Hello folks,
I've recently gotten the bug again lately, and while I don't really have the time to enact the RP dreams I have in my head these days, I thought I would post some of my insight here for new and old folks to look at. Mostly this is a list of mistakes I made, the rest are things I bring from outside of roleplaying. I love this activity, and If I can help someone be better at it than I will.
I am here with the sole purpose of helping you get better. If you pm me for help I will not seek position or power or take your group from you, I will give you an honest opinion on what you are doing well and what you could stand to improve.
Administrative personnel If you feel this post is inappropriate or misplaced, feel free to move, flag, or destroy it.
Who am I?
First, I grew up roleplaying. From the time I could type I was in some sort of chat or something like that. It started with AOL, my family was employed by them from the beginning so we always had access to the bleeding edge. I did the normal internet things; pretend to be older than you are, "act like an adult." Eventually I started walking the walk, and I can attribute almost all of my scholastic success to my desire to be successful in roleplay, which drove me to do independent research and perfect my typing and writing styles. The first important lesson that I learned was that there are people on the other side of that cable, real. live. human beings. So today if I were to create my own little RP home, that important life lesson would be the framework for whatever rule structure I have, but it also goes to my Rules of Running a Program (title in progress) that I suppose I'll put at the end of this.
Quote:Rule Number One: We are all human beings.
Seems like a silly thing, but one so often forgotten, when I get to talking about IC/OOC continuity you'll see that we all have a habit of forgetting that simple rule, and start acting as someone we are not.
So I grew up and went through school and became a music teacher, and now I control the lives of hundreds of kids as I drag them across the state while also conducting and evaluate various longitudinal behavioral studies in young children. So I will say here that in learning and being a music teacher I learned more about running a group of roleplayers than actually roleplaying. That is to remind you that running a roleplaying forum, marching band, small business, platoon, or Moose chapter, has a lot of similarities.
That's where I am now, I'm teaching and when I take free time I play games or write, but mostly I do work related things (life hint: find what you love and it isn't work... I frequently "work" 14+ hours a day and don't bat an eye)
Succinctness
Quote:Rule Number Two: Be succinct.
The first thing I learned when I started teaching was that I write way to damn much. I was expounding eloquently, saying all the right things, but with too many words. The message was getting lost in the audience. Among like-minded individuals I suppose that's fine, but remembering that at the other end of the cable is a human being we hardly know -who- our audience truly is.
Now as roleplayers we love to expound, you see me doing it now. In your organizations there are places where that is perfect and places where that is unnecessary. In roleplaying, expansion and beauty of text needs to only be in actual roleplaying texts and vacant from the rest of the board.
This is a long post. There is a lot of information and detail involved. Consider the intended audience though, board owners. People who need lots of information, people who are looking to develop and change and synthesize ideas. You are not the same type of information consumer that your board members are.
This succinct rule goes for the construction of your sites too (sidebars with useless information). Our groups are made on the idea that people will come every day, or every other day. What information do they really -need- to see every. single. day? I doubt it's that set of rules, or old news announcement, or whatever. Turn the plugin off.
The interface should not get in the way of putting the player in front of a text box and getting them writing. Every player.
Rules
So your rules need to be short, and they need to keep Rule Number One in mind. Apply yourself to the people you're writing to, don't micromanage their behavior. Long, verbose, and specific sets of rules are hard to manage and easily ignored. (Remember Rule Number Two)
Quote:A rule is not a rule unless someone gets a consequence when it is broken. A rule is not effective unless every person gets the same consequence, every time, as soon as it happens.
If you cannot follow this with your rules, then they will slowly start to be ignored. Suddenly Rule Number Two shows up when new players roll up and see a laundry list of rules, only to find out later after careful fretting and planning that no one actually follows them
What are examples of good rules? Well, we know they must appeal to the person as a human being and that they must be succinct. "Do unto others" is so popular in history and society because it fills both of those roles, it makes you second-guess your behavior and think "do I want to do this?" Which solves many problems before a "rule break" even happens
Rules also must be specific. Creating a set of rules for imagined issues is only going to lead to something being orphaned.
If you cannot trust your players to make a modification when you as the leader are observing that a specific behavior is causing a problem, then you need to find new players.
