This'll be a short one.
I keep hearing about this sort of situation: You start up a forum, RPG or not, it doesn't matter. You work hard on it. When it's all ready to start, you tell your friends and anyone else you think might be interested, about it.
They ooh and ahh over the graphics, the concept, the layout, the setup. "I love your forum! Wow, great work!" Etc. You have people crowing over your board, which is great news, right? You're going to have an easy time starting this one!
Then, none of them or almost none of them actually sign up. A few might, but even they tend to drop off quickly. What happened to the love? The grand plans to join and become great members?
The truth hurts, but it's simple: They're just not that into your board.
These people are your friends. They'll compliment you just to make you feel good about something that they know you worked hard on. Even if they are initially wowed by it and genuinely might want to join, the actual level of interest just doesn't carry in this case.
But what about the strangers you asked on Helpmewithmynewforum.com? They were all diggin' it too! Well, probably not as much as they or you thought.
The big mistake most people make at this point is waiting for them to show up and follow through. They won't. Cut your losses {if any} and move on. Make sure also that you aren't fishing for compliments when you ask for opinions on your board. Ask for genuine feedback, and prepare yourself to hear things you might not want to hear. What seems perfect and intuitive to you might not be the same at all to prospective members. You need their perspective, not yours. Frankly, your own point of view on your own forum is about as far as you can get from a helpful one.
Your best feedback comes from those people who, in the end, didn't join your board.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
"I just can't please them! What am I doing wrong?"
That member who has joined your game, and has managed to point out just how horrid and flawed it is. What you wouldn't give to fix your game and make them happy!
Perhaps they started out nice enough. They joined, said a big "Hi!" to everyone, and then their complaints reared their ugly head in the application phase, or maybe they did okay there and got as far as the roleplay itself before finding a hundred reasons why your website sucks. Something's wrong with your rules, your staff, your plots, your members...you! And like an attentive, caring admin you look into these issues and want to fix them ASAP!
Well of course you do. You're a good administrator and what good administrator wants to run a bad forum? So you change a few rules or whatever on their recommendation. You figure, what the hell, right? If it winds up making them happy, you can all go back to having fun and you won't have lost a member in the process.
Only...it doesn't make them happy. They find more and more to hate about your board. Everything that happens, they find at fault. The littlest things seem like a big deal to them. And there you are, scrambling around trying to find a fix for your forum.
What would you say if I told you the fix is easy and right in front of you?
I only wish I hadn't had to learn all of this the hard way--several times, because I don't always seem to get it on the first go-around. :P:
Changing or bending your game hoping to "make the person happy" never works. Never. If they come in unhappy or grow quickly unhappy with the game as it is {and I mean within the first couple weeks/months--many people have a "new person" phase when they are on their best behaviour but it soon wears off and they appear to change for the worse without cause--this is not them changing, this is how they really are} that is not your game's fault. A naturally happy and easygoing person will adapt to your game when they are new and familiarising themselves with it, or if it doesn't suit them, they will casually leave--because it isn't in the nature of happy, carefree people to stay in a situation that makes them unhappy when they could easily leave it.
Unhappy, complaining people will be that, wherever they go, and whatever game they join. Whatever you do to try and make them happy on your game. Yet they will often not leave of their own accord. Misery loves company, after all.
And unhappiness is as contagious as happiness. Surround yourself with the happy folks on your game. I mean those who are glad to be a part of it the way it is, even if it isn't perfect, because nothing is perfect. Let the rest go on and find somewhere else to commiserate. They will not be happy until they figure out how to do that for themselves.
So! About that fix?
By now they may have gotten totally out of control, so the first thing you want to do is shoot them a polite but firm private message, and halt any chaos they are currently causing, chances are they are causing some, somewhere on your forum. Make it clear to them they have stepped way over the line and face suspension if they don't respect your authority. If that doesn't work, have the ban hammer at the ready.
Again, misery loves company. They won't be alone out there.
Perhaps they started out nice enough. They joined, said a big "Hi!" to everyone, and then their complaints reared their ugly head in the application phase, or maybe they did okay there and got as far as the roleplay itself before finding a hundred reasons why your website sucks. Something's wrong with your rules, your staff, your plots, your members...you! And like an attentive, caring admin you look into these issues and want to fix them ASAP!
