Post by Wolfe on May 8, 2020 23:17:31 GMT -5
This is something that’s been a recurring if minor issue over the past year plus, so I’m going to get out in writing what I consider to be the roleplaying games social contract. This thankfully has not been a major issue, with less than a half dozen cases in the past fifteen months or so… but I decided to write this anyway to link to people in the future who might need something like this. In long running sites, burnout is the biggest enemy for players once they have established their characters. Usually this burnout occurs and has nothing to do with anything writing related at all, but mounting time spent doing things other than writing until the non-writing responsibilities pile up and become not worth it.
The fact of the matter is that while some players believe that the only thing, they are obligated to do in order to participate is to show up, that’s simply not true. The players who have this mindset and espouse it the most tend to have very selfish and ‘take, take, take’ mindsets where they feel as though they are the only important person in the roleplay. It’s frankly very toxic to play with or against, for everyone involved. Treating other roleplayers like entitled people treat customer service representatives, like dirt paid for the express purpose of serving their needs is a great way to ensure that nobody has fun. I perceive this mentality to be the number one cause of burnout, especially among people who volunteer their time to run events and scenarios.
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Forum roleplaying is a group effort, and players have responsibilities and expectations as well. The main responsibility a player has is coming into each thread with the mindset of ”Whatever happens, I am going to have fun with this.” A player must decide consciously that they are going to have fun, so they become more receptive to the actual thread that happens versus the thread that they had imagined in their head prior to writing. This is what I believe to be the root of most godmodding, someone imagining themselves as an author of a novel rather than a roleplayer in a collaborative game where one person does not have final say over what happens in the story.
Once a player is out of the mindset that the DM must provide them with fun with some arbitrary measuring stick, they can instead make sure that everyone else is having fun and focus on enhancing the experience for everyone else involved. Instead of having the very selfish mindset of expecting everyone else to cater to them, if you already come in with the mindset that you want to have fun and want everyone else to also have fun you can help facilitate that. This, when bought into, means everyone in the thread is part of a nice trust circle where everyone is looking out for each other and proactively allowing other characters the opportunity to shine. This improves the quality of threads.
If altruism and the spirit of comradery isn’t enough justification for this rule, consider this. If the DM doesn’t have fun, the DM can then stop running threads. This means you no longer have EP options or double XP options. If the other players don’t have fun, then they could stop having threads and you no longer have a group to play in. If the reason that the DM and the other players do not have fun is you, then they will simply move on and play without you – leaving you without a group to play in.
Now that we’ve established that it is vitally important for people to have fun in a voluntary hobby, let’s go over how to make that happen. What can you do as a player to make sure others have fun?
Tip #1: Don’t Hog the Spotlight. In order to let other people have fun, you need to let them play. Steamrolling over people IC and OOC, godmodding, bunnying, backseat driving, guilt tripping, and any number of other things prevent other people from being able to actually roleplay. Unless specifically asked for advice, don’t give it. Let people make their own decisions and let people roleplay their characters and react how they want to react, rather than attempting to force them into doing what you want.
Please note that this goes the other way too. No matter how surly or awful or anti-social your character is, your character must provide some benefit for the team in order to have people take them along. If your character is a load who only serves to sabotage the party, they can and will be abandoned and left behind to sabotage themselves and themselves alone.
Tip #2: Learn the Rules. Nobody expects you to memorize every chart and table. People do expect you to know your own character sheet and know what your character is able to do. The player is expected to be the subject matter expert of their own character. If you have an ability, you are expected to know how it works and what its limitations are. This information is required to be in your profile, so in practice this means you are expected to read that profile every so often if you forget what your limitations and abilities are. Your character is your responsibility.
Tip #3: Be an Active Participant. Everyone knows the guy who just posts their character sheet and no other information when asking for a thread, expecting someone else to do all of the legwork for them in reading the character profile, pitching thread starter ideas, and potentially getting several of them turned down for any number of reasons. This may work, but a more proactive approach will ultimately be much more successful. Instead of assuming everyone else will do all of that legwork, try meeting other players halfway and actually reading their profiles or suggesting thread ideas to other people to show that you’re interested in a thread specifically with them.
Maybe instead of just a flat “Want to thread?” try introducing ideas that are character-agnostic (as in it doesn't matter who takes up your prompt, it works anyway) that your character might be doing. Maybe a list of where your character spends their time, their hobbies, or useful information to help others create hooks specifically for your character. This is a much better long term strategy than expecting people to move heaven and earth off of a sparse character application that often tells people very little about effective hooks for your character.
