RE: Storyteller handbook

I just went through the storyteller handbook on the announcements board. Im not sure if it's complete or a work in progress, but is there any intention to add a segment about bias, running scenes beneficial to your own character, running scenes on behalf of your friends against the faction(s) your player character also finds themself aligned against, et cetera et cetera? I dont want to seem overly negative on this stuff but I think there should be some clear guidelines as this was a constant problem on DH1.

Yeah, I wrote nearly the entire thing, and it's definitely a work in progress.

Now, we do have the Oath that every staffer signed... I believe that was posted? If not, I'll ask Tah or Gulp to post it. It covers stuff like that. So, at least, all the staffers are promising to behave.

I'm not going to be playing a real PC. So, at least, I won't be able to steer things one way or another. But I do have friends and I can see that you want to avoid the bias.

The bit about favoritism in the oath is: I will show no favoritism; this includes, but is not limited to other Staff members, characters of your buddies, and potentially the factions you run. If there is a direct conflict of interest, such as a Storyteller being asked to run a Rogue Squadron vs. Sith battle in which his Rogue Squadron character is involved, I will immediately ask another available Staff member to take over, or if it's not possible, I will refuse to participate as a Staff member and give an excuse


A few things.

1) I think the oath covers the "do not abuse your position." And so I don't think we need a huge list of things not to do in the handbook itself. I am very much about the SPIRIT of the law. It's not "okay" to use your bias for a friend of a friend just because they're not your direct friend and thus you found a "loophole" in the rule.

2) Templates cover a LOT of stuff that STs do. And if a ST isn't doing something via the template, that's going to raise a red flag for both PCs (who see the templates) and staff. So that's a way to CATCH it.

3) We're documenting everything staff does. Decisions, etc. If a staffer is making a ruling and not documenting, that's wrong and will get them in big trouble and the decision will get reviewed. If they ARE documenting and others on staff are seeing this trend always to the same guy winning in situations NOT covered by +checks, etc (ie: it's a situation where a ST is making a decision, and it's the same ST with the same PC every time) then that's also a red flag.

Abuse will happen. But we're going to be good about catching it and PUNISHING it. You will not be able to be a staffer and abuse your position on DH2.

Thanks for the response and I do remember the oath, but had forgotten the exact wording so was good to read it again. By the way, kudos and respect to you for choosing to not play a character. The best MU I have ever played on had a policy that staffers could not have player characters. None of these problems that we had on DH1 - Which apparently occur on every MU - ever happened there.

What about a rogue squadron character, who is also a storyteller, running the rogue squadron vs sith fight, but not having his own character in it? This circumstance was a very common abuse on DH1 and was what I was referring to, mostly. Times where every single judge on the +staff list was either a republic/jedi or a black imperium member remind me of this. Obviously ruling on a scene that your own character is directly involved in is totally unacceptable... But that happened many times on DH1 also.

What about using your friendship with a storyteller/staffer to go through unofficial channels to make a scene happen, get that specific person to judge your scene, et cetera? I think players picking which staffer handles their scene is also a very very bad thing. Why do you want that person?

What about people who are friends with wizards paging them directly and having complex tasks completed for them on the fly where the rest of the players wait weeks or months for said task to get done?

I'm personally in favor of a system that allows for absolutely zero conflict of interest, but I realize we dont have the staffing pool that would be required for such a system. You dont have to answer each of these points, but I hope these issues have received consideration.

I'm in favor of perfect impartiality and perfect fairness too, but I don't think there are any systems for doing it that are both fairer and more efficient than the one we're going with.

Well, I might have a permanent PC that is like... the munitions officer for the Republic. Or the bartender on the main ship or something.

Something that lets me RP with people, but isn't a big huge role that does anything. You know?

Staff is going to be a "who is available" type of thing.

And yes... staff is going to play NPCs. I'm sure I'll be in NPCs more often than my bit-role PC. And sometimes my NPC will "win."

But it's like GMing. Check the handbook and you'll see our three basic rules are CLEAR:

1 Any decision must open new avenues of adventure for a player without violating theme.

2 Any decision must be made to maximize the fun for the most number of players.

3 Any action must be crafted to have multiple possible PC reactions with planned reactions to PC reactions.

So there you go? Yes, maybe the decision rules that you LOSE... but it's going to open up new options. Not close it down.

It may not always work out, right? No MUSH is perfect and sometimes mistakes will happen. But say you get captured and locked up... and can't do anything? Well that's going to get remedied because all staff is going to be remembering "Wait! rules 1 2 and 3!" so even if the ST who made the decision did that, another can correct it with a clever event.