ON IC ORGANIZATIONS

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Mandatory Membership : The Bureaucratic Approach

Mandatory Membership : The Feudalistic Approach

The Group Creation Checklist

ON THE PURPOSE OF IC ORGANIZATIONS

Having IC Organizations around for Newbies to join can be a real aid to encouraging Roleplay. Some of the advantages (in theory - if everything is done properly) include :

1) It helps the Newbie establish a "niche" to fill. His relationship to the general world around him has been put in black and white.

2) It puts things into a more structured form, which helps when planning TinyPlots meant to impact a large number of people.

3) If two Organizations are known to be bitterly opposed (such as the House of Montague and the House of Capulet in ROMEO AND JULIET), it gives their members an additional roleplay "hook" whenever they meet one another.

4) It permits some people to gratify their desire for power by becoming the Head of an Organization. This may not be the worthiest of motives, but if it keeps them coming, then use it!

Most Mushes encourage, or at the very least tolerate, the existence and growth of IC Organizations. The first major question is, "Is membership in some sort of organization Mandatory, or strictly Optional?"

This depends partly upon the social structure already described within the theme (if it's based on a fictional or historical setting) and partly upon the personal taste of the Wizards who implement it. Let's look at a few cases where membership in one Organization or another was mandatory (or very nearly).

MANDATORY MEMBERSHIP : THE BUREAUCRATIC APPROACH

I once spent a little time on a Star Trek - themed site where (with the exception of certain Feature types), every newcomer was supposed to pick which interstellar entity he belonged to (the Federation, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Empire, and a couple of others) and then which of 5 career paths he wanted to follow (Naval, Diplomatic, Espionage, etc.) and start out as an entry-level white-collar worker in one bureaucracy or another (basically, a college graduate in his first job) and try to work his way up the ladder. No professional entertainers, no small businessmen, no children, no wandering mercenaries were permitted (as Player Characters. I suppose Puppets and such were still possible if you really needed to RP a scene with someone who wasn't part of a hierarchy).

Now, this approach was not strictly required by the Star Trek "theme," where private enterprise did exist and many people - even people with their own little spaceships for interstellar travel - were not on the payroll of any government or huge corporation, but the Wizards had apparently seen fit to select certain careers as being the most suited to the kind of RP they wanted, where players would find themselves caught up in high-level diplomatic, economic, and military struggles and intrigues, and so they made everybody start out on a "level playing field" and work their way up through one bureaucracy or another. It was my first encounter with this approach, and while I didn't stick around long (for reasons too lengthy to go into here) I saw that it had merit for the kind of mush they were trying to run.

MANDATORY MEMBERSHIP : THE FEUDALISTIC APPROACH

I shall describe in detail the way the now-defunct Dune II MUSH handled the problem, and then add some comments on how the similarly-themed Regent of Dune MUX, like the phoenix rising from the ashes of its predecessor, kept much of D2's social structure while making a few improvements calculated to improve the RP prospects.

Since the Dune theme is not as well known to the general public as the Star Trek theme (more's the pity), I'd better fill in some background to show you what the D2 Wizards were adapting their social systems from in the first place. The Dune theme is based on an award-winning SF novel (titled DUNE, of course) by author Frank Herbert in the 1960s, which was followed by five sequels which need not concern us here. As the first novel opened, the known universe (certainly several thousand inhabited planets - exact figures were never provided) was called the Imperium and was ruled by the Corrino Dynasty of Emperors. Under the Emperor were the families of the upper nobility, called Great Houses or Houses Major, each of which evidently ruled one or more well-populated planets as its ancestral fief (and possibly lots of sparsely populated frontier worlds, for all we know, but data is scarce). The head of each Great House had an appropriate title such as Duke or Baron. Each Great House had several Houses Minor (lesser aristocracy) under its thumb, each of which supervised a particular region or aspect of the Great House's holdings. The Heads of the Great Houses were collectively known as the Landsraad, a sort of Parliament which the Emperor had to cooperate with in order to get anything done.