Roleplay is about change and learning and growing creatively, if people can't do those things then they will not be successful. Players must be open to observation and analysis of their actions, and yes maybe we do need to make a rule against that because it keeps happening across the board.
Rules should be made as guidelines not as an "aha I'll get these darn players!" Rules should have justifications for their existence, and should never be explained by a line such as "Because that's what we decided." (More on that later.)
So my advice to those starting new groups and developing rulesets;
Quote:Start as simple as possible. Develop as you go. For example your first rule might be "Don't be a jerk." Which is a very good basic, succinct idea we all understand.
As things pop up, develop new rules. I am completely aware that specific fandoms and new Original play areas need outlining and specific rules. That does not mean you need to go overboard with micromanaging all player behavior on your site
Be succinct. Do you want players who write and create, or do you want players who spend most of their time on your site staring at rule pages? I usually recommend that people have five or less basic, general rules.
Too much thought
Quote: Rule Number Three: Don't Overthink
After you read this section, go back and read Rules again, because this is where it happens the most. Pages upon pages of rules and regulations. New site owners trying to plan for every single possible wrongdoing that could ever possibly happen ever. You have more power than you are pretending to have. Who is it that you expect to come on to your board, death row criminals?!
Overthinking extends far beyond rulemaking. Guides upon guides written by the same person on how to do this or that. Forums nested in forums nested in forums nested in forums for these specific things that in the life of the board never gets a single thread or view ever. When we get to Rule Number Four you'll see how this has waves upon waves of counterproductivity.
Be succinct. What do your players need to get started in as few words as possible? Let the word volume come from posting and story creation rather than litigation.
Again; I realize new realms and specific fandoms require specificity on a lot of things, however you don't need to reproduce common knowledge on your website when all you did was copy it from a wiki from the associated fandom. The wiki is way easier to search and is what your players are actually using anyway. While I don't believe in categorizing the use of the Force in Star Wars by assigning them powers, there is absolutely no reason to list every single force power on your board when it is readily available elsewhere... especially if you are just ripping it from the original page.
What do your players need to get started in as few words as possible?
-Rules: Easy to understand to the layman and digestible, succinct.
-Setting: When and where are we?
-Character: What am I?
That's it. From that point the player can begin contributing to your society. All of that should be easily gleaned in less than thirty minutes of reading. If you are suffering from lack or slow membership, check your joining process. Remember that you did not join your community in the manner of which you designed it.
Quality Over Quantity
There was a measurable point in the history of RP where we shifted our focus from quality of text to quantity of text. This is the disease that spawned the sympton that Rule Number Two seeks to fix.
Joining procedures got longer and longer, you now need a book that goes through a three step approval before you can start creating. Some well-paying careers in the real world are easier to get into than some roleplaying groups.
What is it that you are offering to your players that is worth hours of study and preparation. And if you are suffering from membership problems, ask yourself what the product is that you make prospectives jump through hoops for.
Posting should be a pleasant experience of storywriting, not a stressful love-making session with a thesaurus. We shouldn't be trying to catch people in tricks of words or deceit. Remember Rule Number One...there are some aspects that have developed in the roleplay community that are asinine if not detestable.
Quote:Rule Number Four: Quality Over Quantity
In my perfect world a player would be able to jump on and start writing in the first ten minutes of finding my site. It might be in a controlled environment. It might be limited. But it will be engaging them in the activity that you are trying to recruit them to. It is way easier to delete a post and possibly eventually ban a person than it is to bear the chance that players come and go without a word because the people and process are obtrusive.
I truly believe that Play-Bys are the worst thing to happen to forum based rp. I feel that they destroy creation and remove a critical part of the character development process. When you read a book, the author does not tell you "Oh just imagine this person, but with long hair." So why are you doing that to me? I don't want to see your ability to google-search, I want to see your ability to craft a character, and then let my own imagination take ownership of the words that you've written. Whether or not I imagine the same thing as you is irrelevant to roleplay. Forcing me to imagine something is unfair.
Teach. Don't Lord
Roleplayers don't just appear. You don't just have people as good as you or as smart as you suddenly start existing and joining your groups.
If you are not actively recruiting non-RPers, accepting occasionally RPers who do not quite meet the standards of posting you expect, or having OOC conversations with your members about their development as artists, then you are doing a disservice to yourself and to the RP community as a whole.