Well of course you do. You're a good administrator and what good administrator wants to run a bad forum? So you change a few rules or whatever on their recommendation. You figure, what the hell, right? If it winds up making them happy, you can all go back to having fun and you won't have lost a member in the process.
Only...it doesn't make them happy. They find more and more to hate about your board. Everything that happens, they find at fault. The littlest things seem like a big deal to them. And there you are, scrambling around trying to find a fix for your forum.
What would you say if I told you the fix is easy and right in front of you?
I only wish I hadn't had to learn all of this the hard way--several times, because I don't always seem to get it on the first go-around. :P:
Changing or bending your game hoping to "make the person happy" never works. Never. If they come in unhappy or grow quickly unhappy with the game as it is {and I mean within the first couple weeks/months--many people have a "new person" phase when they are on their best behaviour but it soon wears off and they appear to change for the worse without cause--this is not them changing, this is how they really are} that is not your game's fault. A naturally happy and easygoing person will adapt to your game when they are new and familiarising themselves with it, or if it doesn't suit them, they will casually leave--because it isn't in the nature of happy, carefree people to stay in a situation that makes them unhappy when they could easily leave it.
Unhappy, complaining people will be that, wherever they go, and whatever game they join. Whatever you do to try and make them happy on your game. Yet they will often not leave of their own accord. Misery loves company, after all.
And unhappiness is as contagious as happiness. Surround yourself with the happy folks on your game. I mean those who are glad to be a part of it the way it is, even if it isn't perfect, because nothing is perfect. Let the rest go on and find somewhere else to commiserate. They will not be happy until they figure out how to do that for themselves.
So! About that fix?
By now they may have gotten totally out of control, so the first thing you want to do is shoot them a polite but firm private message, and halt any chaos they are currently causing, chances are they are causing some, somewhere on your forum. Make it clear to them they have stepped way over the line and face suspension if they don't respect your authority. If that doesn't work, have the ban hammer at the ready.
Again, misery loves company. They won't be alone out there.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Why is my RPG dying?
I've covered topics close to this one, but I think that, or at least hope that, this is a first for covering everything that I am trying to cover in this entry.
Currently it is about 90 degrees in this room, I am monitoring my own roleplaying site while browsing around and trying to keep cool. I visited one of my old haunts while clearing out my bookmarks and come to find that despite supposedly having once made millions of posts, it too is now dying, like so many other long term RPG forums.
What makes a roleplaying forum die? Most of the same things that cause any forum to die--mainly stasis. But to just say "stasis killed my board" isn't very helpful so I'll try to get to the meat of it.
The focus of this post is roleplaying forums so I will be specific to those, though a lot of it applies to any forum. You start your forum with a small group of friends, either those you had already or those you get right after you set it up, or a mix. Many times a forum dies after this core of original members moves on, because your forum failed to adapt to a changing member base. Maybe it became too closed to new players--a very common problem often exacerbated by the senior, original group of members who will often exclude them.
But a great many forums don't act exclusive at all. They are open to newbies, welcoming and kind, yet those newbies somehow stop coming after a while. You still have been advertising, still affiliating...doing everything right. So why after 5 years {or thereabouts} is your forum going belly up?
Many RPG owners are happy to let their community shrink down to a few folks and roll to a satisfying stop, before closing the game and happily moving on with fond memories. But there you are, a struggling administrator who certainly isn't ready for retirement. You're trying new plots, encouraging members to recruit others, and still your game continues to go.
One big sign that there's serious trouble is a lot of long term, active members leaving in groups, with few to no newbies coming in. This is perhaps THE alarm signal that your game is drowning. When this happens the end is already near and unless you do something drastic, you're looking at closure of the game usually within a few more months, though it can limp along for years if at least a few people stick around and you're willing to keep plugging at it.
Stop the struggle; it may actually be simpler than you think to turn things around.
To understand why it's dying, it may help to understand how it has lived. A roleplaying forum goes through life stages like a person does! Starting out in an energetic infancy, with an open mind, if little experience, growing into powerful prime of life with well established staff and members, and eventually succumbing to old age, when it tends to become set in its ways and not as open to different ways or change anymore.
But unlike a person, we can give our aging RPGs a drink from the fountain of youth!
