Proposal - DM Management/Communication Tools

[Aspect of Sorrow]

Maybe I don't want to be categorized as Team Evil, Whitewood Vanguard, Northern Barony, Zhentarim, Lords Alliance. Maybe I'd like to retain some level of anonymity? I don't want my organization to be public knowledge whether it be IC or OOC.

This is a suggestion to create an open calendar that everyone can view, and can reserve timeslots.

Anonymity is still entirely available, and there are a multitude of ways to still accomplish it with just false names let alone the other options that it has.

[Rhifox]

The constant barrage of negativity, as you call it, is a symptom of a greater issue. Players (some or many) are unhappy about the state of affairs, and want something to change. They might not necessarily know themselves how to fix the issue(s), but they know the situation could be better. As long as nothing changes, or the solution doesn't actually fix the problem, they are going to continue raising awareness.

And we have recently put in changes to try and help fix the issue, and are looking at ways to improve that function. Meanwhile, players refuse to be considerate, and prefer to complain, or think that posting a suggestion is somehow equal to the hours and hours of work staff are putting in every single day.

Players will always be unhappy, no matter what we do.

On another note:
Please remember that the DMs are not your DMs. Nor are they your team. DMs and all of staff are here for the players and server first and foremost. Your statement smells of absolutism, and is exactly the kind of thing that also cause burnout among both players and staff. If staff collectively decides they want to make use of time management tools, then that is their decision. You don't get to, as you put it, force staff to go with one option or another or none at all.

This kind of comment is not helpful, and is a complete misreading of things.

[DM Honk]

On another note:
Please remember that the DMs are not your DMs. Nor are they your team. DMs and all of staff are here for the players and server first and foremost. Your statement smells of absolutism, and is exactly the kind of thing that also cause burnout among both players and staff. If staff collectively decides they want to make use of time management tools, then that is their decision. You don't get to, as you put it, force staff to go with one option or another or none at all.

Hello Zhazz,

I am following this discussion and I just wanted to clarify something about this bit. I'll give you my impression as a fresh ADM, under no circumstance I felt like the HDM wanted to force anything on me nor the others of the team, on the contrary, HDM Ghost wants us to be as free and independent as possible in what we do.

I'd rather not have him depicted as some sort of hyper controlling and harsh boss, he is not, he is always great with all of us.

I'm fine with players giving their feedback and offering their ideas on what could be done to make things better, I just wanted to make you all know that the HDM has never made us feel forced to do or not do anything.

[Ghost]

On another note:
Please remember that the DMs are not your DMs. Nor are they your team. DMs and all of staff are here for the players and server first and foremost. Your statement smells of absolutism, and is exactly the kind of thing that also cause burnout among both players and staff. If staff collectively decides they want to make use of time management tools, then that is their decision. You don't get to, as you put it, force staff to go with one option or another or none at all.

When I deliberately state that I will not force, and you interpret that as absolutism, I have no idea what to tell you. Ever since I was made HDM, I have been actively trying to tear down a culture of DMs always feeling they need to have HDM approval that has been built over the years. It's not easy, however, as it has become so ingrained. But I am desperately trying to encourage the DMs to take more autonomy. I deliberately avoid making decisions because I want them to take charge. In any and all team discussions, my vote counts as exactly the same as any of theirs. I don't overrule.

I am not the HDMs of the past.

[Dragonslayer]

Uh, as an aside here:

On another note:
Please remember that the DMs are not your DMs. Nor are they your team. DMs and all of staff are here for the players and server first and foremost. Your statement smells of absolutism, and is exactly the kind of thing that also cause burnout among both players and staff. If staff collectively decides they want to make use of time management tools, then that is their decision. You don't get to, as you put it, force staff to go with one option or another or none at all.

When I deliberately state that I will not force, and you interpret that as absolutism, I have no idea what to tell you. Ever since I was made HDM, I have been actively trying to tear down a culture of DMs always feeling they need to have HDM approval that has been built over the years. It's not easy, however, as it has become so ingrained. But I am desperately trying to encourage the DMs to take more autonomy. I deliberately avoid making decisions because I want them to take charge. In any and all team discussions, my vote counts as exactly the same as any of theirs. I don't overrule.

I am not the HDMs of the past.

I interpreted this to be aimed at the original poster, not you, Ghost. Unless I'm mistaken!

Was totally mistaken!

[zhazz]

On another note:
Please remember that the DMs are not your DMs. Nor are they your team. DMs and all of staff are here for the players and server first and foremost. Your statement smells of absolutism, and is exactly the kind of thing that also cause burnout among both players and staff. If staff collectively decides they want to make use of time management tools, then that is their decision. You don't get to, as you put it, force staff to go with one option or another or none at all.