We cannot exist on our own with just the people who happen to randomly find us? How many of our RP origin stories involve us "stumbling upon" a RP channel or board and just trying it out? All human beings have a capacity to produce this art on a very high level, they simply must be exposed to it and not shut out, ridiculed, or made fun of for their lack of skill.
Tight knit groups of elitism becomes like the royal families of old, inbred and with no new thought or genetic material.
I challenge you to name any other art form where the prominent figures are not actively involved in some kind of artistic development with people who are learning the craft. Music, "real" writing, graphic art, you name it.
If you are not actively teaching then do not expect active membership. Fruit does not just suddenly grow without a tree.
Keep IC/OOC PAINFULLY separate
Do not speak to other people out of character as if you were your character. When planning your posts OOC, in PMs or whatever, talk from your characters point of view. John wouldn't like this, or Jane might respond in this way. Avoid things like "Lol I will kill you if you do that."
Do not lash out at other people out of character because of the way your character's have interacted.
Remember Rule Number One. We are all humans, and we are here to write stories together. If you are out to "get" someone then you are going to have a bad time. What happens in the context of your story is in the context of your story only.
If you're running a group, ENSURE that your players realize the difference. There is nothing more UNHEALTHY to a group than a person who blends the barrier between IC and OOC and fully assumes the identity of their characters. Why? Because we stagnate. No one dies, no one changes, no one moves, no one gets old. No one is willing to do anything other than post in circles and suddenly Rule Number Four becomes relevant again. I could write on this one topic for hours. So frequently do we get tied and invested in our characters (probably because we were required to spend 3987 hours developing just as many words or more describing their life).
You can't have a discussion about roleplaying without actually talking about roleplaying, so here's a bit of my philosophy on actually doing the thing.
Art
Our currency is emotion. Our currency is emotion and it is a currency that we must always be watchful over or we will lose all of it. The currency of art is emotion and that currency is the absolute sole reason that you Roleplay. “Because I like it” and “Because it’s fun” are middle school responses to the question. We roleplay because it inspires feeling inside of us; making us feel epic or sad or content. We roleplay because that becomes our second voice with which we can explore saying things that we can’t normally say, and doing things we can’t normally do. It is for these exact same reasons that people pick up an instrument, or a pencil, or a brush. We’re capable of breathtaking feats of writing, and to cause the person on the other side to have this sort of emotional epiphany that leaves them wanting for more.
Understanding that; what is your message? Are you dealing in emotional currency when you take the time and take other people’s time to collaboratively write? Do you want to respond to every post you see or do you simply do so because that is expected of you?
Who are we being that someone is not compelled to respond to our actions and engage in our story?
What are we really writing? Am I making art? (Is this something I'm proud of?)
Purpose
To talk about purpose in action is to talk about the purpose of the action. That is a really complicated way to say every line or paragraph that you type should have a purpose. The broader question could be; “Am I wasting the time of the person that I am writing with?”
Roleplay should be an enjoyable and casual experience that is both personally and mutually beneficial. It does take attention and focus; as the person on the other end depends on your choice of words to make a response. On top of this they are waiting for your response.
So what is the purpose of your action? Here are some common purposes;
- Entering a character into play
- Engaging conversation with a new character
- Bringing someone else into play or conversation
- Positioning the character
- Moving conversation forward (changing the subject, adding more info to develop the subject)
- Establishing a characters initial demeanor (mood, clothes if different from character sheet, etc.)
- Changing a characters demeanor (expressing an emotion, changing clothes etc.)
Here is a common purpose that needs to be removed from the toolbox;
- Filler
I’m looking at you sippers, drinkers, chucklers, twirlers, leaners, tappers, etc. In what bestselling novel have you seen the author devote a majority of time to the minutiae of how a character eats or drinks or holds the glass unless it is relevant to the story?
In what world does a person drink from a glass every single time they speak, equivocating the imbibement of gallons of alcoholic beverage before the round is done? The answer is in both cases none of them yet for some reason both of these behaviors persist in several forms in roleplay.
I always advocate going to your favorite author and using that as your target for writing. You should pull the reader out of the page and engage them…compel them to participate. Simply eradicating filler will both stop you from wasting the time of others and get you thinking about the more relevant issue; pushing a scene forward towards a resolution. Humans LOVE to move on, we LOVE to see what’s next, and for some reason the trend in roleplay has been to stagnate.