--Your game likely began things a lot more open and rules-light than it wound up. How many rules have you added over the months or years? All games need rules, but if you're down to your last handful of members anyway, how many of them do you actually need? Turn back the clock and strip away those rules you thought you needed but that are probably the #1 factor killing your game. Ideally, you could just go back to the rule set, and minimum writing standards {do you REALLY need 500 words per post?} that you had when you started it. It was good enough then, and at this point, what do you have to lose? This is a rebirth of your site, so give it a second life! But brace yourself--people hate rule removals a lot more than adding new rules. Be sure to make it clear to them that it's a trial period and done as a last resort--and it was what got everyone started anyway. You can make a couple compromises if you need to, but the aim here is opening your game to as many new folks as you can.
--If you think tightening up on activity rules and activity checks is a smart move right now, think again. Your members' interest is flagging as it is--the last thing they want to hear is more pressure to log on X number of days a week. It just might be the breaking point for them. Remove them altogether--they don't work anyway.
--Don't do major changes to the plots that are mandatory in any way. By all means introduce new elements--you should be doing that on a regular basis anyhow--but don't require people to up and change their roleplaying just because "this is how we're going to do it now." Give them an alternative to continue playing out their original roleplays while you bring in the new elements as optional.
--Promotional efforts also need to be kept up to date. Chances are that the methods you used 5 years ago are probably not as effective now.
Here's hoping these tips help you rejuvenate your game! It's never too late.
Currently it is about 90 degrees in this room, I am monitoring my own roleplaying site while browsing around and trying to keep cool. I visited one of my old haunts while clearing out my bookmarks and come to find that despite supposedly having once made millions of posts, it too is now dying, like so many other long term RPG forums.
What makes a roleplaying forum die? Most of the same things that cause any forum to die--mainly stasis. But to just say "stasis killed my board" isn't very helpful so I'll try to get to the meat of it.
The focus of this post is roleplaying forums so I will be specific to those, though a lot of it applies to any forum. You start your forum with a small group of friends, either those you had already or those you get right after you set it up, or a mix. Many times a forum dies after this core of original members moves on, because your forum failed to adapt to a changing member base. Maybe it became too closed to new players--a very common problem often exacerbated by the senior, original group of members who will often exclude them.
But a great many forums don't act exclusive at all. They are open to newbies, welcoming and kind, yet those newbies somehow stop coming after a while. You still have been advertising, still affiliating...doing everything right. So why after 5 years {or thereabouts} is your forum going belly up?
Many RPG owners are happy to let their community shrink down to a few folks and roll to a satisfying stop, before closing the game and happily moving on with fond memories. But there you are, a struggling administrator who certainly isn't ready for retirement. You're trying new plots, encouraging members to recruit others, and still your game continues to go.
One big sign that there's serious trouble is a lot of long term, active members leaving in groups, with few to no newbies coming in. This is perhaps THE alarm signal that your game is drowning. When this happens the end is already near and unless you do something drastic, you're looking at closure of the game usually within a few more months, though it can limp along for years if at least a few people stick around and you're willing to keep plugging at it.
Stop the struggle; it may actually be simpler than you think to turn things around.
To understand why it's dying, it may help to understand how it has lived. A roleplaying forum goes through life stages like a person does! Starting out in an energetic infancy, with an open mind, if little experience, growing into powerful prime of life with well established staff and members, and eventually succumbing to old age, when it tends to become set in its ways and not as open to different ways or change anymore.
But unlike a person, we can give our aging RPGs a drink from the fountain of youth!
--Your game likely began things a lot more open and rules-light than it wound up. How many rules have you added over the months or years? All games need rules, but if you're down to your last handful of members anyway, how many of them do you actually need? Turn back the clock and strip away those rules you thought you needed but that are probably the #1 factor killing your game. Ideally, you could just go back to the rule set, and minimum writing standards {do you REALLY need 500 words per post?} that you had when you started it. It was good enough then, and at this point, what do you have to lose? This is a rebirth of your site, so give it a second life! But brace yourself--people hate rule removals a lot more than adding new rules. Be sure to make it clear to them that it's a trial period and done as a last resort--and it was what got everyone started anyway. You can make a couple compromises if you need to, but the aim here is opening your game to as many new folks as you can.
--If you think tightening up on activity rules and activity checks is a smart move right now, think again. Your members' interest is flagging as it is--the last thing they want to hear is more pressure to log on X number of days a week. It just might be the breaking point for them. Remove them altogether--they don't work anyway.
