Positive Narrative Change: On Player vs Faction Intrigue
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There seems to be this topic floating around about how the plots and server has been going too epic lately. We keep hearing things like "It's been done before" and "It's too bland" being whispered whenever a faction idea or a plot is suggested, many times those lines are spoken by dm's as well as players.
There's been a trend with dm factions and plot factions of late where if the faction doesn't have this IMMENSE intrigue and convoluted plot with flavorful motives and a large sprinkle of unique npc's each with their own intrigue and motive respectively. Then it's not a faction worth keeping on the server. On top of that this needs to be achieved with regards to avoid pushing a plot that's been done in the past or any similarities to them.
This seems to of have developed into a standard that has to be met, it's ridiculous and it needs to change.Back in the day (yes this is a back in the day post), factions were bland and the underlying objective of the faction was kept very simple. This allowed players to easily tie in their own more convoluted plans into that faction goal. The intrigue was generated by the players, not the dms and the goal of a dm or dm faction was to set players up to push their own intrigue. Once a player tied their own intrigue to the factions interests, the faction then became more interesting.
This of-course worked a lot better when you had 55/55 players online but it still works today. It's since been substituted with the belief that you can't make a faction that people will enjoy being in, unless the faction's intrigue is greater than anything the average player could generate himself.I played a Red Wizard for about six months now and pushed a bunch of my own plots and intrigue on him, tangled with other factions, got involved in some conflict. Accomplished some objectives and gave up on others the same way any other character would. All in all this was a successful character. When the concept ended, the Thayan faction was closed. The reasoning for this was that the factions goals were too bland and/or vague and the dm team had a hard time thinking up ways to pump it full of intrigue plots for players in it to push and tangle into the server.
Thing is, it was generic and simple and that didn't stop me from playing a complex concept, in-fact it made it easier for me to tie my concept into the factions interests. The intrigue was player driven not dm driven and while the dm team DEFINITELY helped make the concept more interesting and successful, but at no time during that plot did I feel I couldn't do anything without one, and that is because the intrigue was tied to my character rather than the faction.
If the faction was generating the intrigue and the players were focusing on the faction plots rather than how to tie their own to the faction, on the grounds that their plots feel lackluster compared to the factions. You've just generated a huge dependence on dm's to solve things for you, where instead of doing your own thing and getting rewarded by a dm for making progress, you now need to complete the checklist of things to do and then wait for the dm to look at it and have the faction progress from it.Even when a faction isn't designed that way but still has a high level of intrigue, it still generates issues. Players get discouraged in pushing their own plots/interests on the grounds that they simply never measure up with the faction's plot/interest and opt to just invest in that instead. It promotes the behavior of relying on the faction to tell the story rather than their own story telling and it puts the responsibility of keeping the players entertained on the dm's shoulders rather than leaving the players to make their own entertainment.
As a result of this, the dm team is constantly pressured to raise the bar over and over again and outdo themselves every time, suddenly a faction that doesn't have x amount of intrigue in it isn't good enough anymore. Factions whom are a great setup for players to make their own plots and push them no longer belong in the setting because they haven't met the golden standard, a standard which constantly gets increased.
Next thing you know you've got dm's going on burnout left right and center, being frustrated and feeling that the setting has gotten out of hand and that epic plots with gods and powerful angels is now a requirement for story telling for whatever reason.
This issue is probably going to factor heavily into what V6 is going to be, and influence the server greatly. The issue is that it doesn't matter what the setting turns into, if we don't change this trend, things won't change regardless of how the setting does.There's a lot of talk about going back to the good ol days on irc, or resetting the setting. People need to remember that the factions in the "good ol days" were very simple and bland on purpose, the common excuse was that the server was 55/55 back then and that's why bland worked just fine. They're not entirely wrong but that's not entirely why it worked either. It worked because the players knew damn well that they needed to push THEIR plots or another players plots. There was no faction plot to push, only a faction interest to tie your plots into, because of that you didn't have players ignoring their own plots in favor of the factions and hoping that this'd mean a dm would hold their hand. This still works even now, I played a character that did just that and I dare say it was one of my more enjoyable and successful ones even.
So tl;dr factions don't need plots to be interesting, they just need interests to be interesting. If we want to go back to the good ol days it's not by changing the setting to the good ol days that we'll achieve that, it's by changing the behavior and habits back to the good ol days.
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Even when a faction isn't designed that way but still has a high level of intrigue, it still generates issues. Players get discouraged in pushing their own plots/interests on the grounds that they simply never measure up with the faction's plot/interest and opt to just invest in that instead. It promotes the behavior of relying on the faction to tell the story rather than their own story telling and it puts the responsibility of keeping the players entertained on the dm's shoulders rather than leaving the players to make their own entertainment.
