Story Railroading.

[Haste]

I must admit I hardly read any of the OP, so bear with me. This'll just be my personal take on how I think Story should function, rather than a direct response to Saronsen's specific grievance. That seems to be the direction this thread has been heading anyways.

I don't think players should hold positions of "political power" in the game universe. I don't think =LSF= represents the LSF NPC faction. I don't think [R] represents the Rogues, and so on and so forth. They're simply players banding together, and ideally should represent some sort of high quality faction people may want to join and/or interact with. But for Story purposes, they are simply another cog in the machine.

This is of course a big change from how things were ran when the DWG were still around. Anyone who was around to witness that knows it didn't exactly work. A simple glance at any faction's repsheet shows why: they all have an ally or two, and then a handful of enemies. Each faction then wants to take a bite out of one of their enemies and take a base asset or something. And then the faction on the receiving end of that "claim" will (somewhat understandably) scream and shout that they don't want to lose that asset. Both factions have their say and Story decides their wishes are incompatible. They cancel out. Absolutely nothing happens.

We've moved away from this. Saronsen now has about as much to say about the LSF NPC faction's Story direction as I do: not a whole lot, and certainly no more than any other player in the community. I do think we may have failed to communicate this clearly.

I believe larger story arcs should be decided by the Story team. Simple. Players can of course contribute with ideas if they so desire (I believe we have a subforum for such requests) and those ideas may in fact be used if they're good, but no individual player should have any more influence on the story than another. This does of course mean that we have to have a competent Story team that (at the very least) a majority of the playerbase can trust and rely on. They'll have to do some Good Stuff™ first to build that trust with the playerbase.

Random note: no, I don't believe that stopping players from deciding which House goes to war with which House or what planet a faction should attempt to colonize really restricts their roleplay options. Sirius is a big place with a lot of funky lore and a huge number of options for how to roleplay within it. All people need to do is reduce the scope of their stories from House-wide super-mega-important to more character-based/individual. Basically: fewer admirals, more lieutenants.

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I do think we can satisfy players' desire for more agency/room to impact a "canon story". I think @Treewyrm is currently doing a good job of it with his Nomad (not-so-)mini-arc. Players who get involved with it are free to shape the story and take it in all sorts of directions, though the beginning and the end of it are (as far as I know) mostly set in stone. He's acting as a DM for a very specific storyline and I think that's something we should explore more. Having a DM per region directing an interesting story with a slightly more limited scope (read: it doesn't decide whether Liberty goes to war with Rheinland or not) that still has tangible effects on the game universe sounds like a good idea to me. The issue likely is finding the right, unbiased candidates for such a position.

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