Post by Wolfe on Dec 23, 2019 20:23:49 GMT -5
Storyteller Introduction
Wolfe
Wolfe
I figured it would be a helpful thing to get a writeup about how each DM tends to run things and what their mindset is, so players know what to expect. I’ve run Events 1 through 3, and Mini-Events 1 and 2 as of the time of this writing. I’ve done more posts storytelling events than I have with my actual characters at this point, and that will probably remain true because I use this as an outlet for creativity. Storytellers will get blurbs here when they run either two mini-events or a finale thread for a full site event.
Basic Philosophy
Winning and losing is completely irrelevant to me and I do not perceive the relationship between a storyteller and a player to be adversarial. I could not care less who wins and who loses, my goal is to create dramatic situations. I tend to use a lot of ethical dilemmas in my full events and play with the flow and reliability of information more than most people do. While I will never lie to you OOC, I will refuse to answer questions and frequently force characters to make decisions with imperfect information in order to heighten narrative tension and drama.
I’m going to add quotes from people that I respect a lot and draw a lot of inspiration insofar as This is how you run a narrative inspiration from. I’m not saying that I am anywhere close to the level of any of these people, just that I share many of their viewpoints on issues related to storytelling.
Flow of Information
“It is profoundly unsportsmanlike to trick your players by withholding information just because your character didn’t think to ask for it.” – Matthew Colville
That does not mean I play your character for you. All information I believe to be relevant will be in available to your character, and out of character if you have an idea of how to get more clarification or knowledge based on what your character might know you are more than free to ask. A combat school graduate, for example, will be much more well versed in how a hunter is supposed to act and will have a formal education to fall back on. The information I believe you need will be in posts that your character is in, and I will not correct any bad assumptions made off of that information unless it is something that would be glaringly obvious to your character. Take for example the following:
Someone could wrongly assume from the above that they had won, and the bandits have learned their lesson and will never bother the PCs again and I would not correct them. You have no information of where, why, or how the fight happened but most people reading the above will be able to correctly guess that the bandits split apart in order to have a better chance of escape number one and are going to tell someone about the new people who arrived and ripped one of their buddies in half. They are guards, after all, and having someone around to do the boring standing around and informing you of threats is the entire purpose of having a guard in the first place. Calling them guards was not an accident, but I am also not going to define to you the player the definition of one in the post and spoon feed you that information. I will give you all the pieces needed to put together the puzzle, but if you wish to be stumped you can remain stumped forever and I will not solve that puzzle for you regardless of how bad the outcome ends up being. After all, catastrophic failure is dramatic.
Validity of Information
NPCs talking is never going to be objective truth, and there will be many times where it will be presented as such. A Council member who believes strongly in the autocratic authority of the position may very well explain the relationships between hunters and the Council thusly:
If someone asks me OOC if that information is true, I’ll probably just ask them to make their own conclusions. I would have mentioned elsewhere in the thread or in the briefing about the Council member’s views and political affiliation, and while the character is confronted with all of that information, I would not correct anyone who legitimately believed no hunter could refuse an order from the Council under any circumstances. I mean, how could people go around breaking oaths? That never happens! Let’s not even talk about the fact the fact that the premise requires one to accept that the Council has ultimate authority of Mistral in the first place, which is true in law but perhaps not in practice. It is completely true information to the Councilman, because he firmly believes in the system of government and does not consider the possibility that a hunter sworn to protect mankind would disobey an order from the leader of the country they reside in.
This means that information is only as good as the character giving it is able to perceive those events in an objective manner, and that will vary wildly. I will not lie to you OOC but will frequently refuse to clarify things because I am not here to roleplay your character for you. My job is to set up scenarios which are dramatic, and I use the flow of information to help create tension. Questions like ”Did I hit that Grimm? will always be answered. Questions like Why would the village council betray their village? is something you have to find out as players with the expectation that all the pieces you need to put together that answer will be put in front of you unless you blatantly ignore hooks.
Event Outcomes
”Say it with me: “If you plan out a plot, you’re railroading your players.” Now, punch yourself in the throat for saying it. I’ll wait.” – The Angry GM
If, for example, you hear someone screaming bloody murder outside your door and the sounds of things breaking and choose to go back to sleep – the loss of information is your fault. Your character will have committed an unambiguously evil act and completely disregarded human life in ways that have the immediate consequence of you missing the information that any amount of intervention would have provided and a potential ally in the person you could have saved. Some people tend to believe that roleplaying is like a video game where they can just ignore what’s going on with no consequences, and that’s not how I run things.
