On the Art of Being a Storyteller

These are my thoughts on how storytelling (or GMing, or Tinyplotting) should be on a MUSH.  And my thoughts on how it is.

A Plot Begins With A Situation, Not A Script.

The Storyteller’s job is to present that situation, then sit back and see what the players do with it.  A good outline works out what the backstory of the situation is, who the major NPC players are and what they want out of the situation, and a good deal about why this is happening.  That way, when players start digging into the situation, your notes are directly at hand.  The situation will inevitably change depending on who sits up and takes notice and who decides to try to do something about the situation.  A good plot almost never dictates who that has to be.  I say almost, because there are always exceptions.

The Storyteller watches.  The Storyteller looks to see how Our Hero brings in Other Heroes and Party Members.  The Storyteller takes note of how Our Hero has conversations with people who might help.  If there are PC villains on the game, the Storyteller takes notes of what the Villain notices about the situation and how they might want to take advantage of it.  The Storyteller does this by staying in play through their characters.  The Storyteller then follows these actions to their reasonable and natural conclusion.

A true Storyteller can take player ideas and “wouldn’t it be cools” and strange, off the wall, “that could work” ideas and uses them to craft an even richer story, without getting derailed at all.  The Storyteller is not afraid to have conversations OOCly about her plot, because she knows she might get the brainstorm she needs to make it truly awesome and satisfy the players the best.  She changes up her outline accordingly, while staying always in control of the situation, and working the situation towards its inevitable conclusion.

Examples From Plots on Hogwarts Express:

1.      During the Dementor's Castle, Selene and Dolph decided that talking to the centaurs about the movements in the stars might be a good idea. This worked in an entire centaur angle, wherein I borrowed Hagrid so they could speak to Firenze. This was born, not out of my outline, but out of their response to the IC situation I had already tossed their way.  I had never actively planned for centaurs to be at all central to the plot.

2.      During the Odyssey Plot, Jabari told me very frankly he was losing touch with Jabari as a character. He wanted to do something to build off of, and we discussed his father as an angle. The entire Sulmahn angle of the plot was built around that, worked in, flowing naturally off the other situations.

3.      During the Realm Plot, Oceania told me it might be interesting if the players had to fix the Ivory Gate on the other side. I looked around and noticed all these continuing story dream subsets, including some I was running -- and glomped them together into the Realm so that the angle could be added.

Telling A Good Story Goes Beyond Entertainment

This is not a new idea.  It’s just that roleplay is a new medium and MUSHing even newer.  But a really ambitious story can create things which the players take with them forever.  It can present a new way of looking at the world.  It can present a new way of understanding things, or a way of delving into real issues.  It can even point the way to God.  It can be so much more than a game of Cops and Robbers played out on a computer screen.

It doesn’t have to be, but it can be.  If you can create a theme for your plot, if you can breathe some life into it, or some larger questions, then you’re ahead of the game in making your plot more memorable.  It also helps you to make things less about looking cool (for you and the players) and more about finding one’s way through the story to see what happens on the other side.  Everyone will come away with something different.  Everybody will see it from their own perspective.  But that’s one of the joys, one of the magical things, about this interactive storytelling forum.

If you’re aware of this, if you respect it, you can make your evening’s entertainment literally take someone’s breath away.  You’ll unconsciously start repeating images and symbolism and choosing words which ask those questions and set those moods.  You won’t get up on a soap box.  Maybe you won’t even consciously choose your theme.  But it will all come if you stay aware of the fact that a story is more than a story.

You Can Lead A Horse To Water…

And so forth, and so on.  Your job as a Storyteller is to be fair to everyone.  Inevitably, though, there is going to be one player that shows up again, and again, and again.  And you’re going to get yelled at on account of that player, especially if that player doesn’t like someone’s character and doesn’t invite them to the Valley of the Shrieking Stars.

Thing is, these players involve themselves. They’re easy to run for.  They are the ones paging you about the creepy NPC, wanting to find out more at the library, asking you questions.  Your job is to provide the answers.  Your job may be to train players who don’t know they can do these things into doing them.  Don’t ever write a plot that revolves around one person, cause that’s the person who is going to have RL explode.  That said, don’t be afraid to reward the players who stay proactive.

A good Storyteller DOES try for what I call “concentric circles of involvement.”  That is taking advantage of opportunities to involve more people when you see them, not being afraid to follow the muse or a weird plothook when the urge strikes, and providing reasons for why one player has to go seek out another PC who has a different specialty than they do, forcing that PC to involve still more PCs, and so forth and so on until you have the widest possible circle of people playing in your plot.  And because you don’t always know who will step up to the plate or show up, you can’t script your story.  It just doesn’t work.

You Can Use Your Chars. It’s Ok.

I’ve found if I don’t let myself play at least a little I get really, really tired and bored.  It is not fun to be nobody but the NPCs all the time, no matter how much I love running the game.  So you have to provide yourself those little breaks.  However, you can’t make yourself the hero for the most part.  There is, however, a smart way to do this.

Make them a good source of information, or allow them to contribute information that would be a pain in the ass for other PCs to go mess with.

Examples from Hogwarts Express Plots

1.      In the Dementor's Castle, I wanted to make sure people understood what the Dementor's Ring could do. I didn't want any of my characters to figure it out, but I knew my character Donelle had some knowledge that could help. I kept having her say, over and over again, "Well onyx in artificing is only used from some specific types of things..." until someone caught on. I was able to get her involved and bring her expertise to bear, without making her the hero. Similarly, I had Adelaide go ahead and notice and bring together all the people who were talking about the Castle. Not to spotlight her. But because as plot coordinator she had a natural role and character to do this (a very observant, passionate older trainee who was more than willing to stick her neck out to do this).

