jpariury
Paragon
$400 is nearly seven times our standard event fee. If you want to discuss orders of magnitude, that's a hefty piece to pay for taking part in a local plot line.
So, there's a thing we've been tossing about in our plot team. One of the plot members said "Hey, we have a dwarf thing coming up, why not have some dwarves from this other chapter be in attendance? You could then give that plot team some information about our local nobles and have them send in dwarves to talk about it at their next event." It's a fairly low-key suggestion, and not a terrible idea, on the face of it. That said, if I were to introduce some other chapter's dwarves into our game, I want them to be done right. Not done third-hand, where far-away plot writes up some stuff about their local dwarves, hand it to me, and I hand off that information to our NPCs to portray at a game as an off-the-cuff sidenote to what we have going on. I would want the plot team that knows how the dwarves are meant to be played on-site doing it whatever way they deem as the "correct" way. When the players decide they want to sit down and talk about their history and culture, that plot team can go as big or as little as they feel suits the characters they're sending into play. Your average Londoner tourist may not know the ins and outs of Parliamant, but they sure as hell know where to get the best shirts. And if a local dwarf NPC wants to get into a philosophical debate with the visiting dwarf, they can do so to their hearts content in a way that is both consistent with the local dwarves and the visiting dwarves. That way, when a local player heads out to that other chapter, they can discuss the dwarves meaningfully. By the same token, the visiting dwarves will have a meaningful understanding of the local nobility because they were actually there, rather than because they read a thing interpreted by our plot team, transferred to writing, read and interpreted by their plot team, and disseminated to their NPCs.
When we have npcs screw up the details of understanding some culture, we want it to be because that screw up has value (this guy claims to be from the royal court, but he got the queen's name wrong. Aha! He's lying!). We'd rather not have to retcon the scenario (Oh, two events ago, when Bob said he talked to Slibboth? He meant Shibboleth!).
Don't get me wrong, I'm down with doing some sort of cross-chapter interaction. I'm pretty adamant on doing it right, though, and "right" to me probably looks a whole lot different than "right" to Uncle Bob.
So, there's a thing we've been tossing about in our plot team. One of the plot members said "Hey, we have a dwarf thing coming up, why not have some dwarves from this other chapter be in attendance? You could then give that plot team some information about our local nobles and have them send in dwarves to talk about it at their next event." It's a fairly low-key suggestion, and not a terrible idea, on the face of it. That said, if I were to introduce some other chapter's dwarves into our game, I want them to be done right. Not done third-hand, where far-away plot writes up some stuff about their local dwarves, hand it to me, and I hand off that information to our NPCs to portray at a game as an off-the-cuff sidenote to what we have going on. I would want the plot team that knows how the dwarves are meant to be played on-site doing it whatever way they deem as the "correct" way. When the players decide they want to sit down and talk about their history and culture, that plot team can go as big or as little as they feel suits the characters they're sending into play. Your average Londoner tourist may not know the ins and outs of Parliamant, but they sure as hell know where to get the best shirts. And if a local dwarf NPC wants to get into a philosophical debate with the visiting dwarf, they can do so to their hearts content in a way that is both consistent with the local dwarves and the visiting dwarves. That way, when a local player heads out to that other chapter, they can discuss the dwarves meaningfully. By the same token, the visiting dwarves will have a meaningful understanding of the local nobility because they were actually there, rather than because they read a thing interpreted by our plot team, transferred to writing, read and interpreted by their plot team, and disseminated to their NPCs.
When we have npcs screw up the details of understanding some culture, we want it to be because that screw up has value (this guy claims to be from the royal court, but he got the queen's name wrong. Aha! He's lying!). We'd rather not have to retcon the scenario (Oh, two events ago, when Bob said he talked to Slibboth? He meant Shibboleth!).
Don't get me wrong, I'm down with doing some sort of cross-chapter interaction. I'm pretty adamant on doing it right, though, and "right" to me probably looks a whole lot different than "right" to Uncle Bob.