City Events

[Dice]

This sounds totally awesome and I hate to be a downer about it, but here was my first reaction:

"No, I don't want to run a ST about these events! I want to PARTICIPATE, not run something!"

And I'm one of the more likely-to-run-ST players around, I think, just based on past performance.

Additionally, my ideas just don't fit the ST setup in my eyes because a lot of them aren't events, period. I'm seeing this a lot more like a tabletop sort of idea - your GM tells you Something is Happening and you say what you want to do in response to it. A lot of those 'do in response' things don't lend themselves to full-out scenes, but are much more RPA style.

Let's take the lynching somebody in the Vandagan quarter for homosexuality. You'll want to do things like find out who the victims were, question the witnesses, etc - investigatory work. It might (in fact, it hopefully WOULD) culminate in an event, but not always, dependent on the event - and most of it would fit much better in the framework of RPA.

So the single-player-in-charge model might work better than allowing multiple STs, since so much of it would kind of require this RPA-style interaction as opposed to actual scenes. Not saying you couldn't let somebody springboard their own STs OFF the event, but I think the core 'resolution' of the event would have to have somebody centrally handling it. For example, there has to be one actual TRUTH about what happened for any kind of investigation RP to work out, and that's problematized if you have multiple people running STs - for staff, parceling out the right amounts of truth to the right people is probably MORE work than handling it themselves.

But the problem I see there, with a single-player-in-charge model, is that the most excited players are going to want to participate in events rather than run them. I think that's also part of why we don't get a lot of STs in general. So... I really think the way the staff articulated this works best, albeit with an option that if a player's really into taking on one of these mini-events, why not let them?

[Leech]

Seems like that's a lot of work staff side, either way, and continuity will be very hard to upkeep whichever way it's decided to implement the system. Good luck!

[Kinaed]

*chuckle* We wanted to hire a staffer to do this, but the person we had in mind said no.

Casimir and I have a parallel vision, but my version is slightly more centralized with the idea that players interact with plot managers (who are staff) through a request system with embedded rewards. The key that I think Casimir is getting at is not keeping the plot "keys to the castle" in staff hands, and I agree that STP plots around city events are a good idea

I also see what Dice is saying about STP plots not being highly incentivized... I naively assumed telling a story would be its own reward, but I understand that whilst this may be true, it's still hard work and some people need a bit more of a boost than feeling good to encourage then to sacrifice their time for others. I'll look at that more thoroughly. Definitely, whatever we go with in regards to city events SHOULD work nicely WITH the story system instead of against it.

Ultimately, however, nothing here at all suggests city events aren't a great idea. The implementation just needs to be well done and supportive of RP instead of a detractor.