Category: OtherSpace

This workspace is an upstairs office with two windows overlooking the yard and the tranquil tree-lined street. It has pale beige walls, a hardwood floor with a decorative oriental rug, a 5-shelf bookcase packed with RPG rulebooks, sci-fi and fantasy novels, and non-fiction. Several corkboard panels are affixed to the wall left of one window, with colored index cards pinned to them. Family photos, as well as quite a few pics of dogs, cats, and the outdoors, hang around the room. There’s a black desk and chair with a two-monitor computer setup in one corner, facing one window. You can ENTER OTHERSPACE or EOS to use the computer to connect to the game universe invented by the guy who spends so much time in this office.

Brody waves. “Sorry that I was running late today. On the upside, I burned a lot of calories, so maybe I’ll live a little longer.  Thanks for attending MUSH 201: Basic Event Planning. If you’re here, presumably it’s to get a grasp (or help others get the knowledge) of how to run a fairly simple RP event.”

Brody is going to start by reiterating a point made earlier today: When you’re planning an event in a place that is owned/controlled by another player, it’s generally considered courteous to make sure at the very least that they’re aware it is coming so that they can be around to advise about things you should know. “If you don’t do this, you run the risk of some nasty repercussions, both in character and out.”

Brody says, “However, if we’re talking about beginner events, I think it’s probably a mistake to start with a ticking time bomb event in most circumstances, anyway.”

Brody says, “For me, it’s sometimes hard to remember back in the day – about 17 years ago – when I first started running events on TOS TrekMUSE. But I *do* remember. I was participating on a game that didn’t like giving players a lot of tools to work with. A builder character would be unheard of. Alts? Fairly rare. I spent a lot of time changing my name to represent the new character I was playing to interact with my crew.”

Brody says, “The earliest events that I ran were actually sims, like the Kobyashi Maru exam you see in the Star Trek movie. I’d test my crew in simulations to see how they functioned, then evaluated their performance in the test. It was a simple sort of event where no one was really in any danger of getting hurt, but I could make them panic a little  “

Brody says, “That’s when I really started homing in on the idea of this game format as a sort of improvisational theater/storytelling. I’m throwing out a situation for consideration and the players are trying to deal with it based on their character’s motivations and behaviors. And that is almost always what I do anymore. Even a sort of sit-and-watch event like the San Angeles Wildfire game became a difficult choice moment when Faith ran into Dmitri Volstov and decided to punch him because he was hijacking the case.”

Brody says, “Also, to make the San Angeles Wildfire game more interesting, I had the players rolling for the teams – so none of us knew how it would work out.”

Brody says, “I’m going to spend a lot of this session taking questions to answer. But I’ll open by saying that the first rule for any storytelling effort on OtherSpace really ought to be about the provision of adventure and chances for glory for the people who come to participate. If it’s your character running things, try to stay in the background or do what you can to elevate others the important things to do. Avoid self-aggrandizing activities. That’s going to be a huge turnoff. You might get a nice turnout for your first event, but if it smacks of all-about-meism, you will not get much of a crowd for the second.”

Brody says, “Any questions so far?”

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