roleplaying-events
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Storyboard: You ruined your own event
You're running a roleplaying event, and it's going well. It's lively, people are having fun, characters are playing off one another well, it's ideal. So you decide to push things a little further, to take things up a little more, and the next thing you see is people mumbling excuses and leaving until you're left with one or two people who remain less as a function of fun and more as a testament to bitter determination. What in the world happened? I'll tell you what happened: You ruined your own event. This has kind of been a week for me of people ruining good stuff, which makes this week's column unintentionally apropos. A lot of roleplaying events start out great, with everyone invested and happy to be present, but they quickly dissolve when a few well-intentioned but poor choices are made by the people running the event. And while I can't chronicle every possible pitfall, I can at least talk about the most common ones that I see again and again.
Storyboard: Pacing and numbers in roleplaying
I attend a lot of roleplaying events. This is not a surprise to anyone, I'm sure. What also probably isn't a surprise is how many of them turn out to be slow, meandering, and generally not all that great. It's like wading through any bunch of player-generated content; you've got a lot of people who have a great idea in their heads to the point that they'll ignore signs about how badly that idea will shake out in reality. A lot of it comes down to two major issues: pacing and numbers. In some ways, this is an extension of the problem of people not playing to the medium, but it's also a problem of pacing and overall event flow. If you're not thinking about how you're pacing an event, you haven't fully thought things out, and if you aren't thinking about what that means for the people attending, you're going to wind up with a lot of bored people complaining via whispers.
Storyboard: Are we still having fun?
Roleplaying events, like any other sort of roleplaying, require a bit of give and take. The person organizing the event puts in a lot of work coming up with a plan and being ready to adapt to changing circumstances, sometimes to great effect and sometimes to... less great effect. But it's not all down to the organizer. If you're actively participating in the event, you have a certain level of obligation, just like you have an obligation to actively participate in a tabletop game. Nobody likes the guy who isn't paying attention and groans with exhausted relief when you finally get to the part that he was waiting for. Organizers are supposed to make sure that the road to the fireworks factory is neat, but what can you do as a participant to make sure that your interest stays up, even during the parts that drag before you get to the fireworks factory? As you've probably, guessed, I have several suggestions.
Breakfast Topic: Where are the best special-occasion roleplaying spots in Pandaria?
OK, roleplayers, let's share some secret spots. Mists makes it pretty easy to find beautiful locations for special occasions. Pandaria is just so darn gorgeous! Still, sometimes a roleplaying occasion calls for something in particular: a wedding gazebo, a serene spot for a memorial, a plaza for a fireworks celebration ... A couple of years ago, Dawn Moore offered up some wonderful roleplaying locales for the Cataclysm era. Then just last week, Anne Stickney gave us some ideas for everyday roleplaying hubs in Pandaria. You have to admit that idea about commandeering one of the deserted ships from Kun-Lai Summit/Jade Forest is sheer genius! But what about just the right spot for a one-off occasion? Those are the sort of settings that are the trickiest to track down. Where would you go for a wedding ceremony in Pandaria? What about something small like a birthday party, or something large like a community fireworks celebration? (Yeah, I'm thinking the potential for this next Lunar Festival has a reach much, much longer than Moonglade.) How about a sober yet uplifting setting for a memorial service? Have you stumbled across any locations in Pandaria that seem to be crying out to be filled by some sort of quirky special event -- someplace eerie or creepy, silly, formal and judicial...? You don't have to be a roleplayer to contribute to our list of ideas. What nooks and crannies have you discovered during your travels in Pandaria that seem to be perfect for a special occasion?
Storyboard: An event with a touch of plot
In tabletop games, the GM is sometimes referred to as the player who doesn't get to play. Running a plot-heavy event in an MMORPG is fairly similar -- you're still technically there in the form of a character, but the focus is on an adventure that you're presenting for your fellow players. That means a whole lot of extra work on your part because you suddenly lack the advantage of letting the game handle most of that pesky worldbuilding work. You probably don't need to be told that this can all go bad. No, what you really want to know is how to avoid going bad. And while some of the stuff that I've posted in the past about running in-game events is still entirely applicable, there are also some unique issues that you're going to have to deal with when your event is meant to be tightly scripted. Plan it right, and the whole thing can go off without a hitch. Plan it wrong, and... well, do I need to do another column on drama already?
Storyboard: Type events
There are certain ideas for movies that get trotted out time and again. I'm talking about remarkably specific plots being rehashed over and over, like "spunky professionally-motivated attractive woman is single and attempts to rectify that problem through a process of mishaps." You would think that people would stop going back to the well at some point, but somehow there's a twist here or there that keeps getting made, and so you can expect to see almost the same movie coming back around on a regular basis. Roleplaying is similar in that regard, at least when it comes to events. I've seen a lot of innovative ones come around, but I've seen far more events that wind up fitting into the same basic archetype. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing -- having a consistent type gives players an easy framework to work with. But some of these events work better than others, and all of them can use a bit of polish here and there to make sure that everyone has fun in the midst of things.
Storyboard: Cooking up a roleplaying event, part one
There's a philosophy for organizing good roleplaying events that runs something like this: If you have a strong overall theme for the event and a bunch of good roleplayers, all you need to do is throw the two together and the next few hours will be fun for all. By the same token, if you have good ingredients and a good oven, you don't need to bother knowing anything about cooking -- just throw all of it together and you'll come out with a cake. Those of you who have tried this and wound up with a cake composed of corn bread, beef, teriyaki sauce, frosting, candy, graham crackers, and fresh-chopped onion will probably be having flashbacks right about now. To make all of the ingredients work together, you need a recipe, a plan -- more than just good intentions and a good group of parts. Otherwise, you're asking for trouble. It's not enough merely to have a good plan for a roleplaying event and a good group of roleplayers to take part. You need to have a plan for why characters are taking part, a way to make the group actively gel into a coherent unit instead of into just a group of people standing around. Of course, no one cooks without a recipe, the ingredients, and the necessary tools. But a lot of roleplaying events I've seen have neglected one of those three elements. So let's start off with the basics, with the things that crop up right in the planning phase that should make it clear your event is going to have some pretty major issues to overcome.
Storyboard: The only way out is the way through
I had originally planned to use this week's column to talk about the ways you can develop a roleplaying storyline outside of sitting in your city of choice and chatting, but sometimes plans work out differently. In fact, that was exactly what inspired me to change topics -- sitting and chatting with the head of my linkshell in Final Fantasy XIV about how he'd realized after the fact that the character he created was unintentionally alienating him from RP and that he'd placed a distance between his character and the other members of the shell that wasn't doing him any favors. We chatted about what he could do with the character to try to salvage him to avoid scrapping the character and starting over with a concept better-suited to what he wanted to do. But he's not alone in that position -- what if your character isn't working out after all, but for whatever reason it's not easy to just scrap the character and start over? I've talked a lot about how to prevent your character from going off the rails, but how do you get back on the rails when a restart isn't a good option?