When I deliberately state that I will not force, and you interpret that as absolutism, I have no idea what to tell you. Ever since I was made HDM, I have been actively trying to tear down a culture of DMs always feeling they need to have HDM approval that has been built over the years. It's not easy, however, as it has become so ingrained. But I am desperately trying to encourage the DMs to take more autonomy. I deliberately avoid making decisions because I want them to take charge. In any and all team discussions, my vote counts as exactly the same as any of theirs. I don't overrule.

I am not the HDMs of the past.

If that is the case, then I'm glad it is so. My comment on it was exactly due to living under the thumb of DMs of the past, where those on the top ruled absolutely. If you are trying to change that, then I applaud it. Hasty or not might comment might have been, it was made in the spirit of not wanting to return to those times. And the wording in your post gave uncomfortable flashbacks to those times.

[DM Winter]

I'm on phone so aint writing much, but ghost is the best I could ask for in an HDM. The current dm team environment is fun, and lighter, and informal. Which is good, at least imo. I'd be long gone and not lasted more than a month in the team were it not for ghost's way of HDMing

[DaloLorn]

The constant barrage of negativity, as you call it, is a symptom of a greater issue. Players (some or many) are unhappy about the state of affairs, and want something to change. They might not necessarily know themselves how to fix the issue(s), but they know the situation could be better. As long as nothing changes, or the solution doesn't actually fix the problem, they are going to continue raising awareness.

And we have recently put in changes to try and help fix the issue, and are looking at ways to improve that function. Meanwhile, players refuse to be considerate, and prefer to complain, or think that posting a suggestion is somehow equal to the hours and hours of work staff are putting in every single day.

Players will always be unhappy, no matter what we do.

On another note:
Please remember that the DMs are not your DMs. Nor are they your team. DMs and all of staff are here for the players and server first and foremost. Your statement smells of absolutism, and is exactly the kind of thing that also cause burnout among both players and staff. If staff collectively decides they want to make use of time management tools, then that is their decision. You don't get to, as you put it, force staff to go with one option or another or none at all.

This kind of comment is not helpful, and is a complete misreading of things.

I sort of feel like your post highlights that there's a lot of hostile misinterpretation going on, on both sides: Spinning each others' posts in the worst possible light, and not necessarily out of any malicious intent towards the other side.

On the one hand, people trying to help come up with even greater improvements, people who may very well be doing (or in my case, submitting applications that express a willingness to do) a lot more than "complaining and posting suggestions" are dismissed as too negative, or as demanding that the DMs treat BG like a second job. I do not think this is the case for all of us, though I do see a few posts which might be cutting it a little close there.

On the other hand, well, yeah. While I won't deny that my first instinct on reading zhazz's comment was "he's got a good point", the point is only good if you assume that Ghost genuinely intended it to come off that way. Honk's certainly not convinced of such, and knowing Honk, I think I trust his judgment (loosely amounting to "it was an innocent, if somewhat inelegant, choice of words") to be more representative of reality than a third-party interpretation.

Uh, as an aside here:

On another note:
Please remember that the DMs are not your DMs. Nor are they your team. DMs and all of staff are here for the players and server first and foremost. Your statement smells of absolutism, and is exactly the kind of thing that also cause burnout among both players and staff. If staff collectively decides they want to make use of time management tools, then that is their decision. You don't get to, as you put it, force staff to go with one option or another or none at all.

When I deliberately state that I will not force, and you interpret that as absolutism, I have no idea what to tell you. Ever since I was made HDM, I have been actively trying to tear down a culture of DMs always feeling they need to have HDM approval that has been built over the years. It's not easy, however, as it has become so ingrained. But I am desperately trying to encourage the DMs to take more autonomy. I deliberately avoid making decisions because I want them to take charge. In any and all team discussions, my vote counts as exactly the same as any of theirs. I don't overrule.

I am not the HDMs of the past.

I interpreted this to be aimed at the original poster, not you, Ghost. Unless I'm mistaken!

No, it was pretty clearly aimed at Ghost, I'm afraid. It's constructed entirely around assaulting the "I will not force my DMs" line in Ghost's initial post.

@Ghost: It's an interesting stance, by the way! At the risk of going off-topic, I'm curious: What, in your opinion, sets you apart from the non-HDMs in the context of the changes you're making? I have some vague notions of what the answer might be, but...

[DM Soulcatcher]

Current time responses are nothing compared to what was going on in 2018 - 2020. Comparatively speaking, there have also been multitudes of denied requests for the sole reason of nobody wanting to bother doing anything. We were left with very few DMs doing everything on their own and then being either grilled or kicked out of the team for doing something without HDM or Admins' say so. The safest way to be a DM was doing nothing, which was the most common modus operandi.

