What makes a good roleplaying guild?!

[Xarleneth-argent-dawn]

Here I am, once again! ;p

Few weeks ago I asked your opinion about a roleplaying guild branded as a zealot/ cult. I had so many feedback and responses that I’ve been working on a little something something. Though-… I’ve tried to lead a guild ones, it went alright but it could have been better.

I know there are many guildmaster and officers around who’ve been filling these positions for years and have quite some experience in doing so. This next questions is directed to you!

In your own words, how would you describe ‘being a good GM?’ From your own experiences.

For the most important members of the guild, what makes a guild a good roleplaying guild? What are the things you’re looking for?

Can’t wait to read your responses (again) <3

[Obahar-argent-dawn]

@Xarleneth-argent-dawn

In your own words, how would you describe ‘being a good GM?’

Immediate disclaimer: I have never been a GM nor officer, I don’t think I’m personally cut from that cloth but I think a common thing that I’ve seen in the GMs that I do like is a willingness to tackle problems head-on.

While sometimes OOC drama between players can just be left alone because people will just move on from it, sometimes it just can’t be. How the GM handles these issues is a very big indicator in my opinion on how the guild itself will operate.

I’m fully aware that none of this relates to how the guild is run in-game but in a way, I kind of feel like it doesn’t really matter as much. If you foster a good OOC environment, you’ll foster good IC interactions. If you let problematic members run rampant and ruin the experience of other people, then there’s always going to be some sort of unease.

Basically - cause some upset in the short term. Kick out problem members that cause issues for others. Have that little bit of conflict and confrontation OOC now rather than having a lot more of it spread out over weeks, months, or even years. If that gets done, I feel like everything else will fall into place.

Without leaning too much on personal examples, I think Orcs of the Red Blade are a good guild to look at for that. I know they had something of an RP hiatus with a lot of older members not quitting the game, but they all stayed in touch OOC and have come back to RP again during Dragonflight, and that guild has basically been around as long as Argent Dawn itself so they must be doing something right!

[Yorah-argent-dawn]

As an Officer of my guild for 5 years and GM for 2. I can only speak from my own experiences with my guild, as i only really been in this guild.

A GM and their officers are often the sole providers for scripted content for their guilds. so they need to have a drive and a vision to create these stories.

GMs and Officers are also moderators of their guild/community. and with the Advent of Discord, their servers. Its important that the GM and their officers know they are working with people. and people can do the darnedest things. and often have wild lives away from their keyboards. Respecting peoples Time is Key in my book. when providing them with RP content, you need to be understanding that not everyone can always attend those dates, even if you run them the same day of the week on the exact same hour of the day.

As a moderator you also need to be sure that no harassment takes place. this is often not as easy as it may sound. Hearsay, gossip, and he said she said discussions will often emerge. Cliques will also start to form, and that can lead to segregation with in your own guild. a thing that can eventually fester drama. best to try and keep everyone involved. this is of course harder for guilds with over 20 active members.

I speak from experience, as cliques have formed and have created drama with the guild in the past. and when that happens it is important to focus on keeping the Guild going, so many guilds crumbled through drama.

It is also important for the GM to trust their officers enough to basically run their guild in their absence. for one day the GM might grow tired of WoW and leave the game. which has done under many a guild in the past. And they should be able to pas the torch to an officer to keep things running. Speaking as the 4th GM of this guild. i can attest that this is effective.

That is all i can say really. Everyone runs their guild differently, but Trust, integrity and creativity, to me, are the corner stones of Good GMs/Officers.

[Thuzar-argent-dawn (Thuzar)]

I have observed many GMs and held officer roles in a few guilds, although I despise having authority, however in my years I have gathered a few nuggets of wisdom.

I like to imagine the end goal of a healthy guild is not necessarily a busy schedule but an active one.
having events every day is not cool if the GM and officers are the only ones who host them
and if people are only online for those 1-3 hours its not a bad sign, but it is something that can lead to stagnation, burnout and community death.

