DM Activity

[Chipmunk]

It's hard to want to DM right now, I get it. There's a low server population, and the people who are on, the second you, as a DM, logs on, there are half a dozen PM's to you wanting you to do something for them, and it's daunting. I get that, I think for the most part, we all do. Most times it can feel like a thankless job, and even though I've tried my best to avoid it, even I, very occasionally, am guilty of forgetting to thank a staff member for the assistance given to me when I needed it, and for that I apologize.

That's not what's kept me from logging in. I've been busy in real-life, for two weeks, after consistently logging insane hours on the DMC.

When I'm on, I consistently try to run as much as I can. Mini-events, particularly, but also just generate ambiance.

When I take a 2-week mini-break and I return to forums filled with statements that there's no DM-activity, I do get a little miffed. Particularly when the first posts has the work put into it to say: "What do?"

[Delexos]

Lots of people seem to be adding their opinions to the pot and so I will do the same. This may turn out to be quite a long post and not all of it is going to be directly related to 'DM activity' but to the server in general, please try and bare with it, i'll try and make my thoughts at least worth reading and thinking about.


That being said..

The following is based purely upon my own opinions and past experiences, and is not representative of the thoughts and opinions of any other party, living or dead.

Any similarities to the thoughts of others, be they living or dead, are purely coincidental.

No animals were harmed in the making of this post.

Viewer discretion is advised.


Also I acknowledge that a lot of my thoughts and opinions are based largely upon supposition, bare that in mind as you read.

Ok so I have been around the block a few times so to speak and all I really see here is pretty much what I saw the last time I played NwN2, and the same as the time before that.. in fact its the exact same as when I played nwn1.

I do not profess to me a smart guy or anything, but for what it is worth, here are my observations based upon what I have seen and what I have also experienced.

A life cycle for a PW server is exactly that, a cycle. A lot like the moon, it is never really gone, but it might take a while for you to see it shining brightly and at full capacity.

Lets not allow ourselves to get confused here, this is not world of warcraft. No matter how epic the team might make the core and mechanics of the game world, it will never be sustainable as an unmoderated experience, NwN2 was simply never designed to be able to be as massive as something like WoW.

Ok so noone has yet mentioned WoW, *EDIT* after writingthis up in a word document and posting it.. Chipmunk mentioned WoW.. go figure LOL */EDIT* so why on earth am I dredging that name up to build points around like it even means something or is relevant here?

Because it is relevant. People may harp on about the supposed addition and changes that have been planned and announced, I assume, for some time now. And YES I can pretty much guarantee that once they finally get implemented it will breathe new life into the server, people will have something new to do, it is not a permanent solution, not by a long stretch, but it serves as a suitable distraction for a while. And might give the current dm team time to charge their batteries ready to bring fresh ideas to the game world. But unlike WoW where the game is just one massive world full of various mechanics to keep people playing for years, the world of Sundren simply cannot become big enough to accomplish that same level of self autonomy. In WoW you could if you wanted, pretty much walk for hours (exaggeration I am sure but bare with me) in one direction, the world scrolling past you, changing climates and its very look as you go. In Sundren you travel for about 2-5 mins at a walking pace before you hit a transition.

NwN2 by its nature is a jigsaw puzzle world, different transitions join onto others to make a path for exploration, but if I recall correctly there can only be a limited number of pieces to the puzzle, I am pretty sure that even if you wanted to, you probably could not create a game world that was say 300 gigs of data in size.. I may be wrong, but i'm quite sure there was a limit. That means that no matter how intricate and well designed your areas might be, and lets face it Sundren has some of the most incredible scenery you are likely to find on a nwn2 server, you can only have so many areas at any one time. This means that people will see the same things over and over again, Also bare in mind that because the nature of the game is roleplay, and part of the roleplay experience is levelling up, that finite number of areas has to be cut up and separated for the distribution of npc challenges and objectives to give a player something to do. So as a low level character you may only be able to experience, for example, 25% of the world, at mid level you can experience 50% (25% being that which you have already seen a great deal of in your early career as an adventurer), 75% becomes accessible at the high level, leaving the final 25% a mystery as this is stuff that no amount of levels will give you access to, faction specific locations for example.


