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Does admin created tension on original boards ever work?


Nox
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On fandom sites the conflicts come with the fandom:  The X-Men and Brotherhood (Xavier and Magneto) conflict comes with the territory on an X-Men board, for example. But on original boards, I've seen time and again the creators of the site start the board with antagonists and conflicting factions already in place, and put the membership of these groups up for adoption as playable characters. But I've never seen that actually work.

 

I was on a site for two years, they had rival criminal groups (a mob boss criminal and a charming rogue Robin Hood-type as the canon leaders of the gangs, who were bitter enemies) but in the time I was there, three different players picked up the mob boss character and then disappeared before the month was out, and the charming rogue was only played for a couple of months before that player also disappeared, and there was never a time when both characters were played and active at the same time.  And yet, the admins kept pushing the idea of these two gangs having an active conflict.

 

On another site, a fictional town site, the admins started the game with a sinister company/business menacing the town and warping the town's officials, and set them up to be baddies. The company and its managers were adoptable and players could join them. But no one ever did and no one joined as the town council or mayor; so, the corrupt town officials aspect never really went anywhere. 

 

I see new sites just when they are just starting and many of them have staged tension : rival gangs and such that people can join. But given my experiences, I wonder if those setups ever really play out or does it just fizzle.  I think a more sensible plan would be for the admins to create tension and drama based on the characters that join and are actually active rather than pushing players to fulfill the storylines they create.

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Any story needs a conflict in order to go further. The conflict's specific shows what characters are needed for the story. Why to create a villain if no bad deed is going to happen, for example? Just to be there?

 

At the same time, the administrators should be the first ones to give the example. If they create a vilainous faction, they should play the leaders and put requests for others in the band.

 

There can be new little conflicts for all the created characters, assumed they want conflict (unfortunately, some don't. Their characters are too precious...) But these are meant to appear later, one can't guess when starting the site what characters they would receive and what they would wish to do. The main plot of the board should be staff-driven (and allow for the widest participation among the members). Also, I believe that if someone joins a story, he should adapt to it, first and foremost, and experiment later, after fully integrated into the story.

Edited by Elena
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Well, I'll be able to report back on how it worked out for my western site soon.

 

When we created the site's premise, we based it off the old family westerns of the 1960s and early 1970s. Following the formula, we have the very powerful, mostly good-guy family and the extremely powerful mostly bad-guy family (and they are really nasty). We created a wiki bio on the bad guys and have them listed as open NPCs as long as the personalities are not altered. Almost everyone has used one or more of them for scenes. If I were not the lone admin and game manager, I would keep them as permanent NPCs and write them for people as needed. Unfortunately, I run the site by myself and have several characters to manage as well as the stories.

 

They are adoptable and one of our members is looking at adopting the family patriarch. We should know soon if he keeps the character or drops him soon. Hopefully, he will keep him since the bad buys are not needed for every story and every scene that we write.

 

I think created conflict has to be managed well or allowed to be written as the occasional story device. For now, that is how we are doing it. The bad guy family are suspected in a couple of events, but there is not hard evidence against them. Still, conflict is in the air since our good guys suspect them of killing another member of their family. That is really all we've needed to state to keep tensions high between the two ranches.

 

Not sure that helps or answers your question!

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At first it can be the admin's job to create the tension, not just by making rival groups, but by being an antagonist to player's stories and plots, and by bringing about consequences of pc actions through narration. If Its engaging, players often catch on and become more interested in whatever conflicts are going on on a site as a result.

 

However the tension has to feel natural to the site or else it breaks down. I've seen sites where factions players felt little reason to interact or fight. There were no real rivalries over land or resources and groups could avoid each other enough to avoid clashes of ideals. When there was a fight, characters often had no idea why there was a fight in the first place.

 

The source of the tension should be clear enough to the participants that it doesn't feel random or out of place in the setting. Rivals should know why they are opposed to one another as meta-knowledge if not also icly, while ic geographical proximity encourages frequent encounters and helps feed the tension. It becomes nearly impossible for players to not see the effects of whatever is going on in their own stories. 

