Investing Presence into... other characters's stories?

You can invest Presence into your own story arcs, to get staff to notice them and drop a few hints along the way. And I assume this is what most people do - they made their character, they have a cool story idea, they want to invest in that. Cool, the system is working as intended. But what happens when your character is heavily invested in another character's story? What if you, say, create a story thread on your chracter about solving another character's problem, and then invest in that? I don't know if it's ever come up internally until now.

This can't be a bad thing. If there's four characters all aiming for the same big goal, that's way easier to manage than four people who all want to, say, build their own individual castles and wage war on four different nations. At the same time of course, they won't have it any other way. What interests me is how it would be managed: I have a mental image of someone looking through a story-by-presence list and realizing someone invested truckloads into something you wrapped up yesterday. There's a new push toward involving ALL players who invested into that story, instead of the one and whoever is around them at the time. With times and availability, people who invested in another player's story might feel cheated if it resolves without them, making it slower to progress depending on time regions and availability.

Has anyone else thought about this, encountered this, etc? What are your thoughts?

Well, I can't speak for the future and how we might handle things in beta when there might be more players, and I don't have any bright ideas of my own right now in terms of how best to solve these situations going forward... and I also am not sure of the best wording for our intentions, and how to document the sort of mostly-organic story-resolving atmosphere we're aiming for ... but I can give a window in how things have worked in the past. (While I'm answering this post, the information I'm taking the opportunity to put in here isn't totally only aimed at pof Sami, but at anyone who's interested to read it.)

We've only had story rounds like four times since the start of alpha, but I've already run across the case of multiple characters submiting stories-to-be-addressed regarding the same plotlines. 

• Whole-game-group plots with multiple people involved -- (Getting out of the mist)
  • Of course, when the ship was trapped in the mist, a lot of people had stories submitted about wanting to get out of the mist and wanting the ship to move on
    • However, different people had different angles, and when resolving stories we tried to give everyone personal tidbits and get them involved in a way that was personally meaningful to them.
    • Story-System Take-Away: If you want to be part of a whole-game plot that you see going on, go for it! But, always keep in mind -- who is your character? Engage as they would, remember how unique they are, and maintain that uniqueness. That is the best way to be satisfied by outcomes, rather than focusing on something like "can I be the star of the show? in this show, and that show, and the next show?!" What is special for your character here? If there isn't something special for them, but you still really want to be involved, then try to think of a unique angle that highlights some part of your character's personality that you'd be happy to see shine as part of a large-scale story.
    • Story-System Take-Away #2: Plots move at an organic pace. If you're not engaging, and just randomly showing up to RPTs and putting things in your story arcs, we can certainly do our best to accommodate you, but the best way to be involved is to roleplay with other PCs. We try to spread hooks around so that multiple PCs might have ideas or things of value to add to an ongoing organic plot. Often, we don't have a final plan for what will happen. A lot of what happens is dependant on PCs planning their ideas while roleplaying together.
  • Once the plot was resolved, story collection script collected a bunch more stories that totally had to do with the ship and the mists and the knots and all that stuff. 
    • If by the time that we get to your story in the queue, if it's no longer relevant, we will focus on another aspect of your character and help develop that along instead.
    • Example: Tabitha wants to catch the Magic Old Fish of the Mire with her rainbow hat, but Merlin catches the fish in a big RPT where Tabitha was also present. Tabitha's story arc was about catching the magic old fish! And ... it's in the queue, sitting there, while Merlin shows off the fish about town. Tabitha didn't get the chance to use her rainbow hat.
      • We look some more into the latest development of Tabitha's arc, and she doesn't know much about her rainbow hat and wanted to experiment to see what it was capable of doing... so she's disappointed, and has a hard time being happy for Merlin. 
      • Tabitha also has a separate story arc where she found her rainbow hat and is trying to learn more about it and trying to understand how this hat helps her fit into the magical side of things.
      • What happens here is that we address Tabitha's other story arc. She gets approached by the Rainbow Sage in a dream, who is a human-sized toad with the power of speech and wants to become her spirit guide, setting her a task to begin learning the powers of her hat.
      • Story System Take-Away: Sometimes you won't get what you're aiming for, but that doesn't mean that it can't be a good story. If your character has multiple facets and an interesting personal life, there's usually something we can do to continue a story.

