Alternative approach to avoid 'Railroad' CGs

[Crimson Echo]

I understand that some/most story elements are beyond the control of the players. CGs however remain essentially pointless. CGs are all but assured to hit tier 1, and appear to have non-linear requirements in tonnage for linear gains in end result. If all the super powers are being forced to expand into the witch head having a CG to determine the number of stations is somewhat hollow. Perhaps it would be better determined based on number of systems controlled by a given power, and the states of those systems (over a recent period of time) to determine their level of resources that can be devoted to the project (how many stations get build). Players are still able to influence this outcome without needing to mindlessly haul for very little impact.

It would have been nice to have competing CGs for the various superpowers (6 total ) with there being a path to not expanding into the witch head. I.E. two factions within each super power with one pushing for expansion, and another wishing to either reinforce their presence in the bubble or repair damaged station.

In short CGs should mainly be used to steer the story in possibly nuanced ways, and more bgs metrics (the health/state of a super power, and their respective size/power with possible base multiplier sets for each of the super powers etc) should be used for more routine 'rail roaded' story plot lines.

 

[Soron Silin]

I come from a traditional, desktop, RPG background. There's an old adage there that says, if something must happen, don't roll the dice. If the whole scenario depends on the players noticing that someone is stealing from the poor box, then you don't make them roll dice, because they will all fail and then the scenario is dead in the water.

There are two types of scenarios. The easiest is the one that drags the players round from one set-piece to the next, where everything is decided beforehand. A good GM can make it feel natural, but the players don't actually have a huge effect on the storyline; they're just in it.

The second type says here's the world, what are you going to do? It's a huge amount more work for the GM, because the players could go anywhere and do anything. The GM has to scurry along just in front of them setting everything up. There was one wonderful example where the GM's young daughters, when expected to fight a pack of wolves, instead befriended them and used them to defend the village from other menaces. And of course it is another level of difficulty on top to make the storyline epic and awe-inspiring when you cannot craft the plot arc as a whole. If you get that wrong then the world becomes boring with nothing happening in it. The players and the GM need to trust each other and cooperate with each other. The resulting story can be more epic and more awe-inspiring than anything written by a single person could ever be. It's well worth the trouble but it is not at all easy and it requires an order of magnitude more work.

So there are ways that Frontier could make ED a player-led epic adventure, but they would need masterful GMs to guide the story, GMs that are experienced in handling difficult and destructive players while riffing on player ideas and actions to expand the plot in unexpected directions. It could work, it could be awesome. But it could also crash and burn in a hundred different ways.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The players and the GM need to trust each other and cooperate with each other. The resulting story can be more epic and more awe-inspiring than anything written by a single person could ever be. It's well worth the trouble but it is not at all easy and it requires an order of magnitude more work.

In the context of ED I don't think any GM can do that.

With a group of six or seven or even ten players, sure, it can work great.

With ten or a hundred thousand players? Where do you even start? (Well, okay, quite a lot of Elite Dangerous is actually "here's a world, do something with it" - but that's the automated side and that's a bit of a different issue again)

 

[Soron Silin]

In the context of ED I don't think any GM can do that.

There are ways. They could work mainly with the squadrons rather than individual players. Some players may become famous and powerful enough to make a difference in the galaxy, but most of us are just going about our normal daily lives.

But, for example, a squadron has a hypothesis that they want to test so they mount an expedition. FDev could take the opportunity to put something in their way that enhances their game experience and advances the plot. If some other squadron is trying to expand their influence then there could be a major news story about how a colony was affected, and the squadron would have to deal with it politically. How they do that could bring them to the attention of the major powers. Now they are an axis that the BGS turns on for a brief moment and they have changed history.

Or imagine that there is a base on a planet situated somewhere just outside the bubble. The first few pilots that land on it are instantly taken to the nearest internment centre. They get an anonymous message warning them to say nothing about what they saw. One or two of them might stay quiet, but not all of them. The next few are met with massive force that destroys them before they can land. So the players get together here, on this forum, and they put together a fleet. They go to the base but it is deserted. They land. Whereupon they get a novella-sized journal hinting at a dark conspiracy with other locations described but not using names that the GalMap recognizes. Twenty four hours later the base is replaced with burnt wreckage. The journal exists only in the game and only those players who landed in that time frame have it. Screenshots will be circulated. Players will type the whole thing up over hours. Everyone will enjoy themselves immensely. But FDev don't need to put in any effort until it is necessary. They could have many of these sites scattered around. The one that is found becomes the storyline and that one is fleshed-out. The others are removed or re-purposed. And if the players don't mount an attack, so what? There's not been any work done that can't be used somewhere else. Maybe the journal surfaces on the black market. Maybe pilots who help evacuate a certain space station find it in their inventory. Maybe that station isn't in an area frequented by Thargoids but GalNet reports that sabotage is suspected. Meanwhile, a few weeks later, pilots who land on the original base are offered membership of a secret faction. Now they get an additional contact at many space stations offering strange and illegal missions. If those missions are completed the faction's power-base grows. As it's strength increases, political leaders are toppled or assassinated, the super-powers are weakened or taken in bad directions.

