Let's Plot (split from RAT)

[Miradus]

>craft idea 2.idea 3.idea into a viable thread

1. "Help!" says a blue-haired templar. "My personal aide, Miss Hotbottom, has disappeared into the wilderness with some valuables which belong to me. Find out where she went and who she went with, and be the instrument of my vengeance!"

Clues: who was she seen with in the Gaj? Which gate did they leave from? Anything overheard?

2. A dirty, hunchbacked gith approaches you but doesn't immediately attack. He holds out his hands and in it you see a ring bearing the emblem of the Golden Macguffin, the symbol of House Deeppockets, the sole makers of rare and valuable silk undergarments. The gith points to the sky, indicating the movement of the sun, then holds up three fingers. It is clearly communicating that they have a hostage and demand something valuable in return, or else in three days. Who do they hold and what can be done about it?

Clues: Who is missing from the merchant house? Can a scout be found to infiltrate the gith encampment? Will a rival house send out its mercenaries to try to prevent the recovery?

3. A rare and valuable flower is going to bloom during the next conjunction of the three moons. Gemmer SitsTavern needs it for her potion of longevity. Can you fetch it from the secret Grove of Regret? She would certainly pass your name on to her superiors so you could become known as a Reliable Person.

Clues: Where in the heck is the grove of regret? Search the world! Can you brew your own potion of longevity from it and gain extra lifespan, or is it all a myth?

I don't know if these would fall squarely into what is meant by "plots" since some clearly would be driven beyond just player-to-player, but there's a start to a thread.

[Delirium]

Honestly, I'm a bit torn on the need for wilderness-based plots. Rangers (and other PCs who would go out into the wilderness) already have a lot of autonomy and relevance.

Stuff for city-based characters like rogues, merchants, and to an extent, warriors, plots that keep people in an area of civilization, those are the ones we seem weak in.

I mean - party RPTs have their place. But I'd rather be sneaking through a back alley looking for that murderer that tried to shiv Lady Fancypants.

Ideally they would be push-pull type plots. Stuff that starts in one location and leads to the other. Like it starts in the city and leads out into the wilderness or vice versa.

I have always found those to be the most inclusive as they involve different types of players.

Good point. Maybe we should just have a general "plot repository" thread, rather than separating it into wilderness vs city.

I'd hesitate to get too specific in the ideas put forward, though. General ideas for plots would probably be easier to piggyback from so it doesn't feel regurgitated in-game.

[Delirium]

See the original post & discussion here:
http://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,31255.msg929405.html#msg929405

Some suggestions for this thread:

* Plot ideas should ideally be left open enough that they can be spun in multiple ways
* Keep it positive. No bashing on past or present plots.
* Stay on topic please - this thread is for ideas, the purpose will be diluted if we devolve into debate.

[Miradus]

Can you pull my spinoff into this one?

[Delirium]

My ideas - general

- Plots should be accessible by a wide variety of players.
- More in-city plots that don't require being a ranger or having "buff" skills to participate in.
- Less high-level politics.
- Some of these plots players could accomplish on their own, some staff would need to assist with; but the more autonomous, the better.

Basic Plot Formulas

- lost & found plots
  - Amos lost something for Y reason, and will give X to have it back.
- simple criminal plots
  - some drunk/spiced/crazy person has broken the law, and needs to be found and killed
- vs the world plots
  - some threat has arisen that PCs must band up against (e.g. spiders, undead - this one has been done a lot, care needs to be taken to avoid boring/overpowered enemies)
- resource plots
  - there is something that multiple factions want or need for an ongoing or temporary reason.
  - does not have to be rare or wilderness based - maybe there is a plague outbreak and the cure is an herb that only grows in the sewers.

[LauraMars]

Miradus, I merged your thread into this one, but it looks like since your post was chronologically posted sooner, it became the first post in this thread. I am not sure how to fix that!

[hopeandsorrow]

You know I always wanted to bite the bullet and play the crazy criminal everyone is chasing around.

But I dunno know how to make a meaningful impact with dem skillz, ya know?

I don't wanna train back stab for a few months just to act crazy for a week giving the militia some one to chase.

Hell I'll probably last like an hour before the entire pbase is like "Oh a mother fucker did!"
Former objective "Wish a mother fucker would."
Change objective "Kill the mother fucker who did."

[nauta]

Here's an idea (inspired by hope & sorrow):

OOCly make up a crime and a criminal.  Your character would play the victim.  Put out a bounty, consult the Arm (only to get turned down),  get the pitchforks and torches out.  Bonus points if you run it past staff so they can make an NPC for the plot -- but even if there is no real criminal out there, you'd have stirred things up.

Ditto with getting mugged or raided: emote out a raid up near where you know gith NPCs live.  Wish up to get some damage done to you (or just drop down the shield wall or use tdesc).  Stumble back into town.  Spread the word around town.