So go ahead, jump into that random roleplay, but jump in with a sense of purpose, develop your character by learning about others, use your OOC tools to strategize. Make something artful and purposeful. Inspire us to give you our emotional currency, and don’t replace it with counterfeits. Explore the boundaries of your character control, take risks, you’re doing this to get out of your real-life emotional safe zone (most of you), so actually get out of that safe zone!
Function
Okay you have a purpose, now the question must be; “Does this action function towards my intended purpose?” If the answer at any time is no then THROW IT OUT! We must get better by self-reflection. If you use the same entrance post every time you roleplay and nobody bites, then it is time to change it! Decide what your Purpose is and craft a measure to that end. If it is inefficient or poorly worded, or leaves someone confused, then it does not fulfill the purpose and is wasting the time of the people around you.
Your goal should always be immediate understanding with as little explanation as possible. I should not have no know beforehand that your character is such-and-such or so-and-so. If it is relevant in the purpose then your writing should function to give me that understanding. In reality we should be able to operate without long character sheets or a plethora of OOCly-obtained background information, because the writers should control the release of that information in the same way that your best-selling author does.
Somehow we have gotten to a point where we equate the volume of background information with skill in roleplay. We make requirements elaborate character histories, descriptions, and meticulously filled datasheets. The intended purpose is that it somehow vets incoming roleplayers and ensures their quality of writing. The function of that practice is only to develop people who are good at writing large blocks of text, more often than not writing themselves into a hole with an inability to grow the character.
Conversations are a great roleplay topic to discuss because they are easy and common. We all do them; it’s how we pass information from our OOC brains through our characters to another
character in a controlled way. At the end of the day roleplay conversations should be just that; conversations. What conversation have you been in recently that has followed this exact pattern?
Quote:Person A
Person B
Person A
Person B
Person A
The answer should be none of you. Conversations are liquid and dynamic, their purpose is to gain information or transmit ideas, and realistic conversations function in that manner pretty well. How then can we make our conversations more dynamic and involved? A large part of this answer has to do with the fact that as Sci-Fi/Fantasy roleplayers we tend to give up too much information too soon. We “skip to the end” so to speak, tie everything up into a neat bow and leave no room for expansion.
How can I compel others to respond?
The best part about me asking these questions is you already know the answer. The answer is the same reason that you’re a roleplayer in the first place. We’re looking for validation, we’re looking for an experience, and we’re looking to create a product. Our currency is emotion; we’re looking to be emotionally effected.
This is where you should begin to think about the common rules of roleplay, and how they fit in with what I’ve said. How is Meta-gaming, God-modding, or Mary Sue-ing a product of purpose/function? How do they affect our willingness to emotionally invest in a project? Always remember that the people who break these common “rules” we have are looking for the same things. They are exploring alternatives and seeking a second way to speak, often not realizing the underlying repercussions for their actions. As you move forward dealing with these people that sort of go against the social grain, simply ask them what their goals are, the might not be as bad as the community often makes them seem. What are they really trying to accomplish with their actions?
A mentor once told me a story;
Quote:A man was a traveling salesman and was very good at what he did, making TONS of money. Eventually he stopped selling and started doing those seminar things where you pay $500 and come in and listen to him speak about how he does it.
Eventually someone goes up to the guy and says "Man I can't believe you're telling everyone you're secrets! Aren't you worried you aren't going to make less money or go bankrupt if everyone becomes as good as you?
The man replies; "You just gave me $500 to learn a bunch of skills that you will never use, who's really losing out?"
When all is said and done roleplayers are quite literally a bunch of special snowflakes. You’ll find changing opinion and making suggestion met with staunch resistance or criticism. This is not the only field in which this occurs. Oftentimes people become so entrenched in their habits that they do not realize there is a problem until suddenly their guild has fallen apart around their ears. There is a definite attitude of defensiveness and that can often lead to arguments. The best way to approach this is calmly and without bias. There is a very good reason why writers are defensive and resistant to suggestion or change;
Our Currency is Emotion.
Quote:Rule Number Five: Make Art.
Quote:Rule Number One: We are all human beings.
Rule Number Two: Be succinct.
Rule Number Three: Don't Overthink.
Rule Number Four: Quality Over Quantity
Rule Number Five: Make Art.