Scalability of Worlds

Roleplay by its very nature can be done in a variety of sizes. Whether it’s two people isolated as they roleplay in the big-wide world or whether it’s a thousand people on the same forum in the same universe, you can make roleplay either way. Typically speaking you’ll probably roleplay with a group of two to four people, but the background is important. It makes a difference whether or not you’re sharing a universe with one other person or a hundred other people. Sure you can fill in enough non-player-characters so that technically the place is “full” like a city full of people would be, but it’s a different experience entirely when there are hundreds of other humans in the same vicinity.

Most people don't pay attention to this factor. They assume that roleplay is, as a hobby, identical in every circumstance. They get used to an environment to the point where they’re very comfortable there and assume themselves masters of roleplay, and when they go someplace else and see things different, they instantly assume it’s bad. While I think there are actually a lot of constants in roleplay as far as quality goes, that it’s not simply a bunch relative-truths, one of the things that certainly does change is the size. I’ve begun to call this scalability in roleplay, and it’s important.

Scalability is what determines, primarily, what amount of role you’re probably going to be playing in the community as a roleplayer. As the roleplay scales up or down in the amount of people active in it (or you could say characters, but I find that people are a better base) what’s acceptable for you to do in the roleplay environment changes. When there are fewer people present, the scale is smaller, and so consequently the characters must, in turn, be larger. If the scale is large with more people, individual characters will be forced to be smaller in turn.

To be thorough, I’ll look at it another way, sort of like an equation. Let’s say that the perfect number for control and effective storytelling is at say… 100, just an arbitrary number. Let’s further say that we have two variables, “S” for size and involvement of people and “R” for role in that world; you can rate each of those variables also between 1 and 99, presumably. S+R = 100. If my size is 1, the smallest number of people involved possible in fiction, it would be like a typical novel of sorts. Consequently to balance the equation, your “role” variable would be a whopping 99, which means that your characters will likely play very large roles. You can reverse it, but there’s the idea.

I will warn though, with this idea in mind, not to assume that the “size” is equivalent to the number of people creating. Having ten creators could very well give you a size of perhaps “60” as far as the variables go, and having a hundred creators puts you at an “80” or something. The point is simply to show that there’s a balance to be had with inversely related variables at place. It’s neither linear nor particularly simple.

So let’s talk about specific intervals for this idea of scalability. Like I mentioned above, the lowest people involved would be one person, which is how typical fiction is written. There’s one creator, and everyone else is simply an audience, not a participator. Especially when you’re dealing with things like science fiction and fantasy and other incredible environments, these stories need characters that are larger than life to lead them through the story.

Let’s take Star Wars, for example. For Luke Skywalker to start off as a humble character on a farm on the desert world Tatooine is great, but ultimately it was important that he take to the stars and prove himself one of the most pivotal characters in the war. His “role” was very high, and it needed to be because without that the audience would either be lost or bored. If we spent the entire Star Wars trilogy watching Luke work on the farm at home with his aunt and uncle… that would be pretty boring. We might have some interesting relations between characters, thoughts about futures and maybe some leaps in that direction, but then we would never discover the mystical nature of the force, the true tyranny of the empire, or anything else really about the universe.

While there are certainly exceptions, a lot of fiction really is written like this to varying degrees, especially when the author is solely responsible for creating the world that is being written into. Without a character that plays a substantial role in the story, we would never get to see much of what was there. Even with an important central character, the universe is often not fully explored and requires other pieces of fiction or other characters to get to the rest of it. These characters are expected to perform this role whether it’s a book, movie, video game, or whatever.

So let’s go up a bit and let’s talk about two authors. You might see this in things like extended universes or maybe fanfictions and the like; they’re actually probably more common than we think. In these scenarios, we notice that often, though fanfictions can roam anywhere on this scale, we tend to look closer at side characters. Because the universe is being actively established by another more important, author, we need not spend as much time on that topic. The universe already has form, so instead we spend more time exploring specific places or elements in ways that might be beneath a main character. The main characters are still relevant, but they’re no longer the focus here as the role diminishes slightly.

These two things boil down to the bulk of fiction that people have to go off, and it’s about where normal fiction ends. However, the “size” variable is still only around 1 or 2, with the roles still being very high. While perhaps the function in reality is not linear (and the math escapes me to go further) can you begin to see how this is a problem if the size is closer to a hundred? How much different would those roles be?

Higher we go, then. As I said, pretty much from this point on we’re out of normal fiction characters and into roleplay exclusively. There can be RPs with two or three people involved that will look a lot like normal fiction from a character standpoint; however, I believe the form stays the same.

A small step would be prudent, so what about say five or six people in a roleplay? Instantly the game changes, and we’re in much more vague territory. People tend to write more personal heroes, at this point. There’s less of a divine hand raising them to greatness, and the characters often have to make their way in the world with a lot more effort. Finding renown likely won’t happen from a single story, though the characters are still clearly above average and there tends to be a lot more specialization. You write characters to reveal specific parts of the universe, but your goal is no longer to put it under domination. Why? Because you’re sharing it with people and sharing is a cool thing to do.

