I actually love a combination between Royal Heir Finds One True Match (not necessarily love, but a good match), and Bridgerton MUSH; something like this:

There’s an NPC Royal Heir (or maybe two, depending on Staff interest and availability) that everyone is at court to meet and hope to marry, but if PCs want to settle for other PCs, they can. Sure, they don’t get the brilliant and powerful connection, but they might get someone they actually match well with. This would also allow there to be PCs of the same gender as the Royal Heir who might not be interested in a Consort match with the Royal Heir. They could even be of higher rank than the prospective matches, and with chargenned connections to the Royal Heir (probably closer personal connections the lower ranked they were for a balance). This leads to a situation where the Crown Princess’s hunting gal pals or the Crown Prince’s lords-in-waiting can get in on the politicking and can provide connections – but are the prospective matches buttering them up to get closer to the Royal Heir or because they really like them?

You could also theoretically have a Consort selected alongside a Royal Spouse in a given season, if two players play the game particularly well, one romantically and one politically.

I do like the idea of the Royal Heir being played by any and all Staffers to avoid scheduling burnout – and wonder if doing so would allow any Staffer to see unshared logs by the Royal Heir (I think it might?). I like the idea of releasing the private logs at the end of the season, and agree that the Royal Heir should not be TSing during the Season.

I also love the idea of an every-week-or-two Court Reporter sort of gossip sheet.

I also also love the idea of Love Letter as an inspiration.

@MisterBoring As @Third-Eye mentioned, there was a mini-bubble at the start of each new Season on the Network, and at the beginning of each Hiatus between Seasons. Some people preferred the Hiatus time in the Dome, some people preferred the Seasons, some people came back whenever a particular Season interested them.

Since most Seasons were 4-8 months, there was definitely a tail-off partway through most Seasons, but it did capture the burst at the beginning.

@Faraday Agreed 100% – what defines BarRP for me is that it’s just two or more characters sitting in a bar making small talk without any purpose behind it, usually because one player asked on a public channel “Hey, does anyone want to RP?” and then another said, “Sure! Meet you at That Bar” without having any further idea of what they wanted to do.

I think that characters going to a bar to try and show off their fan-language skills and send increasingly-elaborate messages with them could be fascinating, as could meeting in a salon to have piano-forte duels, as could being presented at court (although there would have to be some chance for interactivity to that one, or it could get seriously boring).

Add in to this meeting in salons to make and break alliances between the prospected prince(sse)s, having scuffles between commoner supporters, duels of honor and dishonor, accusations of pre-marital hanky-panky, trips to the seamstress that are more like putting on a suit of armor for battle, and carriage races or chases… there’s definitely a whole lot that could be done with a Bridgerton-ish setting (especially if there was also the opportunity to make a match with a lesser noble if you fail hard at wooing the Heir).

@Ominous As for the description “in my style,” I think you could do that even more directly:

The Heir of Kingdomname needs a match! Each Season will be filled with grasping members of the high and low nobility, all struggling to stand out among the crowd and nab themselves a crown through demonstration of their clear social quality.

Pretty Princess Simulator is a humorous game of dynastic intrigue and politicking in a fantasy renaissance setting. Players will portray eligible nobles trying to win a future crown, family members of those nobles trying to advance family fortunes, or servants looking to engage in some skullduggery to get ahead.

Staff will provide opportunities for the prospective spouses to meet with the Heir and their intimate circle to learn more about their likes and dislikes, and will guide players through a Season of matchmaking, providing a backdrop on which the characters can create and break alliances as they chase the crown. Once the Heir makes their choices and the Season has completed, there will be a time skip with a new generation of would-be Consorts and a new Heir. The game is intended to poke light-hearted fun at the Lords & Ladies theme, especially shows such as Bridgerton, while still being a high-quality example of such entertainment.

@bear_necessities said in The 3-Month Players:

OK but what will people RP?

