DGM Cygnus
Game Master Group
Assistant Admin / DGM of the USS Adagio
Posts: 2,191
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Post by DGM Cygnus on Jun 13, 2014 2:34:11 GMT -5
Yes, thank you all for your continued interest and tolerating the most demonic game master is existence. Ny touched on something important. We know not everyone will agree or even get along, but forcing us to resolve a conflict or disagreement puts us in a very difficult spot in our very small and close knit community. And yes, sometimes even we have our own moments and could use alittle understanding and slack given. I want to stress once again, this only works well and if are willing to be open with each other, extend the effort to understand each other and be willing to compromise and meet halfway. I think you will find if I am approached with those things in practice that I can actually be worked and interacted with...sometimes -evil smile-
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Post by Lt Cmdr Billie Jo Spencer MD on Jun 13, 2014 8:11:36 GMT -5
We all need to find better reasons to role play with one another. We all have to begin holding ourselves to higher standard of role playing. Less OOC, More IC, and that will eliminate the OOC anonymity that we always run into opening the more reason for you to go beyond just the circle you've created for yourself because that's what you like. An Example of this is- Hann told me in the Daedalus OOC. That Pilgrim was home and Nyoko should find out through her Admiral sources. My response was? ... Marzz- Send me letter from your Admiral's Desk on the boards. So I can role play and remain IC completely about this. We shouldn't have too discuse OOCly what is going to happen RP-wise. We should just ROLEPLAY it, and let the GM's figure out how the universe is going react. I actually totally agree, especially with the second paragraph. Way too often players will use OOC channel to tell other players what their character is going to do or explain aspects of their characters personality or their motives for committing such an action or even their thoughts and feeling about past actions. This is all stuff that should be handled ICly. With a little effort a great IC forum post can explain all of this about a character with no need for lengthy exposition on the OOC channel. Additionally if the player really doesn't want to use the forum, they should find a way to handle it ICly in game, during an event or during a social RP session. As far as going outside your circles that is easier said than done. What players really need is some sort of "hook" that grants them the opportunity to interact with player they don't interact with normally. By this I mean a reason to interact that doesn't seem forced or contrived. This is not something a player can create for other peoples characters. This is complicated enough with characters on the same ship, requiring some motivation and cooperation on the part of more than just one player. Between ships it becomes much more complicated. Additionally the typical nature of our RP events tends to force characters into isolation and its easy enough just to accept it and run with that. Since our RP tends to center around character positions on the ship, character RP tend to be limited to that position's job functions. For positions like medical or engineering whose primary job functions take place off the bridge it tends to be RP with NPCs unless some other player comes up with a plausible excuse to visit those areas. As medical officer I will visit the bridge, but in reality that is something of a stretch. But I figure Bones did it all the time so it ok. As far as engineering is concerned, Spencer has no reason to ever step foot in engineering unless someone takes an exploding console to the face. Same thing for the engineers, unless they cut their hand off with a phaser welder, they are not going to go hang out in sickbay. What our RP needs is events that take our characters outside of their elements and force them to interact in ways they wouldn't normally do. I don't mean the normal socials because those tend to be people sitting around in the lounge, which in itself doesn't create that "hook" needed to give characters a good reason to interact.
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Post by Vice Admiral Nyoko Honda on Jun 13, 2014 8:44:52 GMT -5
Which is why I'm thinking Social's Need GMs.
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DGM Cygnus
Game Master Group
Assistant Admin / DGM of the USS Adagio
Posts: 2,191
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Post by DGM Cygnus on Jun 13, 2014 8:52:15 GMT -5
We try to as GMs, believe. I set Adagio up much like TOS where the entire player crew goes off and does something and I get complaints it is not "sensible and realistic". For the longest time Talia simply stayed on board and delegated away to the First Officer and whoever he or she chose for the action, due to being sensitive to wanting to allow other people into the spotlight of leadership (yeah we get complaints about that too). We also cannot control the Captain and crew in how they go about doing things. Many of the times when Talia and I manage to get characters together that are not normally interacting, it requires constant prodding from Talia or myself to get anything going...
I maintain the events are a catalyst for players to expand upon with their own role playing interaction, but it has become the events are their only role playing interaction. We can certainly point of finger of blame as to why that is, but ultimately if players wanted more role playing they would put in the effort and find a way. They do not even fully utilize this forum to help extend their role playing and interact with others, but somehow seem to manage to find time to voice OOC concerns...