In every single event I run, I know exactly what happens if the PCs never arrived or are such cowards that they take no action once they arrive. Those actions will happen at exactly the point of time they are planned to happen, completely unimpeded unless interrupted. If Grimm were supposed to attack in the event timeline on Day 2 that is a threat to destroy the village, if the PCs either don’t show up or hide in their rooms the village is destroyed. If the objective of the event was something that one of the villagers needed to assist them with, then that objective is no longer possible, and the event ends without rewards. This is the most boring outcome possible, and I have no desire to run 10 threads of evil characters trying to loot the remains of the town in order to try and get rich.
Since all I care about are creating dramatic situations, whether or not PCs succeed in their objective is largely irrelevant to me. What I am expecting and what I reward EP for is for PCs to have a goal and try to attain it in a way that isn’t so boring that I want to stop roleplaying. If the PCs tried to save the town and failed, that’s super dramatic and I will find some alternative way for the original task to be completed. If the PCs hid in the attic, reinforced the door, took some NyQuil, and slept off the attack as hundreds of innocents died around them, I will not find an alternative way for the original task to be completed and the event is over.
Full site events move the plot of the site forward in some way, and that movement can be positive or negative. I as the storyteller could not care less if they are positive or negative so long as that it is interesting, and function best when players also share a commitment with making things interesting and dramatic.
Rules and Character Death
”Rather than being nebulously chosen by the universe at large, [the characters have] been literally chosen by a sentient and potentially fallible entity.” -- Red
Your character is not the chosen one. There is no force that chose you to be important, and indeed your character is just one of many in the suitably mediocre class at Haven who was given the opportunity to attend solely because the old student base of actually qualified people are all dead. The recruiting staff are accepting literally anyone except for the truly incompetent at this point, and being declared suitably mediocre does not make you any form of chosen one or notable in any way compared to your peers. Fundamentally, the world does not revolve around your character. Your character can make an impact on the world, but that would be the result of sustained effort and commitment on the character's part rather than a preordained right granted because your application was approved.
I do not believe in having NPCs or PCs act out of character in order to help players. I also do not believe that player characters should be protected by acts of divine intervention simply because they are player characters. Death is so hard in this system with aura and the fact that I will always provide a one-post delay between health reaching critical levels and the death blow that death means that your character has chosen to fight enemies that could kill them so far away from any teammates that nobody can help in that one post grace period. If that happens, your character dies as this is a site with Death Enabled Site Events as standard.
One of the things that I try to maintain is plausibility of events. I mean this insofar as while this is a fantasy world with genocidal monsters and superpowers there still must be consistency within that framework. If aura suddenly stopped working for your character, there must be a really good reason for that, or the entire premise falls apart. Aura is always supposed to protect you from physical damage, so if it doesn’t without being shattered it needs to have an airtight explanation. If the rule that Aura protects you from all physical damage is broken too many times, then it ceases to be an effective rule, so anyone invested in plausibility has incentive to almost never mess with the way that aura works.
So your character lives is not a good enough reason for me to disregard rules as a storyteller. You accepted the framework of mechanics and the combat system when you signed up for this site, and we have all mutually agreed to work within that framework. If I disregarded the system entirely at the only time where it actually mattered, there is absolutely no point in having a combat system. If even a minor change is done to the way the combat system works, it will have to be because there is a compelling reason. Because I do not give a single fuck about whether your character lives or dies or whether you win or lose, that reason must actually appeal to the goal I am trying to do in making the situation dramatic. Even then, there are limits.
Going on for one more post than usual before total exhaustion because your best friend/family member/mentor figure/etc. was attacked so you can do an all-or-nothing charge to try and save them before you collapse? That’s dramatic as fuck and doesn’t require a lot of wiggle room, let’s do it. Two skills are evenly matched, but you decide your character will output so much emotion that it will draw all the Grimm around in order to get a momentary advantage to accomplish whatever task they needed? Sure, that’s dramatic as hell and again doesn’t require a lot of rule bending. Decided to wander off alone into a Grimm infested forest and you want a suite of powerups to avoid dying even though you were ordered to stay with the group? Nah dude, you did that to yourself and you’re going to die.
OOC Availability
Neither winning nor losing are interesting. What’s interesting is what comes after the win or loss...
The consequences that follow from the players choices are one of the most important parts of the game… They make the players feel like their decisions matter. They make the players feel like their choices are going to pay off. Or bite them in the a$&. And that’s the essence of role-playing. – The Angry GM
There will be times what I think is important for you to know and what you think is important to know are different, and in that case the way to argue for more information is to come up with a reason why your character would have some sort of information on what you want to know about. If your character is an illiterate barbarian who lived in the woods their entire life with a lone and elderly man whose homeschool consisted of learning kung fu instead of math, science, and history there is absolutely no reason for you to know about any societal norms or political affairs. If your character was a political activist in the past, they might be reasonably expected to be able to know at least a brief overview of the major power players in their area.