At least four other organizations were major powers in the Imperial socioeconomic setup. In some ways they resembled huge (but privately held) corporations, i.e. they all seemed to concentrate on economic growth by means of providing indispensable goods and/or services (and occasionally waging economic warfare, one would think) rather than all that nonsense of raising huge armies and trying to conquer somebody else's planet the hard way (although the Great Houses still indulged in this sort of thing against one another whenever they thought they could get away with it). The Bene Gesserit, the Tleilaxu (apparently brilliant genetic engineers, along with other talents), the Ixians, who specialized in the construction and sale of very sophisticated machinery, and the Spacing Guild, which had a virtual monopoly on ALL interstellar travel. It owned all the big ships; other people merely leased as much passenger space and cargo space as they needed. Each of these organizations appears to have owned and occupied one or more habitable planets as its own seat of power, rather than being a vassal to any Great House.

That was the original thematic material. D2 followed it closely in modeling their IC society. The Spacing Guild and Ixians were NPC outfits managed by the Admins, but all the rest (Imperial Dynasty, several other Great Houses, Bene Gesserit, Tleilaxu) were part of the IC structure in the D2 adaptation of the theme.

They also used Smugglers (mentioned in the books, and who competed with the Guild in a very small way), Pyons (very lower-class characters, not a popular choice), minor merchants (very small-time; all of the really big mercantile endeavors were controlled by the Great Houses and other Factions), and Couriers. Smugglers were organized as a faction, just like any Great House, only they had no official standing. Pyons and merchants were very uncommon career choices, since they couldn't ICly easily "mingle" with the high and mighty of the big outfits. But if you had a specific TinyPlot in mind that required a lower-class character, you might arrange for one.

The generic word for these organizations was Factions. Since every planet was ruled by one Faction or another, it was perfectly thematic to insist that every character created be affiliated with one or another of these Factions.

As I indicated, most characters were part of a Great House and were created were at a pretty high level (socially speaking). A typical Great House might have openings for :

1) The Head

2) His wife (yes, a male chauvinist culture, no doubt about it)

3) Their children and other close relatives, one of whom was the Heir Apparent to the title

4) Mentat (a human supercomputer, the product of a special genetic heritage combined with years of rigorous training)

5) Physician (the Physicians of the Suk School were reportedly mentally "conditioned" so that it was utterly impossible for them to betray the interests of their employers in any way)

6) Warmaster (basically, the general officer in charge of the House's military forces)

7) Chief Diplomat

And of course there were lesser functionaries - junior diplomats, military officers, and the like.

By all accounts, on the good days RP on D2 could be pretty exciting, as high-placed members of various Houses met and schemed and plotted against one another and attempted Assassinations of one another (or occasionally an overt military invasion), even as they were smiling blandly at one another across the dinner table at a formal event hosted by the Imperial Court.

In addition, it was possible, by an extensive application process, to start your own Great House if you didn't like any of the ones other people were running. It is possible that this was overdone, actually. In defense of the House Founders, it should be noted that some of the later ones may have been inspired by a different problem, to wit :

"What do we do when the House Head hasn't connected for a couple of weeks, or connects about once a week, reads his mail, and leaves again without providing any coherent direction on what the House ought to be doing next?"

No mechanism was in place for conveniently dealing with this problem. One approach, inevitably, if one or more of the higher authorities in a House was rarely visible, might be to abandon your old characters and gather together a few friends and apply to begin a new House. I don't know if it actually happened quite this way, but it may have.

Another interesting point was this : to keep players from getting OOCly confused about where their real loyalties were when various Factions were clashing, each Player was only permitted a single Player Character at a time. If he felt capable of running more than one simultaneously, he would just have to create his other PCs on other mushes, but on D2 it was an only-one-to-a-customer setup. If his PC was killed ICly - or if he decided to drop the PC voluntarily because he thought he could get a better job somewhere - then he was permitted to apply for a new one.

Interestingly enough, there was a strict rule that when your old PC kicked the bucket and you wanted to replace him with another one, you could NOT have your new one be some very close relative, such as younger brother, son, nephew, and most especially NOT an identical twin. In fact, it was "strongly recommended" (although I don't know if that meant a thing in practice) that you not even be a part of the same Faction as your most recent previous character.