Tip #4: Assist Fellow Roleplayers. If another player has a question or has an issue that you know you can help with, consider proactively helping them. The fact of the matter is that while it’s very easy to just sit back and let the DM handle all of the low level moderation, that stuff is taxing over time to DMs who often want to tell stories and not necessarily to be full time customer support representatives. Even an occasional proactive member helping out is usually much appreciated. The same goes to disagreements, because to be completely frank the two major causes of DM burnout we’ve experienced in the past 15 months are member moderation and ghosting.
People volunteer to DM because they want to tell stories, but if the bulk of their time running the thread is spent OOC dealing with stuff that has nothing to do with stories then they will burn out quickly and there will be less event opportunities overall. If the bulk of time that a DM spent was actually just running the roleplaying aspect of threads, there would be a hell of a lot more of them and a lot of that comes down to roleplayers helping roleplayers and being willing to help make that happen. Herding cats sucks and being willing as a member to volunteer for a round of that helps a lot.
Tip #5: Be on Time. Event threads have a standard posting timer of one week. If you do not post within that week, it is nobody’s fault but your own. Personal responsibility is a big part of any collaborative game and posting on time is a big part of that. If you agreed to a thread with a posting timer and cannot make that posting timer, the thread will move on without you. There have been cases in the past where people have been livid about this and expressed their grievances very angrily and very publicly. This is frankly embarrassing and will ensure that nobody is willing to DM for you in the future, robbing you of any future event opportunities. On the flip side, to those of you who always post on time – I promise everyone else has noticed and we appreciate it.
Tip #6: Communicate. If you have a problem with something that is happening, talk about it. If you’re a DM and a player does something you perceive to be whack and out of line, talk to them. If you’re a player and see a DM do something you perceive to be whack and out of line, talk to them. Players who see players do something whack, talk to them. Forum roleplaying is a group effort, and not talking about it leads to bigger issues down the line.
What this common advice does not mean is to ignore lowest level problem solving. The DM is not a paid psychologist or a professional mediator and should not be brought in for every single inter-player dispute. Don’t expect to be able to offload all social issues onto someone else, and please read the rules before escalating a complaint. If a player makes a lot of complaints about other players despite those players following every rule, that’s not a sign for the other players to change… it’s a sign to drop the problem player who refuses to have fun in the game we all agreed to play. Abuse of communication by those who are inconsiderate and do not care about an appropriate time and place is a common way that good players burn out. To make matters worse, the abuse is often done via DMs so nobody else is aware of the additional stress put on the targeted player.
A breach in rules or content is completely fine and commendable to bring up. In the past fifteen months, however, most escalations have stemmed from players who were not willing to have fun when a scenario or event did not meet the expectations of the game, they would have ran had they been in the DM’s shoes. Their characters would have been given special allowances, more monologuing time, or been unable to lose or have consequences. None of these are valid reasons to push this frustration onto other players. If you have feedback in that vein, there is a survey at the end of every event where you can provide that feedback. Doing so unsolicited burns people out, because most people do forum roleplaying to write stories and not be psychologists or cosplay professional mediators.
Tip #7: Thank Other Players. If someone set you up for a cool moment, try thanking them. At the end of a successful mission, try thanking the other players OOC for having an enjoyable thread. If you had fun, it’s good practice to let other people know that you had fun. Typically, over the course of this forum’s life the negative feedback has been much louder and more insistent than the positive feedback. Unsolicited negative feedback is universally an awful move, but unsolicited positive feedback is usually very appreciated and tends to stave against burnout. Remember that without other players, you don’t have a site to roleplay your character on and that’s really the bottom line.
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I also completely understand that at some points you may not mesh with someone OOC and there might be a personality conflict. That’s completely and utterly fine, and arrangements can be made to ensure that you are not randomly matched with that person. What this does not mean, however, is that you have license to abuse and harass that other person by dumping baggage on them until they burn out and this really goes both ways. There are a limited number of DMs on this site, and anyone who successfully alienates all active ones on their faction will not be invited to participate in events. A DM who alienates all of their players will not have any participants for their scenarios or events, either.
