Introduction

So in the Before Times, back when we were gearing up for the War, my last report included a survey for what people were looking for from me and future Exarchs. While there’s still a fair amount of one-off project work to be done—the society being the obvious one—that work needs to be balanced with recurring, day-to-day tasks to support roleplaying activity across the club. So I took the survey responses and the statistics on actual RP participation to Evant and Bubba and we worked on our game plan a bit.

While RP has certainly proven it can be a valuable source of activity and member engagement, we have a pretty severe bottleneck when it comes to having people step up to run sessions. And by run I don’t just mean making a thread and calling it a day, but taking ownership of the session and ensuring it stays active and moving forward, whether that involves a traditional tabletop DM role or just making sure there’s not dead air and loss of momentum. As RP so far has mostly happened at the clan level, we’re seeing a big gap in activity between clans that have eager volunteer DMs and clans that don’t. I think the major task facing the Exarch office in the near term is to step in and fill that role when necessary and to mentor and empower other members to do the same. To that end, I will be taking on some help.

Now Hiring

The primary duty of Exarch staffers will be to act as “DMs at large” for the club, running sessions for primarily inter-clan audiences.

• You will have wide leeway in how you structure your sessions (e.g. d10 or d20 or diceless, running for 2 hours or a week or across a month).

• You may be asked to run sessions specific to certain clans, so that members who don’t get to RP much can have a session that’s not dominated by members who have already been in ten different sessions.

• You will also have leeway in the plots you develop, although you will be encouraged to support both the lore of the emerging RP society and the club-level plot as developed by the Story Group.

• You will be encouraged to share your experience and best practices with other RP organizers, directly, through public chats, and through future Exarch reports.

Additionally, my staff will have the opportunity to engage in other Exarch projects based on their interest and availability. These are optional duties; they’re good fodder for award recommendations but should not distract from the primary duty.

• Contribute to the development of the society, including developing lore, a progression curve, and items and other rewards.

• Contribute to potential Shadow Academy courses on RP systems and best practices.

• Help provide resources for regular Exarch reports, such as tools, maps, RP scenarios, etc. This may include resources developed for your own sessions.

• Contribute to odds and ends like wiki documentation and policy development.

So how do you apply? I’m going to eschew a form this time and have you just email me at [Log in to view e-mail addresses]. I’m interested in your experience running roleplaying sessions, especially online, and most especially for the DB. I don’t have a particular format in mind; while making it professional-looking and easy on the eyes doesn’t hurt, a text-only email is fine. I’m more interested in the content. Include whatever you think is relevant.

One thing I think I should stress is that, while I’m happy to chat about dice mechanics and bot features all day, the real purpose of these positions is to build up and maintain a community of roleplayers. The main thing I need is people who can get butts in seats, as it were, and make sure people feel comfortable, especially if they’re trying something new. What would really be a success is if you can take someone who was skeptical about RPing and make them have so much fun that they’re hyped to go looking for other sessions or run their own. Project work and system documents have their place, but they can’t do that. I’m looking for people who can.

I’m going to give people two weekends to apply, so applications will be open through August 7th.

They’re Only Mostly Dead

As expected, we had a bunch of sessions in the lead-up to the war, and then people stopped doing RP to focus their efforts on the big event. Now that the war is over, people are returning to RP, but I’m not seeing a revival of the sessions that tapered off in May. We’ve got about seven sessions that are in limbo right now, neither progressing nor reported. I’ll be reaching out to those organizers this week to make sure those either get moving again or get reported so members can get their CIs.

It’s inevitable that some sessions will fizzle, especially if something happens in RL that makes the organizer unable to take a very active role. While it can be disappointing to pull the plug, remember that your participants don’t get their shiny clusters until you press that Finalize button.

On my end, I’ve updated how I track the individual sessions, so hopefully I can step in a little more quickly in the future.

As for new sessions, I’m happy to see all of them popping back up. Special shout outs to Korvis and Gui for kicking off the first Clan Vizsla one, Atra for kicking off the first Dark Council one(!), and Blade for opening the most recent COU session to outside guests. There are special places in my little black heart for you all.