These are the type of RPs that I think people tend to find the most ideal without thinking. There’s a level of balancing power, where no one is ultra important, but at the same time you can still really be a hero and make a difference in the world by yourself. Because you’re so closely linked with your other roleplayers, since there aren’t many of you, you can accomplish important things and have them know about it. At this point you probably won’t go as far as to change the setting itself, but you can make an impact on what’s inside of it, likely.

Next we ascend to higher levels, somewhere between probably ten and twenty roleplayers or so. At this point we stop having room for even what might be considered “side characters” simply because the world is getting told from too many perspectives for that to work. If you have twenty people all vying to be an important character, you’re unbalancing the equation and the story stops being as effective. If everyone runs around being their own hero, you run into some serious issues because what’s a hero without a world to overcome and mold? At this point, however, world molding has gone from the task of an individual to the task of groups. Maybe one man might not make a difference, but what about a guild or some other organization? You can bring characters together and make an impact that way.

It is also at this stage that you probably have the reality of “public roleplay” take place. There are a lot of seemingly public roleplays that only have four or five people involved, but if it stays that way for long it becomes niche and clique-like to the point where it stops being a true public activity. Anyway, at this point it’s hard to tell someone they’re allowed to be queen of the forest, because then you’d have to be able to give someone else that same treatment, and we’d end up with twenty different monarchs!

The roles shrink down as the universe becomes more populated. With decreasing roles in the universe, it means that for a character to be interesting they often need to be more specialized. This doesn’t mean you’re the best swordsman in the world but rather that simply being a swordsman occupies a lot of the characters identity. Main characters are often wise, rulers, swordsmen, magicians, and wealthy all at the same time. The amount of these things that you attribute to your character gets smaller as the scale increases.

Past the boundaries of about twenty roleplayers actively entering the world we get into some pretty serious public roleplaying environments. These are the big forums that you run into, and shockingly you find out that your characters can’t do what the hero could. You can’t simply be a king (or maybe even a noble) because those people are part of the setting and you can’t simply hand that out to anyone. It becomes more important to find a smaller group, where your character’s role will be larger.

Perhaps you do a lot of your roleplay in a military setting, where your character is sergeant over a unit of guards. To that unit of guards, the role of your character is important and impactful to their lives, but to the world at large he’s simply one more man. At this point too it’s even possible that the members of your guard are roleplayed characters as well, which is pretty cool. Roleplay by nature will take place in smaller instances with only a few people, so your character will always have a height of role in that context. As far as roleplaying universe is concerned, though, you’re probably not going to get mentioned in any histories at this point unless, again, you’re doing things through and with other people.

From what I tend to see, roleplay forums don’t often get much larger than this scale of twenty to forty or fifty roleplayers. That’s pretty huge, if everyone is active, and I don’t know if I’ve seen a steady establishment ever obtain those upper numbers. You can go higher than that, however, if you take the roleplay to a medium outside of a forum, typically. The biggest place of roleplay I’ve seen was in MMORPG environments. A while back I spent a lot (too much) time on Warcraft, but I did learn something about that roleplaying environment, which helped me get perspective on the rest.

It’s a world where the environment is very clearly labeled and defined. You ultimately cannot affect it, unless you do something spectacularly and the community itself recognizes you. Literally thousands of roleplayers all sharing the same universe, so the most believable characters were the ones who were often the simplest. Sure, there were people who claimed they were dragons in disguise, that they’d discovered the cure to undeath, or that they were one of the most important military commanders of a certain war. Those were the people who didn’t understand scalability. They could only interface with their buddies who knew them really well, because the world rejected the character. It unbalanced the equation.

You couldn’t claim to do those things, because those things were already recognized in the world. The best you could say was “I’m really good at making shirts” or something like that. Sure, you could go on adventures that had significance, but they often only had significance to yourself and the people immediately around you in your smaller community. If everyone played nice, you could have some very cool things come about as a part of this, but that was often impeded by everyone still demanding they be a god in the roleplay. But when people were willing to scale down their roles, you got some of the coolest roleplays and scenarios that you couldn’t see anywhere else.

Ultimately, that’s what you’re shooting for. In general, it’s definitely safer to scale down than up, such as having a very humble character in a five-man roleplaying world, but for the most part the best results occur when you get close enough to that balance. You won’t get it perfect, and goodness knows that there will be plenty of people in the community who have no regard for it, but consider it. If you’re in a forum right now that may change in size, then be aware of that. Things may be small and tight-knit now, and that’s great, but long run the characters you make now may not be viable later on in the community’s life.

Real quickly to take this to a moderating/managing perspective, if you want to start a roleplay you need to be aware of this too. A lot of RPs die because they impose the limits of a large-scale RP immediately on the community and they essentially stifle growth. No one can play the characters needed to expand on the world because they’ve been told they’re not allowed. Even if you want to get bigger, part of the way that happens is allowing people to have crazier characters early on and slowly getting rid of that as time passes. Whether you’re simply tagging along or you’re in charge of the whole thing, it’s always important to be mindful of scalability.