> More ships means more "game managers" and giving non-staff control over
> subtopics. Essentially, letting someone other than the editorial staff
> bring in "staff". I'm having visions of them building their own little
> community, with their own rules about creating staff, with their own
> newsletter, and ultimately more loyalty to the CG community than to the
> Phoenyx... big potential for the type of politics we want to avoid. We
> have a disagreement and they jump ship with a large chunk of our
> membership.
>
> I know that Lynn's game(s) are set up pretty much this way and it's not
> caused problems.
I wouldn't exactly say that. Being set up in this way has both good and bad
points.
I am lucky, in that, right now I have a co-GM, Tessa, who is wonderful.
She's kept the Seventh Order game alive while I've been having an attack of
too much real life. Originally I asked if she would co-own the list with
me. However, due to time constraints with work, she asked if she could
stick to running the game and leave the list work to me. If she had wanted
to co-own the list, I would have been asking Karen and Carl if we could set
her up. Tessa and I make sure that the Seventh Order has a consistent feel
as a whole. We coordinate the games so that they are all in the same time
frame, moving them through time together so that we can overlap and have
player interaction between the ships. Besides Tessa and I, there are two
AGMs who run ships. These AGMs consult with us on plot and take direction
from us on the world as a whole. The AGMs take care of the specifics of a
mission and include details that will link it with the world as a whole. I
am lucky, in that the two AGMs have been with Seventh Order since pretty
much its beginning (although they started as players and eventually moved on
to the AGM role). I know they are long term players and they've stuck it
out through thick and thin.
There are down sides to this way of running, though. Before I had my
current set of AGMs I went through a number of them. This was disruptive to
the game. I had AGMs come in who found that it was more work than they
anticipated, even if I had coached them previously, and left. I also have
had AGMs who have decided that they want to strike out on their own, taking
with them a significant portion of the members of a particular game. I
think one of the biggest problems I've had with AGMs is not being careful
enough in selecting them and picking someone who won't work with the world
as it and decides to go off on some incongruous tangent. What I've learned
along the way is that picking AGMs requires you to be as careful as the
editorial staff is.
I've also, in the past, had a newsletter for the Seventh Order. This is
something we've had prior to coming on board with the Phoenyx. The
newsletter is basically a forum for the exchange of information about things
Cardassian. I don't know that it detracted from loyalty to the Phoenyx.
But I do think that perhaps there should be some better ways to build that
loyalty. I think that my players tend to see the Phoenyx more as a
mechanism for playing their game than as a community they are involved in.
I think that building this sense of community among the players and getting
them to feel like they are part of something larger than their own game is
something that needs to be improved on. Things like the Phoenyx newsletter
will help this.
> biggest concern is that we're still in the stage of accepting people
> directly into Leadership without them having passed through the earlier
> stages... meaning they have no loyalty to the Phoenyx and may not see the
> Phoenyx itself as a larger community that they belong to.
I see that as a concern as well. I think more needs to be done to build
that loyalty to the Phoenyx community.
> Should co-GM's (co-listowners) be official Phoenyx staff as well? ("No,
> you can't have her as your co-GM... she hasn't been a member of the
> Phoenyx long enough" or otherwise doesn't meet some set of requirements
> we've established.")
Having been through the good, the bad and the ugly on this, I'd say that it
might not be a bad idea. It would help ensure that a more consistent
message comes from the leaders, both formal and informal. And it might help
to avoid some of the problems that I've had and learned from along the way
by ensuring that sufficient care has gone into the selection of new
co-GMs/AGMs. It also might help with the problem I've had of AGMs leaving
with a bunch of players. When in the position of running a group, it is
easy for people to decide they can do it better and quietly rally a group of
players to move away. Of course as the AGMs have not been part of the
Phoenyx staff in the past--they have just left for other communities. From
my observations, these games are generally not long-lived. It is
unfortunate as the players leave to something that sounds new and exciting
and a few months later find themselves without a game. However, if the
co-GMs/AGMs were part of the Phoenyx staff, their ties of community there
might temper some of that sort of problem.
> Should we limit the number of players or GM's (not lurkers) a game can
> have to keep them from becoming too large a sub-community? Would limits
> stifle the sub-communities that are necessary to the overall community?
I'm not sure I like the idea of limiting the number of players.
Practically, how would we decide what the maximum is? I think that certain
types of games do well with a smaller number of players. Other games do
well being larger. Having said that, the reason I run separate ships
(games) is that I found that once I got over about ten players in a group,
they became less effective. There was too much overlap between their roles
and that meant that the less aggressive players wouldn't write. Splitting
up into groups of that size or a bit smaller has kept the games more
dynamic.
Having said that, I can also see that very large games, with many AGMs could
become unwieldy. I'm thinking of the phenomenon you often see in Star Trek
type gaming where you get huge 'fleets'. They are comprised of many games,
each of which could run on its own. They grow by assimilating already
running games as well as starting new ones. Each game generally has to
conform to the set of 'fleet' rules. From what I've seen, there can be a
wide variety of quality of the games. Because of their size and strong
sense of their own identity, they might be harder to foster a sense of
Phoenyx community in.
>
> Will regular communication from the top-level Phoenyx leadership (via the
> newsletter) help prevent sub-community isolation and thus keep my visions
> of political madness at bay?
I think regular communication from the Phoenyx leadership is a great idea.
The players don't tend to see the larger Phoenyx world very often. And that
sort of communication would remind them that it is out there, and hopefully
catch their interest, causing them to investigate and hopefully become more
involved. I know you are looking at a newsletter, but do you foresee any
other proactive way of communicating with the sub-communities?
Lynn Cartan
Seventh Order
-- --------------------------------------------------------------
Game(s):
Listowner tools are found at http://www.phoenyx.net/listowners/
