Membership IC briefings or planning

[Death Kitten 200]

So, if you're running a game or plot arc that involves a military or military like group (assassins, police, search and rescue, etc) and there needs to be directions/orders given, or planning and brainstorming how do you keep it on track and avoid it getting bogged down?

 

In the past, the two problems I see happen: the log/thread stalls while everyone waits for someone else to tag, or brainstorming ends up going in circles when we end up rehashing the same thing over and over. I had this happen  enough that I really try to avoid writing briefings if I can help it. However, I've come around to the other side of the problem, now my players all come into the action with different ideas than each other on every we're trying to do, and end up working against each other or just getting stuck because no one knows what to do.

 

So, how do you avoid these issues?

[Kittenmitten 40]

One thing I've seen done when a thread NEEDS to be continued is to give the players a limited time to respond. Like, state outright at the start of the thread that if the next person in line doesn't respond within a day or two, that they will be skipped. It helps keep the thread flowing.

 

But then the question comes up about whether or not that NEEDS to be an IC thing. That could be covered in OOC plotting so that everyone can get into the action faster. I think most people would prefer the action rather than the talking-about-the-action. I would, personally.

[Death Kitten 200]

1 minute ago, Kittenmitten said:

One thing I've seen done when a thread NEEDS to be continued is to give the players a limited time to respond. Like, state outright at the start of the thread that if the next person in line doesn't respond within a day or two, that they will be skipped. It helps keep the thread flowing.

 

But then the question comes up about whether or not that NEEDS to be an IC thing. That could be covered in OOC plotting so that everyone can get into the action faster. I think most people would prefer the action rather than the talking-about-the-action. I would, personally.

Okay, so I'll respond to your second paragraph first. One of my problems is that we don't do plotting like most of you forum RP people do, we do most of our planning on our Discord server and by tacking ooc notes into our mission log in progress. Which means when we have players across timezones, it can get a little challenging to make sure that everyone involved in a particular plot thread is in the loop if we have the conversation in one of our discord channels. Nova (my RP CMS of choice) doesn't have anything that's particularly suited to how I understand your plotters work. I have considered encouraging people to set up something like a plotter on our our wiki, hung off their user page namespace... but not everyone in my game wants a wiki account, and I don't know enough to build a single sign on bridge for Nova and Wiki, so they'd have to keep two accounts in order to do that.

 

All that said, ideally I'd like to avoid doing the briefings in character and jump right to the action, and that's what we've been doing for the most part the nearly two years my game has been active... but every once in a while, we end up with people who get lost in a log because communication channels just didn't line up so well. So I'm trying to figure out if there's a better way to plan if I don't have plotters like you guys do on forums. It might just be that some of my players just don't do any planning before jumping into a log, and they'd rather play everything by ear instead of discussing at least a vague framework of the goal for the log, and as long as they continue to play like that I can't do much to fix it other than talk to everyone else involved to at least get the rest of us on the same page.

 

As for your first paragraph, I was starting to consider implementing a time limit before just pushing the briefing forward if no one jumps in (we don't usually do tag order, but my crew's generally pretty good about avoiding leaving people behind), so I'll give that more though. That's probably going to be the ideal solution for briefings in character.

[Kittenmitten 40]

Frown. That is super problematic. Yeah I have no idea how your system works, but with most OOC shenanigans happening on Discord, is there a way to pin something to a channel that you could keep up-to-date on the current mission? And nudge people to check it before jumping into things? I mean it would probably end up being a LOT more work for you, having to maintain it, and reminding people to check it, but it's a thought? Maybe? Discord is weird idk. 

[Death Kitten 200]

Well, there is a mission notes feature in Nova that I can maintain, which is displayed on the writing page when one is editing a log (though it auto-hides itself if it hasn't been updated in the last week), which would function similar to a pinned message on Discord but is a bit more in everyone's face. That still leaves me with a need to work on the ooc brainstorming aspect. Because my smaller player base and the setting being a starship and crew there of, it means we focus on a game wide plot that everyone's involved in, and I want to make sure everyone's engaged and motivated by the plot... which means I need everyone to be involved in guiding it.

[Elena 546]

We do plan things OOC in a thread (you can do it on a nova joint post calling everyone to contribute but which it never gets published) and discuss everybody's ideas and take decisions together, so afterwards everyone knows what to do.

[Claire 18]

In the plot thread I do plot updates, let them discuss for however long then go with the general consensus if needed. Generally I find a mix of dictating setting and promoting choice and brainstorming within it helps. Oh, I also generally float an idea beforehand and get a feel for what people want, and read the IC stuff to try and reflect each persons ideas, bring them all together so they all feel they contributed.

[Zahara 12]

We managed something similar pretty well in character on one site, I wasn't staff at the time, but I'd just adopted the character who would be leading the meeting. Basically the staff sent me a pm that said, 'just be in character, and make sure you say this' there were enough staff on the board that they could kinda guide and direct the conversation and make sure it didn't get bogged down. I'll be honest, it helped that all the characters were a little bit desperate to bring down the current dictator with their rebellion so things that normally could have been points of contention were agreed on pretty quickly) 

 

As a player I felt a little out of my depth, what with having the character that lead the rebellion thrust into my hands at short notice, but actually I think that helped the situation rather than hindering it. I was as edgy and worried about what people were going to say as he was. In the end everybody was heard, and although they agreed to blow up a stadium they did at least make the concession of trying to save as many innocents as possible... That was a fun plot arc. 

 

I basically had one of the admins telling me I needed to post and move things along every so often (when I hadn't already done that myself cause he would have said something by now) maybe it's the use of the 'dominant' or 'senior' character in a situation to keep things moving. Let's face it, the captain of a ship is going to have more to say than the cook... 

 

Interesting thing to discuss though

[Death Kitten 200]

3 hours ago, Zahara said:

I basically had one of the admins telling me I needed to post and move things along every so often (when I hadn't already done that myself cause he would have said something by now) maybe it's the use of the 'dominant' or 'senior' character in a situation to keep things moving. Let's face it, the captain of a ship is going to have more to say than the cook...

I may just need to get better about pushing the log ic, and stop avoiding the briefing logs all together. They're not always a needed thing, but there's probably a balance between none and a briefing every time we're doing something planned.

 

9 hours ago, Elena said:

We do plan things OOC in a thread (you can do it on a nova joint post calling everyone to contribute but which it never gets published) and discuss everybody's ideas and take decisions together, so afterwards everyone knows what to do.

One of my current players does this on other games where he's staff, or at least had in the past. I dislike how much email this generates in the way of save notifications and how it can be easy to miss something further up if someone adds something in the middle. But if I can find another platform to do something similar on, I may be able to work with this.

 

I might have to break down and insist people use the wiki for group plotting. I'll certainly drop the idea past my crew.

[VirusZero 176]

How I've done mission briefings in the past has been to either make it so the briefing aspect only lasts a week, any replies after that are for the mission onward. Alternatively if there is not really a lot that needs discussing, basically just me giving an info dump, then I don't really give players much of an option to debate or interject... simply at the end of my post the mission commences. Which given the time/urgency of some missions it makes sense they wouldn't sit around planning. They might not have 4 hours to chat things out while the enemy force lays siege to a powerplant or whatever the case may be.

Edited July 27, 2017 by VirusZero