If your argument comes down to I need to know this before I make my decision and I determine after a re-read that I gave you all the information I think you needed, I will simply say no. People make decisions with imperfect information literally every day of their lives, and hunters are no different. If you have issues making decisions without perfect information, do not sign up for my events. My goal is to create meaningful and dramatic decisions for players to make and events with stakes that matter. If I make the decision for you, the decision and thus the thread is pointless. Roleplay is an inherently collaborative hobby, and you have to make decisions in scenarios I run, or I will simply skip you and assume your character is wracked with as much indecision as the player once enough time has passed. My obligation as a storyteller is not to you the individual, but to the people participating in the event as a collective. That means that if you the player force a decision where I have to choose between the right of the individual to make perfect knowledge decisions that they're comfortable with and the collective right of everyone else to actually play the event they signed up for, I'm picking everyone else.
On a last note, I have never and will never use strict posting order in events and anyone who expects me to do so will be sorely disappointed. I do not see it as my duty as a DM to provide pointless posts with no consequences just because it is arbitrarily my turn, and I have zero problem not posting for several cycles of posts if the PCs stall in a place where nothing is happening around them. I am not going to roleplay every lesser Grimm that attacks your characters, because stalling the pacing for a fight with no consequences and no stakes and no danger whatsoever to your character is a waste of not only my time but everyone else's time at all. I provide focus to fights and situations with consequences and actual risk, and explicitly allow players to write their way through those that don't.
We already know you win a fight against a vastly less powerful Grimm than your character, so why would we spend the next two weeks roleplaying that fight out when it can be concluded in a paragraph or less in one of your posts? I hound a lot more on pacing than one might expect when people fixate on something with zero risk for long periods of time OOC, and will sometimes force time skips or distribute information OOC in worst case situations where one character decides to carefully examine the curvature of rocks nearby and bring pacing to a halt for everyone else. That's not interesting or engaging for anyone except for that one person, and I feel zero obligation to ruin both my experience and those of others for the sake of those who refuse to participate in a way that allows anyone else to also participate in a meaningful way.
Basic Philosophy
Winning and losing is completely irrelevant to me and I do not perceive the relationship between a storyteller and a player to be adversarial. I could not care less who wins and who loses, my goal is to create dramatic situations. I tend to use a lot of ethical dilemmas in my full events and play with the flow and reliability of information more than most people do. While I will never lie to you OOC, I will refuse to answer questions and frequently force characters to make decisions with imperfect information in order to heighten narrative tension and drama.
I’m going to add quotes from people that I respect a lot and draw a lot of inspiration insofar as This is how you run a narrative inspiration from. I’m not saying that I am anywhere close to the level of any of these people, just that I share many of their viewpoints on issues related to storytelling.
Flow of Information
“It is profoundly unsportsmanlike to trick your players by withholding information just because your character didn’t think to ask for it.” – Matthew Colville
That does not mean I play your character for you. All information I believe to be relevant will be in available to your character, and out of character if you have an idea of how to get more clarification or knowledge based on what your character might know you are more than free to ask. A combat school graduate, for example, will be much more well versed in how a hunter is supposed to act and will have a formal education to fall back on. The information I believe you need will be in posts that your character is in, and I will not correct any bad assumptions made off of that information unless it is something that would be glaringly obvious to your character. Take for example the following:
”The last two guards in the area saw how the angry teenage redhead tore their comrade in half with their bare hands, and one of them pulled out a glass vial from their pocket and threw it on the ground with an expression of abject horror on his face at the grisly display. A cloud of steam then rose up, and both of the guards turned around and started sprinting in different directions in a full on retreat. One of them took the first turn into the nearest alleyway, and the other jumped through a closed window of the nearest house to get out of the street and get out of sight.”
Someone could wrongly assume from the above that they had won, and the bandits have learned their lesson and will never bother the PCs again and I would not correct them. You have no information of where, why, or how the fight happened but most people reading the above will be able to correctly guess that the bandits split apart in order to have a better chance of escape number one and are going to tell someone about the new people who arrived and ripped one of their buddies in half. They are guards, after all, and having someone around to do the boring standing around and informing you of threats is the entire purpose of having a guard in the first place. Calling them guards was not an accident, but I am also not going to define to you the player the definition of one in the post and spoon feed you that information. I will give you all the pieces needed to put together the puzzle, but if you wish to be stumped you can remain stumped forever and I will not solve that puzzle for you regardless of how bad the outcome ends up being. After all, catastrophic failure is dramatic.