What this means is that no matter how many gimmicks and cool mechanics you add, the world itself will eventually become less interesting because you have seen it all a hundred million times over the course of your time as a member of this community.


Which is one of the reasons why a persistent world server NEEDS a dedicated and competent staff of motivated dm's.

[Delexos]

Ok now we get to my thoughts on dm's, thankfully I have been a dm both on Sundren and on other servers, not recently, we are talking back around 2006-7 and earlier. But thats good because I see similarities between then and now so I will reference all of my dm talk to my own situation back then. None of the following thoughts are aimed at anyone who is awesome enough to have signed up to be part of the staff here now.


Ok I was a dm on Sundren years ago, I also dm'd on a server called Necrosis as well as a couple of others. I'm not stating that to try and make out i'm great or anything, just letting you know that I have most likely experienced what some if not all of the current staff may have experienced.


The role of a DM on a persistant world in NwN2 is a tough one, you see an opportunity to add your personality to a server that you most likely know and love a great deal as a player. There are a few cases of dm's being brought in from elsewhere to join a server however the standard way of getting new staff is to promote from within the player community itself.


You have a whole bunch of ideas for cool ways to explore various aspects of the lore of the server and come equipped with a bunch of plot ideas. You take the time to learn the dm client, which is a nightmare most of the time and you take your first tentative steps onto the server introducing yourself to the population gradually. Perhaps starting out shadowing another dm, watching what they do to help you feel confident enough to run something without accidentally pausing the game world or messing up.


You run your plots, hopefully get some great feedback, players contact you to thank you for running something for them and it makes you feel good. This was, after all, the reason you signed up, to provide entertainment to the populous and try your hand at being a director of a show rather than an actor.


The problem is, players are like vampires. Once they get a taste of something good and vibrant, they want more of it, soon enough the moment you sign into the dm client and join the game you are hit with a wall of green text, usually it is nothing more than a whole load of hellos, maybe a question or someone asking for help because they got stuck inside a cow or something. It all seems innocent enough, but those hellos are actually mini flares, shot up into the sky as a way of saying:


”Hey DM!! i'm over here wooohoo!! look at me”. Respond to the hellos and the vampire tries to lock you down and sink its teeth into you. “Ahh you acknowledged my existence.. this must be a green light to get my dose of dm attention.. so while I have you here saying hello to me in reply to my welcoming pm.. how about running me something?”


This in and of itself is not entirely a bad thing, its simply the player testing the water with the dm to see how amenable a dm might be feeling at any given moment. As a player I have done this more times than I can count, as a DM I have been on the receiving end of this more times than it bares mentioning.


However when multiple people do this with a dm at the same time, especially if the dm has only just logged in, the dm is quite likely to get flustered by the mass of conversations.


As a player have you ever been in the middle of a dungeon crawl, fighting against the enemy monsters, trying to get bits of RP in with the party you are travelling with, whilst at the same time having a pm conversation ooc with someone completely different? I bet most of us have, ist hard to mange the action efficently and normally something suffers for it. Well thats what its like for a dm, Imagine trying to set up a plot event, whilst at the same time trying to help some poor sod who has managed to get their character trapped inside a cow AND answer 15 tell conversations at the same time.


The result is quite often that the dm (remember I am still using MYSELF as a reference point here, not any of the current staff) suddenly realises that what he is doing isn't actually fun any more. Certainly what he is doing might be making the players have fun, but what he himself is getting out of the experience is a big headache and a feeling of being mentally drained, And after coming home from a 12hours shift, is this really what he wants to do with his limited recreational time?


What develops now is a very vicious cycle. The vampires start to notice that the source of their sustenance is becoming less and less frequent, being the vampires they are this makes them hungrier and hungrier, and vampires being the intelligent beings that they are, start feeling angry and abandoned. When a dm is finally able to log on the Vampire hunger is unleashed on them in a torrent, those simple little mini-flares become a much more desperate conflagration of desperation.


This in turn adds huge pressure onto the dm and so they retreat and dont show up again for a long time.


The dm burns out, thinking to himself “I'll be back, I just need a bit to recuperate from that last vampire attack, i'll take a break, get some more plot ideas together and unleash my comeback tour on the population!”


