Here's the second part of that original post I made. It's long but covers pretty much everything you could possibly think of when you're trying to get started. Those of you that see me posting elsewhere, literally 90% of what I say here is what I say there as well. A lot of these are things you already know and will seem like common sense. In fact this is a lot of stuff everyone –should- know, but maybe they don’t know how to articulate it, or haven’t seen it presented in this way.
The Five Rules
Five rules play into the consideration of every decision at every step of the guide. Occasionally I will mention them in part, but their use as a whole is implied.
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.
Each rule is pretty self-explanatory but each has its own story or lesson involved in it’s creation. They are all important. If you are suffering from any of the common problems that plague a community, evaluate your board through the lens of this ruleset and see what you come up with.
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. You’ll learn why this is such a great rule when we get to the section about rules, but for right now just keep it in mind.
Every person you interact with is a real, live human being. They have feelings and desiresand fantasies and all of the same exact things that cause you to be on here reading about roleplay. Their opinions should never be discounted. This is one of the first things you learn when you roleplay, that actions have consequences, and that you can’t just do whatever you want all the time if you want to work together with people. These skills transfer seamlessly to real life.
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 every. aspect. of. your. program. (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 and see if anyone cares.
If you wonder why your members have a habit of skimming over guides, rules, setting data, and posts…they’re probably too long. Ego plays a big part here, and for many of us ego gets in the way of being efficient, of giving actual real-life information rather than just a huge block of text that has maybe one key point inside of it.
The interface should never get in the way of putting the player in front of a text box and getting them writing. Every player.
Rule Number Three: Don’t overthink.
Almost always the cause of the problem mentioned in Rule Number Two is overthinking. We plan everything to the ‘T.’ We cover every single possibility. We close every hole and guard every street. There is absolutely no way anything can go wrong…
Of course things do go wrong, and because there is so much stuff, the source of the problem is often hard to find.
Overthinking extends far into roleplaying. Guides upon guides on boards, often with little more than a paragraph of information. Forums nested in other forums, complete Eiffel-like structures that are completely and unnecessary to the operation of the forum. There’s a complete subculture of the RP community devoted solely to aspects of forum management that have nothing to do with RP. You’re telling me that you spent all night changing the shape of a button and I’ll be asking you why. Is it necessary? If it is do it. If it’s just something you want…maybe don’t fret over it as much.
I am totally aware that specific fandoms and setting require specificity on a lot of things. This data, however, can be presented in a way that is in line with the Rules. It can be succinct, and it can be necessary. If the data is useless then it belongs as an external link or not at all. More on that type of thing in Setting.
The best way to tackle Overthinking is to be objective. Ask yourselves “What do my players need to get started in as few words as possible?”
Rules: Easy to understand, layman digestible.
Setting: Where, when, and how are we?
Character: What are we?
Once we have these three things 80% of RPers that view RPG-D and any writer with just a little experience will be able to be a productive member of your board.
Rule Number Four: Quality over quantity.
This is the big one. The rule that I am most passionate about. When I see players and owners complain about stagnation, players getting defensive about characters, and burning out; I wonder how much work they are having to do on their boards. As I say in my Art, Form, and Function paper; at some point we shifted our focus from quality of text to quantity. Somehow the amount of words that you write became a relative measure of your skill.
Most of the time these rules are reactionary to quote-unquote "bad rpers."
The equivalent scenario is making 50 excellent writers each write books of 2000 pages because one time we had that one idiot who wrote something stupid and god almighty we aren’t having that happen again.
It is much easier to remove idiots than it is to deal with players who are stressed out and nonparticipatory because the guidelines seemed fun at first and now seem like work.
Today we see this at almost every step of the process. I can post a crappy character in a number of boards and if it is long enough, the character will be accepted. It’s almost like the old college trick of writing so much or with such poor handwriting the professor just gives you an A because he assumes you must know it.
In my perfect world a player would be able to jump in and start writing ROLEPLAYING) in the first ten minutes of them being on my site. It might be in a controlled environment, they might be limited, but it will be engaging them in the activity, and bringing them into the world.
Again it’s better to delete a post and maybe a person than it is to have ten players run away because your procedure is obtrusive.
You will see more about this in the Leadership bit, but you set the expectations for quality in your groups. You alone. If you are unhappy with the posting (or anything, really) in your group, you must evaluate your own actions first.
Rule Number Five: Make Art.