This is something I have noticed within the last year, that players become fully reliant on DM's to login, push personal plots or events for larger metaplot events. A time seems to have passed where people take genuine interest in just the other characters about them, their story and what at the core drives them to do what they do. For example today I was on the server with just one other pc, we hadnt interacted much in the past perhaps just one meeting. We proceeded to push both of our plots, search area's that I imagine we have both been on thousands of times all the while interacting and learning the other character to an extent, there was no DM in sight and there was no need for any, there was no quests in sight (Disclaimer: Quests are fun and this isnt a post knocking them) and I had a lot of fun doing all this. I believe that without the promise of pushing the metaplot of the moment then people just dont seem to be very interested, I hope this isnt the case however its the perception I have currently.
To me it is the smaller things that make the server interesting, things like these interactions that get me to login and continue to, if a dm takes notice and interest from these interactions then great! Its an added bonus and a great reward for the effort I have put in, but it shouldnt be the essential norm and nor should we expect it to be, because then we become reliant upon it to do anything except questing and lose interest in what fundamentaly drew us into CoA in the first place.
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There seems to be this topic floating around about how the plots and server has been going too epic lately. We keep hearing things like "It's been done before" and "It's too bland" being whispered whenever a faction idea or a plot is suggested, many times those lines are spoken by dm's as well as players.
This paragraph confused me, and i haven't been able to get to the rest of the post because of that. Are things too epic, or are they too bland? What plots and faction ideas are being called "too bland", and where are these conversations happening?
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Needs more cowbell.
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There seems to be this topic floating around about how the plots and server has been going too epic lately. We keep hearing things like "It's been done before" and "It's too bland" being whispered whenever a faction idea or a plot is suggested, many times those lines are spoken by dm's as well as players.
This paragraph confused me, and i haven't been able to get to the rest of the post because of that. Are things too epic, or are they too bland? What plots and faction ideas are being called "too bland", and where are these conversations happening?
What it means is that the complaint that something is too bland is what leads to the plot being made a bit more convoluted. For example, someone suggests a plot idea and gets told that the idea is too bland and "needs more cowbell" in the form of balors and demigods or something.
The Thayan faction for example was discontinued because it was too bland and generic and the faction didn't have an obvious plothook for the players to push, which left them to make and push their own. The speech basically explains that this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
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Well, I agree that our factions need to be more focused on what the players do, and I think you will find that to be the case going forward once the kinks of the new faction stuff are worked out. I also don't think Thay left because it was too bland, but rather because it didn't have a lot of replayability. There's not very much variation from thayan merchant to thayan merchant.
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That's what I mean, the onus of making the plot flavorful and different should be on the player, not the faction. There are many ways to play a Thayan merchant, remembering that making money is a means to an end and the player's app should be pointing out what that end is, a faction gives the player the base foundation and he should be building something from it.
I'm not miffed that thay's gone either for the record if that's what it sounded like, I was just using it as an example of a reoccurring issue. If steps are being taken to avoid going down that path, that's awesome, but the subject was still worth talking about I figured. -
Well, if the steps you are referring to means making sure that factions don't go away ever, that's not exactly what I meant either. People like progress with this game. One of the things that comes with progress is constant change. Factions will come, and eventually they will go. Whether or not they go out in a blaze of glory (the brethren) or fade away into obscurity (thay), eventually they will reach a point where they seem to have lived out their purpose.
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Captain Fantastic that's not the point I was trying to make, it's advice and not meant to be taken to any extremes but rather just to be taken to heart.
I'm not saying that any and all criteria are good enough to keep a faction in and factions should never die. I'm saying that what makes a faction good or bad shouldn't be determined by whether it requires the player to add their own intrigue to it or not.Also, constant change is fine, but there's a difference between constantly changing things and constantly upping the stakes. It's called escalation and it's bad. "We used knives last time so we need to use swords to make things interesting now. We used swords last time so we need to use guns to make things interesting now. We used guns last time so we need to use tanks to make things interesting this time around." When there's a trend in story telling that the next storyline needs to have higher stakes than the last one lest it be "less good" that's escalating in story telling and it's a great way to break immersion.
I've been hearing numerous dm's complain about wanting to reset the setting specifically because they feel the current storytelling of the server has escalated to such a point where plots are revolving around wars between gods now and it's getting slightly immersion breaking. This kindof illustrates the point I'm trying to make about plots and goals having to constantly be more amazing, more complex and more convoluted than the last.
Be it in factions, plots, storytelling it's better to set things up so that the players tell the story within a scenario/setting the dm's made than it is to force a story into the setting and just watch the players react to it. These sound like the same things at first glance but they're really not.
