Now let’s talk a little about kicking off the event itself. You have your ideas, you’ve got a list of NPCs and clues and all kinds of neat things for people to do.   All you need now is a group of willing players.   The last thing you want when you’re ready to roll out your story is to log in to see an empty friends list, or a friends list full of people in various dungeons and raids.  So what are some good ways to get the word out and lure the masses in?

Pick a night when people are usually available. Tuesday nights have turned into an unofficial RP night for us.  Patch days very often meant unstable servers, especially in places like Shattrath and Dalaran.  So, on nights when the Outland and Northrend servers were going splat, we were tucked away in Stormwind, hanging out and RPing.  Are there nights that a majority of your guild is around?

Pick a start time when people can be around. Feathermoon’s a west coast server with a healthy chunk of east coast players.  So if we start an event at 7:00 eastern time, chances are there will be west coast people who haven’t even left work yet.  However, starting an event at 9:00 server time means the event’s just getting going at midnight for the people on the Atlantic seaboard.

Try watching your friends list and guild list for a couple of weeks, and making note of when people are around and RP is happening.

This might mean rearranging your own schedule a bit as well.  For Bricu and I, Tuesday isn’t only RP night; it’s Lost night as well, at least for a few more weeks. The night Naiara was taken, we got the event started right at 7:00 server, minutes after Lost was over.  But that meant that the Panzercow couldn’t stick around too long on his surly dwarf, Beltar.  So while we were working out the details for the second night, we decided to start the event earlier.  Lost could be recorded.  (Funny thing is, we got lucky — it ended up being a rerun that week anyway, so we weren’t at risk for accidental spoilers after all!)

Pick a place everyone can get to, or have a way to get them there. For both nights of the Naiara and Maggie plots, we knew we had some characters attending that were below level 80.   We made sure to find places where there weren’t big angry mobs that would aggro on the level 20s — the grounds of Caer Darrow for the first night, and the mausoleum beneath Wintergarde for the second (where Thel’zan the Duskbringer spawns) — and had people available to summon them in.  That way, anyone who wanted to come out and participate, could.

Confirm with your co-conspirators. While you’re playing the scheduling game, make sure you coordinate with anyone whose presence is essential to your event.  If they can’t make it, you’ll need to figure out what you want to do — can you postpone?  If the role isn’t character-specific, can someone else do the job?  If the role is character specific, are there other ways they can make their presence felt (forum fic, follow-up RP, etc)?

Get the date out there! There are several ways you can do this:

• Write up a forum post — Put all the important information into an OOC post: who is hosting the event?  When will it be held?  Where will it take place?  The what and why parts might be a little tricky, if you’re trying to keep some surprises up your sleeve, but try to at least give your players a bit of information.  Sometimes if they know what the general theme of the night will be, it will affect which character they want to bring.  Hosting something that will require sneaking?  They might want to bring their rogue instead of their warrior who goes clanking about in his armor.

  Put links to pertinent background information in the post, if there is any.  Give your players some lead time so they can make plans to be available.  Bump the thread once or twice as the date gets closer, and encourage players to ask questions about it if they’re unclear on any aspects.

• Spread the info around. Are there several guilds that hang out together?  Ask if it’s okay to post about the event on friendly guilds’ forums in case there are any players who would like to come.  If it’s an event that’s really open to anyone who’d like to come, consider posting it on your official realm forum as well.
• Use the in-game calendar. Sending out invites via the calendar lets you get an idea of who can and can’t be around.
• Remind people with the Guild Message of the Day.  Ask your guild officers if they can set the message to reflect the date and time of the event.
• Call out in in-game channels. This, like bumping the forum thread, should be used wisely.  If you’re in a channel with RPers you’d like to invite, send out a couple of reminders via that channel, but be careful not to spam it.  Toss out a brief reminder a day or two before the event.  The day of, maybe give a couple hours’ notice (“Hey, guys, I’m running an RP event tonight at 6 server in the Park in Stormwind.  If you’d like to come or have any questions, /whisper me!”), and then a callout as the event’s starting.

Allow for fashionable lateness and RL pwnage. Even if everyone’s aware of the start time, chances are a few people will still be late.   That’s okay!  Build in 10-15 minutes or so for people to wrap up whatever they’re doing in-game, or for them to get out of traffic, get in the door, and kick off their shoes.

Be flexible. Sometimes things just don’t shake out the way you’ve planned:  a co-GM’s video card dies; the server won’t stay up for more than ten minutes at a stretch; a friend has a crisis and needs you there; everything’s in place, but you’ve got a case of the plague and feel miserable;  only two people show up. If any of these or similar reasons are making you think, “Y’know, it’s just not a good night for this,” it’s okay to postpone. Let people know you’re cancelling as early as possible.   If you have a new date in mind, get it out there as quickly as you can.  If you can’t be online at event-time, ask someone else to field the “Hey, what’s going on with Event X?” questions so no one’s left in the dark.

I’m sure I’ve missed some good ways to promote your event and get the word out to your players.  What other things have you done to let your RP group know that mischief is about to commence?

At least… )

Last week, the Riders and friends took part in an event that’s been nearly a year in the planning.

I kid you not, before Naiara Bittertongue was even born, while we were still working out the details of when she’d be delivered, Bricu asked me ‘what do you think of Thenia stealing the baby at some point?’

