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Champion
 
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balor (4/2/2007)
[quote]I think you have to sometimes adopt a 'natural selection' approach to plot. Seed as many of them as you can - small and large and inbetween. Cultivate them and develop them, see what the players do with them. Sometimes you might abandon one completely due to lack of interest - just quietly shelve it and pretend it never happened, maybe one or two unrelated small events happened but nothing significant. Sometimes the players pick them up and run with them and turn them into something you never expected. Sometimes they ignore them but you keep them running quietly in the background, dropping hints and tips as it growsin stature until even the blindest player cannot possible ignore it. The important thing to remember is that your job is to keep the players amused.
My favourite approach. you can never have to much plot, just remain flexible as it will rapidly loose all resembelance to your original ideas once the players get hold of it.
I'm a fan of the hidden NPC. The one that no one knows is actually npcing right the way through a campaign, they are incredibly useful for feeding info and spying on the players.
Thinking further on the NPC achievement issue I think it may be as much to do with my personal insecurities about my own role play abilities than anything to do with an npc in general.
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Knight
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[quote]balor (4/2/2007)
[quote][Artificer is a good example of how a fest can work with this model of plot. Everyone gets a personal player brief with information based on their downtimes in it. All NPCs are equally well briefed and also have a large amount of autonomy which goes a long way towards eliminating the 'Stilted NPC interactions' that Matt ascribes to NPC led plot. They aren't delivering a script or performing set actions at a set time as determined by some referee master plan but are rather given a set of objectives (which may be general - 'Acquire riches and fame' - or specific - 'Assasinate Archduke Franz Fernindad before the end of the event') and can achieve these any way they feel appropriate to the character. Its a far more organic approach which harkens from interactive LRP rather than linear or fest style. I can vouch for that. With my NPC it is almost like being a player. The runners give you one/maybe more objective and after that you can run with it how and as you wish. I think that is why a lot of the NPC players enjoy the game as well. We drop out to help monster but when quite we can go back in as the NPC and interact as we wish. I personally prefer that style as it makes it fun for both parties.
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Wag
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Its not so much a 'secret' NPC I use (though I have used them in the past... including the classic 'Yes, I am a player character just like you... oooh, I am going to wander off into the woods... aaaaargh!!!! *splat* oops, I appear to have been brutally murdered, unfortunate person wearing a red coat that I am' incident  ) but rather an obvious NPC. You really can't deny that they are crew - they are the tavern owner, the IC host, they often have a radio hidden nearby so that they can contact the ref team if necessary. But they are generally a character the PCs get along with, have no particular reason to hate or are simply someone they barely notice (servants, for example) who has a good reason to be there which is not involved with the main plot (though they may have their own miniplots to deal with). It is useful to have a 'man on the inside' because as referee (or, more specifically, Monster or crew ref) you are rarely in a position where you can get a good idea of what the players are thinking and that can be essential in determining your next move in terms of what to send in or set up.I beleive that NPCs should be more or less autonomous. I generally prefer that all crew have at least one NPC that they can play more or less as a player would and who they can slip into easily enough when they are not doing anything else. Especially useful at catered events where your crew need to eat too and you can't really walk in as 'Xart the evil demon lord of Krull' in order to sit with the players and have a nice meal (the numerous calls of 'dubbba dubbba dubbba' as they continuously hit you would really detract from the soup course... ). Autonomy has the advantage that NPCs can often get a better grip on what is going on than the referee, especially when the plot often involves quiet little conspiracies in the corner of the room like many interactives. Unless you bug every room and fit CCTVs linked to a master control room somewhere it is very difficult to micromanage every NPC. It is better to say 'Here is your objective, deal with it....' than 'At 5.30 pm you will go to John the peasent and offer him untold riches for doing your bidding...'. Especially when the crew member is more likely to know better than you that John the peasent has already been offered untold riches to be Molly the merchants baggage handler and so will not be interested.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Whispering God is your friend... trust the Whispering God... Ruins of Empire 1st - 3rd Feb, 2008, Gladstone scout centre, Chester
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Wag
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Matt Pennington (4/1/2007)
I don't want to play LRP for OOC reasons, I want to play a character and to think and act for IC reasons...The fundamental weakness of the "trickle down" model of fest plot has tried to make crap LRPers out of us all.
balor (4/2/2007)
No, I understood the point well enough.