And all this is non-inflationary. That journal would be a treasured prize possessed by a bare handful of commanders, but it doesn't unbalance anything in-game.

 

[varonica]

"here's a world, do something with it" -

"Burn it, burn it with fire!"

That's just an example of a response you would see from at least a small group of players, and what do the players who want to follow the story do in that case. You might say, well they try and stop them, but that will inevitably lead to a large proportion of players doing stuff they don't want to do, and if it is burned down then that story line stops dead and any time and effort FDEV have put into a lengthy story line based on the original scenario is basically wasted time and money.

Yes I also am a D&D player from way back, and still play occasionally, suprising the DM with novel approaches is always fun, but you can't adapt for novel approaches in a game like ED because it can't be adjusted on the fly like a good DM can manage. Yes make a novel and surprising move oin an ED scenario, FDEV says, we'll get back to you in a couple of weeks once we have changed the story line to work with your actions.

 

[Soron Silin]

"Burn it, burn it with fire!"

Yes, I know. For instance in my example above, there would be players working with the bad guys. Meanwhile others would be working BGS to stop them and following clues to find the other locations.

Yes make a novel and surprising move in an ED scenario, FDEV says, we'll get back to you in a couple of weeks once we have changed the story line to work with your actions.

So you design the scenario so it naturally includes that delay. I'm not saying it would be easy for FDev. It inevitably means they would have to increase their investment. So it's not likely to happen.

 

[Schmack]

Yes, I know. For instance in my example above, there would be players working with the bad guys. Meanwhile others would be working BGS to stop them and following clues to find the other locations.

Then you have the other hundred thousand or so players who have zero to do with the factions or squads who see these things happening and they make no sense to them because they thought they were blazing their own trail, come to find out they are just living in another guild driven scenario.

So you design the scenario so it naturally includes that delay. I'm not saying it would be easy for FDev. It inevitably means they would have to increase their investment. So it's not likely to happen.

Nor should it. You'd need hundreds of different storylines and each would need to make sense, and they would need to tie together seamlessly and the economies and statuses of the rest of the inhabited regions would need to be malleable and not produce really wacky gold rush scenarios that required more developer time than they have available due to all the GMing they are doing.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Yes, I know. For instance in my example above, there would be players working with the bad guys.

Sure. Actual player-versus-player opposition (in the broadest sense, not just two people in the same instance shooting each other) is part of the design - and I agree with the original post by Crimson Echo that asks for more "A or B" questions in the stories, and more use of the BGS/Powerplay backdrops where possible, to allow representation of that opposition.

There would also be players working against the entire concept of the scenario - not all of them even intentionally, given the things that the BGS can do [1]. That's the much tougher bit to figure out. That sort of "open world" GMing only really works if the players cooperate with the basic concept.

...or if the concept itself is broad enough to support everyone's actions automatically so they can't work against it, which the BGS does as a general "open world, do what you want with it" storyline. Out in Colonia at the moment, there's been some interesting BGS-based stuff going on with that "automatic GM". Colonia is small enough, of course, that individual systems actually matter, so these things get noticed more. It didn't get a mention in Galnet ... but it didn't need to.


[1] For example: there was a storyline last year about the League of Reparations killing INRA descendants in the name of CMDR Jameson. It turned out that this was connected to an Alliance Admiral from Lave. There was some debate about whether they were right to do what they do, whether they were killing INRA descendants or just actual INRA agents, and it was clear by the end that there was rather more going on than got reported in the press. Decent conspiracy storyline overall ... some more ways for those who supported the League to do so would have been useful.

However it was also set against the backdrop of an unrelated BGS conflict between Lave Radio and the local Alliance faction for control of the Lave system, which Lave Radio eventually won, removing Lave from the Alliance entirely. This has been acknowledged in future stories - it arguably led to Kincaid's rise and fall as President of the Alliance - but at the time it was just really inconvenient: the main NPC protagonist, for reasons entirely unrelated to the actual story and those players supporting or opposing her actions, should have lost her job at that point. Frontier chose to just quietly ignore it for a couple of months and let the original story play out, which was not ideal, but nor would allowing every storyline to be held hostage by basically unrelated BGS events.