How to Build a Thriving Roleplaying Region
Regions are the beating heart of a vibrant roleplaying community, but unlike the human heart, regions don’t always beat subconsciously. Without leadership, without someone or a group of players with the vision and role-playing ethic to push the region forward, it can falter and decay. And even if there are players within a decaying region who want to be active, without the leadership and institutions to promote roleplaying any region will eventually wither and die. What are these qualities of leadership? What sets a region like Greater Dienstad, a region that has been strong and active for over a decade, apart from regions like Haven, which were at one point very active but have since then faded into obscurity? What follows is an introspective account of what has made Greater Dienstad successful, with some actionable insight that you can apply to your own region and/or role-playing community.
For the sake of providing context, I belong to a group of roleplayers that interact almost exclusively on the NS forums. We post on our respective regional message boards (RMB), we sometimes have off-site forums for mostly out-of-character business, and we organize IRC and Discord channels, but the bread and butter of our identity manifests on the main forums. As such, I don’t have experience with large off-site roleplaying communities. Nevertheless, I think a lot of the points I make can be generalized to other contexts.
My approach to region-building is built on a philosophy of what a region is and why role-playing regions exist, which is to facilitate the mixture and promotion of canon. I believe that there are certain mixtures of institutions, which I will define, that are best at creating the right environment for a thriving roleplaying community. While administration of said region is not necessarily pluralistic, the rules that constrain players’ creativity have to be flexible enough to give each person an opportunity to take on a significant role in the region’s canon. The stricter the rules, the less creative the process and the less players you will attract to your region.
What’s the Purpose of a Role-Playing Region?
Why do players belong to regions? A better question: why do regions tend to take over players’ experiences in the game? One of the traits that characterizes in-character roleplay is the tendency for threads to be dominated by players from the same region or clique, outside of the big Global Economics & Trade storefronts that represent some of the most stable inter-regional interaction in the game. This behavior is easy to explain, because players develop an identity and, in an active roleplaying region, that identity is based on a common, shared canon. These canons, though, have to be built and the institutions have to prove that they are friendly to creative story-telling. How does a region achieve this?
There must be a strong, stable core of active roleplayers. This core doesn’t always need to have the same players in it, but there must always be a group of players who are actively roleplaying in the community. By way of example, Greater Dienstad has always had that core — between 2003–09, Imperial Armies and then Greater Dienstad had nations like Guffingford, Stevid, and myself. During the very early years of NationStates the game, the region had already established a brand, because it developed out a group that was constantly putting out content. I went inactive in 2009, yet came back in 2014 and saw that the community was vibrant as ever, and that’s because players like Stevid, Lamoni, and Lyras made up the new core. That’s really the key: there have to be people who are willing to get in the weeds. After all, what’s an RP region without the RP?
Yes, it sounds obvious, I know. The thing is, RP regions die all the damn time. If it’s so obvious, why does it keep happening? Because there’s no leadership.
If you want to build a strong roleplaying community, if you want to put together a great roleplaying region you have to be willing to put in the work. Here’s the question you have to ask yourself. What drives you to build this region? Why are you doing it? You can have a lot of reasons, and they tend to be a mixture of noble and selfish reasons, but ultimately they have to all have to align with a vision: that you are promoting the right culture to promote roleplaying and the mixture of canon. What this comes down to is a willingness for an authority figure, or a group of such figures, to enforce inclusiveness. At first, when you first found your region, that authority figure is going to be you, and perhaps a partner or partners if you have them.
Naturally, we need to ask what exactly makes a good leader. First and foremost, leaders are active. This doesn’t mean the founder or the delegate, or the gameside administration, needs to always be active. Rather, a successful roleplaying region must have someone, or preferably a number of members, actively roleplaying in the wider community (on-site). You can have the best intentions and still fail because you have no boots on the ground. Without active roleplayers, there is no roleplaying region. You have no living, breathing canon, you have no gravity, you’ll attract less and less fresh talent and eventually the region will fade. Those of you fighting (roleplaying) in the trenches, you are the leaders. Second, a leader must actively promote and, if needed, enforce the right institutions.
What are institutions? Institutions are a sociological concept, although I know them mostly through economics. Economists know them as “rules of the game.” They’re the cultural values, the laws, the forces that shape behavioral patterns, formal or informal. Institutions give shape to our society by determining how we interact. They both shape us and are shaped by us, in the sense that our behaviors tend to conform to a middle-ground that each of us contributes to along with our peers. These rules of the game are a very, very big deal.