However while this recovery process is underway guess what is happening with our Vampires?


They starve for attention, latching onto any other dm presence that wanders into their killing fields and the cycle goes around again until you end up with a bunch of burned out husks for dm's trembling in a corner, too afraid to step into the world.


Ok so I know I embellished the facts and somehow made it into some weird pseudo-roleplay post there, but im quite sure that even if not openly agreed with, the dm team might be quietly thinking “This guy hit the nail on the head”. Of course I might be right off the mark, and the experience I went through in my dm days may very well be entirely different to what others go through. I did put that disclaimer up at the top by the way.. so This is all still my own opinions based on my own experiences.

[Delexos]

So what can be done about it?


Rather than just adding a bunch more opinions about how things are not working, how can I make this post into something constructive to move things forward, something that I am a fan of doing.


Well the honest answer is that I do not know.


There are simply too many constraints upon what is possible here to give any easy answers.


However lets look at an ideal world view, something that is likely never going to happen, but it gives us a positive angle to look at things from.


In my interpretation of an “IDEAL” situation, the persistant player base would be much MUCH larger, the server can hold a max of what 72 players or something? Most we ever really see anymore is.. 15? give or take.


So Ideally we would have a much larger persistant population on at all times, the DM team would be fully staffed and would be allocated time slots much like any other job, because lets face it, for all the fun the dm's really should be having doing what they do. Its a job.. they are providing a service tot he community and hopefully gaining enjoyment out of it at the same time.


In an ideal situation, we would be at a point where, for example, from 19:00 – 23:00 DM's A, B, C and D were online, running stuff either together or seperately. 23:00-03:00 Dm's E, F, G, and H take over.. and so on and so forth.


The dm hot line would be manned pretty much as often as humanly possible, and the sheer number of dm's would mean that there would be enough brain juice sloshing around that the hive-mind that is the hidden dm sub forums would be constantly a buzz with new ideas, plot hooks, and fresh thinking of how to keep Sundren as awesome as it should be.


There would also be an active policy of encouraging new players to come and join the server, breathing new life into the world through new roleplay styles, characters and ideas.


But we dont live in an ideal world, dm'ing is a volunteer job, and while you do something that doesn't pay, you are not going to put as much effort in when the going gets rough as you would with something with a tangible, spendable reward.


Plus we are all people, and people have real lives. Times fluctuate for activity levels on the server, real jobs, families, real friends everything else stands in the way of a structured, organised, manning of staff on the server. Also lets be real here, the game is old. Sundren has been around a long time, but since NwN2 came out, well there have been many years and many other games that have taken people away. We just have to manage our remaining resources as best we can.


All that being said, I have been fortunate enough to get involved in a number of events since my return to the server, each event no matter how big or small has been a great experience for me, the stuff that the current dm team have been able to come up with on the fly has been of a consistantly high standard and I have always been left afterwards feeling hyped about the whole encounter which, I hope, has been shown in the standard of rp posts I have been putting on the forums in the form of after action reports. It is doubtful that we will ever see an ideal situation on any nwn2 server, but that should not discourage the players or the current dm staff. Because what we may lack in quantity we certainly make up for in quality.


If you have managed to stomach all of my post then congrats! I hope at least some of it has come across as informative and has given a little food for thought. Once again let me state that this post is aimed at my past experience with dming and with servers in general.

Thanks for your time, patience and understanding.
I am glad I got that random email inviting me back to Sundren after all these years, the community here rocks, and on a side note my personal rp muse, who was old and haggard and barely even alive when I first joined the server again, is now a 12 foot tall behemoth.

My muse thanks you all as well.

All the best,
Delexos.

[roguethree]

The server's stagnant right now. The big, looming update (content) will help loads with drawing people back, but what retains people is value. Value is recognition, no matter how small, and the resolution of questions, problems, concerns, and goals. Recognition comes in the form of rank, experience points, loot, reputation, and DM attention. For most of us, that last one is the big one. The other big two - rank and reputation - really need other players to be relevant. Experience points and loot are finite. You see where this is going.

And /delexos.

