[Wolfe]

Storyteller Introduction
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:

”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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[Wolfe]

Storyteller Introduction
Jay

First, a little introduction, in case anyone reading this doesn’t know me already- hi, I’m Jay, and I am currently the main Storyteller for the Asche Syndicate faction on the site, and also help Wolfe run some of the Haven Academy events! I also play several characters here (Carmim, Kishka, Jack Jr., and Mouche), and just a little backstory, I’ve been RPing pretty actively since about 2009, and have done my fair share of DMing in the past, but I’m super-excited to DM for you guys, here! And now that you know who I am, here’s how I like to run my events:

Basic Philosophy

Fun fact about me: I am a composer, by trade, and I’ve been told by a few people that I DM like one. In composition, there’s a saying: “melody is king.” I like to think that in RP, “narrative is king.” I’m interested in telling cool stories, and nurturing character growth and development. That’s what’s fun for me, and what’s always been my favorite part of the RPing experience. Thus, I tend to have a more character-centric take on things, as opposed to say, a more overarching world-centric style. Not that big, world-impacting, events aren’t important! They 100% are. Just that I prefer using those large-scale conflicts to influence characters’ personal conflicts and progressions.

For instance, if a character has a massive hero complex, I’ll try to put the limelight on them, through some aspect of the larger event- say, tossing a handful of Beowolves at a scared villager, so the character can rush in and maybe be the hero- or maybe fail at being the hero, providing them with some opportunities for IC reflection and growth.

Storytelling is important to me, far more than any sense of winning or losing- like Wolfe, I don’t view the DM-player dynamic as adversarial. I like to think of it as symbiotic; you toss in your characters, and their wants, needs, fears, and goals, and I’ll work with you to flesh those out in exciting, cinematic, ways. I’m a big fan of shounen-style stories, with a fair bit of grit and grime to temper the hopeful optimism of shounen a little bit. Personally, I really, really, really, want your characters to succeed! I’m rooting for them, all the way. But my job is to act as a threshold guardian on their hero’s journey- I can’t just hand them their prizes, they have to put in some serious work to get there.

As far as content goes, I like action. Not necessarily combat (though that is definitely something you can expect from me), but definitely thrilling, exciting, situations. Expect things like chases, dangerous escapes, precarious rescues, etc. I’m also a massive nerd, and I have a strong fondness for pop culture references and pastiche.

All in all, I DM because I want to cultivate an environment where characters can really shine and become better versions of themselves, over time. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t personally invested in just about every character on this site- there’s a reason I’m so meticulous about tracking their statistics and changes!

Flow of Information

I’m a firm believer in being as transparent as possible for my players. Part of that stems from being a player, myself; personally, I always try to ask as many clarifying questions as I can, sometimes in excess, so that I know exactly what I think I need to know, in order to properly respond, as my character would. I want to make that as easy as possible, OOC! If you ever have a question, no matter how dumb it seems, and no matter how many times I’ve already answered it in different ways, never be scared to ask. I’m only human- I’m 100% capable of mistakes, and forgetfulness, and sometimes my wording has room for improvement. So if I’m not being clear enough, or if you need more information, I will always be happy to give it to you.

That said, while I believe honesty, and open communication, is extremely important, and necessary for a good DM-player dynamic to succeed, I will, of course, withhold some information. That’s the nature of DMing- it wouldn’t be fun for anyone if I gave away all of my surprises. And I will only tell you things that your character would be able to know, ICly. That’s partly to reduce the risk of metagaming, both subconsciously, and intentionally, but it’s mostly there to preserve a sense of mystery and suspense. It’s fun not knowing everything! And it leads to interactions that might not happen if the “correct” path was laid out on a neon landing strip.

And as far as IC knowledge goes, my goal is to avoid telling you any more than your character, based on their background and experience, ought to know. I strive for a sense of realism, and sometimes, that means that some characters will be better-suited, or worse-suited, for different situations. If a town full of villagers is sick, because of a poisonous herb growing in the water supply, I’ll offer several routes to figure that out, but unless your character has a valid reason to know about either poisons, herbs, or some other related knowledge base, inspecting the water supply won’t reveal anything more than a bunch of plants growing there. You’ll have to go about it some other way.

