Basics Of Eventing

As a Curator (or Admin), you have the power to make rounds more interesting or worse. It is the Curators job to generally respond to players actions or to put players in interesting positions.

Generally, events fall into two types:

Reactive

Responding to faxes, prayers or making something appear from group of players actions, would be a reactive event. These commonly fall under Low Impact or Medium Impact event categories. Usually, staff are improvising on the spot with it.

Proactive

Staff are making scenarios that players have to interact with. Like sending a shuttle to repair for a monetary reward. The size of the Impact various, but usually it could be classified as medium impact.

The Job

In short, your job is to add onto the round with your event. Make it more interesting, make it fun for everyone, not just for yourself.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with ideas, even if they go somewhat poorly. A random, small joke you made with your fellow staff might just lead into an over-blown cinematic ending to the station, which leaves a memorable round for you and for the players. It’s the main enjoyment and goal for any eventer - to make memorable rounds for everyone.

Doing It Right

Of course, making a round memorable (in a good way) is incredibly hard. It generally comes down to forethought, improvisation and restraint. Remember, the best kind of event is a one that players confuse it as a natural occuring thing.

Forethought

The main tactic you can use whenever thinking or doing an event, is considering “what the player would do?” Put yourself in the players shoes:

• What would you do, as a player, if you were faced with this event?
• What about your different characters?
• What would be the worst case scenario?
• What would be the best case scenario?
• If a certain scenario happened, like one of the key members died of your event, what would happen then?
• Could you, as a player playing security, be able to interact with this event during a crisis?
  • What about as a scientist?
  • Maybe there’s no crisis?

It seems daunting at first, and you might catch yourself over-thinking your plan to the point of not wanting to do it, in case of some failure. But this is why you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment. You need to get a grip of this whole philosophy by constantly asking yourself these questions. With enough experience, you will subconsciously take these questions into consideration and be a well adept “storyteller” in no time.

Improvisation

While you might have an overly detailed plan on how things should go, you have to remember that you’re playing a disaster simulator. Things are unpredictable, things can and will go wrong. You’re going to be trying to wrangle some control, while not overly effecting the natural chaos of the game.

This is why it’s generally not advised to write a “script” of what has to happen in your event. While you can control what game mode and scheduler the round has, you cannot predict what players will do with your event. Otherwise, you will usually end up frustrated for things not going your way, which is incredibly discouraging.

Write an event plan of what needs to be done, what things need to be spawned in and what generally is supposed to happen. However, always leave room for improvisation. Have some written up scenarios or expectations of what could happen during your event, but be ready to adapt on the fly.

Restraint

Improvisation is a good skill to have. However, it takes quite a lot of restraint to not go over-board with your ideas.

When you’re eventing, you’re practically trying to find the right balance between too little and too much.

Too much is when you:

• Over-gear your characters with ludicrous amount of supplies just because “it’s what they realistically would carry”, while not taking in account of what they could scrounge up from other departments.
• Seeing your key event figure die due to some understandable reason (like security shooting them for constantly teleporting out of jail due to curator intervention) and angrily or panickingly you revive them several times just to see your end goal.
• Spawning an RPG for someone out of nowhere, because either ghost chat or you thought it would be hilarious for them to go out in a blaze of glory.

Too little is when you:

• Letting your event end early on, because your key figure got hit by a meteor while travelling to the station and you didn’t decide to revive them.
• Abandoning your support for antagonistic group you’ve created on the peak of the stories’ culmination. Like some cultists sacrificing the Captain to you for immense power, while their doors are getting breached by security and not giving the cultists anything for their efforts.
• Not giving appropriate gear to units you’re sending. Like spawning ERT without hardsuits to help out a spaced station.
• Instantly denying on a fax that has a potential interesting plotline for the player to go off from.

Developing the proper restraint generally comes down to experience. However, there are some multitude questions you can always ask yourself:

• Is the action I’m about to do will add anything to the story or detract it?
• Would the players interacting with the event have my input feel fair or reasonable? (Would rejuvenating a dead cuffed prisoner next to a security officer would be fair to the officer?)
• Does the player really need it or can they solve it themselves?