Quoting my other guide. The purpose of this activity is truly to create art. It seems game-like, but we are not playing a game. We are writing a story. Just like everything else your players will match whatever expectations you lay upon them. If you foster a community of writers who are friendly and civil OOC and write powerful and beautiful stories IC then that is what you will get. If you foster a competitive atmosphere where certain people are better than others and you force a subordinate/leader relationship, then that is what you will get. Remember Rule Number One though…I say sir to people out of politeness, not because I think they are better than me.
Approach this activity as an artistic endeavor. Avoid gamifying concepts and create writers. Your adventure will be more relaxed and will have way more participation.
Creating a Program
So you have an idea and you want to develop a roleplaying community based on it. This seems like a giant feat but it doesn’t have to be. You can let your players do the work for you. You SHOULD let your players do the work for you. Remember Rule Number Three. Don’t overthink and you will be less likely to burn out three days into operation. There are of course a number of things you need to provide before we get started though.
The Basics
Setting
I’m going to use setting to describe pretty much everything that your board represents, or everything that players need to get started as far as continuity is concerned. This is the fandom, if applicable, the scope, times, places, and other tidbits. This does not have to be long, drawn out information.
The biggest hint I can give to you is to start small and organically grow from there. To use Star Wars groups as an example, so many try to start tackling the entire galaxy from day one, with huge interstellar governmental conflicts and layers upon layers of feuds. Jedi vs Sith, Rebel vs Empire, Mandalorians vs. Everyone. With five players in the game, this level of detail is not necessary if your group contains only ten people.
Start small and let the players do the writing. Provide a general background of “the world we live in,” list specifics only if they are necessary. Treat your players like intelligent human beings. Remember Rules Three and Four.
Let’s continue with our Star Wars example. We need an overview for where to place our characters. Most of us have seen the movies, so a common idea is to use the format of X number of years before or after Movie Y. This gives us a point from which to start off with;
“We’re 30 years after the resolution of the movies and we don’t operate in the scope of canon characters.”
Or
“We’re 30 years after the resolution of the movies for technology and government. The characters never really existed, here’s what happened instead…”
Be succinct.
Link, link, link.
There are very nice, very well maintained compendiums of information for all major fandoms out there. You might know them as the websites you steal information from for the forty guides you have on your forum. You don’t need to list every Harry Potter Spell or Force Power. There already exists a better list with sources and quotes of how those things were used in their actual context. Use those resources!
Nothing is more prohibitive then making a user read –your version- of the same exact thing they could see by doing research on a respective wiki.
Ego comes back into play here. Use resources other people have created. Wookiepedia was pretty much designed solely to help roleplayers and story writers.
Not to mention; those websites look and function better than any forum post you could come up with.
In your Setting you should include exceptions to common practices. We don’t like this spell, or that group of people here. This means that instead of many documents meticulously telling people what Harry Potter is, you have one document of errata and you let your players act like intelligent folks and do their own research.
If they don’t know what Harry Potter is, then they surely don’t need to learn by reading an Arial 10 list of spells and effects.
Custom Worlds
Worldbuilding in itself is another topic on its own. You have the same problems though. The information needs to be concise and not filled with unnecessary jargon. Things need to be simple and meet a point. Humans are relatively simple creatures, and massive world conflicts are usually just as simple. The layers of complexity get added when people get added. Remember how many large conflicts were started by something as simple as an assassination.
Scope
Consider how big an area you want to take up. And –really- consider how you want it to appear on your forums. A forum for each planet, classroom, person, or whatever might seem like the right thing, but remember how easy it is to move threads around. It’s better to build structure as you need it so that it fits your community exactly as it needs to be. If you have 70 people knocking down your door posting hundreds of things in a day, great. You probably don’t have that though.
Scope also affects how big a bite you’re taking out of your fandom or setting. If you want to focus on international relations, then the everyday life of a peasant needs to be elsewhere or nonexistent on your board. If you want to focus on the everyday lives of peasants, everyone needs to not be arguing about which one of their royal characters gets to die.
Have a goal. Set a specific scope for your RP board. No group can be a catch-all for any type of roleplay. That would be a nightmare to manage. If you expand to more groups and factions, great.
You might consider having a separate forum for playing with ideas, trying new factions as if they existed, or allowing special characters or groups of characters. This lets you have that extra component of the fandom without spending hours and hours creating a whole separate component just for one person’s fantasy.
Be succinct.