This is something I always want to think about when creating a game – and what I want to put into the mission statement to guide and explain every game I work on. I think that every game should have a sentence/paragraph that talks about the OOC community you’re trying to create, and a sentence/paragraph about what characters will be and players will do.

For example:

Fly the unfriendly skies in airplanes that never were, casting spells, dodging dragons, and fighting fascism in the late 1930s. Characters will be members of a “free” militia, The Sky Guard, secretly serving the interests of the French and British governments from an airship base. They will crisscross the Continent finding high adventure.

This describes the setting in an IC manner and emphasizes a “radio serial” feel.

The Savage Skies MUSH is a game of dieselpunk adventure and modern fantasy. Players might be flying against air pirates one week, gathering information on Nationalist Spanish movements the next, trading spells with minions of the Drachenordnung another, and then treating with a great dragon to convince it to join the cause at the end of the month.

This provides a definition of the game OOCly, including the type of events that might be available.

All characters will be explicitly tied to the militia group at the heart of the game, either as a fighting member or one of the smugglers, informants, and hangers-on that work directly with them. From there, you’ll work together with other players to create your own adventures within the setting and metaplot provided by Staff. Staff-run action will take place in Adventures of 1-4 months, with some time between them.

This describes the expectation for players on how they’ll interact with the game and who they can play.

@Jennkryst I would probably let it sit organically for a little while (whether that’s a few days or a week), and then put up a time limit warning (about the same length of time) after that. Mostly that’s just because I would rather teach people to react on their own, rather than wait for a prompt, but I recognize that sometimes the prompt is necessary.

I always want to keep in mind that I want to reward the behavior that I want to see, so giving those who respond on their own a little bonus (and letting them know it) would be reasonable.

Agree with @MisterBoring’s note that some people will complain even if you reach out and ask them directly to intervene… and you’re never going to please those people. And there is value to @Jennkryst’s yeetable sign.

I think that there are several interconnected issues at play here in how PCs interact with plot:

• Plot Hoarders who don’t like to share because they want to do all of the things.
• Making sure that NPCs aren’t being used when there are PCs to get the spotlight.
• Making sure that plot doesn’t get hung up due to inactivity and just linger.
• People who “should” have been involved in the plot not hearing about it.

At their core, it feels like where this becomes particularly applicable to L&L games is where you have a feudal basis, so the Lord of Crakehall really should be brought in to deal with things happening around Crakehall, but if the player is idle or not in the right crowd, someone else might come in and fix the issue, even if that would “never happen” ICly. A good Staff team with good players can rationalize this away well enough, but one bad apple will spoil the whole rationalization and turn it into a morass of blame and disgruntlement.

I think that an effective way to deal with this is what was referenced above but not quite laid out directly: a chain of impact.

So if there are zombie coyotes in the Westwood, then Staff first has some folks at the lowest tier of PCs run into them (squires, unlanded knights, nobles out of direct succession, etc). If those PCs report it up the chain, then everything is good and Staff doesn’t have to intervene further except to run scenes for folks as the problem gets passed up (and hopefully back down) the chain. The Captain of the Guard is warned, assigns several PC guards to deal with it, reports up to the Head of House who adds a noble leader to the group and a few NPCs who will serve as off-screen beaters to bring the zombie coyotes to the PCs. Excellent. When the Captain of the Guard is warned, a bbpost goes up, so if some nobles are often in the Westwood for other reasons, they can reach out to you to see how they could be involved. If there’s a Bandit King of the Westwood… well, hopefully you reached out to him and his people at the same time as the squires, but if not, he can get involved now too. You have some social scenes and some hunting scenes, and your plot is off to the races.