Ultimately what you probably want is a core of trustworthy officers who can share the burden, listen to ALL your members and find out what kind of events they like and how they like them, promote activities besides RP, like a raid mog run or similar to build friendship and community, offer a space where everyone can flex their story telling regardless of rank (that is, be open to anyone in the guild making and hosting events, after all its less work for you and your officers if your members are also invested in telling and hosting stories).
Be preceptive and promote players to officers, if they invest energy into the guild beyond just showing up on the regular (Feel free to promote regulars as well, but don’t give out managements privileges just because they do the bare minimum.)
Be open and honest, you may not think much of your fresh recruits nor interact with them much in-character but don’t let that carry over to out-of-character.
And finally you will have drama, its very important you and your officers can take swift action and uphold whatever rules you have settled on.
be it a zero tolerance policy or 3 strike system, enforce it regardless of who the rule breaker is.

[Kuwei-argent-dawn]

I would like to preface my advice with the note that I have been a regular member and an officer in several guilds since 2019. I even led my own guild for a while which, I must honestly say, didn’t run all that well because of my own shortcomings and insecurities.

But I’ve learned a lot along the way and have been an officer in probably the most prolific Ebon Blade guild on the realm since late 2021, which leads me into my first bit of advice:

1. Establish expectations
   In its infancy but also during your guild’s regular day-to-day you want to constantly evaluate your guild’s standards. You should have a rough idea of what you want out of your members in terms of participation and character design, and if an applicant can’t satisfy those expectations, you shouldn’t be afraid to decline them. That is not to say that there is no room for compromise, but one key to a guild’s long term survival is integrity. Everyone should be clued in and on the same page (or at least in the same chapter) on pertinent matters. Does your guild have a finite purpose to be fulfilled or is the journey your destination? Do you live on the road or hang around the city? How sustainable is your concept in the face of current and upcoming lore? What about everyone’s schedules? Do you need a roll system and if so, what kind? Are there stark differences in power levels to be taken into account, such as between a seasoned mage and a fledgeling adventurer?

2. Communication is key
   It’s better to overshare then to not share at all! Ask your members for their ideas, their questions, their feedback. Put your own ideas on the table and discuss them. Encourage an overall conversational atmosphere in your guild and you will quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. Conversely, you also want to hold your members to the same degree of communication. It’s not hard to give a quick notice when you have to skip an event or will take a break for the foreseeable future. Any notice, no matter how brief, is better than not hearing from a member for weeks.

3. Three’s a crowd
   As was previously stated by other people you want to surround yourself with one or more trusted officers who can bear the workload of managing a guild with you and in your stead. If you try to take everything on your own shoulders you’ll eventually burn yourself out, and delegating some freedom of management to your fellow officers will almost certainly remedy that. A good, healthy core of officers will lift each other up while at the same time challenging each other’s ideas.

4. Roleplay is communal effort
   Remember that a guild consists of multitudes of people and their characters, and that you are not the sole focus of their roleplay. Unless that’s the guild concept, of course, and you’re some kind of mad prophet with the charisma of Hans Landa or Hannibal Lecter. The point is that some GMs fall into the trap of ego-milking their guild and make every event about themselves, which is neither fair to their members nor a sustainable formula for your guild to survive or thrive on.

5. Cohesion is a lifeline
   Even then, in the end you are the guild leader and you set the tone. It is your and your officers’ jobs to maintain cohesion within the guild, to decide how to dispel and deal with certain headcanons, to resolve inter-personal issues and to make sure that everyone has the same or at least compatible ideas of how certain things work in character.

Hope that little wall of text is of any help to you!

[Skrugbak-argent-dawn (Skrugbak)]

Back when I was a Junior officer during my stay in “The Ebon Vigil” while I had far and few issues, one of the main thing you got to get down is to screenshot, scrutinize and break up conversations that look like they are about to take a turn for the worse, in our case, our users were about as cold and unforgiving as the characters they played, each one had their own ideas on how to “lead” the troops, and while some ideas were effective, they all more or less boiled down to “stay in line, or be put in line”.

And that sort of mentality does not fly in a guild where while most Deathknights have the ultimately same goal, we can’t just openly chastise each other, either in guild chat, party char or public chat, so my job as assigned by THANATOS GRAYBORNE himself was to act as a battering ram whenever things went down, identify the opposing parties, separate the issues and delegate senior officers responsible for handling it, worked pretty well, in my opinion at least, sure some were bitter about not being able to come to a resolution, but hey at least there was nothing officially going on in the channels whenever I was online, whisper-wise is a whole other story, and whenever a guild member was reported to me, I would demand screenshots of chat-logs and proof that the character was even there, otherwise the best I could do was caution the reporting party that we don’t tolerate slander.