Be as clear as possible in as few words. Do not generate ten separate threads and make me do all that extra clicking when it can all be summed up in half as much space and in one thread. This makes it easier to bookmark and reference, and means that those things you spent hours dreaming and writing will actually be referenced more.
Remember Rule Five. This is your show. Your fantasy should be at the forefront because it’s your idea. If you want to play out a conflict between A and B, then make those conflicts exist. If you want to provide a home for roleplayers of a specific fandom, then create the setting for that. The creation of this program is your art as much as the posts that are going to fill it. Consider alternatives. If you have a dream of playing a battle out on Antarctica, maybe that can be just one thread in a larger forum that services more people.
Rules
Probably the most important thing next to the setting. Everyone says read the rules. But are they good rules? A good friend of mine put it this way.
Quote:A rule is not a rule unless it is broken and that person gets a consequence, and everyone who breaks that rule gets the same consequence every time.
Do your rules follow that guideline? Or are they really just “guidelines” and not rules that everyone kind of ignores? There has been nothing more prohibitive in my life than looking at a board and seeing a list of rules so long and in depth that I know without a doubt that a majority of this site is not following them. If you have a set of guidelines or best practices, then call them that. “Expectations” is a good word.
Yet you expect me to read them, recite them, click accept, and make my “first character” follow all of them.
Your basic rules should be short and few in number. They should be so obvious that they do not require explanation. I love including words like “respect” in the first rule. Why is “do unto others…” such a popular rule in our society? It appeals to us as human beings (remember Rule One) and when you appeal to a human being you get a human response. It makes people think and support their thoughts, rather than act rashly. Does it work every time? No, but it works a lot.
Plenty of education specialists and leadership specialists in the real world will tell you that five or less is the magic number for rules. They’re easy to remember and broad enough to cover many situations.
Don’t overthink. You will not be able to plan for every possible occurrence. Let things happen, and if it becomes a problem then you can amend your rules.
Specifics of the Setting should be separate from your Rules. Rules should govern the board as whole and not specific things inside the Roleplaying mechanics. So the fact that you don’t allow red lightsabers should be in your Setting information, because only a small portion of people actually even care about that fact.
Notice that my five rules in this post fit every genre and type of play that you could imagine. That wasn’t an accident.
Character
The last thing people need before they get started, a character!
Quality Over Quantity.
That is by itself because you need to read it several times. You do not need to have a lengthy and involved process to get people in the door roleplaying. What is easier, deleting a few posts or losing a member because they spent two days waiting for approval in a board that has only four members?
At the moment by skimming through several boards on RPG-D I’d wager that the number one cause of low activity, low interest, burnout, or conflict among players is the enormously high barrier of entry required to join many forums. You are basically asking for an emotional tax from the player, and then lording that tax over their head for their entire career. And then certain folks wonder why players are unwilling to let their characters die or fight.
The amount of time it takes to craft a character should not be longer than twice the time it takes to write an average post. If it takes more than forty-five minutes to an hour in general, it probably takes too much time. If it takes multiple days then it ‘definitely’ takes too much time.
Again it’s important to be clear and succinct here. If your group is all about the internal development of characters then lots of information is a benefit. If your group is all about character interaction then there are plenty of things that can be left out until they come up in roleplay.
A common worry is that a character will be played inconsistently. They will do things differently every time. This can be combated by using some type of journaling behavior where characters update their bios as they discover things in roleplay.
In my mind it is way more entertaining to explore a character backstory with one or more writers than it is to simply dredge it out myself.
So in designing your character process, decide what bare MINIMUM you need to know about these characters. Their name, what they look like, are they human? We give so much away. If you list all the languages your character speaks, think of all the RP interactions you instantly miss out on simply because someone looks at your character and decides not to engage with you. That’s not even an IC/OOC decision, that’s just a player making a decision based on that mile of information you had to write.
There does need to be a level of accountability but there also needs to be a level of secrecy about the character, both from other people AND the person writing it.
Do we need much more than this? I suppose it depends on the Setting and the behavior of the players and the expectations of the leaders.
Personally I favor the written approach over the NSA Dossier approach. Snippets about the character come from linked quotes of actual RP, such as the moment a character discovers her paternal heritage, or enables herself to use a spell for the first time.
Again I understand fandom/custom necessities, but if your expectations are high you should spend less time policing players characters and more time writing yourself. Remember the basic rules and regardless of how much information you have to put out, you will have a receptive audience.
