Roleplayer Guild - Forum Roleplaying Games

Mod, News anchor and RP Fanatic Walks Back In(stage left this time)

Yes, I'm back! Hi! My school's firewalls had a funky glich and blocked the guild for only a couple of days. Now, everything's back to normal and I've returned with the four winds and the wrath of the Almight God. Huzza! I would like to apologize if I have messed up any roleplays with my absense, but things happen and real life should always come first before the internet (remember that psychos).

Members Demand RPBs (continued from last week....and the week before)

The results of the pole regarding the potential reinstatement of the RPB forum is only somewhat conclusive. However, after going back and searching through the previous AP articles, it turns out the poll results from WoD's original Bringin' Back the Arena thread were actually opposite from what I first thought. The majority of the previous vote for bringing back the Arena and not against it as I mislead you to be. Wow, I guess I make a dang good journalist to already mislead people, eh?

Anyway, I will still post the poll results for this recent thread:

Yay 7- 70.00%
Nay 3- 30.00%
Abstain (No Opinion/Opt Out) 0- 0%

The majority still holds it in favor. The poll has been physically removed.

Study of RP Death
~Candi

As you may or may not be aware I conducted a survey regarding roleplay death within the guild. After a few weeks of accepting submissions and collecting data I have finally amassed a decent amount of responses from which I have learned some things.

First a fore most, what constitutes RP death anyway? Simply put, a roleplay has died when no one posts in it anymore. There is no defined interval of inactivity either - a month is fairly conclusive - but RPs have been known to kick back into life even after that. But, on the fundamental level of things a roleplay is dead if it is no longer actively posted in.

I initially set out with two goals in mind - to understand what everyone considered a dead roleplay to be and to seek out ways to help stave off that death for as long as possible.

Working towards goal number two I examined possible causes of RP death - do certain genres die faster? Does level of roleplay attribute to death rates? Is there a common underlying cause of death?

It turns out, not surprisingly, that genre and death are not inter-related. As for cause of death - there were a lot of them, and non of them were unexpected. Loss of interest, player boredom, authours suddenly disappearing (or players), players getting into fights and the story taking wild turns that impress no one are all causes of RP death. But what can we do about preventing it?

Many suggestions were made to this end as well. Posting in the OOC and private messaging players to keep them interested and remind them when it's come time for them to think about posting, planning the RP out a bit before hand with the players helps keep interest, warn people before you go absent for a long time or leave so that they don't sit waiting for you to post for weeks and cause the RP to die, write your character out if you are going away for a long time. As the authour you need to be active in keeping players interest peaked and helping them keep at it even when the story hits a low. And as an authour, if you decide to leave you should either appoint a replacement authour or leave enough information in the OOC that the players can continue if they want.

((I also posted an article here with more thoughts on keeping RPs alive))

It's also an interesting thing to note that the average life expectancy of any given role play is 1 month, at least in the case of the responses I received to my survey.



Doctors Propose Order of Treatment in Case of Pandemic
Candi

Recently, a report has been released by a team of physicians that outlined a possible emergency response plan in the event of a health care emergency (such as a flu-pandemic). This plan is essentially a list which detailed the order of preference for treatment.

During a pandemic health care utilities are strained. Machinery is constantly in use and beds are in short order as well as doctors. So a proposition has been made, not for the first time, to instate an emergency guideline for determining who gets to essentially live and die in such a crisis.

The basic guideline is a list of those who will be refused treatment if the facilities are strained and a decision has to be made. This includes those over the age of 85, people suffering severe trauma, those with severe mental impairment and those with chronic illnesses. This has raised many ethical concerns in terms of discrimination against the elderly, however at this point it is merely a proposition that has been put on the table as a suggestion to hospitals to either use these guidelines or develop their own such that if a crisis does arise health care professionals will be prepared to deal with it immediately.

More here.



One from each roleplay forum!

The Legends of the Seven- Beginners
the last silver dragon - Casual
Nyxia - Advanced




If you wish to advertise your roleplay here, I will let you. Just PM me a link to your roleplay along with a brief description. I will post up to five (5) ads under this section. The first five I get will be the ones posted here. If your roleplay is currently displayed under the Hottest Roleplays section of the article, then I will NOT advertise it. I will PM you a notification of this as these things may happen upon accident and it would be unfair for TWO links to your thread to be posted in ONE article.

A Study into Evil and Corruption *MATURE*
Brivta

" What is the nature of Evil and Corruption? Or, more importantly, what do your believe is the nature of Evil and Corruption? Attempt to survive in the heartless world of a small town dominated by such a force, learning insights about your character, humanity, and yourself."

Editor's Commentary- This roleplay greatly intrigued me. The title brought me back to an old debate that I've had several times with others and even my own pastor. This thread even got me started on creating a discussion in the OTD and so far, I'm quite amazed to see such philosophical thinking on this site. This is definitely one of the most well set up roleplays that I've seen on this board. The Preface is absolutely captivating and the backstory has set up an adventure that sucked me in like a magnet on speed. I look forward to roleplaying in this particular story and hope that more do too. Hats off to the author - Brivta.


Gladiators!! Fight for Freedom!!!
eferhilda

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I found this to be a very interesting letter. I was able to answer questions one and two, but I had to consult the high-ups for the rest. Here are my and their answers:

Rouge47's responses-
1. Yes, every now and then we'll get this big situation that we have to solve. The biggest ever has been a situation which we all call the Spamming Incident where a member (rpgirl) decided to send PM spams and naughty pics to a few of our members and cause spamming chaos on every forum. Whenever Lordlynxx banned her, she came back as someone else, usually using a members name, but adding a . or a _ at the end to make it hard for Lynxx to ban to the right person. Eventually, I jumped in and scared the spam whore away with a FBI threat. I said that my uncle works for the FBI and that he access to the tracking software that can pin her location and then Mahz can sue for damages to the site since she broke US federal law and decided to threaten us that she would start hacking. Big no no. That's when Mahz promoted me to a mod. weehee!