We could easily both be wrong - only Matt P can say whether we're interpreting his sentiment accurately - but I read that 'OOC obligations affecting IC reasons are bad'. That's something that's going to apply to any form of plot trickling that presumes that the game is driven by player interaction with plot and that players will propagate the plot.
You seem to be worrying about the important issue of how to get plot to people whereas Matt P seems to be worrying about whether he's going to be aware of an OOC obligation to alter behaviour IC (or, presumably, playing up against someone feeling that). Those are entirely different problems - 'how do I transport and distribute plot as equably throughout a volume of players?' versus 'how do I avoid being viewed as a component in a plot-transport system so that my IC actions become OOC-helpful or OOC-unhelpful'?
Obviously, in both cases, a finer transport system is both more efficient and less obtrusive, but that's a compromise rather than a consistent synthesis. If as a player at an event which you understand to be driven partly/principally by plot, you find some item/plot which clearly absorbed 10+ ref-hours of construction, there's an obvious tension between your IC motives (possibly best for you to dump it in a hole and come back for it later) and your OOC sense of obligation to get it out among other players. If the item/plot visibly only took 1 ref-hour of construction, your guilt in burying it is considerably reduced.
Maximum flow is the goal in one situation (with OOC compulsion/plot item being considerably less in the cruder top-down system). Whereas in the other case, the goal is zero guilt (the player should have no compunction about chucking the item into a hole/sitting on top of it publicly because they are aware that plot isn't what drives the game).
I'm not saying that one of these models is better than the other - I have a clear preference - but they are distinct approaches which shouldn't be confused. Saying that they are both really the same because they both reject a crude straw man approach isn't very informative.
balor (4/2/2007)
However, if you are adopting the trickle down approach, there is an inherent conflict between your possible IC reactions and your OOC obligation to make sure that other players have fun and this is why this method rarely works. Its not even so much that it is a trickle down approach specifically that is the problem but rather that you should never be solely dependent on one source of plot.
You're right - it's not the specific form of how you get plot to people but whether anyone feels a 'the ref wants the game to be X/this plot to be distributed for the Good Of All, I probably shouldn't burn it, despite being a pyromaniac'. Breaking plot up into lots of little chunks won't stop someone feeling an OOC compulsion to alter their IC behaviour if they happen to be in a position to stamp on multiple plot nuggets.
Obsessively placing plot hooks left, right and centre means that there is a greater chance of any one person interacting with 'plot'. However, it does serve to highlight just how important you think plot is to the characters involved and it makes it hard for people who don't want to interact with your plot to avoid it.
balor (4/2/2007)
All NPCs are equally well briefed and also have a large amount of autonomy which goes a long way towards eliminating the 'Stilted NPC interactions' that Matt ascribes to NPC led plot.
You seem to be slipping from 'yes, we mitigate that problem because we don't run things as badly as straw man X' to 'there really is no problem at all'. Again, putting words in Matt P's mouth, but I don't think his point was "I don't like interacting with badly played, scripted NPCs" but "I don't like interacting with NPCs". I think it's necessary to accept - even if only for politenesses sake - that if someone says they don't like interacting with NPCs then that's what they mean, not that they just haven't interacted with good ones.
balor (4/1/2007)
Small events can be hothouses of PvP interaction or they can be dull as ditchwater... its not the size of the event but the players you have and even the characters they play.
I think the best of players would struggle to get interesting PvP interaction if they were the only player at an event - schizophrenia gets you only so far.