Having a single character had much to recommend it in such a cutthroat environment, where the Factions did not just contribute something to the general RP - their conflicts were supposed to be the principal CAUSE of the RP, and a Player who had characters on both sides of the fence was likely to be OOCly suspected of doubledealing by his IC associates.. And insisting that a Player not keep playing members of the same family as old PCs died, and preferably keep moving to a different employer, was a way to prevent certain silly scenarios, such as this:

"Gee, my character, Wellington Schwarzkopf, military genius, just died in battle! Guess I'll create a new character to fill the gap. I'll call him Scipio Africanus Schwarzkopf, younger brother of the late Wellington!"

(A few months later) "Gee, Scipio just got wiped out in a duel! Guess I'll replace him with a new character. I think I'll create Stonewall Schwarzkopf, son of Wellington!"

(A few months later) "Gee, Stonewall just got assassinated by our House's worst enemies! Guess I'll create a new character. Perhaps it should be MacArthur Schwarzkopf, Stonewall's long-lost identical twin!"

You get the idea? Telling the player to pick up his stakes and relocate hopefully forced him to create a new character concept to suit the needs of his new employer, and kept enemies from muttering, "Every time we kill him, he just comes back with a new paint job! What's the point of being able to assassinate people if it doesn't change anything?"

However, in practice, problems with the single-character approach (sometimes exacerbated by other features of the mush) included these:

1) Stranded on the wrong planet

2) Stuck in a flying coffin.

3) Socially untouchable.

STRANDED ON THE WRONG PLANET

Remember how I said each Faction dominated one or more planets of its own? In the D2 approach, each of these planets was constructed, at least to the extent of a few rooms, and obviously each planet could only be reached by space travel from any other planet. Space travel ate up a lot of time (see the next item) so people tended to congregate on Kaitain, the Imperial Headquarters planet, and there was a period when the Faction Heads and such were often there, while many of their servants found themselves twiddling their thumbs at home with nothing to do when they logged on if nobody else was on-planet and online at the same time.

SOCIALLY UNTOUCHABLE

Suppose that your character was laid up sick after a duel, or was being held prisoner somewhere, or was ICly on the run after murder charges had been pressed against him, or was so despised by members of a couple of other Houses that the idea of their carrying on a protracted conversation with him was unthinkable. Now, suppose you log on one night and notice that the only other people who are A) logged on, and B) are on the same planet as yourself, are people whom your character simply cannot deal with ICly at this time for any of the reasons given above or another (your House and hers are feuding, or you're in a prison cell, or whatever). What do you do?

THE NEW AND IMPROVED FEUDALISTIC APPROACH

Regent of Dune MUX, a sort of "sequel" to D2 and, unlike its predecessor, still alive and kicking today (it was the brainchild of some D2 veterans who thought the theme still had real potential, if they could just correct several of D2's operational errors), retained the basic social structure but added several new twists inspired by hard experience with the potential shortcomings in the previous incarnation of the idea.

Some of their changes were these :

1) A Faction was now commonly referred to as a Group instead. This is a trivial change on the surface, but it was meant to reinforce another point: Groups on Regent did not work the same way Factions on D2 had done. For one thing, in CharGen you were now required to set a "Public Loyalty" on yourself (always the name of the Group you belonged to), and you were also encouraged to set a "Private Loyalty" on yourself, visible only to yourself and the Wizards afterwards, which MIGHT be the same as the Public Loyalty or might be something totally different, reflecting the fact that you were actually a traitor or infiltrator or some such in the service of another Group.

2) Coup d'Etat. Rules now existed permitting one or more members of a Group to conspire against their OWN leader, particularly if he took an excessively laissez-faire attitude (like not connecting for weeks at a time) and apply to the Crew (local name for Wizards) to see if their Coup succeeded and one of the subordinates unseated his leader and became the new Group Head by right of conquest. In practice, the Crew's calculation of the probability of success here was going to be heavily influenced by the recent online time of the target. If a high-ranking Player hadn't been online at all for some weeks, or very rarely, it was highly likely that his character hadn't been paying enough attention to current events within his own Group to detect and prevent a successful coup. If the Character was still pretty active, the chances of success dropped like a rock even if he didn't ICly or OOCly know that a coup was being attempted (there is no moral or legal obligation to inform the target that you are trying to oust him).

