Roleplaying Guide 3: Creating Plausible & Fun Guilds/Groups/Orders for Roleplay

[Jeremiah]

Check out the other Roleplaying Guides here!
Roleplaying Guide Chapter 2
Roleplaying Guide Chapter 1
It is highly recommended to read these two guides before this one, as they will give you the fundamentals of creating interesting and surprising characters, as well as the mechanics of roleplaying.

Roleplaying Guide 3

Guilds and Groups

My previous guides discussed individual character development concepts, and also the interaction between 2 or more characters. This guide will focus on significantly larger roleplay situations, the formations of guilds, groups, and orders, as well as the different "genres" of group roleplay.

Most will agree that roleplaying in a group of several people is much more fun than roleplaying in a small group of 2-3 people. This is because of the volatility of the roleplay. Since characters create the story, the more characters that exist in one story, the more volatile the situation will be.

Your characters will have opinions about other groups or orders as well. Your character may hate a certain military with a fiery passion, but have a kindly attitude towards a group of pilgrims, who roleplay a religious journey across Kalimdor.

By joining a group, your character will be greatly changed in his or her interaction with the group, and may even be forced to change their opinions as a result! So let's take a look at the formation of roleplaying guilds and groups.

I. Guilds and Groups Formation

It is important to note that there is a major difference between 'Guilds' and 'Groups'. Roleplaying guilds focus on many storylines, but will perhaps chase one goal, while groups are formed outside of guild borders, and welcome roleplayers of all guilds to join in on the fun. For this reason, adventuring scenarios will be much more interesting with a 'Group' in most cases, while a 'Guild' is much more suited to military operation, in part due to the uniformity of a tabard, and to the ease of long-distance OOC communication through Guild Chat.

It is generally easier to form groups, as opposed to guilds. On highly-populated roleplaying servers, most players will already be in some sort of guild, but since there is a substantially-less competitive environment in PvE and PvP progression on most Roleplaying servers, it isn't difficult to recruit. Groups can be formed to serve a simple purpose, such as manning or roleplaying a tavern staff, or the much less modest goal of seeking an ancient book of cures for diseases wracking Azeroth.

First, we'll cover the different hybridized types of roleplaying guilds.

II. RP Guild Types

Military
Military Roleplaying guilds are by far the most common. This is due to the fact that the guild structure supports a military-like organization, since it is based on a hierarchical system. Military RP guilds are often RP-PvP guilds, and focus on hosting World PvP events that are relevant to their storyline. They are usually the most uniform of guilds, and require a considerable amount of patience to keep in order. Good officers are your friends, here. A military guild without a substantiated member base will fail, so grow fast, and pick good members. Elect officers to help you recruit on off days.
Adventure
While not wholly suited to the structure of the guild, Adventure guilds can be quite fun. They require much fewer members. Most adventuring guilds are small, and have something between 4-20 members. This is a good starter guild, and can be hybridized as a Leveling-RP guild, in order to "Adventure" the wilds of Azeroth, and level up whilst. With more active members, these can become raiding hybrid guilds.
Professional
Professional guilds focus on commerce. These guilds are typically made up of trader characters who either sell their real profession wares, or use the assistance of an RP item-making mod, such as Gryphonheart Items. A good example of this is <Four Winds Traders>, on the Moon Guard US RP server. Professional guilds require a moderately-sized member base, especially if your guild sells real items. It isn't a bad idea to have an upgraded guild bank here, either. Because of the large amount of reagents involved in trader RP guilds, they can also be hybridized with leveling or PvE guilds, but rarely have room for PvP involvement. Then again, I suppose you could deal arms/supplies to a guild for PvP, but I suppose it isn't in the nature for merchants to fight.

III. Ignition Thesis
I've shouldered and helmed several successful RP and RP-PvP guilds. In order to spark up a decent-sized and successful guild, you can use what I call my Ignition Thesis.

Observe what isn't being done on your server. Fill a niche. You can't just simply pick up and decide to make a guild that fits an unfilled niche, though. Analyze the popularity and demand for this sort niche-filler guild. There was a thirst for World PvP on my server, and so I started a roleplaying guild that hosts RP-PvP events in World PvP. I also observed that there were many premade pugs advertising in trade, so I decided to use my guild to form premades, as well. We draw in more members once they see how impressive our win streaks are in PvP.

To further explain the Ignition Theory, you have to understand that the spark is not only made by a niche-filling guild, but by a niche-filling guild with a good story. In order to go public and start bringing in and retaining members, you should host world events to promote your guild's goals, IC and OOC, as well as advertise in the GuildRecruitment channel, which is a given. What you're really looking for is a way to get the server involved in your guild's activities through engaging and original world events. I talked to Horde guilds cross-facion, and set up several massive battles between my military guild and some Horde military guilds. We pugged in a few players who wanted to get their characters involved, and my guild's influence spread.

This is the ignition theory. You have to get involved with your server's community, and establish your presence, "igniting" your influence with an engaging world event or interesting storyline. If you're just a pure RP guild, you could host a ball or a fireworks show. There are several successful professional-themed guilds on my server who host GHI (Gryphonheart Items) markets on my server, in order for players to purchase unique and original items for their characters to use in RP.

IV. Infrastructure and Officers
I can't tell you how important it is to have a well-structured guild ranking system, with a team of headstrong officers. It is important to pick a wide variety of personalities to compose your team of officers, and I'm talking purely OOC. You want people who can lead, who know how to speak up when there's a problem, and who aren't afraid to boot someone from your guild when they're acting up. These are all qualities you should look for, but go for one person who is a bit more merciful, one person who is more of a lawbringer-absolutist type, who always follows and reinforces the rules, and a few other officers somewhere in-between. This will give your officer meetings a variety of different perspectives, and will help you diversify your guild's ideas. Make sure you host officer meetings OOC and IC often, as this will be important in maintaining your guild's infrastructure, and the integrity of that structure.

As for ranks, my military guild has a ranking system from top to bottom as follows:

General (Guild Leader)
War Councilman (Guild Officer, is on the council)
Bulwark (Leader of the Ravenguard branch)
Shadowbourne (Leader of the Shadewalkers branch)
Harbinger (Leader of the Starlance branch)
Ravenguard (Member of the Ravenguard shock troopers)
Shadewalker (Member of the Shadewalker intelligence division)
Starlance (Member of the Starlance inquisitional branch)
Vanguard (Veteran Soldier)
Protector (Rank and File)

This is a pretty standard model, and most military guilds have different special "branches" of specialists.

Professional Guild:

Chief Merchant (Leader)
Regional Shipping Manager (Officer)
Shipper (Transports goods)
Merchant (Sells goods)
Worker (Mines goods)

Adventuring guilds have less structure, and don't really need to focus on rank. You should have a good team of veteran explorers, but structure isn't so important for these sorts of orders.

Check back next time for Roleplaying Guide 4: Villains and Anti Heroes

[Skalla]

looks great but what happened with the rp fighting part? I'd like to learn that

+rep <3