Validity of Information
NPCs talking is never going to be objective truth, and there will be many times where it will be presented as such. A Council member who believes strongly in the autocratic authority of the position may very well explain the relationships between hunters and the Council thusly:
”Hunters exist for the defense of the realm, and it is the Council who have the mandate to guide that defense. If the Council asks for a Hunter to do something, they must accept because they swore an oath to protect Mistral.”
If someone asks me OOC if that information is true, I’ll probably just ask them to make their own conclusions. I would have mentioned elsewhere in the thread or in the briefing about the Council member’s views and political affiliation, and while the character is confronted with all of that information, I would not correct anyone who legitimately believed no hunter could refuse an order from the Council under any circumstances. I mean, how could people go around breaking oaths? That never happens! Let’s not even talk about the fact the fact that the premise requires one to accept that the Council has ultimate authority of Mistral in the first place, which is true in law but perhaps not in practice. It is completely true information to the Councilman, because he firmly believes in the system of government and does not consider the possibility that a hunter sworn to protect mankind would disobey an order from the leader of the country they reside in.
This means that information is only as good as the character giving it is able to perceive those events in an objective manner, and that will vary wildly. I will not lie to you OOC but will frequently refuse to clarify things because I am not here to roleplay your character for you. My job is to set up scenarios which are dramatic, and I use the flow of information to help create tension. Questions like ”Did I hit that Grimm? will always be answered. Questions like Why would the village council betray their village? is something you have to find out as players with the expectation that all the pieces you need to put together that answer will be put in front of you unless you blatantly ignore hooks.
Event Outcomes
”Say it with me: “If you plan out a plot, you’re railroading your players.” Now, punch yourself in the throat for saying it. I’ll wait.” – The Angry GM
If, for example, you hear someone screaming bloody murder outside your door and the sounds of things breaking and choose to go back to sleep – the loss of information is your fault. Your character will have committed an unambiguously evil act and completely disregarded human life in ways that have the immediate consequence of you missing the information that any amount of intervention would have provided and a potential ally in the person you could have saved. Some people tend to believe that roleplaying is like a video game where they can just ignore what’s going on with no consequences, and that’s not how I run things.
In every single event I run, I know exactly what happens if the PCs never arrived or are such cowards that they take no action once they arrive. Those actions will happen at exactly the point of time they are planned to happen, completely unimpeded unless interrupted. If Grimm were supposed to attack in the event timeline on Day 2 that is a threat to destroy the village, if the PCs either don’t show up or hide in their rooms the village is destroyed. If the objective of the event was something that one of the villagers needed to assist them with, then that objective is no longer possible, and the event ends without rewards. This is the most boring outcome possible, and I have no desire to run 10 threads of evil characters trying to loot the remains of the town in order to try and get rich.
Since all I care about are creating dramatic situations, whether or not PCs succeed in their objective is largely irrelevant to me. What I am expecting and what I reward EP for is for PCs to have a goal and try to attain it in a way that isn’t so boring that I want to stop roleplaying. If the PCs tried to save the town and failed, that’s super dramatic and I will find some alternative way for the original task to be completed. If the PCs hid in the attic, reinforced the door, took some NyQuil, and slept off the attack as hundreds of innocents died around them, I will not find an alternative way for the original task to be completed and the event is over.
Full site events move the plot of the site forward in some way, and that movement can be positive or negative. I as the storyteller could not care less if they are positive or negative so long as that it is interesting, and function best when players also share a commitment with making things interesting and dramatic.
Rules and Character Death
”Rather than being nebulously chosen by the universe at large, [the characters have] been literally chosen by a sentient and potentially fallible entity.” -- Red
Your character is not the chosen one. There is no force that chose you to be important, and indeed your character is just one of many in the suitably mediocre class at Haven who was given the opportunity to attend solely because the old student base of actually qualified people are all dead. The recruiting staff are accepting literally anyone except for the truly incompetent at this point, and being declared suitably mediocre does not make you any form of chosen one or notable in any way compared to your peers. Fundamentally, the world does not revolve around your character. Your character can make an impact on the world, but that would be the result of sustained effort and commitment on the character's part rather than a preordained right granted because your application was approved.
I do not believe in having NPCs or PCs act out of character in order to help players. I also do not believe that player characters should be protected by acts of divine intervention simply because they are player characters. Death is so hard in this system with aura and the fact that I will always provide a one-post delay between health reaching critical levels and the death blow that death means that your character has chosen to fight enemies that could kill them so far away from any teammates that nobody can help in that one post grace period. If that happens, your character dies as this is a site with Death Enabled Site Events as standard.