--Don't do major changes to the plots that are mandatory in any way. By all means introduce new elements--you should be doing that on a regular basis anyhow--but don't require people to up and change their roleplaying just because "this is how we're going to do it now." Give them an alternative to continue playing out their original roleplays while you bring in the new elements as optional.
--Promotional efforts also need to be kept up to date. Chances are that the methods you used 5 years ago are probably not as effective now.
Here's hoping these tips help you rejuvenate your game! It's never too late.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
So, when does this thing start running itself?
Being a long term member of message board and website management sites, I have been hearing some things over and over throughout the years. One of them I'll make the subject of this quick article: Once your forum is large and really rolling, it gets a lot easier, and you the owner don't have to do much besides maybe occasional server upgrades, tweaking those advertisements to bring in more revenue, and maybe a "Hi guys, believe it or not I'm still here," to your teeming masses of members who probably thought you died. Otherwise you can put your feet up. You've done it! You built a forum from the ground up, and now your hard work is over.
Over time as my own forum grew, I noticed something: It wasn't getting easier to run. It was getting harder. More members meant more misbehaving, more warnings, more requests, more complaints, more bannings, more drama, more issues, more more more...Rather than moving towards that easy peasy sweet spot it was moving away. Delegating the "hard stuff" to moderators didn't solve the problem. That was another thing--as it got larger, the staff team grew with it, and grew more difficult to hold together.
Why was everything getting harder?
I have one thing to conclude from my experiences in large forum management {and my forum isn't even very large by global internet standards} it doesn't "get easy." Growth brings fresh new problems to a forum community that didn't exist at a small scale. For a while, I was wondering where these issues were coming from. I first noticed it in terms of communication problems between the staff. Things began falling through the cracks, and I realised that I was less and less aware of what was going on on my own board. It's easy enough to "be everywhere" and literally see everything that gets posted to your forum when you get about 50 or, if you're diligent, even 500 or so posts a day. When 10,000+ posts are coming through, not to mention PMs and profile comments, you can no longer be everywhere and anywhere that your guidance is needed. You need a stronger staff team. This is when you realise just how hard good moderators are to find. Tasks that used to be minor become major ones. Time becomes something precious and anything at all that reduces the time needed to complete forum tasks, like a code that automates something, is priceless. But in the end, all it can do is buy you some time before things get down to the wire again if your forum is still growing. It's sort of a never-ending arms race. And a large forum is very, very easy to literally lose control over. When that happens, getting it back won't come easily or quickly.
You know how large forums have a reputation for being cliquish and unfriendly? Well this is likely why--forum administrators who long ago gave up on actually trying to manage their communities and aside from a handful of extreme, possibly illegal actions made by members that resulted in a swift {or not so swift} ban, took their hands off the wheel.
It doesn't have to be this way. The key to keeping the roof on a large forum is efficiency. Once your staff team gets to be over around 30 to 40 people, communication between them {and keeping drama down between them} may grow more difficult; do whatever you can to keep it within this limit. Any task that can be automated--automate it. Any rule that can be done without--do without it. You learn this form of frugality to keep things balanced. Time is gold.
So, what about that day when you can put your forum on autopilot?
Well, chances are that if you worked this hard to get your forum to such success, you're not the type who would want to quit it anyway. You love your message board community and chances are they love you too. You've got a bright future ahead.
Nothing worth doing is easy.
Over time as my own forum grew, I noticed something: It wasn't getting easier to run. It was getting harder. More members meant more misbehaving, more warnings, more requests, more complaints, more bannings, more drama, more issues, more more more...Rather than moving towards that easy peasy sweet spot it was moving away. Delegating the "hard stuff" to moderators didn't solve the problem. That was another thing--as it got larger, the staff team grew with it, and grew more difficult to hold together.
Why was everything getting harder?
I have one thing to conclude from my experiences in large forum management {and my forum isn't even very large by global internet standards} it doesn't "get easy." Growth brings fresh new problems to a forum community that didn't exist at a small scale. For a while, I was wondering where these issues were coming from. I first noticed it in terms of communication problems between the staff. Things began falling through the cracks, and I realised that I was less and less aware of what was going on on my own board. It's easy enough to "be everywhere" and literally see everything that gets posted to your forum when you get about 50 or, if you're diligent, even 500 or so posts a day. When 10,000+ posts are coming through, not to mention PMs and profile comments, you can no longer be everywhere and anywhere that your guidance is needed. You need a stronger staff team. This is when you realise just how hard good moderators are to find. Tasks that used to be minor become major ones. Time becomes something precious and anything at all that reduces the time needed to complete forum tasks, like a code that automates something, is priceless. But in the end, all it can do is buy you some time before things get down to the wire again if your forum is still growing. It's sort of a never-ending arms race. And a large forum is very, very easy to literally lose control over. When that happens, getting it back won't come easily or quickly.
