by Scott Roberts
June 11, 2001

"Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known."
– Garrison Kellior

One of the most common complaints in online prose games, regardless of genre, is that of a lack of plots for players to get involved in. You can find people griping about being bored on almost any game that’s out there; it’s a ubiquitous problem and one which many people have tried to solve since the inception of multiplayer online games. It isn’t restricted to online prose games either; the problem of lack of individual entertainment is talked about on graphical games too, after a time. There’s only so many times you can kill the same monster or explore a new zone before you’re tired of it; and in games with massive amounts of players the odds are that someone’s already done it before you’ve had a chance to, robbing the experience of its uniqueness. Why are you bored? How does the staff of a game deal with that boredom? How can you find plots, and how can you get the most out of an online prose experience?

Why You’re Bored

You complain from time to time of boredom within the game you’re playing. Things just aren’t new anymore; there are no plots, nothing for your character to sink his or her teeth into. The administrative staff runs a few things, sure, but you only hear about them from other people. There was that plot you were involved in last month, but it was over too soon and not satisfying enough.

Why are you bored? The simple reason is that most online prose games (and for that matter, online multiplayer games of any kind) simply don’t have the creative resources to provide for the number of players who come to play in their games on a constant basis. One of the major reasons to play in a persistent online prose game is that you can play for more than one session a week; you can login every night if you want to. Most people are on more than once a week that would be the normal workload for a gamemaster in a tabletop game who is responsible for 6-8 players; and it’s a certainty that almost all players login more than the once per month that an ambitious LARP marshal might run a game for 10-20 people. There are dozens if not hundreds of players – sometimes playing multiple characters – logging in constantly to a game and seeking entertainment. It’s simply not logical (nor in a business model, cost-effective to remain profitable) to assume that enough gamemasters could be available to provide the sort of intense entertainment tabletop gamers get in their 6 hours once a week, every day.

Consider a moderately successful game with an average online count of 40 characters. If one assumes that the ideal group of gamers for a plotted session is 8, that would be five groups of players, so you would need five gamemasters to give these players a plot, right? But that doesn’t take into consideration that those characters change in shifts – for the daytime, those players for whom it’s evening in their part of the world are logged in, and vice-versa. This comes out to 80 separate characters in two shifts. And hence, ten gamemasters. Then there’s the matter of frequency of plots. Assuming that these gamemasters did nothing but plan and craft plots for their groups of eight players, they’d probably be able to come up with one plot a week – and that again assumes that the same eight players could be found and placed in the same area, with a reason to be there, once a week. Each plot would need to be crafted so that the players could have an excuse to spend the intervening time between plots in the overall game world, interacting with other players, without significantly advancing the storyline, which of course would need to be engaging and continuing...

As you can see by my example above, the mathematics of running an online prose game like a tabletop game (or even a LARP) quickly prove that the task is difficult to the extreme, if not impossible. It also assumes a great deal – that sufficient gamemasters could be found who could produce quality plots; that these gamemasters never took time off; that they were capable of running for eight players. It assumes one other thing as well – that what players want is intensive plots, all the time.

I’m sure there are those of you who are reading this that will tell me that you don’t want plots all the time; you just want one to happen to you, once in a while, you know, that you aren’t that demanding, really. Which is fine, except that you’re not the only one who is saying things like that, and when it all adds up, what staff winds up perceiving is that every single player on their game is clamoring for a plot right now.

How Staff Deals With Boredom

So how does a staff of administrators on a game deal with players who want plots? First you need to consider the nature of staffers on a game. Most of the people involved in staffing a game from the plot perspective are volunteers, even in pay-for-play games. It’s not yet cost-effective to hire enough plotters to entertain players to the extent that player demand exists. Instead, in most pay-for-play games the effort is put into coding systems with artificial intelligence to present obstacles and conflict for the players. This leads to all sorts of problems like the zone repopulation problem, and the ultimate failure of the mathematics: thus far, coding new zones and artificial intelligence quickly and rapidly is a difficult task, and so even though such systems provide for the entertainment of more than 8 players for a longer period of time, technology hasn’t advanced to the point where crafting such things is rapid enough to meet demand. Players get bored without new challenges appearing at an amazing rate, and any game that relies on such things will eventually lose people due to the lack thereof. As well, automated systems become repetitive once their patterns are figured out, so without significant updates or changes to the technology, even new zones or creatures become run-of-the-mill as they are based on existing technology.

That sort of system works fine for some MUDs or their graphical derivatives. However, most people who play online prose games are looking for something more involved, with more roleplaying. No one has yet developed an automated system that can mimic roleplay to the degree that other humans can. Humans, however, are fallible creatures; gamemasters are not as durable as most code is – they burn out, get tired of people complaining about this-and-that in the game, and as most games are staffed by volunteers, eventually the staffers come to the conclusion that all they’ve volunteered for is to be a complaint sink. It never seems to matter how many plots they run for how many people; there’s always another demanding, complaining player to be found even if the ones they just ran a plot for aren’t complaining about how it didn’t turn out the way they wanted or how an aspect of it was bad.

That latter point is worth expanding on. In no other entertainment setting have I seen a lack of respect for the entertainer as prevalent as it is in online prose games. Neither tabletop nor LARP gamemasters take the sort of flak online gamemasters do from players. One massively multiplayer online graphical game received so much flak from players complaining about various aspects of their game that their bulletin boards became known as "EverWhine" before they were ultimately restricted to selected pre-approved posts by the owners. You don’t see people complaining long and loud about moviemakers or comedians, but let a gamemaster do a little more damage to your character than to someone else’s and it isn’t long until the charges of favoritism come out; and it’s hardly worth mentioning how often gamemasters are met with rules lawyers who want to argue the finer points of a decision which went against them, citing chapter and verse along with their own interpretation of how it should have gone. More gamemaster time gets spent arguing with players who are dissatisfied with plots in some cases than is spent creating plots in the first place! It’s no wonder that the state of customer service in some of the pay-for-play games out there is what it is; if you had to deal with the volume of noisy complaining players who feel entitled to the world on a silver platter and who don’t hesitate to point out every single minor flaw you’ve got in your game, you’d have a problem with your ability to provide world-class customer service too.

