Story Railroading.

[Toaster]

I have always been baffled by how little impact the roleplayers roleplaying on the roleplay server have on the story that they are roleplaying in. To be fair, I have never paid any close attention either, since I play almost exclusively as freelancers and other non-faction-aligned characters who aren't really impacted by story beats anyway.

But nevertheless, player actions by and large being ignored by story developments has always struck me as very odd. Sure, there are stories planned out by the dev team over long periods - stories that they try to ensure are of high quality (though, frankly, they regularly fail at that). Yet there must certainly be a balance that can be struck between pre-planned, developed stories and player-driven stories. See Lucas' recent attempt to create some tension between Rheinland and Liberty in Hudson. See Saronsen's attempt to do some political shenanigans as he described above. See whatever is going on in Kepler. Hell, even Lemon's strange dicking-about in Nu when Core| disbanded. These are all opportunities for interesting stories to be further developed by the dev team with input from the players and their inRP actions. Not doing so just seems wasteful and, like Saronsen said, will lead to a further decline in interest in the stories that are being developed and the mod as a whole.

Yes, integrating player-driven stories into the mod or even listening to player feedback in regards to dev stories will likely lead to a drop in quality of the story beats that are provided, but I frankly prefer stories where player actions actually matter - at the cost of quality - over constant railroading where nothing we do outside of events matters and we don't get a heads-up ahead of time to at least adapt our roleplay to coming changes.

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Olivia Sable