If, on the other hand, the squires never report the zombie coyotes (they’re idle or hogging plot or whatever), then the Captain of the Guard gets an official report from a hunter that there are zombie coyotes in the Westwood attacking hunting parties (slight escalation from the first incident), and now hopefully the rest of the plot works as above (and the squires get chastised ICly for not saying anything if it was a choice they made). If the Captain of the Guard doesn’t do anything either, then there’s a bbpost about an attack on an outlying village, or maybe random nobles are pulled in for a picnic that goes horribly wrong. Either way, the Head of House is now involved (whether they’re a PC or an NPC), with bigger consequences because two levels of folks haven’t handled the problem, and your plot can continue. And if the bbposts go out when it’s still a problem, not a solved one, then your Westwood-frequenting PCs can either ask to get involved at that stage, or can integrate the incidents into their RP and stay uninvolved otherwise.

As for the tangential problem of having NPCs do the work of PCs, I think that this can be addressed directly and OOCly by Staff to the PCs who control those NPCs. If your Captain of the Guards puts in a request to have a group of NPC guards go out and hunt down the zombie coyotes, a note that they have PC guards who might like to be involved, and that the plot can hold for a few days while they reach out to those other PCs, should handle that. Of course, if a couple of the PC guards were the first ones to encounter the zombie coyotes, they’re already involved, and are likely to want to stay involved – hopefully they’ll be working with the Captain of the Guards to pursue the plotline.

I feel like if there’s a system to allow a character to affect the world with dice, they’re great. If there’s an attempt to allow a character to affect another PC with dice… I’d prefer not to.

@Gashlycrumb Then don’t let PCs app into immediate positions of power. Create a setting where your succession rules are flexible, and have the Faction Heads and their current #2s be NPCs to start with, and then move people up as they “prove” to the players and staff that they’re worthy of it.

Heck, that would even allow for some in-faction competition as opposed to only between factions. And if the succession rules are flexible enough, you can encourage rising above people rather than killing them off to get ahead.

@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

If Abelard has enormous influence in ‘society’ and everybody loves him based on his dice, but every single PC thinks he’s an insufferable prick and an idiot, it’s rough.

See this just tells me that Society doesn’t actually “love” him, but they fear his family’s influence (or the dastardly things he’s done to others, or even that he’ll get his stink of failure on them) so they let him do what he wants. The PCs, being special as PCs are, might stand up to Abelard despite his influence on Society.

@Gashlycrumb said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

I think handling intrigue with dice-mechanics is kind of a problem.

This is always going to be one of the biggest debates in MU*ing. I have many thoughts about it, but I think there’s a way to avoid that entirely:

Have dice determine affects on reputation (which I would use like health in an L&L game), but not interpersonal RP. So there’s no “convince another PC to support your cause by throwing dice at them” and there’s no “fantastic RPer with crap dice wrecks everyone around them despite having the stats of a mostly-dead tortoise.”

Have social dice work on Society, but not on PCs. So even if Lord Cantwrite blathers on about “toxic ruffle syndrome,” in his pose, if he’s got the dice (and presumably the background) to back it up, he can cause people to look in askance at Lord Rufflelover, at least for a while. This might be because Lord Cantwrite’s mommy is a Duchess, or it could be because he’s well-known to have influence at Court… whatever the case, Lord Rufflelover can still stand up to Lord Cantwrite’s bullying, but Society is going to notice Lord Cantwrite’s disapproval, and Lord Rufflelover’s suit for Lady Biginheritance’s hand might suffer until he can do some damage control.

To me, the core of a Lords & Ladies game is that characters are grouped by families or groups that are competing for influence and prestige within a larger feudal or semi-feudal structure – and that the characters are influential people within the setting.

Now, this could be:

• wayfinders who lead family canoes between Polynesian islands, competing for pride of place
• competing cyberpunk megacorps all under a Corporate Court – so long as the PCs were high-level executives at the corps, rather than disposable espionage operatives
• knights and barons and viscountesses living in fantasy castles
• mafia families under a capo di tutti capi
• technoknights and starship captains in a semi-feudal, multi-system space empire
• daimyo and geisha in the Shogunate (or a fantasy version thereof)
• minor landed gentry in Victorian England (or a fantasy version thereof)

I don’t think that pseudo-European matters, but I agree that combat is usually going to be a means to gather influence or prestige rather than the point in and of itself.

