2022-01-29 - Mist Harbor - What Dreams May Come Storyline OOC Meeting (log)

This log is from the What Dreams May Come OOC Meeting on January 29, 2022 from the viewpoint of GM Quilic.

Hi everyone, and welcome to the What Dreams May Come OOC Storyline meeting.  The purpose of this meeting is to be crystal clear about what the story is, how to get involved, how to participate, and a very brief overview of the few personalities you may want to acquaint yourself with beforehand.

It is my absolute intention to keep this rather short, but there will be a Q&A period at the end.  I'm going to be attempting to log this for posting on the officials, the wiki, and my LiveJournal page, so I would ask that questions be held until the end.

I'm going to be covering the basics:  Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How, but I'm going to be mixing up the order a bit to clear out the low-hanging fruit first.

What:  What Dreams May Come is a Four Winds-Isle based storyline that is coming in the near future.  Easy, right?

Where:  We're mowing through these!  Here!  This storyline will not venture beyond the bounds of Four Winds Isle.

Why:  Because it'll hopefully be fun.  This is a game, after all, and we should have different venues to enjoy it.

When:  Some aspects of the story have already started.  Various people have seen, heard, been told about, and in one case smelled something odd.  There have also been a LOT of storms lately.  I'm sure you all noticed.  Expect this sort of thing to continue on a sporadic, unadvertised basis through the month of February.

The first "official" date for the storyline is March 6th, which is a Sunday.  This storyline will ONLY run on Sundays, starting at 3pm and running until approximately 430pm.  There will be player-run meetups on Tuesdays, but I will not be involved with those.

I want to be very clear on this point:  If you only attend the Sunday sessions, you will be able to follow the storyline.  Will you know all the details of everything that's happening?  Probably not, unless you put in the effort to talk with people about things in the "off hourse".  But the "main" storyline will progress through Sundays during the scheduled hours.

Who:  Well, hopefully you all, and any other Premium subscribers who want to come out and have a good time.  But there are some NPCs (just a few, I promise) that you should probably be familiar with before showing up.

Greth, here, is one of three people put in charge of the day to day stuff on FWI by Socius Leiffen.  Socius is the titular owner of the Isle, but he is far afield and left the running of the place to Greth, Penre (an elderly man who helps people out around town when he can), and Jorgarn (the former constable, and the person who handles most of the paperwork).  Socius is not slated to have a large part in this story, but his name can be unavoidable, and if you would ever like to ask someone who's been around these stories for a while about them, it turns into a lively conversation pretty quickly.

The only other name you should probably be familiar with is Zofiya.  She is Greth's ward, and has been tabbed as the next Administrator of Mist Harbor by Socius.  She's a teenager, former orphan, and rather hotheaded, so Socius put the aforementioned trio in charge until Zofiya has matured to the point that she can handle the duties by herself, at which point they will revert to her.

There are other names and stories associated with the Isle, and the town, and some of it should be at least moderately entertaining reading or conversation material, but if you just have the above-quoted Cliff's Notes, you will likely do just fine.

How:  This is the big one, as there's multiple answers, and I need to get into the weeds a little bit.  The short answer is to show up on Sundays regularly and play your character.  You do that, and my hope is that you will have an enjoyable time.  I can't guarantee it, of course.  These stories aren't for everyone, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.  We're fortunate that we live in a time where you have lots of RP options in lots of towns!

There has been a lot of discussion about vignettes, and out of game information.  Vignettes are short stories, or glimpses into a character or NPCs life, so you can see their thoughts, motivations, and things of that nature.  They're almost always player-written, though I do enjoy writing myself, and will occasionally contribute a small collection of them.

Here's the important note about vignettes:  If you never read a single one, you shouldn't miss anything important.  If you want to write a vignette, please consider doing so AFTER you have acted out whatever it is that you're writing about in-game.  Don't write a vignette about doing X, Y, and Z with Fred and Ethel if you haven't actually done it, to the best of your ability.  If you want to write a vignette about your character's musings, regrets, theories, plans... by all means feel free to do so, but please make an effort to bring those things INTO the game at the earliest opportunity.

I have the entirety of this story's arc planned out.  I know where we start, I know the high points we will hit, and I know how it ends.  Those things will not change.  What CAN change, based on your guys' involvement, is the path we take to get there.  I encourage you to work together to come up with plans, schemes, and whatever else you like, communicate them to me, and we'll see about bringing things to light.

Examples of how you can get involved with the course of the storyline generally look something like this:  You come up with an idea, you communicate about it in-game with a few people, then you email me with your plans.  I respond, we work out how this will impact things, then it gets realized in-game.

