To all you guild leaders and officers, what advice do you have, that make your guilds a better place to be? Or tips that would make events better? I don’t have any experience as a guild leader, but I have been an officer in guilds creating events and all the other officer stuff. As guild leaders and officers, we strive to make our guilds fun for our members, so what advice do you have for your fellow guild leaders and officers?
My advice would probably be: After your events, ask for feedback. This way you can know on what to improve next time, and if everyone says it was great, then you get that happy feeling and a smile on your face.
Communicate with your members, ask for feedback but also be specific about it.
What’s good, what’s bad, what can be improved upon and what should never ever be repeated.
Ask for suggestions.
Generally communication is key, regardless of what you do be it large scale RP event, small guild only or not even RP related, listening to your peers can help.
I say be flexible and able to ask for feedback and listen to your members and be proactive in all things. Don’t just sit around and let officers if you got them do the work, do as much as you can yourself. Being open about things is far better than being close and ignoring issues but still keep an eye on inactivity and if need be enforce a rule for it to ensure you can carry on.
Forgot to ask this but to you, the members of the guilds, what would you expect from the officers and the guild leader? What should they do to make the guild better?
Kick fast, unironically my advice because you will eventually run into players that complain at all times rly loudly while 99,99% of your members have zero issue with w/ e it is that one special case complains about. Just kick those ppl fast
For me, and I know it sounds obvious - but make sure that everyone has something to do/react to at all times in every event you run! Even if it’s not necessarily something that fits their “character specialisation” (but if you can fit something like that in, all the better!), it’s vital that nobody feels like they could alt-tab for ten minutes, come back and not have missed anything.
That’s why (to name one thing!) I’m a massive fan of filling my events full of “sudden events” that could affect anyone in the party - like an earthquake, a landslide, an explosion, what have you. Everyone has to roll to avoid the thing; and even those who aren’t impacted get to react to their allies being caught up in it. Everyone gets to do a thing!
Which leads me to point two: plan your events out before hand, from point A to B and everything in between! Obviously no plan survives contact with the enemy, and you have to be prepared for your players to act unpredictably, BUT there’s nothing that kills the pace faster than “dead space” in events, where the party is just rambling along waiting for you to think of something. Make sure you always have a card up your sleeve!
…Okay that wasn’t exactly revolutionary stuff, but I hope it helps someone!
New members will look at you and unbeknowingly mimic certain stuff you do. You want your members to be active? Then make sure you’re active as well. You want members to write stories? Then write some yourself as well.
Do not ignore issues else they will be able to manifest into bigger issues. Be honest with your members and they will return that honesty. Unless they keep lying and don’t put in any effort, don’t be afraid to reconsider their membership if they do bring the guild down.
Don’t bite off more then you can chew, try to take a step back when you’re feeling overwhelmed. A burnout as a GM is easy to get if you’re not careful, sure you may be very dedicated to your project but I know folks who’ve burned themselves out to a /guilddisband. It helps a lot if you have a core member/few to rely on, guildofficers to assist you and share the load even better!
And lastly, remember, this is a hobby which you’ve decided to put a bit more work in then the next guy as a GM. Explore certain ideas and directions, see what fits and what doesn’t as long as your goal aligns with that of the guild: Making Roleplay happen
Dont treat guilds like a full time job. The moment you take things too serious is when people don’t feel like being part of a guild in a game, but a company.
Seen it many times where things are treated way too professionally and corporate to a point where people felt uncomfortable.
This! ; I don’t lead a guild and even I have problems not seeing WoW as a parttime job next to my real job on occasions(with all the dailies, farming, alts, etc etc etc). So yea, leading a guild should be a hobby, not a fulltime job.
Personally experienced this one too many times as well, I think it dawned on me when my character wasn’t allowed to RP in certain areas or at certain times by the officers in the guild, that they had to stick to a “rota” type thing and perform menial repetitive and uninspired tasks.
And they had the gall to say everyone in the guild could have character progression!
Definitely - I’m a one man band when it comes to DMing, so class trials have been an absolute godsend for NPCing.
They can also help you plan your event out too - my routine is that I’ll find a cool place I want to use, then work out the plot as I fly around exploring it. Then I’ll use my alts, or create a whole bunch of class trials, and place them around the area more or less in the order the players will encounter them. That means that you have in your head a rough idea of what’s going to happen story wise as the players move through each npc - and if they do something unexpected, you can tailor the path to the next npc along accordingly. They almost work like bookmarks in a way!
Then, when the event starts, I gradually log my way through them all as the party approaches - it’s really time consuming, but also very rewarding & much better for the players!
Even if you’re doing a mass combat situation, having at least one npc to interact with can make all the difference.
I’m of the belief that a certain degree of respect should be shown towards both players and GMs/Officers, but not too much either way.
To explain myself, I’ve witnessed incredible GMs and officers leave guilds that they had dedicated years of their lives to because there were so many players who just couldn’t grasp that crafting incredible stories was a draining process and kept demanding more and more and more until eventually they broke. So my advice to players would be: Show some consideration to the people spending their time to provide you with entertainment. And my advice to officers would be: If your players are acting like entitled brats, remind them that you’re doing them a service for your own entertainment as much as theirs.
On the flipside, Officers should remember that without the players there wouldn’t be a guild. You should listen to what they have to say to a certain extent and not just brush them off and say “We’re dealing with it” when in fact, you’re not. Players should remember that as well, without them there isn’t a guild so don’t let certain officers walk all over you. If that’s how you feel talk to another officer or don’t be afraid to jump ship. So my advice to players is: don’t let officers treat you poorly and my advice to officers is: don’t treat players poorly.
I’ve both witnessed and experienced guilds go through pretty big upheavals that involved members leaving enmass or officers quitting because they felt like they weren’t being appreciated. Remember everyone who plays this game does so for fun and no one owes you anything so just be respectful and polite to everyone around you and you’ll do just fine.
Bonus advice: Storytelling, this goes for both players and officers. My personal best moments in RP have been when there has been multiple storylines occuring at once, usually one main “Guild” story ran by the officers and a number of smaller “character” storylines that are more personal. One shot “Let’s go kill all these cultists then go home” events bore me to tears, they are fun once in a while but if there’s no coherency between events I honestly find it hard to become invested in any of them.
Like Galf says, there’s not a golden ticket to guild success. If your story is inflexible (you plan events to start like X and like Y), poorly written (plot holes, implausible scenarios) or general not engaging for the player (focuses too much on characters, played or otherwise, that aren’t the guild members), then no amount of NPCs are going to help you in the long run.
Assuming you can make a reasonable flexible, sound, engaging story, you can easily spend just as much time polishing individual events than you need to spend preparing characters, e.g:
Back in 8.3, I ran a DM campaign for my guild of 10-12 people (at the time). It was me first foray into using Dicemaster and, by extension, a DnD 5e-like system. Since things were turn-based and there were damage numbers /health pools involved, my approach was to make very mechanical fights, not unlike actual PvE content. It took me most of an afternoon to come up with encounters, and the actual DMing of it was quite intense.
Would the last boss of the campaign have benefited from me playing it on a character as I had done in a separate campaign? Maybe a little. Would it have been a LOT more work? Absolutely, and there was every chance that it would've gone wrong somehow. I distinctly remember trying to NPC something once and the reflecting prism dropping off, turning my massive faceless one boss into, well, just my human rogue. Awkward.
The point of the wall of text is this: choose a style that suits you, that suits your guild, and that suits your needs a storyteller. There’s no need to go overboard with it and put yourself under undue stress for the sake of it, when in fact the vast majority of roleplayers are quite content with what goes on in their chatbox.