Obviously (?), the individual players should be the ones who most determine how an event works out but, presuming that's something you can't control (only good players for my event please!) I don't think it's worth dwelling on. Setting that aside, I do think that the major determinant of what fraction of the action _can_ depend on PvP interaction is the number of people. More people - more options. DUTT has done pretty well with 25-30 but the numbers are still far too small to support proper intergroup-politics (technically, you need something up from Dunbar's number ~150+/-80 to get into the range of politics where not everyone knows everyone and it's no longer beneficial to form one single coagulate group).
balor (4/1/2007)
I think you have to sometimes adopt a 'natural selection' approach to plot. Seed as many of them as you can - small and large and inbetween. Cultivate them and develop them, see what the players do with them. Sometimes you might abandon one completely due to lack of interest - just quietly shelve it and pretend it never happened, maybe one or two unrelated small events happened but nothing significant. Sometimes the players pick them up and run with them and turn them into something you never expected. Sometimes they ignore them but you keep them running quietly in the background, dropping hints and tips as it growsin stature until even the blindest player cannot possible ignore it.
A whole plethora of different schemes for spoon-feeding. None of which, I think, will actually please people who don't want to be spoon-fed, no matter how diverse the approaches.
balor (4/1/2007)
The important thing to remember is that your job is to keep the players amused.
Yes - I think this is the basis of the disagreement. Again, using Matt P as a ventriloquist doll, I don't think he agrees that it is your job to keep him amused. Whether or not that's accurate for him, it's certainly not accurate for me. I attend events to roleplay, not to be amused by refs. Having reffed, I certainly understand the sense of obligation, but I think it's pathological. If you're going to a fest event (and we have been specifically discussing fest events - although I think this may also apply in the case of other events) it seems fair to assume that you are there to interact with other players. If the ref can't get over his sense of responsibility for your entertainment then he's merely going to keep intruding. You can't tell him to fuck off because he's only doing what he thinks will make you happy and he's open to any form of feedback, so long as it maintains his role as an interactor. But that's rather the point - as long as you have someone trying to help you enjoy the game all your IC behaviour now polarises into ref-vision-helpful versus ref-vision-unhelpful.
You might think that I'm painting a grim, dismal and paranoid picture - how can meaning-well not lead to an improved situation for all? - but just think of people who attend fests where ref-plot is peddled. Almost all of the people I know fall into two/three groups: 'plot-assistive' (I want to make the game work for everyone in accordance with the refs vision of game, caveats applying), 'plot-rejective' (I hate plot. I eat and shit out your plot and then bury it where no one will find it) - with a potential third group of 'avoidants/apathetics' who do their best to just avoid interacting with it too much.
I'm not saying that 'plot is bad and must be eradicated', merely that 'plot' should be relegated to an appropriate level of disdain in games which are more about player-player interaction. I think the analogy with money - in systems which have money - is actually rather apt (I would do having been a money-ref). The value of 'IC money' in a game isn't that people will be individually impressed with the money (although I'm sure they will appreciate the effort) but that the money will serve as a mechanism by which people can interact. To judge whether the 'money system' is working isn't a matter of seeing whether the money has been 'properly and evenly distributed among the player-base'. That would probably be the worst of all situations (games where the money system doesn't work tend to feature caring so little about money that the majority of the player base retains the same few pieces of starting cash) unless it followed hard on a revolution inspired by unequal distribution. If one group of people are sitting on all the money in the system and doing their damnedest to block every channel into the system, then I'd claim success (the harder it is to pull off, the greater the success), so long as the other groups of people are IC angered by the monopoly. I don't see how 'plot' differs from 'money' in this context.
In a game focusing - possibly through logistical necessity - on player-player interaction, the value of any ref-token isn't it's equitable distribution through the player-base but the degree to which players can use it to interact with other characters. In that sense, the less even the eventual distribution the more likely it is to have been successful. Just because a player has been observed to have enjoyed receiving a crown in game doesn't mean you can increase enjoyment by flooding the game with crowns.
Marios
P.S. Different thread?
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