Yes, you can criticise us for our current time responses. They're not the best, as we all are: Managing our RL, focusing on RL work when we have to, the situation in the world (Covid + war in Ukraine) has hit the morale of all of us as well. I live not too far from a border with Ukraine and I've been nothing but a bundle of stress throughout the first three weeks of the war.

However, trashing us all for what is perceived incompetence of ours in terms of replying to requests is, simply put, unacceptable. We do not attack anyone for having to reschedule anything b/c of other arrangements, stalling the plot for someone who has to take a break due to RL or even wanting to change the entire event request and objective despite the DM already having spent hours on setting up the original idea. We are more than accommodating, thus I would like to ask everyone, with the inclusion of the above paragraph, to please remember that we are also human beings. We do not work here, they don't pay us for DMing and none of us is forced under any law to do our work. We do it as long as we are motivated to do so. As long as we have fun playing and unfolding events for the players. When they're nice, polite and don't hurl insults at us constantly, we are definitely much more motivated to work with them rather than the opposite.

Brainstorming is not inherently bad, as Dalo have mentioned, but assumptions are. Saying that Ghost is some sort of a despot or that he speaks for us while the majority of us disagree is one such bad assumption. So is that we're not already working on our responsiveness. The best solutions are the most simple ones, not the most convoluted ones which require a separate application for everything. That is why we will not be considering any of the proposals which were so far posted on this thread. We use the forums for most of anything because it offers an appropriate paper trail and documentation for when we have to reach back in time for something some player did 5 years ago and see if we can respect it or if it's made up.

So before you reply to this thread, take a moment to realise that any attacks on the staff for any perceived issues without first asking what's up is not going to help at all. Quite the opposite.

Also

Sure, understandable. It should remain constructive (and this thread appears to be an attempt toward that).

But never addressing it, or stifling conversation about it, and having it never improve is also a cause of burnout, it is also destructive. I could give you a list of at least a dozen people that don't play here anymore over the last two years because of the lack of DM response and/or perception of the same toward them as individuals or as a guild.

If these suggestions don't help, what does? Not addressing it isn't helping, either.

Can I please have that list?

[EasternCheesE]

Honestly, i'd sometimes love DM Ghost being a bit more despotic cause i sometimes struggle to get unified DM response on some Dev/QC topics because there is no single voice that says overall final "yes" or "no".
No offense, just making a pun here.

[DaloLorn]

I did stuff! Just... you know, not IG. (... Wait, did I ever wrap up the paperwork on those last few sessions? )

For my part, though, my reluctance to do stuff was often more about the DM tools than the fear of HDMs/admins. (On the other hand, I remember how my willingness to do stuff on my own did get me a well-deserved grilling from you. That Boareskyr skirmish...)

IMO, the idea Avanos proposed (and variations thereof) wasn't intended to replace the forums so much as reduce the extent to which we keep pushing the square forum into the round use case, if you'll pardon my butchery of the "square peg, round hole" idiom. Keeping a paper trail of the requests and stuff is fine, but do you really need a paper trail for scheduling, and is that paper trail worth the extra work? It's not like half the team doesn't already (... sometimes grudgingly, like poor Ghost...) use Discord to streamline the scheduling process, anyway.

[Ghost]

Keeping a paper trail of the requests and stuff is fine, but do you really need a paper trail for scheduling, and is that paper trail worth the extra work? It's not like half the team doesn't already (... sometimes grudgingly, like poor Ghost...) use Discord to streamline the scheduling process, anyway.

Actually, yes. I have quite often had to go back and check when I was running an event because I needed something from the chat logs or such.

And what extra work does the forums pose? I personally like that it's not instantaneous and has a little bit higher threshold for posting things. When people chat, things tend to go fast and get lost in the void or other chatter. Forums are better because they - at least in my experience - tend to invite people to think things through (at least a little bit more in most cases) and write more long-form, rather than just the chat style:

Hey
Event when?
I can't on Wednesday.
Or Thursday.
Or Sunday
OH WAIT
lol
Yeah
Wedneday is ok, but only after 1700.

[insert 3 gifs]
BTW that other thing
What should I do
:S
[Another gif]
Can my character do something illegal right now?
XDDDDDDDDDDDDD
Like stab a city guard?
Oh, also
Someone PvPed me
[Insert one-sided perspective]
Can I get a DM ruling on that real quick?