Validity of Information

I also believe firmly in the use of unreliable narration as a storytelling device. NPCs will have their own underlying biases, motivations, agendas, and knowledge pools to draw on, along with differing personalities, temperaments, codes of ethics, and all manner of other variables that mean you can’t necessarily take everything they say at face value. Critical thinking is a good skill for any character to have, frankly, and I enjoy putting that skill to work. OOCly, I won’t lie to you. ICly, it’s another story- if the dastardly heroes are approaching from the east, and you, a supposedly-clever villain, asks the village idiot which way they’re coming from, and he says west, that’s on you for taking the word of a guy who is actively proud of being a dumbass. Interacting with my NPCs takes a certain measure of charisma, or at the very least, decent negotiation skills, if you want to gain their trust and earn their help.

Event Outcomes

In a broad-strokes sense, my events are generally going to be planned, hot and loose, with a generous amount of on-the-fly improvisation, reacting to character actions in ways that are consistent with the NPCs I have set out. My planning will always consist of an intro, a conflict, and a few conceptual outcomes that I think of as being pretty likely- usually, a win/lose condition, minimum, sometimes with stretch goals of some sort.

For example: For a Heist-style event, the intro would set the scene, brief the PCs on the job, and provide the space for the players to kickstart the action. Main conflict would be escaping with the cash, but there would be smaller conflicts too, like maybe a man with a gun in the bank, or getting past the guards to the vault. Outcomes would be a basic “you get away with all the money,” and “you get caught and arrested.” From there, maybe a jail break would be a good avenue for a “bonus round” of sorts, to raise the stakes a little.

But all of the stuff that happens in-between won’t usually be planned out in specifics. Outlines will be basic and simple, and I will fill them in as I go, generally- I feel that this is just the easiest way for me, personally, to get things going, and keep them moving until they finish, on my end, whereas if I tried to chart out every detail of the event, I’d probably end up pushing it back ad infinitum while I tried to perfect it.

I also highly value player agency over any kind of DM railroading- my events, generally, will be pretty sandbox-like, and filled with plot hooks that players can choose to interact with or avoid. That’s because, in accordance with my own personal philosophies, I’m not here for some kind of a weird-flex power-trip, I just want to see your characters do cool stuff. Therefore, whatever concepts I come up with are largely only relevant in terms of enabling the players, and their characters, to do what makes the most narrative sense. If that means completely abandoning a plot point, even if it’s one that I’m really excited about, that’s fine, because what matters more is player engagement. I want it to feel like every single action you take shapes the course of the event, for better or worse.

For that same reason, it goes hand in hand that I don’t consider IC failure, no matter how catastrophic, to be OOC failure- OOC, the point of RPing, at least in my opinion, is to tell a good story and have fun writing it, and sometimes losing a fight, or getting your nose bitten off by Sabyrs, is a fun part of a story to write. Therefore, while a huge success, ICly, will be rewarded with glory and IC reputation, a complete failure will be rewarded with consequences that will hopefully shape and mold your characters, and provide future plot arcs and conflicts- because let’s face it, winning every fight isn’t nearly as interesting, or as powerful of a motivating force, as losing, until you finally eke out a satisfying win.

That said, IC victory and defeat are entirely determined by IC actions, in my events. I can only give you things to respond to- making choices that lead to a good outcome, or to a bad outcome, is up to you!

Rules and Character Death

Upfront, my events will, like most events on this site, be Death-Enabled. Which means, if you make terrible decisions that would realistically lead to your character dying, then your character could very well die.

I don’t want to actively murder PCs, though.

That’s not any more fun for me than it is for you. As the DM, I could easily massacre every character on the site in one go if I really wanted to- so could anyone else. (Aside from the fact that anyone who tried that would be banned before they ever got too far) Killing PCs is easy; just throw enough Grimm at them, or big enough Grimm, and they go down, no matter how strong they are.