Circa 2004 or so, a region by the name of Haven pops onto the scene. This name should be familiar to roleplayers and gameplayers, especially since unrelated happenings in Haven (gameside raids/invasions) have played a central role in the drama between the two sides of the game. In any case, Haven very quickly became a major community in the game, at least on the forum-side. They had a lot of talented players that were very active in the community, and that meant that they were that era’s preeminent brand. Greater Dienstad, and perhaps more so Gholgoth, were big too, but by 2007 Haven had grown to over 70 members, which for a healthy forum-side RP region is pretty big. GD had maybe 40 or 50, and I can’t speak for Gholgoth. In any case, despite all this talent, all these good things in favor of Haven, the region ended up dying out. A lot of the players went off-site to play a totally separate, but similar game. That game that ended up dying very quickly, as well.
Why is that? There was a fundamental shift in their institutions during that period. I had the privilege of leading several communities which had prominent Haven membership, namely World at War — an off-site roleplay that combined NS stats with real world countries —, the NS Draftroom — mil-tech design community —, and #draftroom, which was probably the biggest IRC channel for International Incidents at the time. I saw a lot of the change that beset Haven first hand, and at times I had to directly deal with it. Their community started to become more and more exclusive, and the culture became elitist. Those that fit in found it great, but overall that type of environment is subject to attrition because it turns a larger segment of the game off. RPers come and go. Life happens. You need people to pick up the slack when others shift their priorities. For Haven, that shift was dramatic and the region is, for all intents and purposes, now dead.
What exactly happened? The exclusivity was a big factor, but not just because it tends to turn potential recruits away. Negativity is cancerous; it festers and spreads, its tendrils infect other behaviors — other institutions. There was a deep disaffection with the game. This was caused by a variety of things, including the fact that by this time some 7–9 years had gone by and the game’s nature changed, because of how populations grow game-side (they become “unrealistic” or unwieldy). But also, that common culture of negativity arised because they started to associate the game with a broader class of non-worthy players, so they sought to isolate themselves to a community that they thought to be of a higher standard. That community ended up dying because there were no leaders. There was no one, no group, that promoted a brand to the wider community. How can there be leaders in a cancerous environment?
Good leaders steer their communities toward good outcomes. If a region's direction is negative, not only is it being led erroneously, but all of its worthwhile leaders are going to leave because they're seeking success — not failure.
Strong, healthy roleplaying regions need to be inclusive. They need people who influence the community in the right direction, who are willing to snuff out negativity before it grows, and who are active in their community to promote and advertise that brand.
Building a Brand
Roleplaying is about story-telling, and the brand is the world. Gholgoth has a clear brand. It’s a Gothic evil, with nations of slaves commanded via AIs, religious empires which exploit their slave class to provide for the elite class, and scattered fortress-cities impregnable to assault. For a long time that brand was carried out by Automagfreek, but since AMF’s gradual inactivity others have taken the reins — the Kraven Corporation is perhaps the most infamous modern exponent of Gholgoth. Today, players like the Scandinvan Empire and Havensky have taken the lead. It’s an attractive world to a player who likes that style, and the relative inclusiveness of the region makes it easier for new players to get involved.
Worlds, or canons, can be built in many ways, but the only effective way to do it — within the context of this guide’s topic — is via in-character roleplay within the wider community. If outsiders don’t see it, they won’t know about it, so the only people who are going to appreciate what you’ve built is you and the rest of your inner circle. To build a growing region — and if you’re not growing, you’re dying — you need to advertise, and that means showing off your canon via story-telling. And the most interesting way to discover a world is through the eyes of a character that the reader can identify with. That means role playing. And if no one else in your new region is willing to take the lead, guess what, it’s time to get to work!
Once you have this canon to showcase, you can promote it in other ways. You can join out-of-character community threads or discussion threads, and you can share your stories as examples to inspire creativity in others. I don’t recommend having an ulterior motive. Be authentic about it, because it’s easy to spot a fake. It really is. You must approach it honestly: you are proud in what you’ve accomplished and you hope that it can give others the inspiration they need in their world-building and story-telling. I don’t think enough players do this. I recently started the NationStates Post-Modern Tech Community Thread, and part of my motivation was to create a space for players to share their experiences. That sort of use has been timid thus far, but know that there are players like me who are interested in your world and want to know more about it. We might not want to join your region, or we might decide to join after all, if the world and the opportunities to contribute to that world are attractive enough to us.