You know how large forums have a reputation for being cliquish and unfriendly? Well this is likely why--forum administrators who long ago gave up on actually trying to manage their communities and aside from a handful of extreme, possibly illegal actions made by members that resulted in a swift {or not so swift} ban, took their hands off the wheel.
It doesn't have to be this way. The key to keeping the roof on a large forum is efficiency. Once your staff team gets to be over around 30 to 40 people, communication between them {and keeping drama down between them} may grow more difficult; do whatever you can to keep it within this limit. Any task that can be automated--automate it. Any rule that can be done without--do without it. You learn this form of frugality to keep things balanced. Time is gold.
So, what about that day when you can put your forum on autopilot?
Well, chances are that if you worked this hard to get your forum to such success, you're not the type who would want to quit it anyway. You love your message board community and chances are they love you too. You've got a bright future ahead.
Nothing worth doing is easy.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Login to all 20 of your accounts, everybody: We don't want to look like losers.
On smaller RPGs in particular, it's often a recommendation. In some games, it's even a rule: You the player must login to all your accounts every day, or at least whenever you drop by. The whole one account per character thing--not something I'm a fan of personally, but I see a place for it and that some people do prefer this approach. That isn't what this article is about, however. I don't think that the debate of "Single account vs. multiple accounts" on an RPG {or any forum} is anything more than personal preference, and both can work just fine.
This is about making it look like your forum is a lot more active than it is. Multiple accounts are frequently used for this. It seems to have been an offshoot of the practice of using an account for every roleplaying character a player owns on the forum. The admin glanced down at their info centre one day and said to themselves, "Wow. My forum looks like it has 200 people on today even though we only have fifteen members! Maybe more people will sign up because of that."
There are other ways that a message board will try to appear more bustling than it is. One is just boosting the online time threshold to appear like all the members you had in the last five days or something look like they all signed on five minutes ago. Or just flat out changing up those numbers in the postcount, etc and completely fudging your front page.
I'll skip the ethical debate on it, because one's mileage may vary and to those willing to try these practices it doesn't much matter. The real question is, does it work?
Though again, one's mileage may vary, I have to say from long years of obesrvation that ultimately, it doesn't.
Oh, you may get a few extra signups and if you are only slightly exaggerating your forum's appearance it may provide a thin margin of help. The key is whether you can hold up the promise that this flubbed appearance makes to them once these new members enter your board and begin actually using it. People looking for an active forum want a lot of response to their posts and a lot to respond to in turn. If you can deliver, then perhaps it won't hurt you to fib a bit on those numbers out there. Obviously, if you're making it look like you have 5,000 members when you're sitting around with 5 other people on your board, new members will quickly see that they've been lied to. Nobody likes being lied to. Sure, it's not like you literally told them to their face you have thousands of people you don't have, but any time someone takes time out of their day to do something going on what they've been informed is worth their time, then they realise that the true situation is not what was shown to them at first, they'll feel lied to. Chances are they'll just be mildly annoyed and may never check out your board again.
So. If you are going to try this approach, do it subtly. Better yet, don't do it at all. If your board is having problems gaining or keeping members then all that pretending to be more active will do is sweep the problems under the rug. It isn't going to fix what got you into this situation in the first place. It isn't going to get you out of this situation by itself. It might even make problems worse because believe it or not, there are many people out there looking for an active yet SMALL forum to play on. If you go around pretending you're big instead, not only have you lost out on those members who might have loved your forum for what it is, but you don't stand much chance appeasing those who want a big forum either.
Put down the stat modification codes and have a look at your game and where you are failing to attract or keep members. Is it nobody is signing up? Examine your game's eye appeal and readability. Are they dropping out later on? Make sure the gameplay is easy to get into yet offers fun and exciting challenges. Make sure every new {or old!} member is treated with kindness.
If you want a bigger forum, make a better forum. Big will follow.