[Kangleton]

Player-run factions are a good idea, but are not supported on this server for a variety of reasons, especially continuity. A faction that holds a certain number of players who run it today may shift dramatically tomorrow, leaving the faction empty and taking up limited space on the server with whatever functions that the DM's painstakingly crafted for their benefit. Putting together a faction base up to Sundren standards takes time and effort, and it's all the more wasted when the players lose interest for whatever reason.

Who cares if factions come and go? Sounds pretty realistic to me. Businesses, charities (etc) all come and go IRL at an alarming rate, so I don't see the problem with that happening during pretendy-funtime games. Besides, half the factions that are supported and run by DMs don't even have any players in them, so why is it not a better idea to allow players to make and run their own factions which they will populate. This is less intensive than you think.

Not every faction needs a unique guildhouse that takes an amazing mapper a bunch of toolset-hours to complete, and not every faction needs many/any NPC members. In fact, if all the guildhouses that do currently exist became non-specific and could change ownership, that would allow for player-run factions without added toolset work. If there are no Banites on the server for a while but a bunch of Cyricists, let the Cyricists take over the Citadel. If there are Banites and Cyricists but only one guildhouse, holy shit that's awesome! Make them fight for it. Even the loser has an awesome time, because they leave the conflict with genuine motivations to plot revenge or whatever.

Autonomy between cities would also likely be a problem. Sundren is a nation-state, it has complete control over each city through its Exarchs. The same quandary with factions presents itself when you spread the player base over four or five cities, each with its niche thieves or mage guild, or political group.

Solution: make Sundren not a nation-state (we can do that because it's pretendy funtime games and can justify whatever we want). And yes, spreading players out too much is bad, but there aren't that many cities. Make Miraku's Post and all other military installations property of actual cities, and that leaves only four controllable cities? Aquor, Sestra, Sundren, and Avanthyr? There are a number of strategic choices here:

1) Have only one town achieve independence while the others don't, meaning there are really only two groups for players to divide into. Having a town open to player control means having a town that bad guys can conquer and hang out in, which means villains won't be fucked into staying at the crossroads campfire 24/7 anymore. Million doors open up. Hell, even the Veritas could take an actual town. Wouldn't that be fun.

2) Leave Sundren proper under strict DM control as a safety buffer, so DMs can easily intervene when players get up to stupid shit. Now there are only three cities, one of which is Avanthyr, and you can make that a port belonging to another city, leaving two. That's no longer a huge divide of players.

3) I'm done brainstorming.

No, they don't. A fighter can have goals that do not require server changing events. Those server changing events need a DM, only because it's not possible to do so without one. Outside influence, scripting, modeling, dialogue and effort have to go into those. They can't be done on a whim.

Small changes often require DMs too. I don't think I need to give examples.

[Chipmunk]

Who cares if factions come and go? Sounds pretty realistic to me. Businesses, charities (etc) all come and go IRL at an alarming rate, so I don't see the problem with that happening during pretendy-funtime games. Besides, half the factions that are supported and run by DMs don't even have any players in them, so why is it not a better idea to allow players to make and run their own factions which they will populate. This is less intensive than you think.

Not every faction needs a unique guildhouse that takes an amazing mapper a bunch of toolset-hours to complete, and not every faction needs many/any NPC members. In fact, if all the guildhouses that do currently exist became non-specific and could change ownership, that would allow for player-run factions without added toolset work. If there are no Banites on the server for a while but a bunch of Cyricists, let the Cyricists take over the Citadel. If there are Banites and Cyricists but only one guildhouse, holy shit that's awesome! Make them fight for it. Even the loser has an awesome time, because they leave the conflict with genuine motivations to plot revenge or whatever.

Nowhere here do I see anything that requires a DM.

I think the recent Sundren Free Brigade showed that it's not DM-support a faction needs, it's Player-Support and Player-Initiative.

Small changes often require DMs too. I don't think I need to give examples.

Small changes can be requested from DM's directly, often even without filing a character request.

[Chipmunk]

Who cares if factions come and go? Sounds pretty realistic to me. Businesses, charities (etc) all come and go IRL at an alarming rate, so I don't see the problem with that happening during pretendy-funtime games. Besides, half the factions that are supported and run by DMs don't even have any players in them, so why is it not a better idea to allow players to make and run their own factions which they will populate. This is less intensive than you think.

