Positive Narrative Change: On Player vs Faction Intrigue
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I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if a player is trying to push something, the DMs should support that player in a realistic way based on the setting.
I look at House Danmukmul.
House Danmukmul is an exact analogy for what is wrong with this server, right now, if anything is wrong with it at all. People are going to disagree with me, and that is fine, but this needs to be said and hammered home as hard as possible.
What I saw happen to that House, and the reason that I left it, was because I sniffed the wind. It's a mix of the players themselves not having the right attitude towards events, and expecting the events to be something that frankly they shouldn't have been, or couldn't have been, but the other half of it was our interaction with the DM team. After Danmukmul was Lorded, we had two goals at that point; cleaning up Eastway (the House members had made -huge- steps towards doing this) and opening up a road through the King's Swamp.
It was about high time we found ourselves a base, established ourselves as a player faction, etc. It made total sense. We had a Lord. We were Retainers. We were held in high esteem. We were going to give up thousands of IG currency and sacrifice all that money we could be spending on potions and 'win' to rent out that castle and from there have a faction base to sally forth from. We were flatly told No. The DM who told us that it was possible got chewed out for it, and we were stonewalled.
Nobody replied to our IC mail. Nobody met with us IG until much, much later.
We gave up.
Now, a month later, two factions pop up with DM support that have an interest in Eastway, and an interest in the Swamp, and all of a sudden now that the DMs are paying attention to those places and they have made their own factions which they are themselves playing in, the server is changing. The Swamps got revamped. Suddenly they're getting the base, they're getting the cool stuff. You -gave- us the currency to get all of that because we -did- things to earn it. Lord Danmukmul was Lorded personally by the King of Cormyr and you couldn't see any decent reason to put some dinky spawn point in a generic castle base so that we could sally forth from it into the swamps with a little more swagger. Instead, from what I understand, the last time I looked that base is going to a DM faction that just got whipped up from nowhere.
Essentially, you stole a player faction's goals, and drove the nail into the coffin by giving those goals to new factions. I know players who tell me that they are willing to break the rules because they don't trust the DMs to be courteous or to adequately represent the setting or the situation. This is, I think, part of the reason why I keep hearing that.
I hold the utmost respect for the DM team and I am sure that this was not a purposeful mistake, but it is a mistake none the less. If you want to change the setting, and you want the setting to be changed, the best way to do that is by recognizing player agency - not fabricating your own agency with 'blackjack and hookers' because you think you can do it better. You might very well be able to do it better, but that doesn't matter if someone else is trying to do it, and you're in the situation where you need to guide them, help them, or oppose them with the setting.
Plots should primarily come from players interacting with players. Sometimes players want to interact with the environment, and that's what DMs are for, primarily - setting consistency, and for facilitating players' plots against each other and the world around them. To be a DM you do need to step away from the player mentality. You don't get to be the hero anymore, and that's fine. You get to do something better, which is watch peoples' stories unfold and help them tell them and have fun doing it.
What happened to House Danmukmul should never happen to a player faction, or to any faction, ever again.
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Greetings,
I was asked, due to my status as a former old timer I presume, to visit this thread and provide my perspective. Since an old friend from CoA asked me, I will oblige. I'll start with the fact that I haven't played in some time, like mid-2014.
Before that time, I played a guy named Oliver Baba, then a guy named Richard Stallner, and then a guy whose name even escapes me, but he was fun, while short lived.
Oliver started off life as a non-faction character. He was a Ranger that hunted, crafted, sold his crafted goods, and helped travelers on the road. After a time, he applied for and joined the guard faction. The guard faction was great because it automatically put its members into conflict with criminals (in those days from multiple factions). That is how that character met most of his rivals and allies over time, which created more intrigue than the faction/job itself. Catching random bad guys was entertaining for awhile, but developing a complicated, confusing, and sometimes insane relationship that I still don't understand with a member of the underworld was epic. There was no faction goal to that, nor was there any sort of application that put those characters into that insane dance, it was just how the characters developed, and that relationship changed and modified over time, affected by events, as the character joined the Purple Dragons, became a Royal Scout, and ultimately Constal. Just less epic than that was a crusade against Thayans in general, that was complicated by their legal protections, and caused him to skirt the line between "duty" and "justice". While the faction tasks, work, and missions were interesting, the interactions with complex characters was far more engaging and meaningful.
During the same time, the character befriended members of rival House factions, sometimes putting him into difficult positions. He had constant tension with the Knights of the Merciful Sword, the Judges, because he thought that they were all bleeding hearts that cared more for the law than justice. While he didn't ever try to kill any of them, discrediting them, and arresting them (or threats of such) kept things interesting. The KotMS had no charter to conflict with the guards and vice versa, but the framework of the setting/laws were designed that they allowed for complexity of interaction and conflict below the level of stabbing people.
Overarching plots of the time, that evolved slowly over many months, allowed for a wide range of interactions with lots of the server population. Things didn't have to change drastically to keep people interesting, they just had to show change. A player's weeks of effort on something somehow was worth it when you heard a NPC mention it in random chat, or a third party heard about it and wrote or talked about it. It felt like the world changed because of player efforts, and no gods had to be slain. Sure there were some epic plots that had eventual epic endings, but they were just like the exclamation point on a very long adventuresome short story or sometime novel.
