A Functional Roleplaying Community

I suppose it’s a sign of how many topics I’ve covered on this blog that I’m writing tonight on a more ‘meta’ aspect of roleplaying. Specifically, I’m interested in talking about the idea of the roleplaying community itself and what may or may not be an effective model. A lot of my argument draws from my own experience, which I submit is far from all-encompassing, but I’ve seen communities do well, and I’ve seen them do poorly, and I don’t think it’s a matter of pure chance. Experientially driven as my argument is, I believe there is a strong line of logic to follow here, so let’s get down to business and defeat some Huns.

The idea of a “Functional Roleplaying Community” is an important consideration because roleplaying is really a social activity. It takes two to tango, and once you have two people, you can argue you have a community. The larger the community, the more opportunities you have, and being surrounded by a host of fantastic writers and brilliant creative minds does good things for your own writing. A strong roleplaying community should help foster new ideas, challenge your way of thought, and keep you on your toes. In contrast, though, a weak and dysfunctional roleplaying community will do the opposite. This might work best to walk through a simple “What—Why—How” structure.

What is a (Dys)functional Roleplaying Community?

Let me take this from the perspective of the “dysfunctional” community, because everyone is probably—sadly—much more familiar with this. A dysfunctional roleplay community is like any other dysfunctional community: clique-like, inward focused, stagnant, toxic, and terminal. If you imagine a professional sports team with two or three great, veteran players who refuse to cooperate with anyone else, you can imagine where that goes. They might get on for a time based on momentum or other strengths, but overall the team/organization/community is unsustainable. If you stick around roleplaying communities for long at all, you’re going to see a lot of this.

I’ve seen a lot of variations of dysfunctional roleplaying communities, but the model tends to go something like this. There are a handful of people who have authority on the site—often an administrator or two with a couple more supporting people to help with day-in and day-out details and management. At first, this is an excellent model, but when the community matures you start to run into some issues. Because roleplaying communities (especially grown ones) are relatively self-sufficient, it’s very easy for a group to keep the ship from sinking without ever really sailing anywhere. Besides these staff members, though, there are veteran members—people who’ve been around proportionally longer than most people—and between the staff and these veterans, you create a Core in the community.

The Core sets the tone of the site. They have established characters, know all the rules, and have hopefully proven themselves to be competent writers and generally level-headed individuals. When something annoying happens, they don’t leave at the drop of a hat, and people are likely to put up with them stepping away and being absent for long periods of time. One important note, though, is that this so-called Core are almost always friends with each other. They may know one another from outside of the community, or maybe the roleplay itself is what’s bonded them together, but either way they make for a pretty tidy bunch.

For the sake of this piece, I want to differentiate everything based on Core and non-Core people. Staff are almost always Core, but the onus for keeping a community functional falls on the Core as a whole, not just the staff members. The Staff certainly has a responsibility for helping direct and support the Core and, by extension, the entire community, but it’s a bargain deal. Besides, ever notice that communities where the Core never expands beyond just the Staff tend to die really quickly? Think about why this might be. (Seriously, think about it!)

I should make it clear that there’s nothing wrong with having a Core be friends with one another, and there’s nothing wrong with them having history or common ground together. What’s problematic is when it stops there. A dysfunctional Core makes for a dysfunctional community, after all, so I return to my question with an answer: a dysfunctional roleplaying community is one with a static Core. As a site grows (and it must grow—more on this in a moment), the Core must be mobile and expanding as well. The people that comprise the Core must be constantly engaging with new roleplayers, trying to draw new members into the herd and make them feel comfortable. A functional roleplaying community is one that does this well.

A functional roleplaying community isn’t just comprised of elite writers, it’s comprised of functional members who feel comfortable approaching and writing with each other. Absent that, people will pick one or two people to write with and circle the wagons, and then you have a serious problem. You know what’s one of the worst things that can happen on a roleplaying site? Developing two Cores. Welcome to Community Drama and “I’m starting this new place” 101.

Why Should You Care?

We are, by the laws of nature, creatures interested in self-preservation. Everyone has a different appetite, but at the end of the day we all need some essentials to keep going; when we figure out how to meet our needs, though, we stop looking. If something is not ostensibly broken, why go any further? If you’re satisfied with your roleplaying community (maybe because you’re in the Core and it’s become a clique), then most people tend to see no reason to search for dramatic reform. The issue is kind of like natural resource economics. Sure, water may be free now, but if you just run the faucet all the time, someday it’ll be run out, and then it’s gone. You have to be a little proactive. So why should you care about how functional your roleplay community is?

In a word: entropy. We’re at an interesting point in the internet and online writing (15-18 years) that a substantial portion of roleplayers out there have been doing this for 5+ years. If that’s you, I guarantee you have seen this. Things are great in a community for a while, but they start to stagnate. Life comes up, and people graduate whatever level of academia they were in and move on to the next level. Some folks get married or have kids or join the military or whatever, and life moves on. In a community with a static Core, do you see how this could create problem?