Contribution is a big factor. I don’t think a successful region needs pluralistic administration. Greater Dienstad, and its predecessor, have been active since its foundation and it has never had a game-side regional government to speak of. We have a delegate, which is a vital role, but not one in the sense of influencing how the game is played within the region. For the most part, I set the meta-rules — the institutions —, and my approach comes down to a small set of tenets, some of which I’ve already discussed:
- Inclusiveness — Greater Dienstad is an open region, which means anyone can come and go. We have never had a password, except for brief periods (week-long or two at most). The only one that comes to mind is immediately after we got raided and tagged. By the way, as an aside, I’m extremely grateful for that raid. It brought me out of inactivity.
- Creative freedom — I believe in freedom of association and it’s something I promote by not implementing rules that force interactions between players. You can RP whatever you want, but others will choose to associate with you ICly or not. Inevitably, this creates some degree of exclusively (Greater Dienstad was the subject of an unfortunate exodus of pony-countries because of intolerance — a weakness of ours that needs to be resolved), but exclusivity can only be optimized, not extinguished. Anyways, in general, what you can RP about in GD is pretty extensive, meaning the region attracts players with disparate topical interests (military, diplomacy, economics, sports, et cetera).
- Leadership — I was inactive for 4–5 years, and thankfully I could count on many partners to pick up my slack (many of which became NationStates mentors). When I’ve been active, though, I’ve been active. I RP quite a bit, creating new threads that incorporate others and joining others’ threads to help promote their work, and I’m significantly present in the community by coordinating community threads and helping new players out. Furthermore, I try to promote and groom new leadership, but here the truth is that often leadership arises naturally because of the region’s creative freedom. It’s no coincidence that players who RP often tend to become the leaders. RPing not only builds the region’s brand, it builds your own as well; and those with initiative ultimately inspire and attract others to follow in their suit. That is, leaders catalyze more roleplaying amongst the wider community.
- Low barriers to entry — GD will never have a password. Never. Not as long as I can help it, at least. I work in data analysis, specifically around e-commerce and digital marketing. Password gateways are evil, because they make the consumer work. There will always be people on the margin who don’t want to work, so they decide that they didn’t need to buy the product after all and they close out the tab. For an e-commerce store, though, it’s a necessary evil because you need to associate data around the purchase with a member account so that you can feed it back to that person (i.e. “where is my package? has it shipped? what did I order again? I want to cancel...”). None of that is relevant in regards to regions, though. Passwords are meant to be exclusive by their nature. If you’re worried about raiders, endorse a delegate (10+ endorsements — get a puppet in the WA if you don’t want your main nation in the WA). If you have a founder, you’re safe anyways. If you don’t, you’re better off re-founding in some way.
Furthermore, Greater Dienstad has no feeder region. I believe in mentoring players and raising their standards, but I don’t believe in making them go through what’s tantamount to a pledging system. New players can be mentored while being immersed in the region’s canon, and the best way to do the latter is by having them interact with other players. If you isolate them in feeder regions then their ability to assimilate will be more restricted. Feeder-regions are meant to weed out players, but that tends to happen naturally anyways, and by their nature feeder-regions increase the probability of failure because they are exclusionary and deny new players greater opportunities to become part of the community.
So what does contribution mean outside the out of character administration of the region? It refers to the ability of any player to become significant in the shared world. It means that any country, by virtue of their role-playing, can become an important element of our shared history. This history, or canon, is an identity, and if you expect your region members to assume said identity, then you must allow them to contribute to it. This means that, on a region-wide scale, you won't be able to control the direction of all canon and all stories. With some, or a lot, of it, you will have to trust your region-mates with. And when this impinges on you and your story-telling, which it will if you are merging canon via cooperative roleplaying, you must be flexible enough to compromise with those in your region that don't necessarily share the same exact vision as far as where the story ends. It's the only way you're going to get others to become invested in this community you're trying to build, and a healthy region needs a core leadership that recognizes this truth.
If you have this strong core of leaders, what's cool is that this force tends to snowball and grow, because good canon has gravity — it attracts like-minded roleplayers. The core group of RPers can increase in number, even as older members begin to drop off. The healthier your region is, the more it will grow in quality and quantity, and if you have the right rules to inspire the right type of leadership, then you’ll have achieved building a region that can survive transitions in activity (RPers coming and going).
It’s worth remembering that building a region doesn’t necessarily mean being the founder. Like I said, when it comes to a roleplay region, the leaders are the RPers, which may or may not be the “official administration.” Those who build value are those who wade in the weeds. You are the source of energy and motivation that your region needs to thrive, and accomplishing that is as simple as starting a story.