[Syelia-argent-dawn]

I think important part of the guild is to be open to new players, including them in the story and not having a clique of friends they cannot enter. While new people should always expect some degree of not being in the picture (if you join and the guild is 6 months into a storyline, you’re going to have to ask stuff and maybe the impact of the story will be smaller for you than for those who were there for most of it), it’s important to make sure this doesn’t extend to things such as people not being invited to RP or clique of old players doing their own post-event RP where the new ones can’t come.

In line with this, and I’ve seen this happen so much it might as well be a global RP issue, you can’t give your friends a pass to break the rules or act like morons. If you say “X is not OK” and your friend does X, you can’t look the other way. Those who get the pass for it will just use it to break the rules again and those who don’t will either start doing the same, leave, or become disgruntled after you kick the first of them.

Yes, it’s best when people in the guilds form friendships, but an RP guild where the requirement to be allowed to stay is “are you the GM’s friend?” instead of “do you uphold the rules of conduct we’ve set up?” is eventually going to stop being an RP guild and will become chatting room for a closed group of friends.

[Vrayth-argent-dawn]

A band of tight-nit friends who create excellent stories together.

[Gideon-die-aldor]

What, Where, When, and with Whom.

That’s what the guild needs to communicate to it’s members.

• What are we going to do?
• Where are we going to do it?
• When are we going to do it?
• With Whom are we going to do it?

On that basis you can iterate. It can be an intricately planned plot with different episodic adventures every evening, but it can just as well mean “We meet up in Darkshire every evening to play village.”

Doesn’t matter.

You need to establish to your members what you are going to do, and where, and when, and who’s going to be present.

The latter might be the most important thing about it. Nobody wants to be the one standing somewhere alone, so even when there’s not an explicit agenda, you still need to make sure that someone is going to show up there, otherwise, no-one else will.

[Seredwen-argent-dawn]

In your own words, how would you describe ‘being a good GM?’ From your own experiences.

Fundamentally, the GM needs to be the one setting the example, because you will be taken as the yardstick by which the guild members measure themselves. A lot of the time, anyway. The GM needs to know very clearly what the guild is about, its concept, and communicate it. This doesn’t mean holding boring speeches every 2 days, or forcing people to read 15 pages of guild information if they don’t want to. Communicating it can take many forms. The GM just needs to make sure people, both inside and outside of the guild, know what the guild is.

You could argue that the GM has lots of other responsibilities, and rightly so, I’d say. But in the end, as I see it, all of these things should emerge from the concept of the guild quite naturally, with little thought. Why should a casual adventuring group have strict uniforms, recite the words of the order daily, and be lashed 10 times for not showing up for training? It shouldn’t, obviously. Does an adventuring group even have codified standards and training nights? And so on.

On the OOC front, a GM needs to be flexible and understanding, while also having the ability to remove someone from the guild in the (hopefully extremely rare, otherwise, look at your recruitment process) case of a member being disruptive. They need to acknowledge that leading a guild is not a 1-person job, in almost all cases. Start with or quickly find officers. They don’t even have to have an OOC position of officer, they can just be purely IC. No responsibilities beyond leading people.

For the most important members of the guild, what makes a guild a good roleplaying guild? What are the things you’re looking for?

Other people who are frequently online and around for casual RP. A guild might be able to muster 15 people for an event, but if it’s a ghost town outside of those 2-3 hour evenings, it’s going to be an extremely weird place to be very quickly. I would say that both a lot of guilds and individual roleplayers completely misjudge what makes for good roleplayers, whether in guild or not. Most of the time, it really just comes down to persistence and availability. And individuals who display both of these characteristics - they’re around and available for RP - are fairly consistently undervalued in a lot of guilds.

To me, at least, these people are the most important members of the guild, and relatively often, they don’t need a lot to keep going themselves. Even 1 of these kinds of people can keep a small and flagging guild chugging along. But too often, they’re taken for granted.

[Morningstar-argent-dawn]

@Xarleneth-argent-dawn

how would you describe ‘being a good GM?

Losing hair everyday trying to manage your members and coordinating with other gms and officers to make cool events.

If you’re not balding and/or having your hair turn white, you’re doing it wrong.