Roleplay, Plots and the World.

Some recent fiction/plottage has me thinking lately about how we RP and run plots, and how they may relate to the larger game world. Specifically, the SIZE of such roleplay and plots. The question I'm mainly wondering is, when does a plot become too big?

For example, currently a member of the Unity Vigil, a Union based RP supergroup, has gone missing. This is taking up the time of quite a few members and non-members time as said individual is a popular member of the Union based Galaxy Girl meets and people want her back. However, it's primarily a purely personal RP plot on the part of the character's owner and doesn't have any impact on the wider game world at all.

That's means that it's pretty easy to ignore the plot if you're not interested, and everyone is happy.

On the other hand, there have been, and will again be, plots which have much futher reaching consequences, possibly beyond those thought of by the plot originator, and these are much harder to ignore. So I have to wonder, how big is so big that really, we shouldn't do it?

Take another currently starting plot as an example. A staggering number of children at a school (was 2000, now 1000) have just been killed by a giant robot attack, according to a short piece in the newspaper thread. Whilst I have no wish to step on the toes of this plot's owner, such a huge number of deaths, especially of children, would be of 9/11 proportions if it were real, and would be a massive national tragedy. It would headline every single newspaper for weeks, every single news program would be full of it, the US president would likely visit the scene, and all in all, it would be an event of global scale as international news would also pick it up.

This, IMO, means that such an incident CANNOT be ignored by our characters and still manage to retain ICness. Therefore we either get dragged in to something we don't want to be involved in, may personally find hugely distasteful, and affect everyone's RP; or we must break character whenever it's mentioned, and totally ignore it. Easy for small plots, not so easy for such huge events.

My personal feeling is that RP plots, whilst they may be important to the people involved (and everyone wants their plots to be important), should be kept to a scale that don't affect the wider game world; or if such large scale is needed by the plot, either first run an OOC thread to guage interest, or run it privately. This way, arguments are avoided and everyone is happy.

People will ignore it anyway though

In all seriousness, I'd agree with that. My attempt at running the Arachnos Invasion made it quite clear that stuff only works if its group/personal stuff, or 'Underground' i.e. covert stuff that can be ignored/not know about if so wished for.

But, that said, I'm also not going to turn down RP Im involved in *shrug* c'est la vie

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

It's an interesting point, certainly.

This applies to smaller scales of RP, even. If you're walking through the Pocket D and you find a ninja vampire demon trying to disembowel a naive young hero, many characters might find it hard to ignore it and walk on by.

Big or small, there will always be cases where our characters simply can't ignore what's going on around them. But I would agree... the bigger the "impact" an event has on a shared RP resource, such as thousands of kids inside of Paragon, the more effort the instigating RPer should make to consider public response before starting the event.

However, as Techbot points out, even if people don't like it, they will just ignore it anyhow. :P

The problem is we are RPing in a comic based environment, and such high causality events are common and frankly ignored by heroes some times.

Case in point Marvel.

Massive interstellar war, entire planets and species being wiped out, galactic level threats battling each other. Heroes of earth informed?

They don't care they are too busy with their Civil War plot line.

That's without even getting started on the X-men, or Gotham city.

its all down to your personal viewing point ..

the UV missing team mate is a very high profile plot to the UV people, to others at GG is a oh another one bites the dust event . Most of the GG RP is very much small town , small community, events outside Paragon are wallpaper.

The mass killing is a different sort of plotage, and is set in a wider scope.

Yes such numbers of dead would be a major event, but if your not the sort of hero that deals with major events its just a news story. It may be a 9/11 proportions event, but 9/11 had little effect on the day to day work of the police in , say , Idaho, and to be honest GG is as far away as Idaho as it is from most other RP events on Union server.

Also given the CoX world with Rikti raids, zombie invasions etc etc there will be odd spikes of high death tolls.

Roleplayers will ignore other roleplayers' plots all of the time, it's inevitable and I'm glad it happens. Otherwise every Tom, Dick and Harry would be poking their noses into other people's plots and people would get drawn into plots they don't want to be involved with but have to because of their magnitude.

We're roleplaying in a city where threats to the safety of the world exist around every corner but where they're policed by more superheroes than you can shake a stick at. All of which is reported in the media (random passers by know about your exploits so mass reporting is kind of established IMHO). If I was to try and resolve it IC, I would simply say that each character sees an event and then chooses whether to get involved depending on whether they can help or not. But if there's already someone else on the job, what's the point of leaping in to help?

Still, I'd love to have a neat summary of all the plots currently running just to get an idea of what's going on around the city. But our recaps thread seems to have died a death in recent months.

I think we've been a relatively successful RP community so far, even if it is a little divided; GG/PD and the general silly/serious differences in all our RP styles. The majority of us Unioners have happily agreed that certain rules are a given, because it's only common sense. Plot-breaking god-mod characters or items are kept out of plots, agreed. In-game cannon events such as the Rikti Wars, the Rikti revelation and the now crowded bridge between Praetoria and Primal Earth... all accepted and agreed on to have occurred in our shared community.

