I’ve just started a darker themed rp guild. I have never been in a guild, much less led one despite playing the game for as long as it’s been alive. If anyone has any advice at all on how to keep everything running as smooth as possible, I would greatly appreciate it!
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So I ended up writing a fair bit. Sorry if I overwhelm you.
Be stubborn when it matters. I would have quit my guild after the first year due to the drama and harassment I and my guild started to get. It helped for me to focus on my guild, it’s stories, and how to ensure my members had fun. But also be willing to be fair and compromise too. If people aren’t having fun, something needs to be done. This is easier said than done. Personally I like to talk to the guild as a whole and discuss things.
For darker guilds, I would say consent is very important. People don’t always like certain things forced on their characters. Could be something like a pickpocket stealing from them to more extreme stuff. Not getting consent can lead to drama, both within and outside the guild.
Do not feel that you have to be a big guild to be a success. It doesn’t matter if you have four, twenty, fifty, or five hundred members. As long as you enjoy each other’s company and have fun, that is all that matters. Besides, growing too big too fast leads to a lot of problems. My guild got super popular and I didn’t have the heart to deny people entry. It became a struggle but I had the help of good people so we managed. Still, I didn’t like that there were recruits that didn’t have a good time because we were stretched so thin.
This will be a learning experience for you. Not everyone is perfect and as you manage a guild, life will throw situations at you that you won’t know what to do. Just do your best and seek advice.
If someone is telling lies about you and/or your guild, live life so no one will believe them. Haters are going to hate. It’s best not to interact or argue with them. That can add fuel to the fire and make you look worse. Just keep doing business as usual. Don’t be afraid to put people on ignore and report to blizzard. Also take screenshots of anything you find questionable.
It is your guild so you can police it how you see fit. I had some super aggressive characters join my guild once. It got to the point they were starting fights every night and it was contributing to a very unwelcoming atmosphere that most were not enjoying. I tried to talk to the players and see about working on stories and character development that would help them not so aggressive toward our own. It didn’t work and they whispered everyone that I was policing their Rp so that when situation reached it’s boiling point, a good number of folks left with them and they made their own guild. As they left, one yelled at me that they never intended to work with me on the aggression despite telling me in our talks that they wanted to.
Being inclusive does not mean you have to interact with problem people. I got a lot of flak from people that were abusive towards me and in their efforts to harm my reputation, would tell anyone who would listen about how I talked about being inclusive but wasn’t actually. One of my good friends actually heard that I wasn’t a very good person. After I became friends with a mutual friend, they started hanging out with me and realized what they heard wasn’t true. So even if people believe any lies, they might realize the truth. That has always given me hope and I try to remind myself of that regularly.
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Not overwhelming at all, I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this response. I’m absolutely saving what you’ve said so I can remind myself of it going forward haha. Thank you so much for the detailed response <3
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Also, best advice, find folks who make good dedicated officers if you DON’T already have them lined up, because delegation and quality support are the lifeblood of a guild. Folks who can reliably be trusted to carry out what you can’t at all hours of the day be there to do, and recruiters who can find reputable recruits will keep the guild up and running more than anything else.
One other free bit of advice, stay out of any “opt-in” RP like governments, they tend to host the scummiest players, like the vast majority of backbiters Raton mentioned, they thrive off creating drama and demonizing other guilds to try and isolate folks to themselves.
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Hey there!
With darker themed guilds, I highly recommend the following:
- A very prominent IC =/= OOC rule. You want to make sure people know your characters aren’t reflecting who you are IRL. People tend to think dark themed characters are played by villainous people.
- A rule about not using darker themed characters in RP without some type of consent from the other player(s). Pre-arranged dark RP are fine, but for walk up or RP with new people, at least a whisper or at most a full listing of what someone considers acceptable RP is a good idea.
- Don’t let yourselves get used as only the bad guys in some other guild’s stories. It will end with them being surly if they don’t beat you every time, or with them wanting to jump from point A to point Z without any build up.