3) In the old D2 system, you were either a Faction Head or you were a Faction Member (counting such lower-class groups as Merchants and Pyons as being their own "faction" for the moment). Regent expanded this into a three-tiered system of character "levels." Any Group Head was automatically a Level 3 (L3). However, any Feature character (mentioned by name in the books, that is to say), however great or small his political power might be, was ALSO automatically a L3, so being L3 was more a matter of an OOC status than of proving you ICly "outranked" everybody else (also, L3s got a few extra perks in choosing special abilities and the like as they went through CharGen).

All other members of any Group were automatically Level 2. Like L3s, they were vulnerable to the rules about assassinations, the coded combat system, the risk of dying of thirst or withdrawal if cut off from certain vital commodities (water and an addictive spice) for too long, and so forth.

But the real innovation here was the concept of a Level 1 character. With the L1 option, Regent added a remarkable flexibility to the rather hidebound structure of D2. Some of this flexibility would have been theoretically possible on D2 by the use of puppets, except that D2 had an official policy that Puppets are not for extended roleplay which develops a Puppet as an ongoing character; puppets are only to serve as bit parts in a single scene. The policy makers of Regent apparently found this sort of thing stifling and chose to replace Puppets entirely with the independently operated L1 (by which I mean that as a separate character he was operated in a separate connection window, of course, unlike a puppet owned by a L2 or L3).

The L1 was "immune" to some of the coded systems. He couldn't fight in a coded duel, although he could RP a violent encounter with someone else on the Consent basis if both sides were willing. He wasn't affected by economic matters that could potentially cause a L2 or even a L3 to perish. OTOH he could not hold any high office in an IC Group. He needed no Approval Process. In short, he was meant to be the ideal way for a Newbie on this mush to "test the water" before deciding what sort of L2 he wanted to RP, and which Group he wanted to join.

Also, his name and description could be changed at very short notice if, for some reason, there was a sudden need for a certain "bit part" to be filled in a scene or TinyPlot, such as a professional entertainer at a party.

But even after someone became a L2 or L3, they generally kept their L1 around for emergencies and crowd scenes and just for the general purpose of being able to do Roleplay in a relaxed manner that for some reason their higher-level character couldn't ICly do. Also, a party looked more crowded if a couple of the Players were simultaneously pursuing separate lines of conversation with different people with both their characters. It also provided more dancing partners to even up any imbalance of the sexes that existed at the moment.

GROUP CREATION CHECKLIST

Moving right along, we have the Group Creation Checklist. If you have any special expectations in any of these items, they should be made very clear online, definitely in text files accessibleon the mush, and preferably on the webpage as well.

SECTION A : MEMBERSHIP DRIVE

If you want Possible Members to apply for membership in your group, how easy are you making it for them to know what is involved in doing so?

1) What sort of job openings does it include?

2) Is membership strictly hereditary? This is more important than it looks. If the answer is supposedly "Yes," but this isn't GLARINGLY OBVIOUS to any Newbie checking out the Mush for the first time, it's very possible that this scenario will occur more than once:

Newbie arrives on Mush. Newbie starts a character and hangs out in bars talking to people, getting a little RP started while he looks over the options and wonders about joining an IC Group . . . A couple of weeks later, Newbie decides your group might suit his interests, and @mails something to the Group Head asking about the membership process. Newbie is informed that he'll have to start a brand-new character who's a hereditary member of the Group, since he's already done some RP with his current character which made it clear that his PC does NOT satisfy your membership requirements, because he clearly wasn't born in your group or he would have said so already. Newbie has just gotten started on this character and is reluctant to try two at once. Result : he gives up on you and looks around for a Group that permits pre-existing characters to petition for membership.

3) If membership ISN'T strictly hereditary, what basic requirements should a pre-existing PC meet in order to even have a prayer of being accepted? (Examples : Should he be literate? Should he be of a certain nationality? Should he practice a particular profession? Should he practice a certain religion?)

4) Any gender-based discrimination in your organization? Explain.

5) Any IC "rituals" or "tests" or "ceremonies" which a new Member must pass through in order to join?

SECTION B : HOUSE RULES

Assuming he ever joins your group, what special rules will he need to adapt to? You really ought to tell him BEFORE he signs on the dotted line.