One of the things that I try to maintain is plausibility of events. I mean this insofar as while this is a fantasy world with genocidal monsters and superpowers there still must be consistency within that framework. If aura suddenly stopped working for your character, there must be a really good reason for that, or the entire premise falls apart. Aura is always supposed to protect you from physical damage, so if it doesn’t without being shattered it needs to have an airtight explanation. If the rule that Aura protects you from all physical damage is broken too many times, then it ceases to be an effective rule, so anyone invested in plausibility has incentive to almost never mess with the way that aura works.
So your character lives is not a good enough reason for me to disregard rules as a storyteller. You accepted the framework of mechanics and the combat system when you signed up for this site, and we have all mutually agreed to work within that framework. If I disregarded the system entirely at the only time where it actually mattered, there is absolutely no point in having a combat system. If even a minor change is done to the way the combat system works, it will have to be because there is a compelling reason. Because I do not give a single fuck about whether your character lives or dies or whether you win or lose, that reason must actually appeal to the goal I am trying to do in making the situation dramatic. Even then, there are limits.
Going on for one more post than usual before total exhaustion because your best friend/family member/mentor figure/etc. was attacked so you can do an all-or-nothing charge to try and save them before you collapse? That’s dramatic as fuck and doesn’t require a lot of wiggle room, let’s do it. Two skills are evenly matched, but you decide your character will output so much emotion that it will draw all the Grimm around in order to get a momentary advantage to accomplish whatever task they needed? Sure, that’s dramatic as hell and again doesn’t require a lot of rule bending. Decided to wander off alone into a Grimm infested forest and you want a suite of powerups to avoid dying even though you were ordered to stay with the group? Nah dude, you did that to yourself and you’re going to die.
OOC Availability
Neither winning nor losing are interesting. What’s interesting is what comes after the win or loss...
The consequences that follow from the players choices are one of the most important parts of the game… They make the players feel like their decisions matter. They make the players feel like their choices are going to pay off. Or bite them in the a$&. And that’s the essence of role-playing. – The Angry GM
There will be times what I think is important for you to know and what you think is important to know are different, and in that case the way to argue for more information is to come up with a reason why your character would have some sort of information on what you want to know about. If your character is an illiterate barbarian who lived in the woods their entire life with a lone and elderly man whose homeschool consisted of learning kung fu instead of math, science, and history there is absolutely no reason for you to know about any societal norms or political affairs. If your character was a political activist in the past, they might be reasonably expected to be able to know at least a brief overview of the major power players in their area.
If your argument comes down to I need to know this before I make my decision and I determine after a re-read that I gave you all the information I think you needed, I will simply say no. People make decisions with imperfect information literally every day of their lives, and hunters are no different. If you have issues making decisions without perfect information, do not sign up for my events. My goal is to create meaningful and dramatic decisions for players to make and events with stakes that matter. If I make the decision for you, the decision and thus the thread is pointless. Roleplay is an inherently collaborative hobby, and you have to make decisions in scenarios I run, or I will simply skip you and assume your character is wracked with as much indecision as the player once enough time has passed. My obligation as a storyteller is not to you the individual, but to the people participating in the event as a collective. That means that if you the player force a decision where I have to choose between the right of the individual to make perfect knowledge decisions that they're comfortable with and the collective right of everyone else to actually play the event they signed up for, I'm picking everyone else.
On a last note, I have never and will never use strict posting order in events and anyone who expects me to do so will be sorely disappointed. I do not see it as my duty as a DM to provide pointless posts with no consequences just because it is arbitrarily my turn, and I have zero problem not posting for several cycles of posts if the PCs stall in a place where nothing is happening around them. I am not going to roleplay every lesser Grimm that attacks your characters, because stalling the pacing for a fight with no consequences and no stakes and no danger whatsoever to your character is a waste of not only my time but everyone else's time at all. I provide focus to fights and situations with consequences and actual risk, and explicitly allow players to write their way through those that don't.
We already know you win a fight against a vastly less powerful Grimm than your character, so why would we spend the next two weeks roleplaying that fight out when it can be concluded in a paragraph or less in one of your posts? I hound a lot more on pacing than one might expect when people fixate on something with zero risk for long periods of time OOC, and will sometimes force time skips or distribute information OOC in worst case situations where one character decides to carefully examine the curvature of rocks nearby and bring pacing to a halt for everyone else. That's not interesting or engaging for anyone except for that one person, and I feel zero obligation to ruin both my experience and those of others for the sake of those who refuse to participate in a way that allows anyone else to also participate in a meaningful way.
Ice cream is justice.
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