#AskArch Learning to Roleplay through bad dice rolls: The Kamjin Lap’lamiz story

So there was actually a pretty robust discussion on Discord when I started taking questions, and I don’t want to repeat all of that here. You can take a look here, assuming I know how Discord works (I don’t, James pls halp). There’s a really cute picture of a bird. Anyway, I figure I’ll just address some of the salient points and shorter questions here.

Mune-Mune asks: Just wondering if general membership has access to rp logs. Cause thought a company that has then take a scene from one of them to do up a fun comic of 3+ panels would be fun

Yes and no. There’s not a central list of all the RP logs people can access; I’m not averse to trying to create one, but I know some people were not crazy about the idea of strangers reading their logs. But anyone who has the link to an RP log can access it, and the links are available in the OOC channel after the organizer reports the session. You can also poke me if you need to look up the logs for something, or someone can tag you into the session even if it’s archived and finalized.

I really love the idea of people illustrating their RP sessions, by the way, so if you do, please share it in #art-chat and/or #rp-lobby.

We had several questions in chat about the upcoming society.

Participating in and running RP sessions will form the core of how you advance. The actual structure might be a little different from the existing societies, as we don't have placement modifiers for RP. We spoke a little bit about some different data types we do and don't have that can figure into progression, but most of this is way up in the air right now.

We also had some discussion on run-ons, specifically if they're going to be involved in the RP now that they're using the RP system and the line between a clan RO and a clan RP is more blurry. In the past, I've kept established DB fiction, particularly ROs, at arm's length because it was important that the club adapt to RP on its own terms and not try to shove it into a familiar box. I think I can probably take that chip off my shoulder now, and I think the Voice and I will be coordinating more closely going forward. I don't know what specifically that will mean for ROs but until you hear otherwise that is a Voice question.

In terms of society rewards, I might drop some teasers here and there but I don't have anything for you yet. Even once development is "done" on the Exarch side, items will need to go through the Regent's process (and there will be items), CS features need to go through the Voice, certain things might require James tweaks, etc. Evant has something in mind for the Rank XII capstone that I think most members will enjoy. But the other rank awards are, say it with me now, up in the air.

In terms of lore, I floated a premise for the society a few months back and the initial feedback was positive. The GJW and especially the closing fiction for it have made me feel more confident about that direction, but we'll see what the incoming staff have to say. The big challenge is finding something big enough to appeal to a lot of character concepts without retreading ground staked out by the established societies.

If you think I have good ideas you’ve clearly spent the last seven years in the Rogues.

The other topic that got a lot of attention was the interplay between RP and the club "macro plot," i.e. the stuff the DC puts out around and leading into vendettas. As Idris mentioned, I'm in the Story Group chat now. I've been there for like two days. I don't know how that's going to play out or what my involvement in future plot updates will be. The best I can do right now is some background on why I pushed for that.

So my personal experience is that the club plot used to be more of a dynamic, engaging phenomenon in my early years here. And I don’t think that’s necessarily because of the plot. I think “Space Hitler does Space Hitler things” is less conceptually interesting to me than the basic premise of, say, the Collective or the Children. What hooked me was the amount of bottom-up and lateral engagement there was. I'd see other member characters in the plot updates and then the clan and house fictions would all come out and riff off it. I'd go in fic chat and be able to talk to people I didn't know about how our characters felt about what was going on and we could develop that further in an ACC match or a fic or whatever. That's how I met Blade, one of the people asking about this, and that's how I got to know people around the club and ended up joining other clan chats.

And I think we can sit around all day speculating why things don’t feel that way anymore—and I’m sure some people would disagree with the premise—but what’s more important to me is if RP can help bring that energy back. As the current Voice and his predecessor both pointed out, official fic has a lot of baggage and has to thread a lot of needles. RP sessions don’t have those same constraints and are member-driven by default. So my hope is that by collaborating with the Story Group, I can be a bridge between what people are doing with their peers and what club leadership has in store for them in future events. We’re just going to have to see how it goes.

Alethia Archenksova,
Exarchissa