running a game and not have any fun on it. Good luck finding other staffers who’d be willing to do it either (though I’m sure there are a handful scattered around).

MUs are not like TTRPGs, where it’s considered poor form for a GM to simultaneously run a PC. The groups are smaller, it’s often friends, and there’s a lot less administration and shenanigans you have to deal with.

I think all alts should always be transparent. I’ve never seen any good come from hidden alts. Especially so for staff alts.

@Tez said in Big Update Thread:

Changed themes from the default since other people seemed to hate it as much as I do. Bar is back on top.

Does anybody know if/how you can make the buttons and stuff be across the top instead of the side, before I spend a bunch of time hunting for it?

@Trashcan said in Blocking Players:

If people genuinely never want to see a word Bigmouth Joe ever says for the rest of time, I guess that’s fair,

That was the requested feature, yes. I understand that someone may only want to suppress notifications rather than block completely, but I think differentiating those would entail too much complexity on both the player/command side and the code side.

@MisterBoring Even on telnet-based games, there’s always been a tension between reporting capability and player expectations for privacy. It’s long been considered inappropriate for staff to enable logging of all commands, or to lurk in rooms watching private RP. Most platforms don’t provide a way to review pages.

With Ares, I’ve just taken a more explicit stance in the privacy statement that there are no core server commands to do these kinds of things. I can’t stop a staff from making their own, but they are not built-in. Instead, players can send the evidence to staff via the reporting features. It really hasn’t hampered staff’s ability to investigate things - it has enhanced it.

@chorus Character-specific.

@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:

rather than hoping someone has logs from their perspective (which they could easily edit) and adjudicating based on that.

Ares gives players access to the logs, and easy reporting tools to share them (in an automated and verified fashion) with staff when trouble arises.

@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:

If a game has staff that give people ick for having access to this stuff

There is a world of difference between cracking open the database/bytestream and having ready commands at your fingertips to spy on players. Staff are way more likely to use the latter than go out of their way to do the former.

As the designer of Ares, I can’t stop someone from being a jerk and spying on a private conversation between two players, but I certainly don’t have to give them a command to make it easy for them.

I am genuinely unconcerned about the scenario where someone is blocking and unblocking you. Just stop talking to them, then it won’t matter if they’ve blocked you. Or block them back. If the content of the conversation itself is troublesome, report it. I do not feel this problem requires additional code. But the code is open source. If you care enough and it’s your game, you can do as you please.

@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:

I agree, and that’s where having staff be able to see who’s banning / unbanning who with timestamps might shed some light on someone doing something that staff needs to intervene on.

Digging through logs hunting for evidence of misconduct when none has been reported or suspected just feels icky to me. YMMV.

@Pavel That’s childish, sure, but I don’t really see the need for staff intervention? Not letting someone get a word in edgewise is not generally a bannable offense or anything. Just block them back and move on.

@SirKay said in Blocking Players:

@Faraday Doesn’t ares have a report feature of sorts, that would allow a person to send relevant things like pages or the scene itself to staff if they feel it should go that far too?

Yes, Ares has built-in commands for reporting PMs/pages, channel chat, and scene RP that automatically include relevant logs.

@Pavel said in Blocking Players:

Ares definitely seems to lean more towards ‘no more information than is strictly necessary.’ So while I might prefer that staff have said information, I think it goes against the overall design philosophy.

I wouldn’t say that’s the overall design philosophy. For the most part, Ares is built around OOC transparency. Sheets are public, scenes are designed to be shared, command logs record traffic (with reasonable limits to safeguard things like private messages and passwords), etc. I just don’t like the idea of staff snooping on private interactions between players, so Ares doesn’t let you do that with the built-in commands. If there’s a problem, Ares makes it super easy for the players involved to report it with verified logs. Otherwise, I think staff has no business poking into peoples’ private scenes and PMs.

@Pavel said in Blocking Players:

It’s true, i still curse you for doing thing at place with people.

@Pavel said in Blocking Players:

The only real purpose I can see for staff needing block information is in those situations where a complainant is weird and does the unblock-final retort-block thing. So perhaps it could be included in the report staff get sent when someone reports pages?

I don’t quite follow this example.

@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:

Should staff be able to see information related to blocking, such as a list of blocks?

“Should” is always going to be a subjective opinion. I have no intention of adding that to Ares, though, because I don’t think it’s relevant. People can use blocks for all kinds of reasons. Maybe you just find me annoying, or had a bad experience with me back in 2006, or my politics differs from yours, or whatever. That doesn’t mean staff needs to (or even should) act on it. Ares has other robust reporting mechanisms for problematic behavior already.

But the info is there in the database if some staff really really wanted to make a custom command to see stats. It’s just not baked in.

Appreciate all the feedback from everyone. Like @Pavel mentioned, there’s no system that will please everybody, but I think the consistent theme is that people view channel blocks very differently from page blocks, so there needs to be a way to differentiate.

The current prototype defines a generic “blocks” system, managed via a single settings page/command. This lets systems define different block types. It’s extensible, so plugin designers could potentially hook into the blocks as well.

PM blocks will give a failure message if they try to PM you, but it’s indistinguishable from the “do not disturb” feature (to @helvetica’s point about not broadcasting the fact that you’re ignoring them.)

Channel blocks will just silence the messages. No one will know.

Forum blocks could work the same way as channels and Mail blocks could work the same way as PMs, though I haven’t decided if it’s worth implementing those yet.