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I'll probably have to look into this more to give a proper answer, but it wouldn't surprise me if the reason it doesn't work is because people aren't inspired by the characters or want to take them on. It has to appeal. Do the admins make the character concept loose, for instance, advertise a for a 'good guy' and a 'bad guy' and the concept of the character's background, family ties, personality, name, face claim, etc, down to the writer taking them on, or is it more a case of where the admins have to set out every single aspect of the character? If it's the latter, I can see why people don't want to write the character. They need to have some leeway with how they write the character and can't if the concept of it is too rigid. In a fandom setting, it works because people love the character they are playing, or find the character interesting enough for them to play. It might not happen in an original setting. It's probably not a good idea to have the rpg centre too much around characters that the admin create or want taken up by someone, and just consider them a 'nice to have' rather than 'essential to have' for the game. If it's the latter, then the admin might be better off writing a story by themselves rather than do an rpg around it.

Edited by Icewolf
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Ark isn't old, but it's no baby at this point. 

 

We run a political factions plot and a rising civil war/dispute. Most of our faction leaders are not taken, but we have a solid enough world and concept of them posted that they are referenced with relative frequency in passing.

 

My co admin and I also play them or move the plot forward when necessary, in a way that follows the feeling of the board. (In other words, if the plot isn't moving because the faction leaders aren't taken, you have to treat them like NPCs, and have them still do things... the crime families aren't stopping crime because their leader isn't there, so if a cartel gets busted up, the cartel gets busted whether or not the leader is in play.)

 

That said, I have seen a few (specifically) DRoP boards move well with established weyrleaders, wing leaders, etc. 

Edited by Thyme
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Did you ever consider letting the players who joined create the faction(s), instead of having them join something that you had already created?  How do you think that would have gone?

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I find a lot of the "us vs. them" plots on boards are very repetitive.  You can copy and paste them and place them on the next board over (though with a change of faction name or character race or genre) and it's pretty much all the same.  So it's quite possible that it just isn't intriguing enough to do the same thing all over again and again.  I know that there are many genres that I will not join at all when I see a "faction vs. faction" plot set up.  (Though that might all be personal preference.)

 

My suspicion is that people aren't comfortable taking initiative and being the antagonist from a board-wide perspective.  People don't like to upset the apple cart, as the saying goes, especially when they are not the person who owns the board.  It's hard to figure out how far one can take it, when one needs to ask for permission, what exactly the admin wants, etc.  And how do they actually make it all happen, you know?  If I played somebody in the big, bad corporation, it would be difficult for me to come up with plots that push the "us vs. them" plot forward, especially if I had a character who wasn't high-ranking.

 

The administrator needs to take lead for most sites with these sorts of plots.  There has to be a way to get all characters involved.  If I have a basic werewolf, for example, and the big plot is vampires vs. werewolves but most of it revolves around the leaders and how they fight with each other, I'm not going to have much I can do with my basic werewolf.  Especially if any sort of skirmishes with vampires would get a low-level werewolf in serious trouble.  There's no incentive to be a part of the plot.  So the administrator would have to enable interaction from all members of the relevant factions by either dropping in plot twists, or allowing characters to do things that they wouldn't normally be allowed to do, or whatever.

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Many of the people who read this site have also created your own boards, how many of you have created a board with canons (heroes/ villains/ prominent families the story narrative circles around) and had it play out as you hoped or intended? 

 

On the few sites I've been on, I've seen and been part of many storylines, but the most successful ones don't involve canon characters or situations setup by the admins. Is that a fluke or fairly common?

 

 

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6 hours ago, Nox said:

Did you ever consider letting the players who joined create the faction(s), instead of having them join something that you had already created?  How do you think that would have gone?

 

They might have never created factions and be content playing family. Been there, seen that.

 

And for the question quoted below (I don't know why I can't write under it anymore), I had pirates vs Navy and it worked well. Yes, I got the occasional Navy officer who was an officer just to charm every lady ashore, and when there were battles he forgot to join the threads... or a similar charming pirate. But most of them weren't like this.