During those times, the DMs provided very little direction to any of the guard factions. We had a good framework, an organizational mission, characters with motivations and personalities, and the setting inevitably drove us to conflict that didn't always result in other players dying. The best conflicts resulted in months and months of subtle exchanges and near deaths on both sides before someone finally reached a climactic end, usually on their own terms.
The second long-term character played the other side of the coin, a Knight of the Merciful Sword, who ultimately would have been a Knight of the Holy Judgment (KotMS were more interested in "good", while KotHJ were more interested in "law"). This created personal conflict for the character, as well as his fellow knights, and I got to see the other side of the Knight-Guard faction conflict. This also put the character into different conflicts with various groups, including noble houses, the Thayans (another long-term personal grudge), and individual guards that he believed to be corrupt. He participated in some epic quests, others because he was a Paladin, and some just because of his friends and rivals. Again, the plots and factions were a framework that was more backdrop and window dressing than center stage actors, who were all played by players.
If you build the right stage, get the right story, set up the right props, the actors (players) will build a great adventure. I personally always enjoyed the random DM spice of a possessed NPC or unexpected encounter when I was doing something as a character, more than I did the huge plot quests that probably took hundreds of times more work and effort to build. Those were fun, but on an enjoyment vs. time it took level, spice sprinkled everywhere around a good backdrop is probably better for more players than a handful of epic events.
Just my $.021 worth (adjusted for inflation from 2012).
Aldrien
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@RedGallant:
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if a player is trying to push something, the DMs should support that player in a realistic way based on the setting.
I look at House Danmukmul.
…. snip....
I just want to assure the player base that this is actually frankly untrue, and I personally spent many hours working all of this out, and talking with the players involved to explain the actual situation, instead of the perceptions that had been built upon misconception (understandable as they were.)
(And I'm fairly sure most of you know how little time I have these days.)If anyone want's to PM me with specific questions about this, then feel free, and I will do my best to explain what actually happened (though the people in the house mentioned shouldn't really need that, as It's already in their forums), but I'm not going to take such things into general discussion, and to be honest, I'm not hugely impressed it's turned up here.
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I just want to say that those issues were indeed all worked out in the end and Zool is a hero.
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Nothing I say is "Frankly untrue", CaptainFantastic. If it were "Frankly untrue" you would not have spent "many hours trying to fix it". There was a problem, and you fixed it. That does not make the original problem a non-existent occurrence any more than wiping up some water means you never spilled it.
I am purely speaking from my perception and from the knowledge that I had at the time I left that faction and from what I heard from the members shortly thereafter. I have not had access to those faction forums for a while and am not aware of the current situation, so it is quite possibly that got solved amicably, and if it has, then I applaud that action.
I am still not impressed with how that was initially handled. It was immensely frustrating while it was happening and in part caused me to abandon that concept, and so I bring it up here as an example of the difficulty we are running into with Faction intrigue.
It shouldn't just be A priority to help players interact with the setting for a DM, it should be THE priority.
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Though I agree with Zool that the situation discussed was settled.
I also agree with Redgallant that the problem itself persists.
I wish I could explain my thoughts better, but after trying over the past several days to discuss it with people, I apparently can't phrase it right or make it not sound like whining so I'm not going to try.
There is a problem though, I can say that.
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@RedGallant:
Nothing I say is "Frankly untrue", CaptainFantastic. If it were "Frankly untrue" you would not have spent "many hours trying to fix it". There was a problem, and you fixed it. That does not make the original problem a non-existent occurrence any more than wiping up some water means you never spilled it.
I am purely speaking from my perception and from the knowledge that I had at the time I left that faction and from what I heard from the members shortly thereafter. I have not had access to those faction forums for a while and am not aware of the current situation, so it is quite possibly that got solved amicably, and if it has, then I applaud that action.
I am still not impressed with how that was initially handled. It was immensely frustrating while it was happening and in part caused me to abandon that concept, and so I bring it up here as an example of the difficulty we are running into with Faction intrigue.
It shouldn't just be A priority to help players interact with the setting for a DM, it should be THE priority.
Wat? What did I do?
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You did nothing, CF, he's mixing you with Zool for some reason. Check two posts above his.
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Oh, I see. Looks like which dm he was talking to was the least of what he got wrong, so I will just assume the name mix up was par for the course. It was nice to hear what people think I should be doing with my spare time though, kinda like having a boss when you get home from work in case you missed the one you left back at the job.
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Don't take it too hard, CF.
We all know you DMs do a job for us all, RedGallant knows it just as well. I'm sure it is appreciated by everyone, including him.
He's frustrated with something, this results bitter comments. That's not a good thing, the way he tried to address the problem might be frustrating, but silence kills communities. Seems he's missed the point it was handled which makes things harder. -
Oh, I see. Looks like which dm he was talking to was the least of what he got wrong, so I will just assume the name mix up was par for the course. It was nice to hear what people think I should be doing with my spare time though, kinda like having a boss when you get home from work in case you missed the one you left back at the job.
I have apparently mixed up some information, for which I apologize.
When I write these things, I try to write them so that they have some punch to them, and it seems I've missed the target this time.
(Note, this was edited by Gallant after about a minute of thought)