Storyboard: Guilding the lily

If guilds exist for any purpose in MMOs, it's providing drama for the customer support team to secretly observe and laugh about behind closed doors. (That's my suspicion, at least. I wouldn't blame them.) But as a presumably unintentional side effect of that, guilds are a great way for players to get together and bond over common interests within the game. Considering that roleplaying is one of the most group-intensive activities in any game... well, you see where I'm going here. Getting a good guild can be the difference between a consistent storyline and a few disjointed RP sessions followed by uninstalling the client.

Unfortunately, if there's a magical formula for getting a guild that suits your needs perfectly in every game, I haven't yet found it. There's a process that works fairly well as a general flow, however, and while it hasn't always gotten me into the guild I wound up sticking with, it has at least pointed me in the right direction. So without further ado, this week's Storyboard is dedicated to finding you a guild. (By which I mean telling you about how to find a guild, after you click the "Read More" link. Which counts as further ado, I guess.)

Step the First: Do your research

Some games, chief among them a game I prefer not to link if I can avoid it, are kind enough to designate certain servers as roleplaying servers from the start. If you are playing one of these games, your first step is really simple: make sure your characters are there.

At the risk of sounding patronizing, this part is not exactly rocket science.

The vast majority of MMOs, however, do not have servers titled just for roleplaying. That doesn't mean they don't exist, just that the developers didn't wish to designate a server. So it's time for you to hit the Googlesphere and figure out where the roleplayers have decided to congregate. Outside of single-server games such as Champions Online, there is usually one server or another known to be the unofficial RP spot. I personally know it's Landroval for Lord of the Rings Online and Virtue for City of Heroes.

You may find that there's not anything pointing to a specific server, however. That isn't inherently a problem; it just means that the population is spread out. Final Fantasy XI didn't allow players to pick a server at launch, and as a result there were many small RP cells operating on every server. (The fans are trying to get much more organized for Final Fantasy XIV, which is a good thing.) But before you decide to pick a server, do some searching first to see what your odds are.

Step the Second: Do your slightly different research

The downside is that there are no two ways about the second step -- you need to find a guild. The upside is that since you've done the work to be oriented in the right direction, you have better odds than you would have otherwise. And the further upside is that you have more resources at your disposal than you might think. Generally, there are three great places to start looking for a decent guild: the official forums, the major player hubs, and the people you have to party up with.

More often than not, the people you need to work with for various group quests and the like are an excellent source of conversation and potential roleplaying allies. If you're lucky, you'll wind up grouping with someone from a big RP organization right off the bat. Even if you don't, though, the odds are good that the people you meet will know others, and you can get to work on some networking. John the Healer might not be in a roleplaying guild, but he might know of one, or have some friends who know of a few. Never discount the potential for larger-scale organization.

Official forums are usually replete with guilds looking for members -- and if your game has an unofficial RP server, odds are that server's forum includes many RP guilds open for applicants. (The City of Heroes boards have excellent supergroup roundups on the individual server forums, for the record.) Even if not, you'd be surprised how often you can get responses just by saying that you're looking for an RP guild. Roleplayers tend to congregate quite easily.

Of course, a guild with enough members is likely to be hanging around any major hubs of activity -- albeit not always the hubs of normal activity. Star Trek Online roleplayers congregate in areas where there's plenty of backstory but not much to do -- for instance, Vulcan, Risa, and so forth. Check for spots that are either visible hubs of roleplay (however poor it might be) or major player hubs to begin with. Spots off the beaten path with nice scenery are natural haunts.

Having said all of this, I'll move on to the next point before this starts sounding any more like Steve Irwin hunting roleplayers.

Step the Third: Do your research in another fashion

Once you're in a guild, it's tempting to declare the whole process done and just relax in the warm glow of camaraderie. Unfortunately, there's always the possibility that while the guild fits all of the broadest criteria you're looking for (it's a guild, and it's in the game you're playing), it doesn't fit with the RP you actually want to be involved in. Sometimes you wind up with a great group of people that just doesn't work with you.

It's helpful at this point to figure out where your priorities are and how much the size of the guild can facilitate them. If you want to split your time evenly between roleplaying and endgame activities, for example, it's worth seeing whether there are segments of the guild that take part in that sort of rotation or not. Smaller guilds don't have the luxury of having several different foci under a single roof, while larger guilds often might have more than one focus compared to the overarching story behind the guild's existence.

For the purposes of this discussion, however, let's say that you find yourself realizing that the things you want to do with roleplaying are just not within the aegis of this particular guild. You went through all of the effort to find it, though -- do you have to just leave without getting anywhere?

Here's the thing: If your guild has been active on the server for any length of time, the odds are good that your officers will know a fair bit about the roleplaying scene. And speaking as someone who's done the officer juggle a few times, I can say that if a friend said the guild wasn't for her, I know I've always been happy to point her toward people who will fit. Have a chat with your officers and see if they have either other guilds to recommend, or want to start getting a group together to try to make the guild more varied overall. For all you know, there are other people who want to work with long-form character stories, but no one before you had bothered to ask.

Or you could raid any accessible guild storage, laugh maniacally, and flee for the hills. I will admit that's cathartic.

That's this week's edition of Storyboard, and as always, I'm eager to hear what people think. Next week I'm going to be dipping into character creation once more, albeit from a different angle. Comments, suggestions, and promises of free automobiles may be sent to eliot@massively.com or left in the comments, as always.