If whoever reads this be it a dm or player is aware of this concept and mindful of it when telling a story then GREAT. If not then I figured it's better to explain it and hope it gets taken to heart than to leave it unexplained and have said person continue on with things the way they have. The onus of getting the players to tell their own story rather than depend on the dm's to do everything lies in both the dms and the players alike, not just one or the other.
If a player decides to just not play unless a dm force feeds them the story then you'll see escalation and have this issue. If a dm decides to stifle a players attempt at telling a story/pushing intrigue (accidentally or not) by tossing more epic and grandiose plot hooks at everyone, effectively luring their interest away from other player plots and leaving everyone dependent on the dm to do everything. That's obviously not good either, it's hard to admit but too much attention in the wrong places can be bad.
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Chips, if I understand you correctly, do you mean that the plots have become too epic in terms of levels of intrigue, or too epic in terms of "Magical Level and server impact"?
I have personally always loved the "low level, but impact heavy" plots. I am a huge fan of "human vs human" rather than human vs gods, or human vs The Nine Pits of Hell. Plots that circle around the poor rising in Old Town, sembian soldiers trying to annex Northern Cormyr (which is a very cannon thing that we for some reason never used), intrigue and fueds between powerhungry nobles (the plots around the nobles houses in V3 when they worked, were awesome to partake in), orcan war bands terrorizing the forests, plots to uncover bloodstone smuggling rings. Hells, the odd demon cult, that serviced a demon that never actually entered the realms, or the necromancer seeking eternal life, or the hunt for that odd relic of power (not necessarily god slaying power) are the stuff that really makes things fun for me.
But I do agree, that if everyone has a pet dragon, everyone has to kill a deity, every plot is death or life for the entire server, or every plot has to be epic level magical rituals… Stuff like that can quickly grow stale, and if one has been had, it can be very hard to make the next plot shine. -
I'm going to say I completely disagree with everything here.
Are some of the plots grand in scope/complexity? Yes, definitely. Because DnD/Forgotten realms is a world of grand/epic things. Where gods have mortal faults, human desires, and lots of power. We aren't seeing a war between gods.. we are seeing a war between faiths, acted on/out by players. When did the "silencing" take a bit of a background in the setting? When players stopped making clerics that focused on it.
There are lots of "grand" plots and interactions going on. There are also lots of small ones. And I don't think factions are designed in a way that forces players to "be a certain way" or to leave their own plots behind for the sake of the faction. Mine and planks last characters, if anything, changed the way the faction was doing things to better suit us. We had the authority to act as the faction, and so we became the faction. I can promise you the "Hardcastle" of right now is not the "Hardcastle" that existed 6 weeks ago when me and plank were in game. And I love that the DM's have created tools in game that are so malleable to how the player wants to do things.
If a DM wants to run a simple, linear plot.. all they have to do is.. run it. I promise some players will enjoy it, jump on board, and introduce spins of their own. I do not think, even a little, that there is some sort of unavoidable escalation ongoing that prevents this from happening.
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Plots need dragons, demons, vampires and gods messing in the affairs of mortals or it gets boring imo. I could care less about silly noble house squabbles, bloodstone rings, Dalelands intrigue etc…Unless, of course, a dragon is involved!
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@Khamal:
Plots need dragons, demons, vampires and gods messing in the affairs of mortals or it gets boring imo. I could care less about silly noble house squabbles, bloodstone rings, Dalelands intrigue etc…Unless, of course, a dragon is involved!
I agree.
But having said that, I want the dragon to be freaking awesome, and an amazing event, not something my current character killed ten of last week.
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With the daleswar plot it wasn't good enough to be a war in the dales, it had to be a deific demonlord's Generals, and we even fought the Ghoul King who itself was a demonlord in the past.
Mahaganai was a fallen Archangel, the closest thing to a demigod you can get and in some cases more powerful than one.
The sibilian shade moving in was said to be far more powerful than many (if any) other dracoliches in the lands and the last dracolich we had fought before that one was in the Dracohorn plot which required the entire server as well as a nearly indestructible shadovar golem and the king of cormyr himself to defeat.
And the sibilian shade was defeated with a handful of adventurers and a fancy hammer with the excuse that it fought a slightly weaker op dragon previously (another dragon which was fought by stronger adventurers than the handful who fought the sibilian shade, said stronger adventurers who subsequently got roflstomped by said dragon in a heartbeat)These plots are cool yeah, but the fact of the matter is that we're practically fighting demigods in every single plot and when we do get the opportunity of seeing a plot where the threat is in a quantity rather than a quality, there's still a demigod-like power leading it.