As for GMs running socials, we do some on occasion during our regular event time. I know I do not want more work and responsibility of now having run things and keep people interacting throughout the week as well. I know for myself, I put in some serious effort and time as it is and that I need activities I can simply show up for and enjoy with my own characters, which sadly I cannot recall any within years. Oh there is the Sentinel stuff, but there I have to be Shantal and kinda expected to be there and participating...so not the same...you know?
~the demoness
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Post by Vice Admiral Nyoko Honda on Jun 13, 2014 10:32:07 GMT -5
I wouldn't ask you xae. This would be more then you need to give. Thanks.
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Post by Lt Cmdr. Vorath on Jun 13, 2014 11:26:03 GMT -5
I've always liked the idea of running two stories at the sametime. Like on most TNG episodes, you have one part of the chrew doing something, then the scene changes to another part of the crew doing something else (related to the main story or not). So for instance, you could have the ship aiding a colony world with the First Officer and a few players down on the surface RPing a story, The Captain and other bridge officers conducting a repair on the atmosphere (or some other story problem), and also a group of players playing poker in their quarters.
Like, a TNG episode where the ship is trying to scan a binary star but gets trapped in the gravitational pull, and Data is trying to start a romantic relationship with a crewman... that kinda thing.
maybe what we need are two GMs per ship. One to supervise the main plot, and the other to coordinate the secondary one. The 2nd GM could always be promoted to a primary GM role if our numbers expand or they could host short socials on the starbase, risa, ESD, or other gathering places as a way to build up their experience GMing on their free time.
just a thought. Not easy to implement, but it could be a start.
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DGM Cygnus
Game Master Group
Assistant Admin / DGM of the USS Adagio
Posts: 2,191
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Post by DGM Cygnus on Jun 13, 2014 14:05:49 GMT -5
It is not a bad idea, but we are kinda small fleet-wise and it would make our GM to player ratio rather...odd, plus we do not have a good track record of game masters staying consistently active long term. It is also directly opposite of my preference in making the players accountable for their role playing interaction, and a game master's job by and large is to provide a broad and deep setting to allow for that creative interaction and keep the role playing in-bounds. So I would like to see less game master dependency and speaking on that note and since we already have brought up many tangents here...
There is no kind way to say this, but players have come to rely on Talia and her many incarnations to drive pretty much all role playing in the fleet. It is a testament to her great personality and skill, but ultimately not a healthy sustained environment for our role playing community. Her and I talked at length numerous times on how to correct this and have come up with nothing on our end that we can do, it ultimately falls to the players to see this and make the effort to adjust...
~the demoness
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Post by Captain Anja Malitzka on Jun 13, 2014 14:34:35 GMT -5
We try to as GMs, believe. I set Adagio up much like TOS where the entire player crew goes off and does something and I get complaints it is not "sensible and realistic". For the longest time Talia simply stayed on board and delegated away to the First Officer and whoever he or she chose for the action, due to being sensitive to wanting to allow other people into the spotlight of leadership (yeah we get complaints about that too). We also cannot control the Captain and crew in how they go about doing things. Many of the times when Talia and I manage to get characters together that are not normally interacting, it requires constant prodding from Talia or myself to get anything going... There are lot of problems involved with interaction on the Adagio, some of which I've addressed in private. I have also been responsible for some of the complaints about sending people who don't make sense... but those are also IC biased, since my complaints only arise because as chief security officer I'm constantly being assigned to handle assaults using Delta, which is designed to cover all needed rolls for combat situations... and putting non-trained personnel on an assault team is an awful idea. When we have exploratory missions, diplomatic missions, investigations, anything that isn't primarily a combat mission, there is no reason to object. A way to fix that might be: leave Delta to be NPC's, when we have ground only combat missions to take a position, send the NPCs, do a few rolls to find out how well it works (inside like 10-20 minutes), then have a normal away team move in to complete other tasks such as accessing computers or what have you. I've also addressed the issues with bridge RP before. When the Captain is on the bridge, the Captain is in charge and the center of all activity. We also only have four people on the Adagio who aren't either Talia or the DGM's character, and it's not that uncommon for real life to knock that down to three people. Two of the people are stationed at opposite ends of the bridge and don't have much excuse to leave their consoles (Helm and Tactical). We've had some more success once people had to get off the bridge, but the Galaxy bridge isn't very conducive to interstation RP except for Helm and Ops. More recently I have made some efforts to improve my personal RP responsibility. I helped to push some form of RP during a few weeks when Talia's internet was down, I had some follow up between events. During socials I put in effort to interact with others I wouldn't normally. I intend to continue this trend.