-
From this point you should be able to operate. You may be able to get by without starting plots yourself, you may have to start a few yourself. It all depends on who you get. The rest of this guide will be sort of random, but important sections you should consider as a Leader.
IC/OOC Continuity
This is a big issue in many communities, keeping IC and OOC issues separate. So many people get so invested in their characters, or become their characters, that it can create a lot of problems in the long run of a program.
Wherever possible, your OOC group should be a group of friends who write together. You should not foster/allow antagonization, unhealthy competition, or unhealthy relationships between people OOC, remember Rule Number One.
Probably the most prevalent example I can think of this are folks that take their character’s IC position, or their Forum rank as license or excuse to be better or lord over other folks. The extreme version of this is guilds in video games that require people to actually, OOC, call their leadership sir or do something special every time they log in.
If I join your group, I approach you as a human being with a vision who’s providing a service for all of us to write in. I don’t approach you as a God or General. I accept your leadership decisions because I want to be there, but your decisions should be based on your own Rules and in sound logic, and they shouldn’t make me feel uncomfortable. Aha! Now you’re in my puppet house and I get to play with you!
The other big problem here is folks taking the conflict that their IC characters have OOC. There are gamed aspects here, our characters may be fighting, or mortal enemies. It is extremely dangerous though to allow those things from harboring any bad feelings towards the other writer. Will we be upset? Sure. But really you should have seen this coming. Every plot has a plan and you likely new the resolution before you even joined it.
The best way to maintain IC/OOC Continuity is to make healing statements every time you see it. Do not allow players to take on the identities of their characters OOC. Encourage them to refer to their characters by their names, or ‘he’ or ‘she’, rather than using ‘me.’ Nip OOC conflict in the bud, that may not mean locking a forum down and deleting a post…but rather just a PM sent to both parties.
Something like;
“Hey guys I see that you are getting a little frustrated at each other. Maybe it would benefit you both to take a break from posting with each other IC and OOC so that you can cool down. Remember we’re here to write not make enemies. If there’s anything I can help with let me know.”
Gamifying
Gamifying is a great concept to get people invested in things. It gives them a sense of persistence, it lets them set goals and meet them. I hate it, though. It can be very counter-productive. Game concepts can make your quality fall through the floor. Stats, badges, awards on non-writing, and many other things that usually have the word “system” next to them. If they support and augment writing, then that is a great thing to have. If they become the sole reason of existence for even one player, then toss it out. Numbers are a great way to quantify someone’s skill versus another, but I bet you’ve read plenty of books where you know exactly how strong someone is and there isn’t a number anywhere save telling you what page you’re on. Is it necessary?
Expectation
In any leadership situation the people under you will match the expectations you both ask for and model. If you expect your players to post, behave, and act in a certain way, then you must make that clear and do it yourself. The first stage in setting your expectation is your rules list. When something happens that you don’t like, it is likely a function of that person not understanding the expectation of whatever it is. If you expect players to get their characters into plots on their own, you must make that expectation clear, and give players the opportunity for that to happen in a receptive environment. If something is happening or not happening the way you want, then you need to make clear in a friendly manner what your expectations are for that group.
Interface
The interface should never get in the way of writing and reading others writings. Forcing someone to look at a chatbox, mile-long copyright statement, wall-of-text rule list, or a bunch of links they never use every-single-time they come on your page is going to get old. Color schemes and fonts that do not lend well to reading is not even going to make it to the toddler stage. Look at your interface and ask yourself honestly; “is this something I want to spend hours on?” Black is a cool color, but just because you’re a vampire doesn’t mean the internet forum on which you play a Vampire has to be black.
This goes for the organization of your players too. All the rules apply all the time.
Teach
As a leader you should be doing that. Help your players get better at what they’re doing any way you can. They’re helping you by playing into your fantasy, help them by occasionally giving them chats about how they can improve. Everyone can improve.
Award creativity
If/When you give OOC awards to players. Make them based on creative/writing feats only. Do not set goals of post count or longest posts because that will tend people to create a lot of words with no content. It’s not a race to see who posts the most, it’s a competition to see who writes the most intriguing story.
There was a comment by Pinkatron2000 here (Link, Link, Link) with a very nice list of specific awards for specific writing behaviors, like Fearless, Charmer, etc. Those types of awards appeal to or human-ness and are better appreciated than; “Congratulations, you posted the most.”
Formatting in progress.