[LauraMars]

hopeandsorrow, just do it all with emotes.  I once held up the Gaj with a crossbow with a 0 hour character.  This led to my being arrested and killed IMMEDIATELY.

If you want a little more survivability to play the run and gun criminal you describe, forget stealth skills and backstab, just start your career as a warrior elf. Never underestimate the effectiveness of a newbie warrior with high agility.

But also don't forget to play responsibly and try to make it fun!

[Delirium]

You know I always wanted to bite the bullet and play the crazy criminal everyone is chasing around.

But I dunno know how to make a meaningful impact with dem skillz, ya know?

I don't wanna train back stab for a few months just to act crazy for a week giving the militia some one to chase.

Hell I'll probably last like an hour before the entire pbase is like "Oh a mother fucker did!"
Former objective "Wish a mother fucker would."
Change objective "Kill the mother fucker who did."

Well, the trick is, you wouldn't actually train anything.

Make a temporary character just to inject some interest into the game, as long as it is done with care and quality roleplay to keep things feeling seamlessly in-character.

Maybe the PC you roll up has a bad spice habit, and the particular spice they take has caused extreme paranoia.  You end up causing trouble with the wrong person.

They get to chase you down, you get to be chased. You're twitchy and obviously spiced up. You suffer punishment accordingly. The militia gets to do their job!

The selling point would be that that entire reason for the character would be to lose at their story, for the net win of the entertainment of the playerbase.

[Delirium]

I would hesitate to create plots with entirely "virtual" goals - a virtual criminal to hunt, or a virtual lost thing to find, gives PCs nothing tangible to accomplish.

[Miradus]

Miradus, I merged your thread into this one, but it looks like since your post was chronologically posted sooner, it became the first post in this thread. I am not sure how to fix that!

No need.

Here's another idea.

>/at JoeNPC recho "JoeNPC sneezes. He seems feverish."

>look JoeNPC

He is covered with boils that seem to be spreading.

Find a physician before the plague spreads! Would require at best a couple of imm interactions. Load and string JoeNPC. Animate JoeNPC for a few minutes (he could even die in the street). Echo to someone with high physician/herbalism skills that their herbalism knowledge lets them know that the such and such plant in the remote wilderness of Zen would be a proper preventive for the plague.

Spinoff plots: "Templar says, "There's too many peasants in the city as it is. Have the physician brought to the dungeon where they can make the cure just for us elites."

Or ... "I've always hated desert elves. Let's pay someone to haul that diseased body up to Blackwing and dump it in their well."

[Delirium]

Also, there's no reason a player would need to 'sacrifice' a character to do this - a staff member could probably whip up a few NPCs and give players a merry chase through town for an hour or so. Simple, short-term stuff is fun, in the right dose. Long-term more involved plots are also needed, but the simple stuff keeps you entertained in the meanwhile.

[nauta]

I would hesitate to create plots with entirely "virtual" goals - a virtual criminal to hunt, or a virtual lost thing to find, gives PCs nothing tangible to accomplish.

True.  But there's a thin line between a virtual criminal and a PC criminal that dies the next day to a fall in the rinth. 

The real trick is to combine the coded world with the plot in the right way -- you have to assume little to no staff animation, simply because (a) they could not be around or (b) the parties involved might be dead by the time you get to filing up a report about it.

So, for instance, if you know that NPC gith spawn up a spot (or NPC scorpions), you could spin some story about losing something there, or getting ambushed, or whatever, and the coded world would support you.  Sort of.

That said, I do find coded accomplishments a bit over-rated, but that's just me.  I'd much rather the storyline be interesting more than codedly fulfilling -- but as said: the best ones will do both.

[Marauder Moe]

I don't think most plots need to be widely accessible.  The more people you involve, the more failure points you add, and the less relevent the average role is to the story of the plot.

I think we just need enough plots of differing types to cover all those interested in plots.

Besides, I feel like the relationship between plot size and staff support is not linear.  Therefor it's more efficient to have lots of little plots rather than a few big ones.  (Or more reasonably, one or two big ones and lots of little ones rather than several big ones.)

I think the main problem is coming up with compelling plots for the "lower class" character.  (Staff have much more ease/experience plotting for nobles.)  Hence this thread, I suppose.



P.S. You want to be an unskilled criminal?  Be an information broker that sells lies.  You'll be snapped up in (or creating) plots in no time!  (But then you will probably die at the end of them.)

[Delirium]

Well, hopefully this thread will also give staff some ideas. This isn't just "stuff for players to do" though it certainly serves that purpose as well.

Just gonna leave this here..
http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/plots.htm

Honestly I just want to spread out some ideas for plots which aren't necessarily GoT-level complex. This is at its heart an RPG game. So finding new ways to tell the same stories, or finding different stories to tell while we let the old stories cool off, that's the primary challenge. For example, the spider plot was AWESOME. It needed mundanes, it needed mages, it needed people of all walks of life. But if you try to recreate a good thing too many times, it goes stale. You have to give it a break for a while, that's the inevitable nature of storytelling.

