What defines a good overarching storyline?

It should be fun.

That sounds like a dumb non-answer, but it's true. Different people have different goals and enjoy different things, but generally, people enjoy stories that follow a few guidelines.

A) Allow them to participate.

Think of RP as a conversation. No one likes people who speak over others just for the sake of being heard. You need to let your players have a voice in the conversation or else they're going to get bored and ignore you. Player participation is also the best way to find out what sorts of RP your players enjoy. They'll probably trend toward the sphere they're most comfortable with.

B) Create focal points.

Try to think about the groups that would be effected by your story, or which group will react to your story in the way you want it to go, and center your attentions on them -- at least in the beginning. You want to establish importance in whatever it is you do and throwing it at everyone all at once will cause groups to separate and do their own thing. By creating focal points you keep players from running off in a million different directions.

C) Spread outward.

Once you've established a proper dilemma/conflict with a certain group you can up the ante so that others are drawn in. The purpose of this is to create potential conflict or cooperation (read: roleplay) between different groups. Intra-group RP is already abundant so for your story to be interesting and not just another mindless task, you have to introduce them to people/stakes they're not used to. Players might already be involving themselves or involving others without your guidance. If so, take note and reward them for being proactive!

D) Build tension.

Don't rush, don't blow your wad all at once, and don't hit players with stuff out of nowhere. Players should feel that there is an escalation to their problem with stakes rising as long as it goes unanswered. Do this and they'll try to end the story early: Don't let them. This doesn't mean spawn a bajillion spiders to keep them from killing a nest before you're ready. Let it die, then hit them with a twist that reveals it was just the tip of the iceberg. (Note: The rest of the iceberg should not be more of the same. If they defeat the spider nest, the twist should not be that there are six more spider nests)

E) Consequences, Consequences, Consequences.

Your story should have consequences for whomever it involves. Otherwise people won't care. Sometimes these should be negative, but if players are getting involved in your plot then they should get something positive out of the experience. This doesn't mean you give everyone metal swords and sorcery for participating. Prestige-based rewards are the best, and bending the rules of Arm is a great way to show prestige. Let the breed, dwarf, or rinther in the Arm if they want it. Let the human soldier become a Red Scorpion recruit. Your imagination is the only limit here.

F) RP hooks.

Make sure that the conclusion of your story is NOT the conclusion of the RP. If it has proper consequences then there will be an outward rippling of cause and effect. In essence, your consequences should become RP hooks that spur more RP once you're done. Good consequences create new chains of events and plots without you having to get too involved.

Good storytelling is good storytelling. I'd rather see RPIs focus more on dungeon crawls then storytelling though. Anybody can throw together a mini quest, have the guy find the special weapon, save the damsel in distress, etc. But I'd want to see automated instances like in WoW where players find some ancient ruins, a blasted temple, or an abandoned village. They go in, look for treasure, encounter brigangs, a pack of kiyet lions, or whatever.

There's a reason dungeons worked so well in WoW they were terribly satisfying to complete. I think if the Byn had the ability to go run and do dungeon crawls every weekend they would. Opposed to them riding around outside nak and call it "desert training"

QED.




Also: spiders (or kryl).

I understand where you're coming from, but it's mostly because you're inured to suffering under the status quo, and consequently have much lowered expectations.

1) Armageddon isn't 'really a low power game' because the staff haven't told 'low power' stories. If a story is out of alignment with the vast majority of players, then something is wrong. If the game is out of synch with the playerbase, then staff needs to adjust it.

If you were playing a tabletop game, and the DM spent all of his time telling elaborate, complicated plots and acting out conversations only between NPC movers and shakers, and you were only tenuously involved (and felt like somewhat of a nuisance) you would not want to stay. It would baffle you why the DM was so intent on having you stay, even though he had nothing for you to do. It's because you were his audience.

2) There's no such thing as running out of stories. This isn't a sitcom or a tv show. This isn't a movie trilogy. Players don't want to be told about cinematic, dramatic stories. They want to act out their own cinematic, dramatic stories. That means you have an endless source of potential stories. It doesn't matter if something has been done once, twice or a hundred times. If a player is trying to do it for the first time, it is still meaningful to them.

3) Armageddon staff like to tell stories about high powered, elite NPCs such as black robes and such - because it's EASY. They can decide how something will go more or less by fiat, and have no need to try and bring the world to life. If no one can challenge their black robe, then they can pretty much log on, ejaculate a bbpost, load some 'rioting mobs', and go to sleep.

RE: Lack of Ideas

Just once, I'd like to see Armageddon staff lower themselves to facilitating some kind of mundane conflict instead of brainstorming the next yawn-inducing world changing event. A spat over a watering hole, or raiding a caravan route. Attempting to secure supply routes, or having outlying villages suffer predation. If you're going to bring in the heavy hitters, then have them set the stage for the conflict and let players interpret what is to be done about it. 

It's perfectly justified to spark a trade war between the Houses over some spurious NPC reason. Perhaps the two NPC leaders of the Houses had some personal falling out. Now it's /your/ job to do something about it. How might that conflict take shape? What might the consequences be? Who will the Templars side with? Who will hire the Byn first? Does it actually come to blows, or just economic warfare? The NPC leaders set the stage and the conflict in motion. But then they're mostly hands off and off-screen while player leadership takes the initiative. What are they doing? Who knows. It's probably important. But it's not the focus of the story. The focus is on the real human beings involved as player characters.

Armageddon staff has made this difficult by aggressively doing all they could to restrict players to an eternal position of collared middle management. If the highest rank in your clan is a sergeant, then you are damning yourself to a tedious level of micromanagement. In all fairness, the playerbase could very easily play roles up to Captain or even Colonel, and do it just fine - if not better than the staff. I'll tell you what - the game's population would be a fuck of a lot more healthy if more PCs were in charge of clans with real authority.

Armageddon's way of doing things is to have the NPCs completely take charge, leaving nothing for the PCs. You won't find out about what happens, until someone shits out a bbpost. And the result will be whatever they decided ahead of time.

There is no excuse for bad storytelling. And of all the potential excuses, the 'lack of ideas' excuse is the most lame one. It's true though that the Armageddon producers of Nyr, Nessalin and Adhira were basically living human cesspools of apathy and indifference. And I'm sure that trickled down. Maybe Rath will set a different example.

Although, if his tablelands plot ends up having a bunch've fuck-off powerful NPCs and over-the-top magic and carefully fences all player agency into a tiny little parcel of near-irrelevance...Then I guess we'll have our answer.

Storytelling is not as hard as people make it out to be. You're not writing for the Sopranos. You simply need to set the stage for an somewhat entertaining conflict of interests and STEP THE FUCK BACK.

I would rather have a storyteller view themselves as a glorified referee, than as a budding George R.R Martin. Because the referee? He's gonna be FUN. The budding novelist? He's going to be fucking boring to everyone but himself.

deez nutz lmfbo

You may be right, and it sort of makes sense that it had something to do with the upcoming closure of Tuluk, but I personally suspect that in this case, the Red Robe told the templar not to go because it was in this particular Red Robe's agenda to want Ten Serak to be taken. However, since this kind of "you've been ordered by your superior not to do that" business smacks so heavily of the kinds of heavy-handed, hypercontrolling staff beatdowns one usually sees, it might as well have been a shutdown from on high because it was going to be treated like one.