This is about making it look like your forum is a lot more active than it is. Multiple accounts are frequently used for this. It seems to have been an offshoot of the practice of using an account for every roleplaying character a player owns on the forum. The admin glanced down at their info centre one day and said to themselves, "Wow. My forum looks like it has 200 people on today even though we only have fifteen members! Maybe more people will sign up because of that."
There are other ways that a message board will try to appear more bustling than it is. One is just boosting the online time threshold to appear like all the members you had in the last five days or something look like they all signed on five minutes ago. Or just flat out changing up those numbers in the postcount, etc and completely fudging your front page.
I'll skip the ethical debate on it, because one's mileage may vary and to those willing to try these practices it doesn't much matter. The real question is, does it work?
Though again, one's mileage may vary, I have to say from long years of obesrvation that ultimately, it doesn't.
Oh, you may get a few extra signups and if you are only slightly exaggerating your forum's appearance it may provide a thin margin of help. The key is whether you can hold up the promise that this flubbed appearance makes to them once these new members enter your board and begin actually using it. People looking for an active forum want a lot of response to their posts and a lot to respond to in turn. If you can deliver, then perhaps it won't hurt you to fib a bit on those numbers out there. Obviously, if you're making it look like you have 5,000 members when you're sitting around with 5 other people on your board, new members will quickly see that they've been lied to. Nobody likes being lied to. Sure, it's not like you literally told them to their face you have thousands of people you don't have, but any time someone takes time out of their day to do something going on what they've been informed is worth their time, then they realise that the true situation is not what was shown to them at first, they'll feel lied to. Chances are they'll just be mildly annoyed and may never check out your board again.
So. If you are going to try this approach, do it subtly. Better yet, don't do it at all. If your board is having problems gaining or keeping members then all that pretending to be more active will do is sweep the problems under the rug. It isn't going to fix what got you into this situation in the first place. It isn't going to get you out of this situation by itself. It might even make problems worse because believe it or not, there are many people out there looking for an active yet SMALL forum to play on. If you go around pretending you're big instead, not only have you lost out on those members who might have loved your forum for what it is, but you don't stand much chance appeasing those who want a big forum either.
Put down the stat modification codes and have a look at your game and where you are failing to attract or keep members. Is it nobody is signing up? Examine your game's eye appeal and readability. Are they dropping out later on? Make sure the gameplay is easy to get into yet offers fun and exciting challenges. Make sure every new {or old!} member is treated with kindness.
If you want a bigger forum, make a better forum. Big will follow.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Your RPG is dying? Here's why it's on you.
Because you are the administrator of your game. Your community relies on you to lead the way, to take the lead in developing it, and when it's in trouble, to front the rescue effort. So let's say your RPG forum {this can also apply to non roleplay forums; my warrior cats forums have both and have suffered slumps more than once} has done well up till now but is showing signs of low activity. So, when you bring this up, what is one thing that at least one person will say as a possible reason for the slump?
"It's a bad time of year. People are too busy to roleplay."
Really? What time of year would that be? Maybe...
It's January/February. It's post holiday blues, and people are all back in work/school, nobody has time to roleplay.
It's March/April--spring break time. Everyone's on vacation or doing family things, nobody has time to roleplay.
It's May/June. Final exams, graduation plans, who's got time to roleplay?
It's July/August. Summer time. People are having summer vacations, going away to camp, and, you know, spending time outside! Who's roleplaying?
It's September/October. People are all going back to school, taking up classes again. Nobody has time to roleplay.
It's November/December. Holidays--Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, just about everyone is too busy shopping and preparing for holiday events and vacations. Nobody has time to roleplay.
And so when the site goes down the tubes, at least you can sigh and say it had nothing to do with anything you did wrong yourself. I bet a lot of sites that aren't around now might still be up if their owners had taken responsibility for the issues and really looked into turning things around rather than saying it was a "bad time of year" and waited for it to improve.
In my experience, NOTHING ever comes of hoping without doing. Stop telling yourself it'll get better on its own. Look critically and objectively at your site. What are the patterns governing the low activity? Where are players stumbling the most? The information is all there, you just need to uncover it. It won't be easy, but nothing worth doing is. And if after all that, you try your hardest, trying everything and the site STILL must close, at least you can then say you tried your hardest and best. {By the way, it's never too late; see my articles on reviving a dead forum!}
The time to act is now.
"It's a bad time of year. People are too busy to roleplay."
Really? What time of year would that be? Maybe...
It's January/February. It's post holiday blues, and people are all back in work/school, nobody has time to roleplay.
