5) Hyzhenhok and I have been friends since we were little dudes. I'm pretty sure he got me into the whole play-by-post roleplaying thing. I've only ever been a PbP roleplayer and don't have a very expansive roleplaying history. I only roleplayed in forums in the form that we do here, but no forum really seemed to click. Most were small communities with an exclusive userbase of a dozen active posters and my experience led me to wonder what a large community would be like. The idea intrigued me and Hyz and I finally found a great, large roleplaying community where we ended up roleplaying with Blackfire. While the community there was mature and friendly, the administration seemed to distance itself from the users and came off largely pompous and power-mad. That community had been operating the same way for years and didn't really change much with its conservative admin. I've always been into starting web projects, and simply said to Blackfire and Hyz, "Hey guys, let's just make our own community."

We tossed the idea around for bit and then I ended up buying RoleplayerGuild.com and threw up vBulletin and an ugly blue skin. This is an unmentioned fact about RPGuild, but we had what I will refer to as a "trial-run." I had never tried starting a community before and I tried a few promotional strategies and methods to attract new members. We got a few users and got some solid threads, but RPGuild just quietly shimmered into existence. I decided that we would need a big launch and gain as many members off the bat as we could to create our first community foundation. I reinstalled vBulletin and imported some of the key threads from the trial run. At the same time, I started promoting RPGuild across all sorts of communities and locations around the web. However, people aren't going to join an empty forum. Hyz, Blackfire and I had to produce interesting discussion and roleplays ourselves so that visitors could instantly involve themselves.

Hyzhenhok's responses-
1) Besides the odd spam attack every once and a while, I think it's fairly run-of-the-mill. The main thing was laying down tough rules and enforcing them. We wanted to cater to both experienced roleplayers and newbies, while keeping things as simple as possible. The Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Beginner's split that we had going in our earlier days just didn't really work well, because we were having a lot of problems dealing with the inbetween: those not quite "advanced," but who knew their way around RPing on forums enough that they definitely didn't belong in the Beginner's forum. Once we changed to Advanced/Casual/Beginner's, quality enforcement has become a lot easier and less stressful, and we don't have to worry about hurting feelings as much. That, along with the fact that we have a lot more moderators now, means that the quality-control issues that we struggled with early in the site's life are a lot more manageable now.

As an aside, I really think the Advanced/Casual/Beginner's split works a lot better than the Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Beginner's split, which we adopted from another RP forum that we eventually took issue with. It really sets RPGuild apart.

2) Mahzkrieg and I are both college students, with stuff actually happening IRL (gasp), and our time for writing is a lot smaller during the spring and fall than it is during the summer (when we launched last year). No promises, but we might be able to get something going once this semester ends.

3)RPGuild is just a place for people to come and engage in play-by-post roleplay, which I sometimes call "cooperative fiction" because it differentiates from tradition face-to-face roleplaying rather markedly. There are plenty of sites that do this, but our basic idea when we started the site is that having experienced several of them for ourselves, we wanted to do it, and do it the right way.

5) Like above, we basically wanted to make a forum and do it our way, because we had quite a few ideas and noticed quite a few problems about various other roleplaying sites. Even though these days I pretty much spend my time dedicated for writing on various personal projects, it still feels good knowing that we've created a site to cultivate roleplaying and writing that seems to be working well, and shows no signs of stopping in the future.

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