Although most people find the idea ludicrous, I'll give some insight to my background in roleplay. I started out with tabletops, but my first online roleplaying was Vuen's DnD on the Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne battle.net, and I loved it. After a while, I went from roleplayer to DM and even further was recruited into clans and people were always spamming me to DM or for help or for ideas, and for a while I was actually part of Clan Vuen and was part of some of the original beta and production teams for the map. That is mostly just backstory, but it did open me up to the roleplaying community, and what I found was that there were a plethora of maps and roleplayers ranging from the casual semi-gamers to the horny teenagers to the diehard Warcraft fans, and of course a few hidden gems here and there.
Before the battle.net updates that killed a bunch of maps and when the servers were still so full that you had actual wait times to log on, there was a point when roleplaying clans would literally compete. They would teach different methods, have different leaders, different views. I recall it literally being an amalgamation of political parties and pokemon gyms, at least in terms of the atmosphere, and some clans couldn't be more different. Some literally roleplayed out meeting each other, entire scenes, created what they called a "shared world" where everyone had to abide by a set of rules; others thought that was silly and merely gamed. There was quite a bit of social stratification, too; the more serious a clan was, often times the better roleplayers that were in it, which is why they ultimately competed.
This is where this story gets relevant. With competitions and actual contests of objectified skill came a need for teaching. One of the most common methods was apprenticeship, but from apprenticeship came dual-mod roleplays. A roleplay would be at the entire control of a DM, but it had a higher one (the teacher of an apprentice) and often they would set forth challenges or training exercises to increase the rate of or strengthen qualities that they individually felt were important to good DM'ing.
This entire anecdote is a setup for a specific 'training style' in which my teacher (and a few others) would begin making things harder for the DM's by limiting what they could do (at one point, my Mentor refused to let me ever use a Dues Ex Machina, and another time he refused to let me 'create villains' without them first being either neutral or protagonists) and would ultimately challenge the ingenuity and creativity of a DM. Roleplayers that were often also trained would be part of these roleplays and often intentionally be toxic, and generally instead of just removing them, you were taught to deal with them. The ideal was 'a disease can be cured, not just surgically removed', and often times a toxic player would prove to be substantially valuable to a roleplay. The other factor was that I distinctively recall training where I wasn't allowed to make antagonists significantly stronger than protagonists and several roleplayers made it their personal mission to kill antagonists that were hugely important to the plot. The results were huge rewrites, often adding in entire plot elements that didn't even exist before and completely abusing the gray area of unknown character histories to continuously revamp the plot. This was huge and the goal was to teach us as writers and DM's that you can adjust effectively and that even if an entire plot falls apart, you can salvage it.
Before the battle.net updates that killed a bunch of maps and when the servers were still so full that you had actual wait times to log on, there was a point when roleplaying clans would literally compete. They would teach different methods, have different leaders, different views. I recall it literally being an amalgamation of political parties and pokemon gyms, at least in terms of the atmosphere, and some clans couldn't be more different. Some literally roleplayed out meeting each other, entire scenes, created what they called a "shared world" where everyone had to abide by a set of rules; others thought that was silly and merely gamed. There was quite a bit of social stratification, too; the more serious a clan was, often times the better roleplayers that were in it, which is why they ultimately competed.
This is where this story gets relevant. With competitions and actual contests of objectified skill came a need for teaching. One of the most common methods was apprenticeship, but from apprenticeship came dual-mod roleplays. A roleplay would be at the entire control of a DM, but it had a higher one (the teacher of an apprentice) and often they would set forth challenges or training exercises to increase the rate of or strengthen qualities that they individually felt were important to good DM'ing.
This entire anecdote is a setup for a specific 'training style' in which my teacher (and a few others) would begin making things harder for the DM's by limiting what they could do (at one point, my Mentor refused to let me ever use a Dues Ex Machina, and another time he refused to let me 'create villains' without them first being either neutral or protagonists) and would ultimately challenge the ingenuity and creativity of a DM. Roleplayers that were often also trained would be part of these roleplays and often intentionally be toxic, and generally instead of just removing them, you were taught to deal with them. The ideal was 'a disease can be cured, not just surgically removed', and often times a toxic player would prove to be substantially valuable to a roleplay. The other factor was that I distinctively recall training where I wasn't allowed to make antagonists significantly stronger than protagonists and several roleplayers made it their personal mission to kill antagonists that were hugely important to the plot. The results were huge rewrites, often adding in entire plot elements that didn't even exist before and completely abusing the gray area of unknown character histories to continuously revamp the plot. This was huge and the goal was to teach us as writers and DM's that you can adjust effectively and that even if an entire plot falls apart, you can salvage it.