Yes. I have had conversations like that. Several times. Especially the pressure to make DM rulings on-the-go, with little information and only one perspective, and no conferring with the rest of the team, is something that has happened a lot. It was why we originally closed down the bridge bot between the BGTSCC discord and our DM discord. People kept asking for immediate rulings, or even just claiming things said there to be rulings, using it as a shield ("But DM Horse said he agreed!")

The spontaneity of live chats is not conducive to good communication and planning about events and plots. Especially in group chats, as we are spread out across many time zones, it can end up being quite exclusive to those who aren't present as the conversation is going. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy chats as well, but it's not for this purpose.

[DaloLorn]

Forums have enough of a turnaround time that it can take days or even weeks to schedule something that could be scheduled within minutes or hours, or could even be done as an impromptu event whenever the DM feels like it. Remember that time Ilhara started spamming Morex with Sendings? We're in the same timezone, my open timeslots are basically immutable outside of emergencies or other special circumstances, and it still took days for us to agree on when we should play it out! (Even then, it was only because you decided to break your no-Discord rule and poked me about, IIRC, doing it basically right then and there.)

Or the final chapter of the Rockrun campaign, for that matter. Despite being scattered across both sides of the Atlantic, it took us only what, a day and a half to arrive at a schedule for the whole thing in Discord? If we'd kept it on the forums, odds are I wouldn't even have participated in the scouting mission on Thursday, because it wouldn't have been on Thursday, and by the time we'd finished collectively processing the implications of my company trip, the only timeslot we could all agree on would have been after all the illithids were dead already.

Compare and contrast with Nelee's request now. Over the first 10 hours since he notified me he'd be taking it up, Honk and I have already performed at least a half-dozen PMs' worth of casual back-and-forth conversation about when we should do it, and the biggest slowdown has been due to the fact that most of the people that might agree to accompany Nelee weren't available in Discord. (Most of those were, at least, available IG throughout the day, which considerably reduced the time it took for me to gather their scheduling data.)

This isn't even limited to DMs, either! Arranging interactions with other players also goes a lot more smoothly in chat, because although the worst-case response time is comparable to forum PMs, the best-case response time is virtually instantaneous, and reality often tends to align with the best-case scenario if there's any real hope of finding a timeslot that works for both sides.

Edited to add:

There's two more points you're glossing over here:

• Chats are not incapable of depth, and forum PMs do not guarantee it. Just before writing this post, I embarked upon as thorough an explanation of how the server's changed over the past few years as my memory permitted, in #new-player-questions. Aside from the lazier formatting I use in chat, that explanation would not have been inappropriate as a forum post. (Better than a forum post, though, is how the reader could have interrupted me at any point to ask for more clarification on any of the things I was explaining. With forums, you either need to pray you've correctly guessed what is or isn't relevant, or write boatloads of redundant or otherwise unnecessary information in order to exhaustively cover all the things that could be relevant.)
  
  Meanwhile, I've often exchanged series of PMs with players and DMs alike because the original PMs didn't cover all the bases, or because of a misunderstanding that rendered them invalid.
• Even if this wasn't enough to convince you that chats do have some value for scheduling, it's a moot point, because Avanos' proposal isn't about scheduling in chat. It's about scheduling with calendars. He aims to reduce the use of both forums and chats alike, by occasionally letting the players go "okay, the DM thinks they're going to be free Tuesday evening, which works great for me, so I'm gonna see if that's okay" instead of "sure, I'm available every evening in the week, but I have to check when the DM is going to be available".

[DM Honk]

I just wanted to add, in Ghost's favour, that when moving to Discord it is at time difficult with some players to stay on topic and keep everything to the request they have submitted.

When we approach on chat we are often asked to do more than what the original request was supposed to and there it's where things might get lost in the void.

Personally, I am willing to approach you all on discord for scheduling but I have to ask you back to try and keep everything on point. I understand that it is convenient to try and maximize any DM attention you'd get on a quicker media but any additional requests are to be submitted like any other, also to avoid favouritism and have some people getting more responses than others.

So substantially, it's a two way relationship, I am willing to do scheduling on discord but the individual request must remain the matter at hand.

[DaloLorn]

Ultimately, the players have that same responsibility on the forums... but yeah, I can see arguments in favour of it being more commonly neglected in Discord/IG chat. (The worst offenders tend to stick to those media anyway, which probably doesn't help.)

Still, I do think there's two distinct conversations to be had here: The one about preferring Discord over the forums or vice versa, and the one about whether there's any value in keeping a public calendar of expected (not guaranteed, but at least likely) DM timeslots for people to try to choose from. I'm obviously of the opinion that both Discord and the calendar could eliminate a lot of busywork with regards to event scheduling, either separately or together... hence my efforts to keep both branches of the thread alive.