This week I’m going to be rolling out the personalized story system. This is a system for allowing staff (me) to track what characters are doing and create story beats or consequences for IC choices to help enrich and personalize their stories, it also dovetails into the system for metaplot.
The story profile page gives staff a list of PCs, ordered by activity level, and opening up a PC page lists a bunch of relevant details, who they’ve been interacting with, what their omen is, what NPCs think of them, what NPC villains have grudges against them, who they have chemistry with, and a summary of recent rp, weighted to elevate important events, interactions and things which could cause consequences, here are some screenshots of the page, with a synthetic character to not reveal overmuch.
One of the things tracked are gathered metaplot clues, as part of any ongoing story, clues are generated and spread throughout the world, whenever you do an adventure in an area there’s a small chance that clue will be folded in, but the main way for them to be discovered is via the House Intelligence system.
Once per day, more with energy, a PC can deploy an agent from their house to a region in the Empire to gather intelligence, often, they’ll find out things about that region, political actions and other events, reports on the regions hazards and weaknesses, and if there’s a clue and they’re not unlucky, more information about it. Obtaining information about a clue via one of your agents guarantees the next adventure you go on in that area will include information on that clue surfacing it into your profile.
Clues are one of the things that surfaces to staff in your story profile, the ones you have hints for and the ones you’ve entirely uncovered.
From the story profile interface staff can do things which will impact a PC’s story, one option is to create an adventure hook with a set of circumstances, this hook fires on their next adventure that meets the criteria of the hook and alters it in some way. Another is to create encounters, these again fire on circumstances but play out as mission-like activities in your present room.
So for example, if in your story profile I can see that you recently pissed off a bandit captain, the next time you’re in the tavern chilling you might find a bunch of bandits hired by that guy suddenly busting down the door and trying to collect. Or if you’ve built up a high level of chemistry with someone, the next time you go on an adventure together you might find a hook that ensures that adventure requires a sadistic choice to sacrifice yourself to protect your companion.
They can also use the system to just have your character be invited to a conversation by an NPC, or sent a letter by one.
This helps to break down the gamey feeling of a game because even non-mechanical actions can be given real consequences and enables staff to be able to get good insight into what particular players are up to and to tailor stories to individual players and characters. The House Intelligence system helps to promote unequal information which provides more reasons for characters to interact and RP together, their intel will be different to yours. Or they may have a lead on something so you want to be included when they go adventuring there.