Online prose gamemasters – at least those who don’t burn out due to complaints and working with so very little reward – have certain methods to deal with crafting plots. First and foremost is a method similar to the way that educators deal with class size problems. It’s impossible for a teacher who has 25 pupils to give each and every one an individualized, rich educational experience; it is also impossible for a gamemaster on a game with a 25-to-1 (and often higher) player-to-staffer ratio to give each player a plot on a regular basis. Instead, gamemasters craft settings that encourage players to explore. They provide open-ended plots with key, feature characters that the players can interact with or not at their choosing. Rather than embarking on often-futile attempts to gather a specific number of players in a location to achieve a goal in a fixed period of time, they will throw out plot threads that the players can pick up and run with. The skilled online prose gamemaster never pre-plots the ending of their story or campaign; they leave the results open to the actions and reactions of the players. With any luck, the gamemaster, like the teacher, finds two or three exceptional people who will help him or her by getting the others involved and spreading the entertainment of the plot around.

How You Can Get Plots

So how do you personally get involved in plots? The first suggestion I have is, unsurprisingly, never complain about how bored you are. Work with what you have around you, and keep an eye out for opportunities and plot threads. Interact with possible NPCs, but don’t be annoying about it. Sometimes they just won’t respond to your character type. Don’t force your way into plots; pass some by if it doesn’t look like you’d be a good fit. Don’t act drastically out of character just to take part in an activity; that belies the point of roleplaying in such a universe in the first place. Praise the gamemasters when you see something worthy of praise, but avoid kissing butt. Most online prose staffers loathe butt-kissers as much as tabletop gamemasters do. If the opportunity presents itself, talk to a staffer and ask a few questions about how you might become involved in a plot. Be careful with this last one – don’t be annoying, repetitive, overly critical, or whiny. Ask the gamemaster if they can think of any future plots that might involve you, or if they can refer you to another staffer who might be interested in same.

Some gamemasters, ideally through NPCs or prominent PCs but sometimes through OOC means, will ask for volunteers of a certain stripe or kind. If you’re going to volunteer, make sure you don’t have any serious demands or requirements about what might happen to your character; don’t volunteer and then complain when things don’t turn out the way you expected. If the heart of your desire for entertainment is that nothing at all ever happens whatsoever to your character, including reactions from other characters to your actions or negative consequences to your IC actions, then don’t expect to get involved in any plots run by gamemasters. Staff-run plots are run to the tastes of the gamemaster involved; as most gamemasters are volunteers they are doing this because they enjoy running plots and entertaining people, but they are not often the sort of personalities who are going to clear every aspect of what they’re running with each and every player involved beforehand. Entering a staff-run (or even some player-run) plot means that you will encounter the meat of all interesting roleplaying – Conflict – and the reason you’re playing this kind of game rather than others is because that Conflict is with other human-run characters; and these characters will act or react to you according to their own perceptions, not your own.

Be in interesting places. Sitting around in the same common area with other players can be useful a lot of the time – gamemasters will occasionally run plots from staging areas with lots of players to maximize the number of people they entertain. Just as often, however, a gamemaster or a game designer will hide a clue or the beginning thread to a plot in an out-of-the-way place for players to later discover. Also, there are a lot of nefarious, interesting, secret and skulking deeds which form some of the most essential plot elements which can’t be done in the "full light of day" associated with common meeting grounds. Gamemasters will sometimes check the locations of groups of players in search of an individual or small group away from the main common rooms, and spring a surprise on them. This happens somewhat more often in places where the common gathering areas are extremely crowded (with ten or more players) because the gamemaster may be reluctant to deal with a large crowd all attempting to get involved at once.

Getting the Most Out of the Game

The most interesting way to get involved in plots is the subject of the next few columns in this series, however. Crafting and running your own plots as a player can be some of the most satisfying roleplay to be had in any game. Delving into the intricacies of your character; interacting with myriad and different types of characters; and showing something OTHER than the standard “I-am-a-good-and-nice-person” roleplay which is all too common in online prose games is key to getting the most out of an online prose game. Your best tool for getting the most out of a game, as is alluded to in the quote that begins this column, is yourself. Your character needs to initiate, to explore, and to get involved with the other characters in the game in order to enjoy it. The designers and gamemasters provide a setting; they may occasionally provide plots for you – and I’ve given a bunch of tips as to how to get involved in those above – but the life of any game is the players themselves. How they interact, how they react, what plots they develop amongst themselves, and the details of their lives are all things which not only enhance the enjoyment of their players, but also give gamemasters new threads with which to weave future plots. If a gamemaster is seeking a replacement for a prominent NPC who has an important role in the game world from amongst the player base, they aren’t going to choose the character who waits passively for plots to come to him or her, not really doing anything interesting. They’re going to choose an outgoing character who strives to roleplay with other characters of all stripes, who gets curious, who is not perfect and nice all the time, but who has some very human flaws.

The next column, "I Will Always Be King Of Pain", is about the roleplaying of angst and depression in a character’s life, especially in how it applies to plots being run by and around the character. I’ll talk about some of the bigger cliches in the genre that have been used time and again by Drama Queens and their male equivalents to gain attention, and provide some suggestions as to how what is bad in excess and cliché can be wonderful in moderation. As usual, I appreciate any comments you might have on this or other columns. Until next time! forums!