1) If your group has a strict hierarchy in which everyone has a certain place in the pecking order (RL Example : An Infantry Company in the U.S. Army, with a captain commanding, a lieutenant as his Executive Officer and other lieutenants commanding platoons, different ranks of sergeants under THEM, the corporals, and - at rock bottom - the privates) then this hierarchy should be described online so a Player can see what he's getting into, and whenever he meets another member of the group he can check the online file again to see who outranks whom, and by how much.

2) Are there special forms of address which are mandatory (or very customary) when addressing another member of the Group - especially if speaking to a person of higher rank? (To return to the Army example, any enlisted man is supposed to call any commissioned officer "Sir." And any commissioned officer calls any other officer who outranks him "Sir" as well.)

3) Do all members of the Group reside within official quarters? (Do all the soldiers sleep in the same barracks? Do all members of a Noble House have quarters inside the family Castle? That sort of thing). If so, where, and how do you get a room assigned to yourself? (Or maybe you don't, if you sleepin a barracks).

4) Are there any special rules relating to sexual conduct which this group rigorously enforces? (For example, are members likely to be expelled or otherwise punished if they indulge in premarital or extramarital sex?) This is mainly important if this Group has stricter internal rules than the "normal accepted rules" are in the local culture in general.

5) Are there special rules relating to getting married? (To return to the U.S. Army, it used to be the case - and may still be for all I know - that soldiers on active duty had to get the permission of the Army bureaucracy before they could legally get married. As a more extreme example, Roman Catholic priests are sworn to never get married at all, period. If one did get married, he'd automatically be expelled from the organization when they found out).

6) If marriage is possible, what about children? (If you think permission to ICly get married automatically equates with permission to ICly have children, you haven't seen the silliness I've seen on a certain mush). Are Members permitted to have children while on active duty? Does "maternity leave" exist? Are the Members allowed to raise their own children? (In Robert Jordan's WHEEL OF TIME series, members of an all-female warrior society called the Maidens of the Spear are NOT permitted to get married unless they are prepared to quit the society to do so. However, they are permitted to have affairs, but if they bear children without choosing to marry the fathers, they are obligated to put them up for adoption through a complicated process meant to insure that the mother never knows just where the baby ended up).

7) Are there any special dietary rules? For example, a member of an Orthodox Jewish group would be expected to stick to kosher food and avoid pork, butter, etc. Or the organization might forbid drinking alcohol at any time, period, on pain of punishment or expulsion. Another organization might specifically limit the ONLY acceptable foods to raw beef, sliced cucumbers, and rye bread for some reason.

8) Is there a strict dress code? (In the U.S. Army, you are naturally expected to wear an appropriate uniform when on duty).

9) Are there any special rules about hair - length of hair, permissible types of facial hair (if any), a requirement to have a certain kind of haircut (including shaved heads), a requirement to wear a wig, anything along those lines?

10) As a general rule, just how "military" is your organization going to be in practice? Do Members spend a lot of their online time carrying out your explicit orders, running errands for you, etc., or is their membership largely a matter of "background material" for their character? Are they sworn to obey orders of the Group Head, or are things looser than that?

11) Any other special rules you can think of? If you don't mention it explicitly before the Member joins, and don't have it listed in files for him to peruse, it's your own fault if you find him inadvertently breaking a "rule" he never saw written down.

GROUP BENEFITS

Okay, assume the Potential Member is fully briefed on what he needs to do to join your group. Assume he has been properly informed of all the special rules with which he will be expected to comply, and he hasn't flinched. There's still something else he might be wondering about : What's in it for him? Why should he join your group instead of any of your competitors?

Here are some points you might want to consider, and use in your advertising.

1) Paychecks. Does your mush have a coded IC Economy? If so, what sort of pay can you offer your people?

2) Social status. What sort of status will a new member of your Group enjoy when interacting with outsiders? (Even if it's a low status, at least he'll be able to RP being the victim of unjust discrimination. Make it a selling point!)

3) TinyPlots.

4) Group Activities. Does your Group stage IC Activities which the general public are welcome to attend? How often? What are they like?

5) Membership. He might be mildly interested in knowing how many members you already have.