2. Mahz isn't active a lot now because he's busy getting through college exams and stuff. He's schedule is cramped and he doesn't have a lot of room to move around when it comes to forum updates and getting that long-awaited chat box up. This also means that he won't be roleplaying for a while.

Blackfire's responses-
I can give an answer to four and five.

4) Of course! But it's a big secret. A huge secret. Actually, I have no idea what we're gonna do. Probably shouldn't actually put that answer in the RPG AP.

5) We all roleplayed on a common play-by-post forum in the past. Hell, we'd been on that site for years, but it was mostly for lack of a better one. The moderation team was pretty (excuse my French) stick-up-ass, and there was a clear division between the newcomers and the elite writers on the site. Even a damned good writer would have trouble fitting in, simply because they weren't buddy-buddy with the "in" crowd. Eventually, many of the "in" crowd became moderators, further distancing the staff from the public. That, plus harsh, unaccommodating, and sometimes unclear rules made the site feel unaccessible and unfriendly.

Despite all of that, we still had some good times. We knew it could be better, though. It was Mahz's idea to start RPGuild, and Hyz and I were right behind him. I had tried to start forums before on my own in the past, but failed. Mahz took a much more organized approach, even shelling out cash from his own pockets for something more than just another proboards site. Our initial launch wasn't completely successful, though. We had few returning members, and they weren't exactly the best writers, either. Nevertheless, we persisted and generated some pretty decent content.

Only after a complete redesigning of the boards did it really take off. Old RPGuild was ugly, to be frank. New RPGuild is sleek and attractive. I also think a huge part of our success was dividing the boards into Beginner's, Casual, and Advanced, and being sure to emphasize the fact that everyone is welcome, and that the section you choose to roleplay in is your own preference. We let you play however you want to play.

Another addition coming soon will be the introduction of PW, a project we've been working on since the old RPGuild. I think that PW will draw in a whole lot of new players, too. For those of you who haven't read the last RPG AP, PW stands for "Persistent World," and runs a lot differently from the sections you're used to now. Instead of each thread being it's own story in it's own setting with it's own characters, all threads in PW are part of a bigger plot; they're just events taking place in the world.

Like I said before, it should draw in a lot of players. I really think that it'll round out the boards, providing another new way to roleplay. After PW is launched, we'll truly have something for everyone, which has always been one of our main goals.

That's what sets up apart from the hundreds of dead and dying boards on the web.

Did we ever expect RPGuild to get so popular? More or less. It's what we always wanted, of course, and we knew that one day, it'd get pretty big. But not like this. The growth in the last year was unprecedented. We had no idea that RPGuild was going to explode like it did. We hope that the site will continue to grow and still remain the most accessible community out there.

I think that pretty much wraps it up for me.

Mahz's responses-
Radical letter! Cool questions.

2) I started roleplaying in the beginning of RPGuild when the community was very small and new roleplays didn't spring up every day. There wasn't much to moderate and my administration duties were few and simple. As RPGuild's community and activity increased over time, I got more busy. 30 minutes on RPGuild was slowly transitioning from roleplaying to more administrating tasks.

Another reason is that when you turn a hobby into a "job," like getting a roleplaying forum established, it's easy to get burned out. I used to battle burnout from time to time if you can imagine. I guess my hobby has shifted from roleplaying to providing a place to roleplay. While I will still roleplay periodically, running RPGuild presents a lot of challenges and puzzles, and answering these obstacles is part of being an admin, and I enjoy that.

3) Roleplayer Guild is a community of roleplayers. It's a very successful one. We've had a ridiculous amount of growth and we're not even a year old (established July 2007). I've never seen such a specific-niche forum grow so fast. I knew play-by-post roleplaying is a pretty large scene, but almost all of the successful communities are years old and I was breaking into a scene with established oldtimers. However, I've always held the methodology to keep RPGuild simple. I noticed that other communities have large learning curves and lots of subforums and it can be hectic to keep track of much less be accessible for new people. I think that the roleplaying scene as a whole was limiting itself by being largely inaccessible to new players. A lot of communities had essentially exclusive userbases because actually joining and participating in the community was downright cryptic and hard for a new player to figure out.

If you look at a chart of daily visits and posts over time since RPGuild's establishment, you'll notice that it's on a steady rise. Since RPGuild climbs the ranks in search engines and the userbase attracts more members, RPGuild as it stands will constantly grow. One of my tasks involves mitigating the negative effects of growth and adapt RPGuild to be able to handle its own community. No single model can work with all sizes of communities and RPGuild will always be adapting. One example is the upcoming Off-Topic Forum split. Another big example is the massive revision of the RP forum structure into "skill"-based rather than genre-based categories.

It really is engaging to deal with the challenge of community growth. At the same time, running an expansive, friendly community is highly rewarding. We've been blessed with a great userbase and have had very few user-related troubles. My long-term ambition is too keep our community a friendly, engaging one no matter how big it gets. Another ambition is to grow RPGuild into a community more encompassing of all types of roleplaying. Eventually I'd like to provide a platform for DnD players to utilize dice and keep track of stats and almost automate the process of playing DnD on a forum. I'd like to open RPGuild up into other forms of roleplaying I'm not familiar with. We're a community of play-by-post roleplayers and I'd like to expand.

4) As far as a year anniversary goes, I've got no idea. But you can bet it will be something intriguing. You know, like new servers or something. :P

continued on next post...

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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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