It's when it comes to player-created community plots, or as Sadron pointed out, some character plots too even, that a few people get the hump. Complaints surface about the shared world being permanently affected. What I would like to add is that one, it's a valid concern to have as we must all protect our Unionverse from self-destructive plots. However, like Temporis's Requiem War, Britanic's Supremacy Plot, My Rogue Wars 1 & 2, Alpha's Arachnos Invasion, Mechano's Chronodyne Incident, Ammon's Heroes for People, Big Lunk's Council of War, Big Game/Bathory's Open Season and as mentioned above, Cactus Brawler's Saint John Terror Attack (Now revealed to us OOC to have been orchestrated by Tomb to violently spur the heroes into taking extreme action against the rising number of demonkind). All these community plots share the scale of the real world 9/11 disaster. CB said it; in a comic-book world such as this, 9/11 type terror attacks happen all the time so not detailing the President's/Government's reaction to it or even Freedom Phalanx's (and your hero's) awareness of the incident is not so far-fetched. They could be busy handling an even bigger catastrophe or maybe they're letting Longbow deal with it. Pick your excuse.

On a personal level, my hero recognises the Requiem War and all the community plots that followed but I don't subscribe to GG and as it was mainly GG-ran, I left it to them. ICly, my hero did a similar thing; he left the crisis to the trusted supers that were involved. He mourns with those that suffered losses and celebrates the overall victory. I expect that is the approach of many other RP'ers who for whatever reason did not directly partake in whichever community plots.

To summarise, I don't think we can or should, as a whole, try to limit plot magnitudes as we do character-godliness magnitudes, based on the argument that it forces an unwanted story to reach our characters. Why? Simple, its a shared universe and a massively multiplayer game. You don't like the X-Men's world-changing story, do like the Avengers; ignore it and go make your own.

Although some would stick to proposed limits, others wouldn't and would then call foul on those trying to impose unenforceable rules on their plots. It's up to each participant as to whether they join in on a plot or not and to find their own reasons for not getting sucked into an event be it simply ignoring the event right up to not recognising it as part of their RP canon.

As it is, I'm finding more personal, individual plots more fulfilling these days rather than OMFG!!! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD type plots (and I'll hold my hand up to being guilty of running some of those too). :P

I quite agree that trying to apply any kind of limit will never work, and we shouldn't try. The point of this thread isn't to try to impose limits on people's fun.

However, what I think people should do is, when they have an idea for a plot, take a long, careful look at it. If it's something that has wide reaching consequences, such as something like mass killings, then consider making OOC posts about it first to guage interest. If the wider community doesn't seem interested, by all means still run it if you want, but consider other avenues of running it rather than the shared world. Possibly an alternate dimension begging for help, or just keep it to private channels. Try not to bother people who don't want to be bothered, and you avoid friction. At the end of the day, it's all just about having fun, after all.

Hell, many people decided that the Requiem War plot happened in another reality so as not to be bothered by it; and indeed, most of it happened on the forums so it could easily have done so...

Well, this is a good discussion, and the sort of thing that I like to get my teeth into (as people may have noticed, I'm very much interested in Roleplay Theory and Dynamics, so this is right up my alley).

There are several degrees of "Plot" to consider in this matter.

1) Dev-driven storylines. Ouroboros, The Rikti War, Cimerora, Rikti Invasions, Zombie Invasions. These are the things that we pretty much have to acknowledge IC, otherwise there's no point RPing in Paragon City, because these things happen in Paragon.

2) Wide-effect Player Plots. These are the plots that should have wide-reaching effects (i.e. they would if they happened in the real world - everyone would know about them, everyone would talk about them). A prime example of this is the Unionverse's Requiem War.

3) Large-scale Player Plots. These are plots that are big in scope, but that aren't something everyone would necessarily have to acknowledge or be aware of, IC. There are innumerable examples that I could list, but basically anything that gets a number of players involved, over the course of several days/weeks/months would fall into this category.

4) Personal Character Plots. These are plots that directly affect either a single character or a small group of characters (a SuperGroup, for example), and will not garner wider interest.

The issue that has been raised in this thread is pretty much "should anyone activate Wide-effect Plots?", and it is a difficult question to answer.

My first inkling is to say "no", because there is the potential for a great deal of grief that falls OOC - Union has seen it, time and time again.

However, there is also the argument that a plot is a plot is a plot, and the scale of the plot shouldn't be allowed to put off the Plot-Master.

The question to ask, before activating a plotline with an impact (whether direct, or simply emotional) on other characters, ask yourself which of the above categories you think the plot falls into. Then bump it up one, because the odds are that you're wrong - we're RPers, our characters like ot get involved, and more people than you expect will feed off the plotline you throw out. If you are not comfortable creating a plot that hits Wide-Effect (and the inevitable ensuing grief it will cause), then it's a good idea not to plan a plot as a Large-Scale one, unless you are planning to keep very tight control on who gets involved and what actions can be taken in the plot. Ask yourself "If Ellie Stoneburg, Richard Huntington, Pious Hunter and Statesman saw this on TV, what would they do?" And if you don't like the answer "Rush in, all guns blazing", then the plot is too wide, and needs to be tightened up.