It's March/April--spring break time. Everyone's on vacation or doing family things, nobody has time to roleplay.
It's May/June. Final exams, graduation plans, who's got time to roleplay?
It's July/August. Summer time. People are having summer vacations, going away to camp, and, you know, spending time outside! Who's roleplaying?
It's September/October. People are all going back to school, taking up classes again. Nobody has time to roleplay.
It's November/December. Holidays--Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, just about everyone is too busy shopping and preparing for holiday events and vacations. Nobody has time to roleplay.
And so when the site goes down the tubes, at least you can sigh and say it had nothing to do with anything you did wrong yourself. I bet a lot of sites that aren't around now might still be up if their owners had taken responsibility for the issues and really looked into turning things around rather than saying it was a "bad time of year" and waited for it to improve.
In my experience, NOTHING ever comes of hoping without doing. Stop telling yourself it'll get better on its own. Look critically and objectively at your site. What are the patterns governing the low activity? Where are players stumbling the most? The information is all there, you just need to uncover it. It won't be easy, but nothing worth doing is. And if after all that, you try your hardest, trying everything and the site STILL must close, at least you can then say you tried your hardest and best. {By the way, it's never too late; see my articles on reviving a dead forum!}
The time to act is now.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
It's an epidemic: Why "plague" plots fail in RPGs
I have covered a lot on this blog over the months and sometimes find myself struggling to grab onto something new to write about. Fortunately the RPG world is not only full of surprises, but is endlessly deep and convoluted. Today's subject: "plague" plots.
Wha? Yeah, I am talking about what is usually intended to be a wide scale plot on the RPG in which a deadly contagious disease is ravaging the lands, taking victims by the hundreds/thousands/whatever is mass scale to that particular game. It sounds like a great way to create widespread misery, suffering and panic--and clear out a lot of underused characters in the process. This is what makes it so alluring to gameowners. Kill two {or 2,000?} birds with one stone!
So they ask their players: Hey guys, how about a plague hits the town? The reaction is typically enthusiastic. Who wouldn't want a twist like this if the game was, maybe a little slow, or even just needed something new. Plagues make history. They're THE plot material, and the best part is, no real complex plotting or character motives need to be worked out. People start getting sick and dropping dead and the rest takes care of itself.
Nothing can go wrong with this, until somehow it just goes wrong. More like it doesn't go at all. I've seen it again and again. Now, time for a disclaimer! YES I am sure that somewhere, somehow an RPG has made this work and work beautifully. About as beautifully as two thirds of a town's population dying in incredible pain and ugliness. An RPG somewhere made this work for their game to what was considered great success.
I'd love to see such an example, because in my more than a decade of PBP roleplay, I've seen several attempts to make it work and not seen one take off in more than a minor way. At best, what is intended to be a major plot settles for a minor side story, with a handful of players participating and less than a handful of characters actually dying, unless NPCs are used, and then who really cares anyway? None of them were actually characters. So, other than a bunch of red shirts and maybe an amount of real characters you could count on your fingers, nobody is actually dying of this plague, not even largely abandoned characters or underplayed ones, and so, it is the plague plot itself that dies.
Nobody wants their characters to actually DIE in the plague.
But I noticed something. Pick any battle going on in the game that's reasonably large and you see characters dying left and right. Not to mention death in childbirth, a very popular way to kill off female characters, I have observed. It isn't that people are unwilling to kill off characters. It's that they don't want to do it by disease.
Why? I thought I'd write about why, seeing as it might save people the trouble of trying one of these plague plots for their game--at least, on a large scale, and then being disappointed when it flops.
Killing characters by a disease involves deciding beforehand that the character will die, and then carrying it out slowly and painfully. People develop emotional attachments to characters they play, to the point of actually going through grieving processes, though muted, when they kill them off if they had played them enough. People seem okay to do it as long as it's over quickly. Death in a battle is pretty quick, as is childbirth. The character can sometimes linger to say a few parting words, then go, and their suffering, if horrible, was at least brief. Killing off by disease will prolong what is usually a painful process. There is no hope, and a million chances to regret one's decision to do it, and emotional pain when they realise what they got into and that they cannot get out of it. I had a lot of people who initially decided to do it, begging halfway through for their characters to pull through as a survivor. Some actually got uptight when pointed out the "this thing takes no prisoners" rules they had agreed to themselves at the start. A few people did play it out, to great emotional effect. They were excellent mini-plot threads. They were anything but a large scale plot.