It's not too bad that we're doing this but I'm pointing this out because I've actually heard "the server is getting too epic" said by at-least four dm's lately as a sort of justification for considering a server lore reset. I decided to address the issue in this topic specifically because I felt that it's not a lore reset that's going to fix that issue but rather an attitude change towards story telling. If we went back to Cormyr in the year 13-whatever and still started throwing Balors at people every other day due to this mindset that everything needs a dragon lest it be lame.
We'd still have the exact same problem, except probably fewer players to contend with that problem on the count of the people that'd have quit the game over the lore reset.I'm sure we can find similar examples of extremely powerful enemies being used for plots even as far back as V3 and I won't say they didn't make for really good stories (they did). I'm also not saying that these plots/stories are bad (they aren't). I'm just trying to say that not every plot needs it to be good.
If I'm hearing people stating they think the server's gotten a bit too epic, then it's either because it has, or because people's perception of the server is wrong. Either way there's an issue that needs to be addressed and people are going at it with the wrong mindset when talking about server history resets fixing the problem. -
And the sibilian shade was defeated with a handful of adventurers and a fancy hammer with the excuse that it fought a slightly weaker op dragon previously (another dragon which was fought by stronger adventurers than the handful who fought the sibilian shade, said stronger adventurers who subsequently got roflstomped by said dragon in a heartbeat)
This plot ran for a very long time, included several generations of PC's, a dozen or more perma deaths, and that's just on the adventure side. There was also an incredible amount of intrigue involved, and at every step the odds of failing and everything crumbling to dust were greater than the odds of success. Tenacity. Preparation. Involvement of others. And a lot of luck lead to success. It was a far deeper, wider reaching, PC involving and hard to achieve plot than most realize. Not some over the top to epic plot that got wrapped up by a poorly imagined Deus ex machina like this statement makes it seem.
The same goes for a few of the other plots you mentioned. They were epic, yes. But as a player who had characters neck deep in a few of them, I can vouch that they reached those levels because players pushed them to those levels. Not the other way around. Yes the DM's had the possibility of it happening in the storyboard, but it was never a guarantee, or at least didn't seem that way while playing through it.
I don't think a Lore reset is needed. I don't think plots are to epic.Do we maybe we need more low level, local intrigue? Sure, why not. But I don't think it needs to come by sacrificing of the epic adventure stuff. Both can be done, side by side. I know because I've done them both side by side. And I've seen them done side by side. An example was Hardcastle vs Manzahar was a 2 month long exclusively player driven plot between two noble houses, one of which was entirely PC created, with more back door deals than you could possibly imagine. DM's saw this, enabled it, and even provided the ability to tie it into other things. It was fantastic and a perfect example of what it seems like this post says is missing.
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@Khamal:
Plots need dragons, demons, vampires and gods messing in the affairs of mortals or it gets boring imo. I could care less about silly noble house squabbles, bloodstone rings, Dalelands intrigue etc…Unless, of course, a dragon is involved!
Dalelands intrigue…that plot was going to end more epic then likely all but the most epic in coa's history. So much so that i had DM's saying "don't you hear the cries of less epic coming from the players, dude?" But to build on zool's response, it needed the build up to get there. If it started at the epic point, a six month plot would have lasted two weeks, and would have meant nothing. I mean, it involved sembia, thay, myth drannor, the shadovar, zhentil keep, Elminster, and several gods, the most important being Mystra. It had a climax that was a threat to the entire world. I just couldn't get people interested enough to get it to that point, which is fine. Lesson learned, don't do plots that are miles and miles away. But the fact that players need to try and enjoy the journey as much as the ending for things like this to work was not lost on me either.
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If it helps CF, those are my favorite plots.
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Dalelands intrigue…that plot was going to end more epic then likely all but the most epic in coa's history.
I should have said intrigue plots in general are not my preference. The Dalelands plot seemed very involving and rich in detail and lore from what I saw. I just couldn't get involved in it, for various reasons. You and Nematode had plots I always heard good things about IC and OOC, but I always seemed to miss them. <3
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It's the contrary for me, I will be more likely to enjoy a plot if I can see the human being struggling between choices. Even if the being I play isn't human, merely humanoid.
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It's the contrary for me, I will be more likely to enjoy a plot if I can see the human being struggling between choices. Even if the being I play isn't human, merely humanoid.
Or even if I see some OTHER human having to decide bewteeen choices
Some of my fav plots were ones that had to do with wars, talos war, grey circle, etc because it was easy for non-central people to get involved.
Some fav struggles were non-violent blackmails ending up in LG people deciding whether to give in to blackmail to protect a friends reputation.
Note that Neither actually involved my characters except in a supporting/side role, so my opinion had nothing to do with my involvement, just the simplicity.