- Decide what kind of dark themes you’re looking at. Are you openly doing things, or doing things behind the scenes, or comedic, or something else?
- You can RP as player vs environment and still be dark themed. You don’t need to engage other RPers.
For guilds in general:
- Have your basic rule set figured out, an idea of scheduling, and stay active. Have at least 1 officer and preferably more.
- Know that you’re on the job what feels like all the time. If you have real life events, tell people you’ll be unavailable so they don’t DM you and expect the immediate answer. This isn’t as bad nowadays as it used to be.
- If you don’t know something or need time to plan something, don’t be afraid to say so.
- If someone needs to be gkicked, don’t be afraid to do it. I went for years trying very hard to be nice to people, give them chance after chance, thinking if I did, they’d change. They didn’t. I don’t do that now.
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I’ll def be sure to keep all of that in mind. You’ve been a great help! ^^
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There’s very little I can add to the sage advice you’ve gotten here, but here goes.
- The Safety Word Method:
This is borrowed from a different community that the online gaming one, but ‘Safety Words’ are vitally important with darker or similar tones in Roleplay. And they must be enforced with an iron fist, no ‘Oh but we were going with the flow’ or ‘I was caught up in the moment’. nonsense.
If the other people involved say the Safety Word, you gorram stop right then and there. Beat that into your players/guildies/friends skulls with whatever large, blunt, heavy object you require to make that stick.
If you’re tackling ‘dark’ or ‘serious’ topics, you need an immediate out if a player(s) feels uncomfortable or threatened, be it something being done in-character that they did not agree to, or something that opens real-life wounds or trauma. I cannot stress enough how serious this is.
- Better the B Team you can live with than the A Team you can’t:
You’re going to run into people that you just won’t mesh with, and trying to force it to work is just going to hurt both sides, and cause bad blood. Distance and time, and sometimes a third, neutral party to act as a referee in the discussion, can clear this up, but sometimes its just a personality clash too severe for anything other than a parting of the ways.
Don’t be afraid to tell the popular person to tell their story walking if they start pushing other people out of the group or trying to bogart the Guild and the players for a personal agenda. Especially if you talk to them about it and they refuse to budge, or worse yet, say they’ll moderate themselves and then go behind your back even harder.
If they want a Guild of their own design, tell them all the best and send them on your way, this is your Guild, and you must not let rogue egoes and online personalities take the reins, because once you do, it is forever a struggle to get control and stability back again. I’ve watched Stormrise Warband and a few other Guilds disintegrate beneath the weight of their Officers/Guild Leaders’ egoes because once they got rid of the ‘casuals’, the ‘niche’ folks, the ‘weekenders’, then the ‘lesser raiders’ outside of their primary group, the only thing they had left to blame for their failures was each other, and that kind of ego never will acknowledge they’re in the wrong, or that their behavior is toxic and self-serving.
We went from officers that couldn’t stand to be in the same chat as each other and a single player handing out death threats and driving ‘weebs’ out of the guild to them bogarting RP events for people for their PvP events, multiple muppets earwigging two officers who profoundly detested each other for shizz and giggles, and splitting the Guild down the middle because this was fun to them, and they’d come up with any amount of projection to justify it.
And then the other egoes got involved and our GL at the time tried the whole ‘both sides’ school of leadership, which amounted to letting the mass exodus of players and the rage-baiting amongst the officers slide because he was adverse to personal conflict, he was in a relationship with one of the agitators, and was more worried about the Guild’s raiding progression and PvP ranks than the roleplay guild that had brought us all together.
It ended with multiple people throwing trying to steal from the Guild Bank while claiming they were ‘hacked’, getting temp bans for slurs and other stuff in Guild Chat, the Discord shouting-matches were the stuff of legends from the recordings I got sent to me, and the end of friendships that had lasted years because a handful of people literally could not function without driving everyone else around them crazy, and they were good enough at reading people to know who to poke, and who to isolate.
