On Events and NPCs

[Rias]

Generally speaking, staff have tried to let the PCs take point on things while keeping NPCs back to mostly act as information hooks, or subtle guides and hint dispensers when necessary. This approach was in an effort to let the players have more opportunities for their characters to be the driving forces behind things and the decision-makers. As I like to say when people question why NPC X or Faction Y isn't getting involved and solving a situation: It's not particularly fun to start an event just to then turn around and solve it with our own NPCs. It's like running a tabletop campaign as a lone GM with no players.

On the other hand though, I think we may be a little too hands-off with NPCs. A little too hesitant to get directly involved, and the hints and guidance given too open or subtle. This tends to lead to events going stale as nobody is sure who's supposed to be doing what to move it to the next stage. Sometimes there are periods of "sit tight while we prepare the next stage" but other times it seems like more of a stalemate as the GMs wait for the players to take initiative while the players are waiting for an NPC or other type of hook to guide them to what to do next.

I won't speak for the other GMs, but for my part I'm going to try a little more direct involvement with NPCs. They'll be more direct about what they want and what needs to be done to accomplish that, and will occasionally lead parts of events themselves. This has worked well in the past when I've done it, and it was a lot of fun for me, and I think the involved players enjoyed it as well. This won't always be the case with events, but I'm going to try doing it more often. I just want it to be known that I'm doing it in an effort to help move events along rather than let them go dead, and not in an effort to push player characters aside or create any kind of Mary Sue/Gary Stu NPCs. I get that players are people with real lives and sometimes need to take a break from the game, so having NPCs able to take point will prevent these situations from throwing off events that were dependent on specific PCs. It'll also help prevent situations where a player feels increasingly pressured by being "the one" that everyone else is looking toward to move things along.

Here's hoping we can find a good balance of NPC and PC event involvement! I'd love to hear any related advice or feedback from the player side.

[Rilulth]

To add to Rias, I feel reluctant to bring my NPCs out to play because a lot of people tend to take the opinion of "Oh its a GM!" and focus all their attention on my NPC or expect me to do something. I like bringing my crafters or merchants around just to chit-chat and be seen as real people, but it's so often met with "Oh so and so is here! Custom items! Let me tell the world!" and suddenly I'm spending 3 hours making stuff that I had no intentions doing. I will admit I actually completely gave up on an event idea I had planned because of this. Please, just because you see a merchant around, don't metagame and assume they're going to spend their time around making stuff. I'll announce it when I am. Just the same as a councilman having a drink at the bar isn't some huge conspiracy or the weird guy clad in chitin armour polishing his gauntlets in the town square doesn't mean a huge war is upon us. We enjoy playing our NPCs as the people they are supposed to be, not some god-like entities that only appear when trouble is afoot or riln to be made.

That said, I do intend to bring some others around, and actually have met a few people on one of my most recent NPCs and had plenty of fun. I'm looking forward to developing that more and seeing what happens!

[Squeak]

On my behalf, I'm still too new to really know what ya'll, as GMs, expect from us measly little mortals. If you want to leave NPCs as the subtle guides - you'd have to closely monitor what everyone is doing. Useful for the THINK command (which I still don't use often enough).

After I got the game's systems down, mostly, I started pushing the current even pretty hard - going off on random tangents and theories - and have since backed off since I'm still not entirely sure what's going on and getting no responses from anything done can be a bit disheartening. More the former than the latter, though!! Coming in part way through and trying to make sense of it all when everything surrounding the current event is so hush-hush is HARD - especially when you've got so many different hands working independently of one another with little communication between them. It doesn't help the situation when I have a tendency to play at extremely odd hours on the regular.

Regardless of what you choose to do, it'll still be fun!

[Navi]

To combat the idea that oh, so and so NPC is here, let's tell the world, it might be a good move to create NPCs that are indistinguishable from other player characters. This way you get an authentic reaction and treatment. Of course you can drop the fact that you are so and so from the counsel of 9 after a little bit.
Course, you don't have to do this for all NPCs. Just a suggestion. I hope it helps.
From a player's perspective, whenever I see NPCs like that, I'm always thinking about other characters and who could benefit from this interaction the most. I try not to be a very selfish player, but it sounds like this behavior puts a lot of stress on you as GMs.