Plot-mastery is an artform, not a science. You can't put numbers to "how many characters are affected = the size of the plot". The best course of action is to consider the characters you know about and try to imagine how they will respond.

I've rather purposefully left out discussion of player reactions to certain plotlines, but just to note it at the end: Emotive events (the murder of children, bestiality, ****, torture, paedophilia) will trigger an emotional response from other players. Usually disgust. And that disgust may find itself directed at the person who brought it into existence: The person who created the plot.

We're generally mature enough to recognise the difference between the fantasy we're playing and the real world, but if someone activates multiple plotlines involving strongly emotive events, then other players can easily interpret that as an intentional attempt to force the emotional response from them, and will, people being people, take it out on the person running those plotlines.

Yeah, thinking about it a little bit more than first glance, an attack of that level that seems to be orchestrated by the Court would result in a City wide APB, with express orders to bring all sorts of crack down on the Court. Theres really no two ways about. You can't just brush a thousand dead school kids under the carpet; even with the Rikti invasions and bombing runs, thats what the Heroes are for; they engage them as soon as they show up, preventing the worst of the damage.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I got permission for the plot from Pious and Bathory before hand, saying it would be a pretty massive game changer.

Its not supposed to be something that can just be brushed under the carpet either, its an attempt to instigate a war.

I read a little about the plot that FFM posted in regard too.
I have not read all, I asked some members of my sg ooc like and well...

What I'm sitting left with is that the Character Bath is screwed, she is as good as dead/not existing at all. This goes for everyone that follows her.
Cause I agree with FFM. Killing 1000 children and who knows how many adults is a major event that would have repercussions globally. Like 9/11. The world media would go crazy, the government would have to act. No matter what, Bath would now be like a terrorist. Every hero in Paragon, Longbow and police unit, would be after her and they would find Castle Bathory and reduce it and the responsible to cinders.
This with the world and medias blessing.

Nice initiative, but too many deaths to be believable. And thus loosing the immersion, cause if the worlds heroes and government do nothing... its just not believable.

Had it been a city block, hey... tragedy, terrible tragedy. But it would not have needed to involve every character that we have in the game. It could be ignored by most players as there are other things that happen.
But
1000 children?... That means every player, every character.. this cannot be ignored.

Even other villains would jump on the oppertunity to take down a rival (Bathory), sure there might be some rivalry between heroes and villain, but hey.. it would be for who gets to Bathory first. (and how can I benefit most towards this?) And with Mass media coverage outside castle Bathory to see this epic battle. (World vs Bathory).
Not even a Bookie would give the responsible a snowballs chance in a very warm place.

So, again, nice initiative... but too many casualties.
(Not read the entire story progression, but from what I have understood from players that has followed the story... my impression is that if the character Bathory is not defeated/killed it will not be believable. Sorry no Zig for Bathory, its Kill on sight)

I went for 1000 because it's a nice round number, it's actually 150 maybe 170 higher than an actual attack on a school in a city like Paragon would produce.

Assuming of course that people see Paragon as a New York sort of city.

I know I used CB's plot as an example, as it was his newspaper post that got me thinking about this, BUT I'd like this thread to try to stay generic if it's at all possible. CB's plot can and will be dealt with ICly as appropriate. What I'm wanting to discuss is more the generic wide-plot scope, and where we should draw the line.

I think if enough warning and planning is done, then slightly larger plots can be possible. Before I tried to kick off Operation Escalation, I did make sure to ask around...practically every day, really, for a good couple of weeks. And that was nearly a month or more before the thing even kicked off.
Well, in fact, if you count the attempt I was going to do until I14 kicked off and everyone got distracted, the thing was in the pipes for over a year.

My own time getting limited and RL stuff occuring, along with....communciations breakdown, lets call it, lead to it being more a caffuffle than it should have been. That, and RPvP only works when you have even numbers. The Heroes, facing a mass of VEATs, were understandably a little miffed by the end of it, so it wa probably best to call it a day when it did.

I think the line is, and always will be; Have consideration for other peoples chars and the implications of the plot, and a clear goal of what you want to happen so you can keep things on track, while trying not to railroad too much.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

The problem is, we are playing a game of Super Heroes and Super Villains, a setting in which some one could quite conceivably steal the moon, or turn all the buildings in the city into monkeys that they control.

If you're saying people aren't allowed to do that, well you take the Super away from the Super Villain, reducing them to the level of costumed bank robbers, actually lower than that because Weather Wizards, weather control would be too much since it'd be affecting the climate.

As for why your character doesn't react IC when OOC you don't want to?

Well that's mainly your problem, though you could always ask why Su8perman's not in every DC comic, and go with that.