Here's a more concrete example, with apologies if I offend the person who did this: Say you can't make it to a planned storytime event, but it's been announced already as an invasion.  Your character really would like to have some impact, but you can't be in-game.  So you write me and say, 'My character is a bit of an alchemist, could I perch him on a roof and shoot bombs at the invaders?'

In this instance, SURE!  But what that actually ends up being, in-game, is a line of boldtext in the middle of the invasion where 'a figure' rains down bombs onto the enemy forces.  That's it.  But then that person can say they did it, and have that be 'canon' for them.  Functionally, did anything change?  Not really.  It didn't deplete the number of creatures, or anything like that.  But it let that player be involved even though they couldn't actually BE there.

This is a good example of the kind of thing I'm talking about.  Those SORTS of things are almost always things I'll be open to, so long as they don't divert the story in any meaningful way.  I want to enable you guys to play your characters and have some agency with how things progress.

Another example would be if you and a group of friends wanted to do some research on some subject.  You could email me, lay out your qualifications and your plans, and I would let you know what you might find.  In this way, if any of you are familiar with them, this takes a lot of inspiration from tabletop gaming.

In the second example I just quoted, this is crucial, though:  Nobody will get critically important information through this method.  You won't ever find out the last piece of information, the answer to the puzzle, or the identity of the bad guy this way.  You MIGHT, though, get a sense that it's someone from Solhaven.

And I want to be clear on this:  It's my EXPECTATION that anyone taking this route takes any information they glean this way and share it in-game.  Hoarding information doesn't do anything but create bad feelings.

Anything that rises above the level of, 'kinda interesting' will be shared in-game with everyone.  You don't have to read, write, edit, proofread, or even tolerate vignettes or out of game communication to get all the pertinent information.

I have written this story to be a rather loose framework.  There will be a large "RP Prompt" provided at the outset that anyone who wishes can take and run with.  I don't want to reveal too much, but the entire premise of the first half of this story is that it can be intensely personal, and will hopefully give you all lots of good material to influence your in-game roleplay.

One final note that I have, then I will take questions for a short while:  There will be invasions as a part of this storyline, but not until the second Act.  Once we enter the second Act, which I will make clear to everyone when it comes, Invasions should be expected every Sunday.  This in no way means that they will HAPPEN (they won't, flat out), but I will not be providing any more warning or information than that.

Q&A (lightly edited)
Sothog asks, "Will there be any major pauses betweens sections of the plot that we should be aware of?"

Speaking to Sothog, you say, "Excellent question, and I don't have a perfect answer for you yet.  As soon as I know, you'll know, though.  I should have that information before March."

Speaking to you, Meliyara asks, "Knowing that there are no guarantees, when are the pre-story things (other than the Tuesday meetups) most likely to happen through February, in terms of days and times?"

Speaking to Meliyara, you say, "Honestly, it's mostly when I get the chance.  Some people have met kids who were scared, some have seen things.  Lots have stared blankly while sitting at nodes when I tried to engage them."
Speaking to Meliyara, you say, "But to be clear, this is all 'flavor'.  Nothing big is being divulged, and it won't be.  It's fun for me, and for those who play along, but it's not meant to be more than that."

Yukito says, "It's hard to know what is an ambient from someone's spell or item anymore sometimes. Do you tend to do things that will pop into the ambient or announcement window, or things that will appear in the main window for flavor text? Just so we know if there is something interesting to catch our eye."

Speaking to Yukito, you say, "Bold text is usually a strong indicator, and I will make an effort to make sure everything like that is bold going forward."
You say, "Also... and I should be very clear here and say that this is in no way a guarantee... but this room is a Supernode, and it might be worth hanging out in here.  A lot of the people involved with QST do, and so you're likely to find conversations.  When I do stuff that's pop-up like that, I almost always check the supernodes first, to try and give the most people a chance to play along."
You say, "I generally keep going until SOMEONE plays along."

Kiyna asks, "I've never been to a FWI invasion. Are they separated into level brackets like those I've seen in Icemule and the Landing?"

Darcena says, "It's on the Mist Harbor Militia wiki page."
Darcena says, "Https://gswiki.play.net/Mist_Harbor_Militia."

Speaking to you, Vaemyr says, "Tough subject, that I don't personally care about, but might be good to have on record in the QnA, but are there any titles/awards planned as part of the RP stuff?  Again, I don't really care I'm here to have fun, but I don't want this to come up later as a sore subject."

Speaking to Vaemyr, you say, "I reserve that right.  There will be no material benefits to participation, however."

You exclaim, "And done!  Thank you all for coming out, and I hope to see you involved as things progress!"