It doesn’t matter if it is in your Discord, on the Forums, in the Game, in whatever arena you find yourself and your Guild. It doesn’t matter if they’ve been your friend forever or they’re the best raider you’ve ever seen. An average player can grow to become a good or great player with time, context and experience, be it in RP, PvP or PvE.
A toxic player will need to be dragged and made to face their consequences with multiple people as witnesses to make it both sting and stick. Some players just need a kick to the grundle to wake up and realise what they’re doing, but most toxic players are only likely to change if their toxicity isn’t gaining them something, be it fame, gear or entertainment.
You wouldn’t leave a plant that gave you life-threatening allergies in your garden because it looks pretty, you don’t let a toxic player(s) set down roots and kill off your Guild.
- Set inviolate social rules for the Guild to abide by:
Depending upon the ‘dark’ nature of the Guild, there needs to be a concise, brutally clear list of rules for the Guildies to follow. These are up to you, and they must not be too authoritarian or unyielding, but they do have to be very clear, and the punishment for breaking those rules equally clear, and enforced firmly.
No slurs, especially in-game ones that might sound or seem similar to RL ones, is a good start. You’d be surprised how often cultural context can make one word seem awful to one person and blasé to another.
Players must spend a few hours on their Guild Character per week and if they repeatedly cannot make events, ask them to step into a support role rather than a main character involved in the story, as this is very unfair to people who can show up on time, or even a bit before the event begins.
Players, be their officers, Guild Leaders or rank-and-files, have lives outside of WoW and if they need to take a leave of absence, please let folks know in advance if possible, or even just a quick text on Discord. The world is not a kind or forgiving place, so we have to step in to pick up the slack. Pounding the Officers/GL day and night for an issue is only going to make them resent the player, the issue, and eventually even the Guild and the game itself, and then they will stop playing.
All serious issues will be brought before the GL and several officers, and if the GL or one (or more) of the officers are involved, either through RL relationships, they’re involved directly in the issue, or similar issues such as the inability to be impartial on the matter or they have a known bias, they must excuse themselves and abide by the decision of the committee. Decision by Committee is annoying as all hell, but it can help prevent cliques from forming or blind-spots in enforcing Guild rules or social obligations.
Adding to the other matter, all such disputes are handled IN TEXT. No voice chats. You want that in writing so there’s no “But you saaaaaaid…” arguments from toxic players when there’s future disputes down the line. It is all in writing, right there, deal with it.
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You said there was little you could add, but you gave a lot of important insight!! Thanks <3
( that is a little for Gentarn )
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(HA absolutely love that)
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Kirsy made this well on point. This is the primary reason for a recent decision to NOT add guild tags to my character hosted on WRA anymore. In real life, Sadgati is NOT ‘me’. In fact, waking up one day as Sadgati sounds like a nightmare!! It is unfortunate but guilds hosted on home server have become synonymous with sh*ting where you eat and sleep. Join a PVP guild hosted elsewhere then use communities and Discord for RP. Seems to work very well!
For running an RP guild, my advice is this. Warcraft is really anything goes sort of situation with RP. Going strict on lore, if you can really call it that, will put off alot of players. Let players be who they want to be. Don’t try and moderate what a character should be. Afterall, Azeroth is a world of pure fantasy!!
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I wish I could give you more than one like, especially for point #1. 
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When doing dark RP, make sure that the space you’re using is free of chairs you might trip over or expensive vases you might bump into.
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Don’t get insular. RP Guilds that turn inward wither, even if they’re otherwise excellent.
Make some of the many weekly or monthly events hosted by players your regular guild get-togethers for informal RP. A lot less behind the scenes work for you and your officers. Attend world events such as Lunar Festival or Brewfest IC. And make sure to always interact with other RPers when you’re out and about as a guild.
Building a positive relationship with the rest of the community is far better recruitment than all the /yell and forum announcements you could manage. And you might just be surprised how it opens the opportunity to some of the “invite-only” RP events other guilds run.
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