I am not forcing anyone to roleplay with someone who has treated them badly and disrespectfully for simply doing their best on a hobbyist roleplaying site. That would be the biggest and best way for me to lose all of the core members I have acquired over the past fifteen months, and I have no problem losing people who refuse to consider the fact that their behavior effects other people’s enjoyment and find pleasure in putting down others and burning them out of my favorite hobby.
The fact of the matter is that while some players believe that the only thing, they are obligated to do in order to participate is to show up, that’s simply not true. The players who have this mindset and espouse it the most tend to have very selfish and ‘take, take, take’ mindsets where they feel as though they are the only important person in the roleplay. It’s frankly very toxic to play with or against, for everyone involved. Treating other roleplayers like entitled people treat customer service representatives, like dirt paid for the express purpose of serving their needs is a great way to ensure that nobody has fun. I perceive this mentality to be the number one cause of burnout, especially among people who volunteer their time to run events and scenarios.
__
Forum roleplaying is a group effort, and players have responsibilities and expectations as well. The main responsibility a player has is coming into each thread with the mindset of ”Whatever happens, I am going to have fun with this.” A player must decide consciously that they are going to have fun, so they become more receptive to the actual thread that happens versus the thread that they had imagined in their head prior to writing. This is what I believe to be the root of most godmodding, someone imagining themselves as an author of a novel rather than a roleplayer in a collaborative game where one person does not have final say over what happens in the story.
Once a player is out of the mindset that the DM must provide them with fun with some arbitrary measuring stick, they can instead make sure that everyone else is having fun and focus on enhancing the experience for everyone else involved. Instead of having the very selfish mindset of expecting everyone else to cater to them, if you already come in with the mindset that you want to have fun and want everyone else to also have fun you can help facilitate that. This, when bought into, means everyone in the thread is part of a nice trust circle where everyone is looking out for each other and proactively allowing other characters the opportunity to shine. This improves the quality of threads.
If altruism and the spirit of comradery isn’t enough justification for this rule, consider this. If the DM doesn’t have fun, the DM can then stop running threads. This means you no longer have EP options or double XP options. If the other players don’t have fun, then they could stop having threads and you no longer have a group to play in. If the reason that the DM and the other players do not have fun is you, then they will simply move on and play without you – leaving you without a group to play in.
Now that we’ve established that it is vitally important for people to have fun in a voluntary hobby, let’s go over how to make that happen. What can you do as a player to make sure others have fun?
Tip #1: Don’t Hog the Spotlight. In order to let other people have fun, you need to let them play. Steamrolling over people IC and OOC, godmodding, bunnying, backseat driving, guilt tripping, and any number of other things prevent other people from being able to actually roleplay. Unless specifically asked for advice, don’t give it. Let people make their own decisions and let people roleplay their characters and react how they want to react, rather than attempting to force them into doing what you want.
Please note that this goes the other way too. No matter how surly or awful or anti-social your character is, your character must provide some benefit for the team in order to have people take them along. If your character is a load who only serves to sabotage the party, they can and will be abandoned and left behind to sabotage themselves and themselves alone.
Tip #2: Learn the Rules. Nobody expects you to memorize every chart and table. People do expect you to know your own character sheet and know what your character is able to do. The player is expected to be the subject matter expert of their own character. If you have an ability, you are expected to know how it works and what its limitations are. This information is required to be in your profile, so in practice this means you are expected to read that profile every so often if you forget what your limitations and abilities are. Your character is your responsibility.
Tip #3: Be an Active Participant. Everyone knows the guy who just posts their character sheet and no other information when asking for a thread, expecting someone else to do all of the legwork for them in reading the character profile, pitching thread starter ideas, and potentially getting several of them turned down for any number of reasons. This may work, but a more proactive approach will ultimately be much more successful. Instead of assuming everyone else will do all of that legwork, try meeting other players halfway and actually reading their profiles or suggesting thread ideas to other people to show that you’re interested in a thread specifically with them.
Maybe instead of just a flat “Want to thread?” try introducing ideas that are character-agnostic (as in it doesn't matter who takes up your prompt, it works anyway) that your character might be doing. Maybe a list of where your character spends their time, their hobbies, or useful information to help others create hooks specifically for your character. This is a much better long term strategy than expecting people to move heaven and earth off of a sparse character application that often tells people very little about effective hooks for your character.