 

1 hour ago, Nox said:

Many of the people who read this site have also created your own boards, how many of you have created a board with canons (heroes/ villains/ prominent families the story narrative circles around) and had it play out as you hoped or intended? 

Edited by Elena
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19 minutes ago, Elena said:

Yes, I got the occasional Navy officer who was an officer just to charm every lady ashore, and when there were battles he forgot to join the threads... or a similar charming pirate.

 

I feel you so hard Elena. 😆

 

1 hour ago, Nox said:

Many of the people who read this site have also created your own boards, how many of you have created a board with canons (heroes/ villains/ prominent families the story narrative circles around) and had it play out as you hoped or intended? 

 

I haven't created a board with canon opposing factions, but I've adminned on one. It worked on that one because it was a huge member base and a huge staffing team. Each faction was headed by one staff member who oversaw the approval of new entrants to the faction (sounds a bit elitist, but people were only denied a couple of times). In order to reach that stage, the character had to make contact with extant members who would act as their recruiter. I guess that that encouraged players to be invested in the story to begin with. They stayed invested because if they didn't do a thread a month directly related to the activities of the faction, they'd get booted. (Absences aside, grace period also in effect.)

 

Once you were in, there would be events run. The staff would say, ok, this faction is going to attack this place. We would have the goal in mind and just have to RP it out. We'd make sure that numerous events involved civilians, as well as emergency response so that you didn't have to be in the faction to be involved with the events.

 

I think this worked because of the number of people involved, staff involvement and because things were planned. So we knew what the end goal was.

 

Now I personally, in boards I create, do not go for faction v faction stuff for the same reason as @Uaithne. I find them to be pretty copy and pasta material, same with the characters involved. Even if I came up with an idea that I found engaging, I think it would involve a bit more management than I'm really interested in as a sole staffer.

 

So I go down this path:

 

22 hours ago, Nox said:

I think a more sensible plan would be for the admins to create tension and drama based on the characters that join and are actually active rather than pushing players to fulfill the storylines they create.

 

Work with who is engaged and respond to member's demonstrated interests.

 

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6 hours ago, Nox said:

Did you ever consider letting the players who joined create the faction(s), instead of having them join something that you had already created?  How do you think that would have gone?

 

We didn't. It would not have made sense for the style of site we were running. The concept of the board and the overarching lore and plot is going to dictate whether you can use player created concepts. 

 

I have seen on a good number of sites though that allow player groups and those thrive or fail tragically, it's all a toss of the coin and depends on the player(s) running it. 

 

In my experience, the board does as the board does and different worlds require different maintenance and planning. 

 

In other words, if your board is a political intrigue board not creating political factions is ... just poor planning. There is nothing that stops a political faction from growing and changing over time or a new leader from influencing the way the group moves.

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I like to set up the surrounding world/setting; and then let the "us vs them" be created by what the players decide to do. I have some "canon" plots hinting at dissension and bad blood between certain groups but the function of the site is not reliant on them - they're more like flavor until somebody joins and says "Hey I really wanna work this angle this sounds up my alley". In the mean time, these groups technically still exist, and staff plays out their function as much as necessary to keep the Feel of the World consistent. There IS a list of Canons (in positions of power according to the setting of the board) that people can adopt if they choose, but they're classified as "Important NPC"s to reinforce that staff WILL use them to further plots and such without being reliant on people wanting to join that particular group.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I do think they can work but that the primary reason they fail is because there isn't someone project managing the thing from start to finish. What you described strikes me as very "Revolving Door" type of setup for the primary antagonists. Ideally this will be an admin or mod that is invested in the plot and the plot has a somewhat definite end so that one person isn't managing the rival gangs for infinity. So something like, every x months, or every y number of z type of events, the same role goes into the hands of a new person or a new character comes into the mix 

 

We've had success on our board with things like climate change events, magic chaos storms, and one major nation is in the midst of a civil war that is setting up a lot of rival factions and regions which has so far generated a decent amount of activity all its own. But this last one, which I managed, did required me in a project manager type of role to make sure that people were posting regularly, and that those who disappeared were cut off. We started with 4 regions but ended up dropping to 3 because of inactivity from some members - but those other 3 regions worked out pretty well 

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