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Story focus

Posted by Apostate on 12/01/18
So something that concerns me a great deal, and something that I believe is unhealthy for the game, is how some systems we put in to create RP are working in practice, with clue sharing as a specific example of this. When we create actions and clue sharing, that's ideally done to give people a reason to get together and RP, and move stories forward, but one thing that drives me crazy is when in practice they turn into OOC discussions and planning sessions. We just don't want systems when the most effective way to approach it is to draw the RP to a halt and interrupt the flow of a scene, and then discuss things ooc. So we'll be doing things that I think will make for a smoother, more story focused experience, but I want to make it clear to people that I think some scenes are very unhealthy. For someone excited about lore, and wanting to know more about the stories, the last thing that will help with that is inviting them to a scene and then methodically peeling off clues one after another. That turns it from an exciting story into someone doing the equivalent of sharing their vacation pictures to a complete stranger. That's just as boring as it sounds, and very unhelpful. I think clues are important, because they show evidence that a character knows about something, and we want to use that more for a secret, but ideally, any clue share should be able to answer three things:

1. What is the story behind this clue? What is it illustrating for them? What relevance does this lore have to them?

2. Why am I sharing this? How does it help them get involved? What goals are they working towards that this helps with?

3. Why is this interesting to them? What about their character would find this relevant? What hooks does this play into?

I really want systems used that way. It's very easy for some people to forget that just spamming other people with command runs is likely not very fun for them, and not as helpful as they think, so I really would like people to ask questions like that before they do code runs and if something can't be explained purely in IC terms then it probably isn't a good fit for how I designed the system.

Now there's something upcoming that I am excited about, that I think will help a great deal to have a greater story focus, but will post about that soon.