Larger isn't better, but a game benefits from having both large and small plots, and when you plan out something big and it fails, it can translate to a lot of wasted energy, even on something as easy to plan as, "If your character gets this disease they start to vomit blood, and in 3 days they're dead."
But you want to try one anyway? Well, I have nothing to suggest that can guarantee its success and my main suggestion is to avoid these plots as major plots. Unless you're using abandoned characters as fodder, and even then it can fail, because people will be playing them again and there's every chance to get reattached. If you want to try a plague, start small, don't play it up like it's the 'next big thing' for your game and you may very well get a few devoted players with strong resolve to give a drawn out, horrid ending to their beloved characters.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
Wha? Yeah, I am talking about what is usually intended to be a wide scale plot on the RPG in which a deadly contagious disease is ravaging the lands, taking victims by the hundreds/thousands/whatever is mass scale to that particular game. It sounds like a great way to create widespread misery, suffering and panic--and clear out a lot of underused characters in the process. This is what makes it so alluring to gameowners. Kill two {or 2,000?} birds with one stone!
So they ask their players: Hey guys, how about a plague hits the town? The reaction is typically enthusiastic. Who wouldn't want a twist like this if the game was, maybe a little slow, or even just needed something new. Plagues make history. They're THE plot material, and the best part is, no real complex plotting or character motives need to be worked out. People start getting sick and dropping dead and the rest takes care of itself.
Nothing can go wrong with this, until somehow it just goes wrong. More like it doesn't go at all. I've seen it again and again. Now, time for a disclaimer! YES I am sure that somewhere, somehow an RPG has made this work and work beautifully. About as beautifully as two thirds of a town's population dying in incredible pain and ugliness. An RPG somewhere made this work for their game to what was considered great success.
I'd love to see such an example, because in my more than a decade of PBP roleplay, I've seen several attempts to make it work and not seen one take off in more than a minor way. At best, what is intended to be a major plot settles for a minor side story, with a handful of players participating and less than a handful of characters actually dying, unless NPCs are used, and then who really cares anyway? None of them were actually characters. So, other than a bunch of red shirts and maybe an amount of real characters you could count on your fingers, nobody is actually dying of this plague, not even largely abandoned characters or underplayed ones, and so, it is the plague plot itself that dies.
Nobody wants their characters to actually DIE in the plague.
But I noticed something. Pick any battle going on in the game that's reasonably large and you see characters dying left and right. Not to mention death in childbirth, a very popular way to kill off female characters, I have observed. It isn't that people are unwilling to kill off characters. It's that they don't want to do it by disease.
Why? I thought I'd write about why, seeing as it might save people the trouble of trying one of these plague plots for their game--at least, on a large scale, and then being disappointed when it flops.
Killing characters by a disease involves deciding beforehand that the character will die, and then carrying it out slowly and painfully. People develop emotional attachments to characters they play, to the point of actually going through grieving processes, though muted, when they kill them off if they had played them enough. People seem okay to do it as long as it's over quickly. Death in a battle is pretty quick, as is childbirth. The character can sometimes linger to say a few parting words, then go, and their suffering, if horrible, was at least brief. Killing off by disease will prolong what is usually a painful process. There is no hope, and a million chances to regret one's decision to do it, and emotional pain when they realise what they got into and that they cannot get out of it. I had a lot of people who initially decided to do it, begging halfway through for their characters to pull through as a survivor. Some actually got uptight when pointed out the "this thing takes no prisoners" rules they had agreed to themselves at the start. A few people did play it out, to great emotional effect. They were excellent mini-plot threads. They were anything but a large scale plot.
Larger isn't better, but a game benefits from having both large and small plots, and when you plan out something big and it fails, it can translate to a lot of wasted energy, even on something as easy to plan as, "If your character gets this disease they start to vomit blood, and in 3 days they're dead."
But you want to try one anyway? Well, I have nothing to suggest that can guarantee its success and my main suggestion is to avoid these plots as major plots. Unless you're using abandoned characters as fodder, and even then it can fail, because people will be playing them again and there's every chance to get reattached. If you want to try a plague, start small, don't play it up like it's the 'next big thing' for your game and you may very well get a few devoted players with strong resolve to give a drawn out, horrid ending to their beloved characters.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
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