A Measure of Success

[Feanor of the Peredhil]

I like the concept of a back up game owner. Having played in a game where the owner bailed, as did half of the writers, I can say from experience that leaving the responsibility to players who signed up to be players, not Big Decision Makers, is neither fair nor kind. After all, if you love the characters that have been deserted, you want to do them justice. Also, you wonder, what happens if the game owner comes back and hates what you've done, and what gives you the right to take charge anyway, and etcetera. I think that the mindset of a game as a small business is hurting us.

Here's what I mean by that: the game is an entrepreneur. S/he has this wonderful idea, and gets together a crew of people to staff the enterprise. They get a solid thing going, and then one of the staffers is offered a better job elsewhere. Maybe you hire on a new employee, maybe you just all do a bit more work to make up the difference. You're still pretty okay, though, because it's all the kind of work you feel qualified to do, even if it's a bit more than you originally signed up for.

Say your small business owner trips on a puppy and somehow incapacitates his or herself entirely. They're in a puppy induced coma. Can't make decisions, can't come to work, can't do anything. They're gone.

You're left with premises populated with people who are really good at their jobs, but definitely didn't sign up to become responsible for paying rent, back taxes, employee health insurance. They signed up as writers, not managers, and there's a huge difference between being in those positions.

With the concept that a game has an owner, we either need to ensure that there's a second in command with the ability to take over as needed, or we need to frame games more efficiently as a collective, belonging equally to all of the players.

Granted, I'm a hippie. I believe in gardening, and goats, and community living with shared chores and cabinets stocked with miso and tea. So the concept of a collectively owned story wherein every player has equal ownership and equal responsibility appeals to me. In the case that the game leader (a bit more democratic of a position than game owner or game authoritarian, don't you think?) needs to step down, the players can choose who will be the boss from amongst themselves.

Bwahaha, I've just realized what I'm proposing.

Shire: a benevolent dictatorship. Games are structured by owners, with predetermined seconds-in-command. The structure of these games provide a basic framework for the writers to work within, giving them a firm but generous place to write. The games are owned, more or less, by one person that makes key decisions, and the players are obligated to work within the game owner's constraints.

Rohan: hippie commune nation of love and voting and sharing. Games are proposed, players sign up, and responsibility is shared. Decisions regarding plot, time lines, and any other game related issues are made by everyone, who will have equal stakes. It's more work for everyone involved, but also provides a greater since of investment, since it becomes OUR game instead of His or Her game.

Regarding Pio's question, if we worked in this manner, the role of forum mod would possibly be unaltered.

With regard to my proposed Shire plan (guiding the players by the hand), we already have it set up so that game owners write out proposals for the admin. That would not change, except maybe it should be required instead of suggested that a rough outline (weekly? biweekly? monthly?) of how much should be accomplished in certain increments of time should be sketched in. The work for the game owner would go up, but the work for the forum moderator would remain about the same.

For the Rohan plan (players guiding themselves), the forum moderator's work would possibly decrease, because players would be taking more responsibility onto themselves. Perhaps the basic premise would be proposed, but the details would be hammered out by the players themselves?

[Bêthberry]

Well, I'm going to throw in another 2 cents worth (those of you who have been around here long enough out to get a laugh out of that reference--that won't be many of you--and therein lies one problem with RPGing) and see where my thoughts fall between those two stretchers of Noggie's.

First of all, some history. Not all of you might know that I was the Moderator of Rohan when the new three-part system was instituted. So I go back to the bad ole days when irresponsible kids would try to write indulgent, self-flattering Lego luvah and Mary Sue fanfics in the worst forms of text-ese. And when some of the more senior members of the Downs would laughingly let games go silly. Yes, it was a habit of even the most illustrious of us. Not good role models. So the present system was designed to counter the blatent bad writing of many fly-by-night posters and to provide a gaming equivalent of the best of the discussions in Books and N&N. Whether the Hobbit movie will reprise those days, we don't know. As Noggie says, times change.

More history . . .

My son, an avid RPGer, joined the Downs, as Tharkûn, for the first game in the early days of the new system, An Audience with the King. He was looking forward to gaming here, despite the fact that his mum was here. Yet he was completely turned off by the requirement--and the reminder--that he was expected to post daily. That requirement ruined that elusive thing which Durelin has called enthusiasm. And just so you understand what his committment to gaming is, he is now in post secondary studies learning to program and design computer games. In his spare time with his buddies, he works on story boards and illustrations. So the Downs lost that kind of committment and enthusiasm. There's a million stories out there, and his is but one--which I'm telling here for the first time--but I don't think it's the only one like that.

Rohan was/is a difficult forum to define because it was supposed to be the place where responsibility and independence was to devolve naturally to gamers, who cut their teeth in The Shire, but it wasn't supposed to be as complex or (for want of a better word) as literary, as Gondor. As such, I didn't see it as my role as Moderator to undertake the incredible and very laudable efforts which The Shire Moderators did to attract new gamers and to supervise game development. The Books Moderator doesn't do anything to encourage threads in Books, so, once gamers have got the gist of things, why should the Moderator in Rohan? There was supposed to be more freedom here in Rohan. Well, that was my line. So when I go back and read the start of the Scarburg Meadhall thread and see gamers posting character bios and asking if they are accepted, I'm a little bit nonplussed. That was for The Shire games sure, but for an Inn in Rohan? Maybe it's a matter of old habbits once learnt in one forum stay with you in the next. But as I say, I'm of the old stock and my time is passed. And in many ways I'm deeply impressed by those who have run the new Rohan inns, Littlemanpoet and Noggie, especially because they have brought new gamers in and developed a bond amongst them. That's not an insignificant factor in making RPGs attractive.

So how do fora (NB: that's another old joke from days gone by. Forums) develop? As I've already said, no Moderator sets out topics in Books or N & N. Nor in Mirth. Or accepts submissions before threads are started. The Chapter by Chapter and Sequence by Sequence fora have their Moderators starting discussion because the discussion was supposed to be focussed and it was a way simply to keep track of the discussions. And the Werewolf games, they have an interesting history. SaucepanMan started a rules procedure for them because of the heated emotions they were creating amongst the players. Yet just recently, when there was another quite heated discussion over rules and procedures, most of the WW gamers came together to discuss the rules and create some further guidelines which Morm oversaw. It was really a community effort and I was impressed with how the WW gamers themselves resolved the problem without authoritarian intervention by a mod. But there, they had already come together as a community with a shared interest in the game. Still, it was a community procedure.

So I look at Rohan and wonder why that cannot happen here, when Downers have already proven themselves in The Shire? Which is not to say that I think the well-defined time frame of WW games should be carried over into RPGs. There's a reason why WW has set time limits and it all has to do with the plot, the conspiracy, and the highly structured nature of the endeavour.The timing is part of the appeal. But fantasy-driven, narrative driven role-playing games--where characters aren't stereotypes of cobber, villager, werewolf, etc-- are not like that.

What I think is crucial is something Fea mentioned: allowing gamers to have more of their own investment in the games, allowing gamers to "hammer out the details" amongst themselves. Not quite a Borg collective, but where every gamer has (like WW) a vote in the proceedings.