• Secretive large-scale plots with multiple people involved -- (The mutiny):
  • Many people on board the ship didn't even know the mutiny was being planned. At one point, there were multiple mutiny threads in the works from different people. 
    • Again, here is a point where in-game engagement with other PCs is key to being involved.
    • Several of the people involved did not know who else was involved, as there were some stealthy types who were just kind of sneaking around and people-watching and being informants.
    • We mostly just watched how this panned out, but in the end there was a path of highest likelihood and fairness. We engaged with some NPCs and put some game-world weight behind the PCs for whom it made the most sense.
      • Story-System Take-Away: Your background and character concept is key regarding what plots you might get to 'star' in. 
        • Example: Kimmy is a level 9 Carpenter Engineer who dreams of building the best siege engine ever. In the Catapult War with Fiberus, she wants to get together with Dilbert the Famous Fire Mage, and Jubbernicus the Poet, to build the Serenity Storm, a monstrosity of multiple ballistae that shoots bolts armed with green fire . Meanwhile, Rillithus the Ship's Cook of the Greenest Dolphin has a plan to attack the walls of Fiberus with a battering ram built of bilgerat sausages. The thing is, Rilithus is an amazing and charismatic roleplayer who has a ton of friends who are really into the bilgerat sausage plan. Unfortunately for all of them, quiet Kimmy is still going to come through with that machine. Focus on your concept; it's not a popularity contest. Everyone's story is just as important as anyone else's!
      • Story-System Take-Away #2: When it comes to a scenario that has multiple players involved with multiple angles like this, we're probably mostly just going to watch and see what happens organically. But if it gets to a point where, like the mutiny, the world has to respond in the form of NPC/vNPC opinion or non-mechanized story reactions, that is where we will eventually step in to help guide things along a path that makes the most sense and helps people's concepts to shine.
      • Story-System Take-Away #3: You don't have to be a Talkative Timmy to engage with other players and be involved in plot intrigue. You could totally just spy on PCs and report to your friends.
  • When it came to be the time to set up an RPT over the mutiny shenanigans, we let the players of Team Mutiny decide on the timing amongst themselves. They had a few story elements that they wanted to execute before the situation become overwhelmingly public, so we set up the RPT (where there would be more of a large hubbub) to be about an hour to a half-hour after that. In situations like this, there could totally be a RPT scheduled where you don't really know what's going on and the announcement lacks details except for: 'something loud is going to be happening at this time!'
    • Some people did feel left out over the mutiny plot, and we actually put out some guidelines about 'Exclusion' right around that time. But mostly what I saw from Team Mutiny was that they were stretching the boundaries of believability to include people, and often people don't fully realize the very serious reasons that they might be feeling excluded from things. In the end, when we just watch and let things play out organically, and there's a high-conflict high-intrigue situation, it's impossible for absolutely everyone to get what they want.
      • Things happening organically, in-game, using automated systems as much as possible -- that's how we run the stories, and generally everything can be affected at any point. 
        • Real Example: The Sacrifice of the Shipwitch
          • This was unplanned from the beginning, and came into being due to a NPC interacting with a PC and an organic idea coming up in my head (as I tend to imagine happens to anyone) while roleplaying immersively from a character's perspective.
          • This was able to be affected at every stage of the path, up until the storm carried the ship off that sea and out of the zone.
          • There are still impacts from this plot that could be picked up as story threads in the game world and used as elements to help forward PC stories.
          • Players may tend to think 'once the staff decide on something, that's it, we're being railroaded' -- but that's not how we operate here, generally. Engage organically using in-game mechanics, and the stories are yours; all we really plan to do is put in some input here and there where it makes sense for the world to react in ways that the world can't codedly react (yet?).
• Highly-personal plots with multiple people involved -- (Not public info!):
  • There have been only a few cases so far of multiple characters having stories submitted to deal with one character's personal story hook plot. But when this happens, it is usually just fine and great! Usually it's because these characters are pursuing different avenues on the same plot.
  • So far, we haven't seen any situation where a personal plot is actually 'resolved' entirely -- most often, the story just gets a plot twist and continues. 
  • However, there have been two instances where I couldn't figure out anything to do for a person due to the lack of story details, arcs, and everything that was mentioned either being resolved or currently out of reach with no sort of story stepping-stone to get there.
    • One of these times, three people had stories up about the same plot and I was able to resolve two but there didn't seem to be anything I could do for the third person that would seem very satisfactory. So I just sent them an OOCmail to try to figure out a path forward.
    • Right now, we have few players so I've been trying to make things that happen as a result of story arcs relatively impactful and exciting, hoping for people to be content and happy. But if we ever did get too many players for us to do that, and we hadn't gotten to the point of appointing story-staff-helpers, then probably what we'd do is just start addressing these sort of dead-end story submissions with quick somewhat-automated answers, like reputation increases and Presence/XP awards.
    • I believe that cases like this will exist far less, though, once we have changed the current story collection, which is based on a timer, and made it be something that players choose to submit themselves at a time that they feel appropriate to have some staff input for a story.

Thanks for the opportunity to yammer about the story system! Honestly I've been thinking a lot about it and how to present information about it as well as streamline it, so this was useful for me to ramble about.

Woah, you've put a LOT of thought into it! Thanks for the response and transparency, it's very helpful to know what you're looking for and what you're not.

I should probably fix forum quotes one of these days. 

But yeah we're really listening about the story system and thinking about it a lot these days -- I definitely don't mean to stifle any further discourse by weighing in here.

Hopefully more players with respond with thoughts and ideas and how they've felt about stuff so far!