Introduction

So I think this is the fourth or fifth time I’ve started on this report, but it seems like whenever I got something down, it was irrelevant by the time I finished. Part of this gig is collaborating with a bunch of different stakeholders, and as a byproduct of that very little of what I initially planned will be going live the way I thought it might a few months ago. So while I regret the silence, I’m also glad I didn’t end writing writing a series of “I think we’re doing this” reports followed by “James has explained why that was a stupid idea” reports. However, now that we have a clear path forward I’m happy to share some of that with the club.

How Roleplaying Works Today

Organized roleplaying in the DB predates the Exarch position. Arcona and Odan-Urr were both doing this on the regular for well over a year, and there have been scattered attempts at organized roleplaying dating back many years, some more successful than others. Most of it was happening off-server, with Arcona doing things on Telegram and Odan-Urr—and later on, Scholae—on their clan Discord server. Although the Voice staff doesn’t ask for much when it comes to awarding CIs (logs, PINs, and wordcounts), since neither Discord nor Telegram is designed to collect and provide that information, it took some wrangling to get us to a place where session organizers can easily get CIs for their participants.

• Telegram does at least make it easy to export logs in two formats. Terran Koul developed a script to parse them and extract member-specific wordcounts, which was a huge help for Arcona before they migrated fully to Discord.

• James developed a simple method for RP organizers to generate and access logs. You may have noticed some channels and threads have the :book: emoji in their name. This is actually a command telling the bot to generate logs that are stored on the DB website. (The logs are CSVs, which stands for Collected Space Verbiage.)

• Those logs, however, have a few issues, so there was still manual labor involved in calculating wordcounts and, especially, clearing out duplicate log entries created whenever somebody edited a message. Blade wrote a script to automate that, and she and Wally put together documentation on how to use it.

• Several RP hosts, namely those in Arcona, Taldryan, and Scholae, like using dice for their sessions. Although we discussed coding dice rolls directly into dbb0t, in the end James decided it was best for the club to add the DiceMaiden bot to the club server.

The current system is still fairly clunky, as it requires someone (i.e. CONs) to manually set up logged channels and for the organizer to use a third-party script with Google Sheets and then email the Voice staff, who have to manually award words. But it’s still significantly better than what we started with and I don’t think we’d have the level of activity we do without the improvements Terran, James, Blade, and Wally have made.

How Roleplaying Works in the World of Tomorrow

So now that we have everything we really need—logs, wordcounts, dice, a CI policy—we’re working to cut out as much of the manual overhead for starting and reporting RP sessions as possible. Many of you presumably saw Drac’s recent message about the /party command for gaming groups. We’ll be doing something similar.

If you want to host a roleplaying session, you will be able to create one using the bot. The bot will create a logged in-character thread and an unlogged out-of-character thread for your session. The bot will advertise the session based on your input (e.g. a description, start time, who can join, etc) and members will be able to join it with a button press. And when everyone’s done, the host will press a button and the website will spit out your CIs automagically.

I don’t have an estimated completion date for this, but James has been hard at work on it and I expect to be able to roll things out Soon™.

My co-conspirators and I will probably have our hands full helping the club move from a summit-driven system to one where any member can quickly spin up a session, but as we move forward into 2022 the Grand Master has tasked me with developing a new society for roleplaying. I don’t have a lot of details on what that will look like yet, but you can expect the usual twelve tiers of dice made out of increasingly weird materials unlockable awards.

Obligatory Numbers Section

Appius asked me the obvious question: How big has RP activity been club-wide? Are you seeing a lot of submissions for clusters being done from RP's?

The short answer: we’re seeing a lot of RP activity. I’m pretty happy with the volume. I would like to see that activity more evenly distributed across the club, which I think will happen as we change how sessions are created, but it’s also normal for different kinds of activity to be more popular with different units.

The long answer: I think RP activity levels hold up well when you compare them to our big three activities (gaming, fiction, art). It’s not a contest and these are apple to orange comparisons to some degree, but in terms of raw output I think we’ve got a strong foundation.

The most obvious comparison would be fiction, since we’re counting words for both. Basically, we’re seeing a higher volume of words reported for RP but only 69 members have reported RP compared to 86 for fiction+poetry in that same period. But when I say we’re seeing volume, I mean as of this writing people have submitted 795,066 words of RP. We’re also seeing new members participate pretty often.

The chat logs are almost as long as my reports.

Roleplaying submissions have also varied a lot. The smallest RP submission was for 13 words; the largest for 87,503. The standard deviation, which measures how spread out a set of numbers are, is over five times for RP what it is for fiction in that same period. And that makes sense. Fiction “events” since September are all solo fiction comps, official report fiction, or a poetry comp, so except for the poetry every event is describing basically the same kind of activity. For roleplaying, the sessions we’re seeing reported cover anywhere from two hours to six weeks of activity.