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DGM Cygnus
Game Master Group
Assistant Admin / DGM of the USS Adagio
Posts: 2,191
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Post by DGM Cygnus on Jun 13, 2014 15:23:05 GMT -5
Delta is NPC, so I am not sure I am following there. We have been on a shuttle bridges and the same issues of interaction applies. If the physical prop setting is the big issue...we could simply not use a bridge and use a chat channel with no physical props. Other than that I got nothing...and your current effort is noted and appreciated, so keep it up long term Anja. My stated view is not narrow to one ship or to small section of time.
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Post by Captain Anja Malitzka on Jun 13, 2014 16:07:50 GMT -5
Delta is NPC, so I am not sure I am following there. We have been on a shuttle bridges and the same issues of interaction applies. If the physical prop setting is the big issue...we could simply not use a bridge and use a chat channel with no physical props. Other than that I got nothing...and your current effort is noted and appreciated, so keep it up long term Anja. My stated view is not narrow to one ship or to small section of time. If a situation arises where I think my suggestion will be useful, I can bring it up again, but I don't know how to explain it better. In terms of interaction, my point remains that whenever the Captain is present, the Captain will be the center of any activity unless people are given specific orders to work on something first. This is a fact that will not change, since decisions have to go through the Captain anyway. Moving people off bridge for projects could help. The Adagio is honestly suffering a bit right now due to the fields covered. If we were able to maintain other PC science and engineering officers, it would help add a lot more reasonable opportunities to handle planning. Right now we're stuck thinking about how to fight stuff or heal stuff.
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Post by Lt Commander Marcus Aquila on Jun 13, 2014 19:37:28 GMT -5
More personel just means more paperwork for me bring em on
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Post by Vice Admiral Nyoko Honda on Jun 13, 2014 20:09:26 GMT -5
Let's talk about what it is we can do to make character Generation Easier.
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Post by Lt Cmdr Billie Jo Spencer MD on Jun 13, 2014 21:12:38 GMT -5
Let's talk about what it is we can do to make character Generation Easier. I'm not sure that discussion is really going to go anywhere. So far the only suggestion put forth that might make character generation easier would be that put forward by Reins. I am opposed to the idea completely, not based on the merits of the system (it is a fine system, it worked well for us in the mercs game). My issue is that I have been playing Spencer under the current system since the character was created and earning points and advancing. Switching to a completely different system would result in all of that effort on my part being lost, in essence it would have been all for nothing as none of it would translate over and I would have to start all over with the character. The skill consolidation idea is not designed to make the character generation process easier. While not opposed to the idea completely, I still have the same concerns about it. I would be ok with it if the skills being combine could truly be shown to be redundant. So far a lot of the skills being combined didn't seem to be all that redundant. I don't thing that overlap between skills is sufficient reason to go and combine them.
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Post by Captain Erys Murai on Jun 13, 2014 22:03:01 GMT -5
Well, we could at least combine the academy's Core into the Branch curriculums, maybe even include Department Head training too? That would at least lessen the amount of work a character has to do to get started. Branch schools aren't really a separate thing anyway (except for Starfleet Medical), so there's little reason to have those separate.
We'd have to figure out how to combine the two elective and advance study sections, but it would make things somewhat easier, I think.
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Post by Captain Anja Malitzka on Jun 13, 2014 22:50:21 GMT -5
Well, we could at least combine the academy's Core into the Branch curriculums, maybe even include Department Head training too? That would at least lessen the amount of work a character has to do to get started. Branch schools aren't really a separate thing anyway (except for Starfleet Medical), so there's little reason to have those separate. We'd have to figure out how to combine the two elective and advance study sections, but it would make things somewhat easier, I think. Removing the arbitrary split of general curriculum would be good, I know in the past there was a lot of confusion over whether people chose just one of those. Creating a simple list of skills for each branch, starting with general ed, would probably be useful.
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