2.      In several of my plots, I’ve had the need to make financial realities of a situation clear.  Clearly, no PC really wanted to sit down and go through financial records as RP. But having Adelaide do that, and then report her findings to the other PCs, proved very useful.

3.      In the Dream Plot, I went ahead and let Donelle get a position that gave her, as part of the position's abilities, a great deal of the history, rules, and protocol of the Dreaming, so she could pass it on to other PCs. And her current position made it very easy for me to send people out on scenes and quests.  Between “Go do this for me,” “Help save me,” and “Info-Dumps,” she was very involved, but she was not the hero of the plot.

PC fulfillment before NPC Showcasing

This really only comes up in MU*s with a heavy canon with powerful NPCs where one has to sit there and explain why they don’t show up and deal with the problem, even if they never did in the books, either.  This further gets sticky when some player or admin has a favorite NPC, and they want to safeguard that NPC’s reactions or reputation. 

Yeah,  in a Harry Potter world, we've got Voldemort and Dumbledore, and yeah, they'd probably take an interest in what's going on. But often in my opinion they are off distracting each other from the main action, because I want the PCs to solve the problem. Not for Big D, cool as he is, to come wave his magic wand of Bad Ass Hero and solve it for the players. So. V & D cancel each other out. If Player A and B need a situation to develop their characters or bring something about they'd really like to see happen (and SO many of my plots grow out of 'it would be so cool, Rane, if my character got to ____) then this is more important to me than anything the NPCs can contribute.

So if someone needs to go kill the traitor to Voldemort, it is not necessary to bust out the Voldemort NPC to go do it.  It’s necessary to have Voldemort dispatch the PC lieutenant and let THEM do it.

Be Respectful of Player Enjoyment

My greatest joy is when players page me and tell me what a good time they're having. My biggest passion is providing them an experience. This is my passion. These players could be out doing anything. They could be reading. Watching a movie. They could be playing tennis or on a date or swimming or opening a small business. And instead they are on our games, looking for entertainment. So what a small thing, when they ask for something reasonable, to accommodate them. If they aren't asking for something ridiculous, if they're asking for something the story can accommodate and beautifully -- as opposed to ha ha ha i'm a noob an' i wanna be the werewolf couzin of harry potter and i want to kill voldemort -- if it’s as reasonable as: "I really really want to be the one to nail that guy"...

I feel that can be done, and should be done. This is a cooperative effort, after all. A story told by not one, not two, but at times upwards of 30 or even 90 or 100 people.

Impressionist Canon

"IT WASN'T IN THE BOOKS!" or "THAT WAS IN THE BOOKS," so you can't possibly run it! "Canonically, yadayadayada..."

Spare me man. Yes, you want to keep it to cannon. You want people to be able to understand what the hell is going on when they log on. But lets not get so stifled that we can't tell the story. My rule of thumb is that, if you take the source material and could sit down and from the source material, extrapolate that something COULD BE POSSIBLE then you can include it. Now I KNOW others have different opinions on that, but that's where I'm coming from. There's a whole world out there that JKR doesn't have time to showcase.

And I feel cannon adjustments can be made when it fosters RP. Ok, so probably every Auror maybe didn't have a mirror in canon. We're not sure. I've heard arguements about it. And mirrors are POSSIBLY not the JKR equivalent to a cellphone, even though we play them that way. But BOY is it nice for getting lots of people involved when I can just whip out my mirror and Dial-A-Player. "In the books most of the Order of the Phoneix was slaughtered!" Whoopie, man. JKR doesn't have to make anyone happy but her publisher and her multitude of fans, and she can slaughter a bunch of "NPCs" in the background history. Us, we have 18 OTP players who would probably enjoy keeping their characters, so we work with that. MUSHing is different than writing a book, and god alive someday someone's going to freaking get that. "Realistically" and "canonically" Slytherin and Gryffindor are NOT FRIENDS. But if Sue Slytherine and Joe Gryffador log on and they're the only two people on, having their characters meet at the Grand Hall, strike up a conversation, and become friends is a hell of a lot more productive to the MUSH than: "Why would Sue talk to YOU, you stupid Gryffindor?" And yeah, rivalries are fun, but look at Draco and Harry. Most of their interactions took less than 5 minutes -- not always condusive to continuing RP. Realistically, the characters at Hogwarts wouldn't have the kind of free time they're always RPing having, to form friendships out of their House. But somehow we manage that with a minimum of whinging.

Mix ‘Em Up.

As a Storyteller, one of your major aims is to get characters to meet and form some kind of relationship that they would not have had before.  Why?  Because this is what will continue the RP and keep your game alive when you’re sitting there gasping for breath because you just can’t take it anymore.  You want to do your own RP now, you’ve been providing heavy duty story for the past 7 months and if you have to GM one…more…thing…you’re going to lose it.

If your MUSH consists of character A, B, C, and D. And A lives in the North, B in the South, C in the East and D in the West, then my aim, as Admin E, is to provide them a situation that gets them to the centre of the compass --

So that while the center of the compass is being a Sitch, A and D become friends, C and A become lovers, D and B become rivals, B and C discover they're cousins, and oh--they go recruit F, G, H, I and J to come play too, and go inhabit those previously inhabited by 1 character areas of the map.

So yeah. I'm TRYING to throw the barhop in with the Auror, the healer in with the student, the reporter in with the sleezeball, the dark wizard in with the Head of Human Resources. To see what will happen. Because it’s about the characters, and interpersonal and personal development ENDURES more than the 'gun to the back of your head situations' that I put forth.