Slightly tangential; plots where mages can be included without mundanes breaking character, and vice versa, that is a much trickier beast due to the nature of the documentated gameworld. Still I encourage finding ways for all stratas of the gameworld to remain engaged and interested; there's nothing worse (and arguably, more deadly) than a bored gemmed.

[SuchDragonWow]

Just gonna leave this here..
http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/plots.htm

This is a neat resource, so I'll go ahead and post what I found a few weeks ago when I came across a term I hadn't heard, and dug a little deeper.

These are con artist schemes that could perhaps be adapted to Arm:
http://gregorywilson.com/bonus.html

I may have a more useful post later if I get the time.

[Patuk]

If a plot falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, did it still fall?

[Eurynomos]

Great ideas on this thread so far. Keep them coming! I like Delirium's guidelines.

[Riev]

I have always wanted to see if a con-man could work in Arm, but one of the FUNDAMENTAL things about being a con-man, is not being recognized.

Which... cannot be done in a universe like Arm. The first person you trick is going to tell everyone you're a fraud and boom, dead character.

What we need more of is PCs that just log in, shovel poop, sweep the streets, come into the gaj and drink, but keep to themselves... until at 10days played they just drop Krath Itself onto Allanak because... cleaning is TOUGH.

[John]

Here's some plots with the idea being to find competent people who can survive in the wild and involve other players:

Buy an expensive piece of jewelry. Be seen wearing the jewelry publicly for a month or two before ceasing to wear said jewelry.

Hire someone to find a "safe area" where they can bury the jewelry.

Announce that criminal so and so has stolen something from you and you're willing to offer a reward for anyone who recovers it. Give a description of the criminal that sounds like an sdesc (e.g. he had broad shoulders and blue eyes) and then include that he was last seen heading in direction that the treasure was sent to. Make sure the reward is more than what could be gained by simply selling the jewelry but not so much that it's more cost effective to simply buy another one.

Wait for half the playerbase to kill themselves and then hire a burglar to go through their apartments and clean them out.

Profit.

Okay, maybe that last bit wasn't really serious. Maybe.

[Coat of Arms]

Fake plots will feel fake and boring. It needs to come from emergent roleplay. When the source of a plot is someone sitting down with a pen going "hmm, what can I come up with that might be fun?" then that would need to be super good in order to be, well, any good. Otherwise it's gonna be a contrived bore that feels janky because it didn't stem from anything real.

Plots will happen if the roleplaying environment is healthy and active. They always have, when it was, and it currently isn't. At least not in Allanak. It's entirely ordinary to be online at peak hours, with 70ish players online, and all three Allanak taverns are empty. Nothing happens. Nobody's around. There's no trace of any activity that can be seen from any neutral perspective. It feels dead as a doornail.

Fix that and the plots will come. Trying to inject artificial plots in a dead roleplaying scene will do nothing.

[Alesan]

Fake plots will feel fake and boring. It needs to come from emergent roleplay. When the source of a plot is someone sitting down with a pen going "hmm, what can I come up with that might be fun?" then that would need to be super good in order to be, well, any good. Otherwise it's gonna be a contrived bore that feels janky because it didn't stem from anything real.

Plots will happen if the roleplaying environment is healthy and active. They always have, when it was, and it currently isn't. At least not in Allanak. It's entirely ordinary to be online at peak hours, with 70ish players online, and all three Allanak taverns are empty. Nothing happens. Nobody's around. There's no trace of any activity that can be seen from any neutral perspective. It feels dead as a doornail.

Fix that and the plots will come. Trying to inject artificial plots in a dead roleplaying scene will do nothing.

+1

[seidhr]

good thread

[Delirium]

Fake plots will feel fake and boring. It needs to come from emergent roleplay. When the source of a plot is someone sitting down with a pen going "hmm, what can I come up with that might be fun?" then that would need to be super good in order to be, well, any good. Otherwise it's gonna be a contrived bore that feels janky because it didn't stem from anything real.

Plots will happen if the roleplaying environment is healthy and active. They always have, when it was, and it currently isn't. At least not in Allanak. It's entirely ordinary to be online at peak hours, with 70ish players online, and all three Allanak taverns are empty. Nothing happens. Nobody's around. There's no trace of any activity that can be seen from any neutral perspective. It feels dead as a doornail.

Fix that and the plots will come. Trying to inject artificial plots in a dead roleplaying scene will do nothing.

I agree with this, to a point - a well-crafted plot will always be welcome, and even the simplest of ideas can be compelling with the right presentation.

As for stagnancy; if the ball isn't rolling, somebody's got to get it moving again. We can't just sit around and say "not my job".