Death is there as a consequence.

Actions should always have appropriately scaled reactions, and death isn’t an exception. That said, if you die in any of my events, it is because you made several terrible decisions in a row, that were likely pretty obviously terrible. As much as I love rolling dice for things, bad RNG will never kill you in one of my events. It might screw you over, in some other way, or put you in a more dangerous situation, but if you die, it’s never going to be because you were just unlucky.

As mentioned above, my DM style is largely character-centric; in my view, the characters on the site absolutely are the most important characters in the world of TRP, at that given point in time. And with that, comes a certain sense of narrative leeway.

I fully believe that the site’s mechanical systems are well-designed, and in place for a reason, so make no mistake, I will absolutely not disregard those systems all willy-nilly. Narrative is king, but we still need rules to govern the world and provide it with consistency.

That said, in any RP event/campaign I’ve ever run, on TRP or off, I try to keep what I like to call the “Everybody Gets One” rule. Once, every few events, if there is a compelling enough narrative reason, I may allow a character to do something a little larger than life, for the sake of the story. For instance, if a character’s best friend is pinned under a huge support beam, and they just happen to have G strength, but try to free their friend anyways, I very well might let that slide and allow them to lift the beam just enough for their friend to escape. Things like that- a sort of one-time hero/badass card. I won’t ever use that to allow a character to win an impossible fight, of course, but if they provide me with a lot of drama to work with, then I will happily work with it. Because that’s the kind of story I like to tell; overcoming daunting odds with grit and determination.

Communication


Just a few final points of interest: firstly, when it comes to my events, I tend to prefer a loose posting order. It keeps things structured and organized, and helps me to keep the overall timeline in check- a “round” consists of one post, per character. The order within a round doesn’t matter nearly as much to me as ensuring that things don’t get unbalanced. IE, one round that ends up with three posts by X character, one post by Y character, and then Z character shows up the next round, upset that he didn’t get to do anything in the last round because X kept “breaking” post order.

It’s largely just my personal preference, and it isn’t a huge deal, but I would like for a loose post order to be maintained as well as possible, during my events. Which ideally isn’t too hard- just sticking to whatever order you enter the thread in, as best as possible. Sometimes things come up that change the post order; that’s totally expected and reasonable. If two players agree on trading places in the order, for instance, that’s usually fine, and if someone can’t post for a couple of days for whatever reason, as long as they inform everyone else, I have no problem moving them to the end of the post order. However, I will be enforcing post timers, and have no issue with skipping a player who doesn’t let me know what’s going on. I can work with most OOC-interference, but I need to know in advance, so the rest of the group isn’t stuck waiting.

I just think it makes things a little neater and orderly. But again, it is just a preference of mine, and while it should be considered my default, there will be times when I will lean towards having no posting order, especially for bigger events with more people. I will always make a note of which method I want to use, in the intro post for the event.

That said, my goal is to create compelling stories and drama- if your character ends up just grinding weak enemies, that isn’t likely very fun for either of us to write out in painstaking detail, so I’m willing to handwave fights that will very obviously end in success. I try to avoid stalling threads unnecessarily, and will try to focus on situations with higher stakes. Ideally, the kinds of situations where you aren’t dealing with an interesting obstacle will be minimal, in my events, as I try to match threats to the cast of characters I am working with, as best as I can.

OOCly, if you don’t already know me, while you’re reading this, then I’m absolutely positive you’re the type who reads all the info threads before joining the site Discord. Because I’m basically always hanging out there. I’m not hard to find, and I’m readily approachable, as much as anyone could be- if you ever have a question, about anything, but especially about my events, don’t hesitate to ask. Ping me in one of the appropriate Discord channels, or just private message me there.

I’m huge on communication as an important facet of RPing- for me to be as successful a DM as I can be, for you, I will need to know what exactly you want to accomplish, and why you’re interested in my events. Post-event feedback is very important to me, and helps me to learn and grow.

Charts are justice.

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