I am, by my nature, a very introverted person. It’s natural for me to make a few very close friends and spend almost all my time with just them, so this idea is one that’s very challenging to me personally. If I’m not thinking about it, I’ll pick just a couple of people to roleplay with and get comfortable, and I have to remind myself not to do that. Not only is it unhelpful for the community I’m a part of, but it’s unhelpful for my own personal growth as a writer and a roleplayer. Given enough time, most friends will stop truly challenging you, because they’ll become comfortable too. When this takes place on a community-wide scale via the Core, the community is now terminal. It might last a month, or it might last three or four years, but whether it’s a day or a decade, you will see the decline one step at a time.

As a roleplayer in a community, you are invested in it, especially if you stick around for more than two or three months. After a certain period you have characters, accumulated history, and picking up and moving sounds unpleasant; if the community exploded tomorrow, you’d be upset, right? Feeling this way doesn’t necessarily make you Core, but it does mean you should probably be thinking about these things. For a community to do well, the roleplayers currently invested in it must be proactively investing in the future.

How Do We Foster a Functional Community?  

Okay, so, provided you care about where you roleplay, then now we have to talk practically. Let me return to the idea of the Core for a minute or two, because this is where it starts. The Core of a community is primarily responsible for this fostering of functionality. The number one way that a Core will help a community do well in the long-run is simply by being welcoming. This is much more complicated than it sounds. This isn’t hopping in a chat-box and having that nice, five-minute conversation of how happy you are someone joined, and how much you adore their character. It’s really much more than that.

In order for a Core to be truly welcoming, they have to genuinely want the Core to grow. They have to want the new person to someday be a part of the crew, to have stories to laugh over, and to be trusted enough to partake in some of the more sensitive areas of the community (Helping build a plot, roleplaying a family member to your character, writing a character who is maybe a little more influential, and so on). If the Core members of a community are too happy with their posse to ever think twice about genuinely wanting someone else in it, then it’ll never happen. The new person can try and push their way into the herd, but, I mean, everyone’s been on the outside of a clique before—how well does that work? How does it feel to try and get inside?

This is so essential to a functional community, and it’s really frustrating when people don’t think about it. The model I’m outlining is true of almost any organization, but it’s especially difficult in roleplay, so it has to be given serious attention. If the community’s members are not outward-focused, if they are not constantly looking for the next person to invite in and welcome and treat like a peer, then you’re going to get some very predictable results. The Core will shrink over time as people drop out or become less active, and either the site will shrivel and die, or it will grow awkwardly until a second Core slowly develops, and then you have an Old and New Guard. It’s not a place you want to be.

To make matters worse, though, non-Core people are relatively useless to the overall prosperity of the site while they remain non-Core. Even if they stick around, they will feel left out and won’t be able to effectively engage in new people either; you’ll form a leper colony around the outskirts of the village, and the people inside will become too scared to leave.

So how do you actually do this? Assuming you’re a Core member, what does it practically look like to be externally focused? Getting people to the point where they will transition to becoming a Core member is both a social and a time-sensitive thing, so get to work. Roleplay with new people and invite them into your roleplaying life. Quit cracking inside-jokes that make the new people feel ostracized and alienated and treat them like the peers you’re pretending to write to them as. If it’s hard, fake it until you make it. If they’re bad roleplayers, then raise the bar for them and build an atmosphere that supports active, quality writers. No one likes standing on the outside of a clique, so don’t let them.

A Functional Community is Achievable, and it isn’t Utopia  

I’ve just spent a while painting a relatively grim picture of your typical, half-dead roleplaying community, but I don’t want to end there. Functional roleplaying communities exist, but in my experience they’re really rare. This rarity, though, doesn’t stem so much from the lack of perfect people or circumstances as it does a simple ignorance and selfishness. When you get beyond that, though, you can make headway really quickly, and it’s actually pretty awesome. Functional roleplay communities are real and imperfect, and they are a blast to write in.

In my mind, a truly functional community has about 90% of its active writers as these so-called Core people. That means that for every ten writers, nine of them feel comfortable and integrated into the community. You only get to that point (besides the week after you start a community with your friends) by building this atmosphere of being externally focused. Once you reach that point it’s actually pretty easy to sustain. People begin to feel comfortable and on-mission together, and you get to draw new people in together.

As a result, when people leave the community because life happens, things keep on moving. Obviously the Staff still has a lot to do, even with a large and effective Core, but it’s so much simpler to manage when you feel like you have a community full of people who you like and trust. All of the time places have to create a really hard line between Staff and non-Staff, because they recognize that they only trust some people in the community; this turns into them having to trust no one in the community save the Staff themselves, and the Core shrinks all the more rapidly. This is so common, but it’s not unavoidable. It’s not like only with a select few of really quality people can you create this community—you just need a little direction and thoughtfulness.  

If people have this on their mind, the possibilities are endless. An army of other writers to sharpen your wit and push your creativity? Sign me up. Not only do you have lots of practical, logistical opportunities with more people, but adopting an expansive and embracing attitude does wonders for a person's satisfaction even in the midst of varying styles. If there's a difference between 'surviving' versus 'living' in a roleplaying community, I think this is where it's at.