Tip #4: Assist Fellow Roleplayers. If another player has a question or has an issue that you know you can help with, consider proactively helping them. The fact of the matter is that while it’s very easy to just sit back and let the DM handle all of the low level moderation, that stuff is taxing over time to DMs who often want to tell stories and not necessarily to be full time customer support representatives. Even an occasional proactive member helping out is usually much appreciated. The same goes to disagreements, because to be completely frank the two major causes of DM burnout we’ve experienced in the past 15 months are member moderation and ghosting.
People volunteer to DM because they want to tell stories, but if the bulk of their time running the thread is spent OOC dealing with stuff that has nothing to do with stories then they will burn out quickly and there will be less event opportunities overall. If the bulk of time that a DM spent was actually just running the roleplaying aspect of threads, there would be a hell of a lot more of them and a lot of that comes down to roleplayers helping roleplayers and being willing to help make that happen. Herding cats sucks and being willing as a member to volunteer for a round of that helps a lot.
Tip #5: Be on Time. Event threads have a standard posting timer of one week. If you do not post within that week, it is nobody’s fault but your own. Personal responsibility is a big part of any collaborative game and posting on time is a big part of that. If you agreed to a thread with a posting timer and cannot make that posting timer, the thread will move on without you. There have been cases in the past where people have been livid about this and expressed their grievances very angrily and very publicly. This is frankly embarrassing and will ensure that nobody is willing to DM for you in the future, robbing you of any future event opportunities. On the flip side, to those of you who always post on time – I promise everyone else has noticed and we appreciate it.
Tip #6: Communicate. If you have a problem with something that is happening, talk about it. If you’re a DM and a player does something you perceive to be whack and out of line, talk to them. If you’re a player and see a DM do something you perceive to be whack and out of line, talk to them. Players who see players do something whack, talk to them. Forum roleplaying is a group effort, and not talking about it leads to bigger issues down the line.
What this common advice does not mean is to ignore lowest level problem solving. The DM is not a paid psychologist or a professional mediator and should not be brought in for every single inter-player dispute. Don’t expect to be able to offload all social issues onto someone else, and please read the rules before escalating a complaint. If a player makes a lot of complaints about other players despite those players following every rule, that’s not a sign for the other players to change… it’s a sign to drop the problem player who refuses to have fun in the game we all agreed to play. Abuse of communication by those who are inconsiderate and do not care about an appropriate time and place is a common way that good players burn out. To make matters worse, the abuse is often done via DMs so nobody else is aware of the additional stress put on the targeted player.
A breach in rules or content is completely fine and commendable to bring up. In the past fifteen months, however, most escalations have stemmed from players who were not willing to have fun when a scenario or event did not meet the expectations of the game, they would have ran had they been in the DM’s shoes. Their characters would have been given special allowances, more monologuing time, or been unable to lose or have consequences. None of these are valid reasons to push this frustration onto other players. If you have feedback in that vein, there is a survey at the end of every event where you can provide that feedback. Doing so unsolicited burns people out, because most people do forum roleplaying to write stories and not be psychologists or cosplay professional mediators.
Tip #7: Thank Other Players. If someone set you up for a cool moment, try thanking them. At the end of a successful mission, try thanking the other players OOC for having an enjoyable thread. If you had fun, it’s good practice to let other people know that you had fun. Typically, over the course of this forum’s life the negative feedback has been much louder and more insistent than the positive feedback. Unsolicited negative feedback is universally an awful move, but unsolicited positive feedback is usually very appreciated and tends to stave against burnout. Remember that without other players, you don’t have a site to roleplay your character on and that’s really the bottom line.
__
I also completely understand that at some points you may not mesh with someone OOC and there might be a personality conflict. That’s completely and utterly fine, and arrangements can be made to ensure that you are not randomly matched with that person. What this does not mean, however, is that you have license to abuse and harass that other person by dumping baggage on them until they burn out and this really goes both ways. There are a limited number of DMs on this site, and anyone who successfully alienates all active ones on their faction will not be invited to participate in events. A DM who alienates all of their players will not have any participants for their scenarios or events, either.
I am not forcing anyone to roleplay with someone who has treated them badly and disrespectfully for simply doing their best on a hobbyist roleplaying site. That would be the biggest and best way for me to lose all of the core members I have acquired over the past fifteen months, and I have no problem losing people who refuse to consider the fact that their behavior effects other people’s enjoyment and find pleasure in putting down others and burning them out of my favorite hobby.
Heavy inspiration taken from Seth Skorkowsky's excellent video on the subject.