Now, Thenia al’Cair has always done what she thinks is best for her daughters — whether they agree or not.  However, no matter what decisions Threnn and Bricu made that she didn’t like, she’d need some serious motivation to take her granddaughter and flee Stormwind.  And so we began sowing the seeds.

There were gdocs and emails and gchat sessions, back-and-forths in-game, and plenty of fics.  Over the summer there was a late-night session in a hotel room at Feathermeet, in which our grand plan was tied into at least two other plots.  As plans firmed up, there were inevitable, unavoidable complications — delays due to key players getting sudden cases of Real Life Intruding, business travel, holiday travel, and assorted other things.  There were also other excellent RP stories whose plots were ramping up (I’m looking at you, Arrens and SWU!).

When the stars aligned, though, we co-conspirators got together and started discussing the final plans.  There were several things we needed to establish:

How long should the story arc take from start to finish? We knew we needed at least a few days.  Tuesdays are our unofficial RP night, so kicking it off on one Tuesday and ending it on a future one made sense.  We also wanted to keep it on a tight schedule to hold player interest — let things drag on too long and people are going to get caught up in other stories.  And, lastly, we needed to take Bricu and Threnn themselves into consideration.  Playing two characters who are scared and heartbroken can be amazing for character development, but it gets exhausting for the players themselves.  A week seemed to work best.

What do we want to accomplish with this plot? We had several goals with this story:

1. Bring back an old villain
2. Open up a way to get a character who’s been on the outs with the Riders (Uthas) back to working with them openly
3. Make Bricu reconsider his decision to retire
4. Give anyone who’d like to participate a hook

The first three were completely in our hands — Maggie Maunt has been in place for almost two years now, waiting for her opportunity.  Uthas would be half of the Naiara-rescuing team, along with Tarquin.  Bricu had already announced his plans to take off the tabard to Threnn and Tarquin, and his player knew the things that would need to happen to change his mind.

Which left us with the last point.  A baby going missing wasn’t exactly something the Riders would let Bricu and Threnn handle on their own.  So what sorts of things could we arrange for that first night, when she went missing, what others could we set up to carry through to the next week?

Very early on in the plotting, we’d kicked around the idea of sending everyone — Bricu and Threnn included — off on some wild goose chases to heighten the tension.  Some would be dead ends, others would have them just a day or two behind Thenia, Maggie and Naiara.  But as we talked about the endgame for that part of the arc, the idea changed and (I think) got stronger.  Strong enough for a bit of bolding.

How do we make sure the PCs’ actions affect the outcome? Sending 10-15 people haring off around Azeroth for an evening with no impact on the plot is only going to serve to piss off 10-15 people. Players shouldn’t feel like they’re just there to watch other people act out a story.  That’s what books and movies are for.  Roleplaying games, however, are a collaborative effort.   Even if you, as a GM know how you ultimately want the story to end (which you should at least have an idea of at the start), you need to leave wiggle room for people to add their own touches.

We needed to have things to do for anyone who joined the search.  And while, on that first night, we’d decided that no one would find where the women had gone off to, we needed to drop clues about where the plot was headed.

When it was within a day or so of go-time, we started getting our hooks in place.

In the hours leading up to the event, several forum posts appeared.  Padraig, Threnn and Annalea’s father, got his ass kicked.  We dropped poor Giorgi’s body in the canals.  Bricu set up a gdoc describing what the searchers would find and when.  Everything was ready. We were pretty giddy.  There was a good crowd in the Pig already when Bricu logged in and started talking about what had transpired.

We’d planned for two concurrent stories that night:  the search for Thenia and Naiara, and the discovery of Giorgi’s murder.

However, a third story emerged.  And it was every bit as amazing.

I’d parked Threnn at the Stormwind building where I imagine her parents’ shop to be, mostly because I’d been helping Giorgi’s player place the corpse there.  It also made sense for her to be there, taking care of her father.  When Bricu let people know what had happened, several characters headed over to the shop to check in.  Still well within what we had planned for the night — obviously, if we wanted them to discover Giorgi’s body, we needed people to come by and find it.

I’d been figuring on Threnn joining the search parties once we dragged Giorgi out of the water.  But instead, Aely and Shaurria came upstairs to see Threnn and her dad.  We’re very lucky that another awesome RPer, Shad, has been playing the part of Threnn’s father from time to time:  when we realized that y’know, this little group wasn’t leaving that room, Shad logged in on Padraig and came out to RP.

It was an unexpected facet of the story, but while Bricu and Yva were freaking out the other players with details from the adventures we’d worked out ahead of time, there was just as much drama unfolding in a quiet upstairs room in a Stormwind fabric shop.

This illustrates one of the most important things for a GM to keep in mind:  No matter how well you know your players, they’re going to suprise you.

And it will be the coolest thing ever.

Integrating PVP and RP has been my weakest link in game. I ran a story once that was supposed to end with a little PvP–just to incorporate more people in the event–and it went poorly. Since then, PvP and RP have been taboo for me (and a few others).

With 3.0, I have become more interested in PvP, and I’ve even purchased PvP gear. Even with this increased exposure, I’ve only come to one conclusion about PvP in RP:

1) Plan for the Result of the PVP
If the result of the PvP action is going to be pivotal to the story, then as the Storyteller (GM), be comfortable with the outcome of the story. One cannot assume that the outcome of PvP will go the way the script demands.

With that, I have to ask: How to integrate PVP into RP?