[Kaliyah]

I keep saying that I’m not gonna post, that being said I have found very interesting topics that make me want to post. When it comes to GM interaction I typically give a nod or a greeting unless they indicate that they want to speak to me further or there’s an indication that something is happening such as an attack or something of that nature. I don’t really know when they want us to interact with them or they don’t so that is how I handle the situation most of the time. As far as events go it can be disheartening to have an event and then nothing comes of it for such a long time it’s the point where you don’t know if it’s ongoing or not and it kind of flounders and you don’t really know what else to do or where it’s going from there from a player perspective. I do know that GM’s have lives and things of that nature so I just go on with my gameplay and if they pick up the event at some point in the future that I am a part of then I just jump back into the event while grumbling in character about my boss is being slow and taking forever to get anything done or accomplished.

[Gorth]

This is a very complicated topic. From the player's side of things it can tend to be very disheartening when you attempt to move something forward or even just move something at all, and get met with either silence because a GM isn't online/able to progress with you,or a simple 'no' in some IC form because a GM just simply isn't ready. I get it, though. With a game so unscheduled, you can't expect to be able to match everybody's schedules based on luck.

My point is, this is good. You all are part of the stories, too, and I prefer the stories actually moving so that we feel like we're part of something, rather than feeling like we're the important parts of the story, but only when we manage to be there at the right time.

[Laroremas]

I think it is an important reminder for players that a lot of controlled NPCs are really no different from them (and often times several times more mundane)

That said, I think most people appreciate NPCs being controlled in more assertive ways, as it often leads to better stories (and memories of them) overall

I think a 70/30 split is good, maybe skewed a little bit in either direction - really I think they are probably ultimately employed to showcase happenings of some significance in the world, which is a good thing, but will simultaneously have the issue of them being fawned over, and the only real counter to that is to routinely have controlled NPCs milling about doing little more than socializing or something equivalent - which is an unrealistic expectation, because it is a lot of time and effort at the end of the day

[Delphine]

It'll also help prevent situations where a player feels increasingly pressured by being "the one" that everyone else is looking toward to move things along.

This sentence really spoke to me as I'll admit that this feeling is part of what drove me to take my latest break from the game. On one hand, I don't mind being a driving force behind events because I'm quite happy to pick up the bread crumbs the GMs are throwing down and run with them. I enjoy trying to rope in as many PCs as possible to make sure people feel involved. And I don't give a fig if it doesn't feel like it's "going" anywhere because, you know what, we're all RPing and having fun so who cares? But it can get to the point where you're then logging in every day (every day) to mountains of mail and people looking to you, wondering what's next on the RP agenda and you're screaming into the void, "I'm just a normal player like you! You could be doing this, too!"

And, of course, sometimes I get paranoid that my character is giving off too much "main character" energy which I don't want. But I recognize that the GMs really need some players down there, nudging things in certain directions, so I try to help that along where I can. But a bit more guidance from NPCs would be nice every now and again so that those of us playing the "movers and the shakers" don't have so much weight on our shoulders to keep the RP ball rolling.

To add to Rias, I feel reluctant to bring my NPCs out to play because a lot of people tend to take the opinion of "Oh its a GM!" and focus all their attention on my NPC or expect me to do something.

This is a problem I've seen across MUDs. I actually remember a rather hilarious moment on another game where a staff-controlled NPC stablehand entered a scene and everyone started bowing and scraping and doing the HOW MAY WE ASSIST YOU M'LADY? while the poor NPC tried to stress over and over that they were just a stablehand. I think, maybe as a community, we should all just agree to be chill when a NPC comes around and treat them as a normal person. Because this world is very much filled with plenty of normal people and just because there's a NPC suddenly in the room doesn't mean there's a massive plot on.

[tulpa]

I enjoy the NPC interactions I do have in this game. I think I'm much more relaxed around them than I was as a newcomer. Reckon their relative scarcity, though, does contribute to that player instinct to capitalise on the moment somehow. They're like shiny Pokémon encounters, especially when you're new, and I think that's understandable from a player perspective sometimes, if unfortunate for the GM. See someone around town with a full outfit with custom strings and a fancy horse, get told on OOC channels or in some IC fashion that it's from a one-off event, then people are going to be quite tense when they stumble on an NPC being played by a GM. People wait years for custom strings. I got lucky, but even in my case I've not had a recent opportunity.

So I'm all for more NPC encounters with the pisspot porter, or whoever, in the hope that people become more comfortable and familiar with NPCs and won't assume every appearance is the big bonanza.

I would prefer some kind of more rigorous OOC scheduling/framework for custom strings generally, but I appreciate that this could work out even more labour intensive than the current way of doing things.