Not every faction needs a unique guildhouse that takes an amazing mapper a bunch of toolset-hours to complete, and not every faction needs many/any NPC members. In fact, if all the guildhouses that do currently exist became non-specific and could change ownership, that would allow for player-run factions without added toolset work. If there are no Banites on the server for a while but a bunch of Cyricists, let the Cyricists take over the Citadel. If there are Banites and Cyricists but only one guildhouse, holy shit that's awesome! Make them fight for it. Even the loser has an awesome time, because they leave the conflict with genuine motivations to plot revenge or whatever.

Nowhere here do I see anything that requires a DM.

I think the recent Sundren Free Brigade showed that it's not DM-support a faction needs, it's Player-Support and Player-Initiative.

Small changes often require DMs too. I don't think I need to give examples.

Small changes can be requested from DM's directly, often even without filing a character request.

[Kangleton]

Nowhere here do I see anything that requires a DM.

You don't need a DM to have Cyricists take over the Citadel?

Besides, I think you missed the point of the post. It wasn't a statement about what requires a DM. It was about a change in server dynamics that would make DMs less necessary.

[Chipmunk]

You don't need a DM to have Cyricists take over the Citadel?

Besides, I think you missed the point of the post. It wasn't a statement about what requires a DM. It was about a change in server dynamics that would make DMs less necessary.

I meant that said Cyricists would have to be rolled up, the whole events would have to be RP'd out, and an invasion of the Citadel can already be done.

That said, if you point is to "change server dynamics that would make DMs less necessary" we're arguing for no reason - that's my entire point. You don't -need- DM's for most things. They're icing on a cake. Some of this thread reminds me of seeing messages being popped in the DM channel: "Where can I buy object X?" from a player out in the boonies, while there's a whole group of people waiting at Second Wind, ready to RP about a shopping spree.

[Biohazard89]

I think the recent Sundren Free Brigade showed that it's not DM-support a faction needs, it's Player-Support and Player-Initiative.

And there you have it folks.

TAKE INITIATIVE! STOP REQUIRING DM's FOR EVERYTHING! its what me and Dave Fritz have been trying to beat into your heads over the course of the Brigades lifetime, and im sorry to say this but we didnt do the job good enough im sorry.

[roguethree]

I think the recent Sundren Free Brigade showed that it's not DM-support a faction needs, it's Player-Support and Player-Initiative.

It's actually quotable on this board that DMs are supposed to lend more support to Sundren factions over player-initiated factions.

This is a persistent world, but it's still D&D; it needs DMs.

[Chipmunk]

This is a persistent world, but it's still D&D; it needs DMs.

Just much less than people think. Creativity trumps DM Client.

[Kaybrie]

I meant that said Cyricists would have to be rolled up, the whole events would have to be RP'd out, and an invasion of the Citadel can already be done.

Say they did go through a long, arduous in game process. Would they take it over? Or would the representation of Cyrists actually sweeping through, dominating the inhabitants of the citadel and taking over be represented? OR, more importantly, would power house NPC's just get spawned in the Citadel to whoop their asses, boot them out with their pride handed to them on a plate with the message "Set lower goals for yourself next time."

[Kangleton]

I broke into the Wyntir Estate and killed all PCs and NPCs in there. Alone. Without a DM. Yesterday. I then went into the Citadel.

Do I own it now? No.

Also, I'm tired of hearing about this Brigade or w/e it was. Maybe people didn't get involved because they didn't like it or weren't interested. It's not an example of people's lack of initiative. It's an example of you having an idea people didn't care enough about to become hyper-involved. Please, stop blowing it out of proportion.

And creativity doesn't trump the DMs when you don't have the tools to act on your creativity. Shopping sprees, as per your example, aren't particularly exciting for many of us. We don't RP to do boring, mundane things. We want adventure and conquest and heroism, villainy, ethical dilemma, etcetera. Sure, we can creatively imagine these things, but they don't really happen without the DM; otherwise I would have imaginatively and successfully conquered the Wyntir Estate. But that had no effect.