I would actually love to see a Lords & Ladies game using FS3 autocombat for attacks on reputation – leave any physical combat to just straight rolls, because it’s just not as important as the social maneuvering.

@helvetica I’ve poked at mechs vs mechs and mechs vs kaiju combat on FS3, and it can definitely work. But changing types (ie, hitlocation charts) during combat would be very difficult.

I would still love to do a Pacific Rim-style mechs vs kaiju game.

The parent(s) of student(s) at my district were picked up by ICE and detained. The student(s) are with family, but it’s still shaking up this tiny-ass rural, progressive island community. And it’s shaking up me too even if I’m white as Wonder Bread.

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

How often did you get players running things?

I don’t remember off-hand, but I’d say it was probably somewhere around 75-25 Staff-run and player-run for straight up combat scenes. But this could also be because I had just fallen in love with the FS3 combat system and was running a ton of scenes.

Seeding plot points to PrPs has to be done carefully, and if I’m being blunt, only with trusted plot-runners. On The Savage Skies we had a few player-run-plots that went off the rails and had to be reined back in via minor retcons. I would only provide metaplot seeds to plot-runners who have demonstrated a good handle on the basic setting, and only then after having an explicit back-and-forth conversation so that they knew what they were introducing and at least some of why they were introducing it.

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

Did you get a feel from players or any feedback as to how the political side worked for them?

There were certainly players who were chasing that side of things pretty hard. Interestingly, it was particularly the players who were on the side gaining power who were chasing after it, because they knew they weren’t doing anything, and yet their side was still gaining power and influence and they wanted to know who was doing it and why. Knowing players in general, I expect that they would have found the person who was gathering the power and done their best to shut them down – and I think they would have succeeded, but it would have caused a power vacuum in the Crown Council that would have caused short-term chaos in the war effort (but probably would have come out ahead in the long term).

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

TWOP definition

I had only tangentially heard of this source (Television Without Pity?). I think that my definitions came from working in gaming companies (tabletop and video) where there are some things that are immutable or relatively immutable (setting) and some things that can change with the story being told (metaplot). Looking at the wikipedia definition of metaplot, I don’t think that I disagree with the first two sentences at all:

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.

I definitely think that that’s talking about metaplot – the events taking place in the setting that connect all the various storylines going on at once – rather than setting – the details of the world where the action is taking place – by my definitions.

@Warma-Sheen said in Metaplot: What and How:

Respectfully, IMHO, that’s because that example doesn’t really sound like a metaplot. That just sounds like a setting.

I think that this is an important point: setting and metaplot are different. I can’t comment on the difference on Keys because I was only there for a hot minute, but for myself, I would say that the difference is thus:

Setting is a backdrop, it’s where the game is happening and what is going on around them. On The Savage Skies, the release of The Hobbit was part of the setting (and even showed up in a setting update post), but it wasn’t part of the metaplot; likewise, the combat between Japanese and Soviets was part of the setting, but it wasn’t part of the metaplot, because it didn’t have impact on the PCs besides giving them something to talk about, and it wasn’t (directly) part of the rise of the Drachenordnung and the PCs’ fight against them.

Metaplot is the things that are actually happening to PCs and people who matter to them, and it’s something to tie plotlines to. On The Savage Skies, when the Drachenordnung gave people ID cards that listed their magical potential and restricted the actions of those with low magical potential, that was part of the metaplot because it caused problems for the PCs operating in D.O. territory and gave them a new group of people to help escape from the D.O. – it drove storylines and was part of a larger storyline itself.

@Tez said in Metaplot: What and How:

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?