As I mentioned, activity’s also varied a lot in between clans. How much of each clan’s submitted wordcount since September is roleplaying content ranges from 93% to 0%. The current system for logging and submitting RP activity is cumbersome and it’s mostly summits doing the lifting there, so as we make things more lightweight and reduce the barrier to entry, I’m hoping we’ll see more adoption in clans that haven’t been fully on board so far. I’m also hoping to see more…

Events and Cross-Clan Activity

Appius and Teebu ask: Are there any plans from you as the Exarch to run club-wide RP events? Ie, the upcoming gjw/vendetta?

My focus has been on systems development, so for the most part I’ve been trying to sit back and observe what develops organically so I can support what people are interested in instead of what I’ve decided to shove down their throats. Wally did run a demo session for members whose clans didn’t already have active programs but that’s about as much as we’ve done so far. That said, I do hope to have some sessions organized right around the time those systems go live so that people can get a feel for what they can do going forward.

People will absolutely be able to do cross-clan or club-wide RPs. What exactly the Exarch’s role in that will be is up in the air. I was hired as a project manager to get the club in a good position to support roleplaying. I think it’s important to have a community manager for RP, just as I think it’s important for the Voice, Fist, and Herald to be community managers and champions for writing, gaming, and art. That’s not a role I’ve embraced so far, but it’s a role I think the Exarch will need to fill in the future.

As for vendettas, because roleplaying is inherently non-competitive, I don’t think you’ll ever see a GJW bin for who can RP hardest. You might see competitions to develop RP content, like writing modules, making maps, or designing NPCs, but those competitions come from core DC and there are no plans currently to bump Exarch up to that level. There might be some sort of roleplaying plot tie-in to hype a GJW or introduce plot aspects, similar to how there was an ACC prelude to GJW XII, but Evant and I haven’t discussed it and I’m not planning to lobby for it.

Rules and Dice

Von Ricmore asks: I saw in the first report talk of establishing a baseline rule set for running RP’s. After having a wonderful experience in an RP Wally ran I’m hoping to help try and bring it to Viz. Summit, quite understandably, would prefer a more solid set of guidelines for RP before it is incorporated. Is that something we can expect to see in either this report or a future one?

I have no intention to force people to conform to a particular ruleset, but we have a few documents that might be helpful:

• Wally wrote a guide for how he runs sessions. He and Arcona more generally have people do 1d10 rolls, but both Taldryan and Scholae are successfully doing 1d20 rolls more akin to D&D.

• Blade wrote a guide for how to run sessions without dice at all.

• I wrote a guide for how to use Fate for sessions. Our CS system borrows a lot of structure from Fate. So far nobody has tested this but, as I teased above, I’ll probably run a session or two with this system at launch to see how people like it.

In addition to the above, we’ve got a good half dozen members who’ve been successful at running sessions and can give advice, and Appius can speak to successfully incorporating RP into clan events. If members or summit are interesting in setting something up, please let me know what your pain points are. If I can’t resolve them myself, chances are I can hook you up with someone who can.

Aru: Can you make it so we have different dice available on the stores? I want my full DnD set of dice

As someone pointed out, you can get the standard D&D set through the system currently. If you’d like to suggest other items, there is a suggestion box as well as a policy for how the Regent office approaches that.

Tabletop Talk

I have good news and bad news for our tabletoppers. The good news is that, thanks to Zuser, there’s a #tabletop-gaming channel on the server now. The content is similar to the old Tabletop Madness group on Telegram, meaning a good amount of RPG chatter and even more about 40k/miniature.

The bad news is that I’m not likely to have any more news for you going forward. It has been very easy to justify devoting club resources to text RP because we know people show up for it. Virtual tabletop is much trickier to design systems for, especially if we want to lump it with wordcount-based text RP, and at the end of the day it was a hard sell and I didn’t have a working model to point to. If you are interested in trying to get a virtual tabletop group together with other members, feel free to contact me and I’ll support as best I can, but we have no plans to design tools for it or officially recognize it as DB activity.

Parting Shot

On a personal note, I’d like to thank everyone for the kind words and especially the recommendations for my recent promotion. I’d also like to congratulate several folks who’ve been working with me on their recent awards, including Blade and Appius on their promotions, Atty on her ED, Wally on his AK, Revak and Teebu on their SBs, and Xathia and Raleien on their ACs. Some of these are people I’ve been friends with for years, others are people I had never spoken to before getting this job, but I’ve been consistently impressed by their passion for making cool opportunities for their fellow members.

Alethia Archenksova,
Exarchissa