The broad strokes of the invasion was handled by Staff, based on scenes we ran and our reading of scenes that player GMs ran as well. Players were welcome to run general combat scenes, and if they wanted to try out something particular, we asked that they check in with us first. When they did, we sometimes gave them additional details that they could drop into their scenes to feed into the players’ understanding of what was going on. We determined what happened with the course of the war through how things went in the various scenes (Staff-run and player-run alike), some jobs/rolls, and some narrative license.

The “narrative license” might be called railroading by some, but the idea was that we wanted to see the Good Guys on the back foot for a while before they turned things around, so while the actions of the PCs could win local victories, or lessen the cost of local losses, they weren’t going to turn back the tide yet. The events of GMed scenes (Staff- and player-run alike) changed where the Good Guys would be pushed back or hold back the tide, but not that the Good Guys were going to be pushed back.

The politicking came in two real waves: first a choice of which child would succeed the faltering King, and then who would make up the Crown Council around the new ruler. To be perfectly honest, we didn’t leave things open to too much player input on the first wave, as I recall. For both waves, the questions were presented in GMed public scenes, and then there were House meetings for most of the Great Houses, where PCs associated with that House were able to weigh in on their preferences and make plans to support them while the House Head was NPCed by a Staffer.

The Crown Council politicking we put into play through posts and public scenes, as a couple of the members of the new King’s Council were unexpected, and seemed to tilt things pretty distinctly in one direction of the philosophical differences between Great Houses. After seeding the idea of the imbalance, we held more House meetings to answer some questions, and then people went off on their own to RP about the situation, put in requests, get more information, and make attempts to figure out what was going on. We closed down before we could get to fruition on that story thread, but we had a dozen or so players chasing it and looking to impact which NPCs had power and influence on the Crown Council. That in turn would have impact on how the war was prosecuted, as well as how efficient the Crown was at prosecuting it.

@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.

I agree with @Raistlin’s definition of metaplot as an overarching story that impacts every character on the game.

My example from The Savage Skies would be “The Global Fight Against Fascism.” So metaplot involved trying to protect an area of northern Spain during the Spanish Civil War, softening the landing of Czechoslovakia into the Drachenordenung orbit, collecting magic spheres to raise Atlantis, and preventing the Hollow Earth from becoming a fascist garden were all chapters in the metaplot.

On the other side, exploring ruins for magical artifacts, meeting with dragons, random skirmishes with fascists, and the like weren’t necessarily part of the metaplot, but sat within it, defined by it.

On The Fifth World, the metaplot was “The War Against the Hostiles.” All the noble political maneuvering and concert series and Senate elections and the like were smaller plots that were placed in context by the metaplot.

At the simplest level, I would say that Metaplot is the stuff that NEEDS to have a post on the game boards, simply so that everyone knows what’s going on with it.

To @Pavel’s point, I agree that the problem is perception, but I also think that perception is important. I also know that my own experiences of legitimately having my character in the spotlight and having players call me on it have colored my perceptions.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that staff PCs should never be out in front of a story – I don’t think of myself as a Sith, so less with the absolutes. I wonder if a better description of my position is that staff should be incredibly careful about the dangers of spotlighting or appearing to spotlight. Because as noted, players will notice if you or another staff member runs plots that are well suited to your characters.

If players want to, that’s fantastic, but to @Faraday’s post, that tends to be rare (very special and appreciated, but rare). I think that it’s absolutely reasonable to run a scene to develop your character’s story, as long as you’re up front about it. I also think that it’s entirely reasonable to be one of the Big Darn Heroes, but I don’t ever intend to be THE Big Darn Hero on a game where I’m staffing.

I agree with @Pavel and others that staff should play on their game. I also agree that staff’s alts should be disclosed for transparency purposes – if someone is telling me something wild about the theme (ICly or OOCly), I’d like to know if I’m dealing with a random player or a staffer.

I also think that a staffer’s PC should never be “out in front” of a story. They can be right alongside the PCs of multiple non-staffers, but shouldn’t be out in front unless they’re serving as a glorified plot-giver – and even then the balance is very tight, and should always tip in the direction of non-staff PCs.