Hey everyone! ’tis I, your humble writer M1SF0RTUNE. It’s a busy week on my end, as we’re celebrating Christ-, er, I mean Life Day, here in the chilly state of Indiana. Today’s entry will be warily brief, but that’s because I’m looking on building up my next article where we talk about a bit of a guild event that happened on my server, and I’m debating on which subsection to write it under, or if it should be a brand new one. We’ll get it figured out though, but for now, here’s today’s War Stories with a Stat Management entry about Guild Stories!
–Stat Management–
By now, hopefully you’ve got a deep character with an even deeper backstory and a colorful personality. But of course, you need someone else on the stage along with your character, and guilds are the perfect place to strut your stuff and develop your character! Not only that, they’re also a fantastic place to create new scenarios the developers of SWTOR never thought of by changing the “canon” to something more to your guild’s preference, or telling a big story of heroes battling against the Empire or the Republic in their own unique way. This is where I’d like to introduce you to Guild Stories.
The key to a successful roleplay guild is to have a guild that is essentially a character of its own. You could have a guild comprised entirely of Imperial Intelligence Agents working in a secret society against the Sith, or maybe have a small enclave of dedicated Jedi taking down Imperial spies within the Senate without official orders from the Order. You could also be a detachment of Jedi, Troopers, Agents, or Mercenaries out to fight on the front lines against the opposing faction, or maybe you’re just a group of civilians supporting the Jedi stay in power, or a group of political figures within the Empire. One guild on the Begeren Colony server, the Aeternum Ascension, is a guild based out of House Organa from Alderaan and acts as guardians and servants to the House. A guild I used to run once upon a time was spun off from an early quest on Coruscant about a “True Republic.” You could also make the daring jump, so long as it stays strictly within your guild, to roleplay as official Council members of the Jedi, or Dark Council members on the Sith. One guild even dabbles with the idea of there being an Empress to the Sith throne on Begeren Colony as well. The trick to it all is that your guild needs to have a goal just as much as your character would. As I said, a guild should be treated as a character as well.
Here are some essential needs your guild should have in order to be a successful RP guild:
First, it needs to have a mission statement. This can include non-RP elements such as promoting PvP, PvE, Leveling, or anything in between, but it should at least include a “theme.” A guild’s “Theme” basically needs to show what makes your RP guild unique, what kind of people you look for, and where its’ place in the universe is. Feel free to use one of the previous examples in the last paragraph for ideas of themes.
Once you have a theme and a mission statement, then by now you should figure out what kind of people you should allow. After all, if you have an anti-Jedi Trooper/Smuggler guild that are all about keeping the Jedi out of Republic affairs, you can’t have any Jedi in that guild, right? So figure out what kind of people are welcome in regards to their class or even their character’s personality. Are you looking for mercenaries looking for honor or money when you recruit them? Do you have Jedi that are willing to bend or break rules for the greater good? What about Sith looking to aid the Republic in the war effort against their Sith slaver oppressors? These are things you should keep in mind when finding your new guild members to really give your guild a very distinct identity and purpose.
Finally, and most important, your guild must have a structure. This may or may not include activities for PvE, PvP, or Leveling, or even guild community events such as lotteries or Datacron Days, but it should include Major RP Events. These are what propel your guild’s story forward and give your members something to contribute to and even change in drastic, maybe even really fun ways. To come up with RP Events, you have to look back at what your guild’s goals are and what they’re trying to accomplish in the galaxy, then simply come up with some roadblocks for starters that would get in the way of that goal, and those should serve well enough for your early days. Further RP events should come from your fellow members or be inspired by actions they’ve taken directly or indirectly toward your guild, the goal, or even going against the goal.
Something worth keeping in mind is it’s perfectly okay to include people who aren’t a part of your guild’s goals or are even opposition. These can create good “antagonists” and give the guild members fun foils to work against and play off of. Just remember to keep things civil and fair and don’t create end-game solutions where it could kill off people’s characters unfairly or end entire storylines and leave your guild with nothing to do. If you don’t keep a story going in your RP guild, you won’t have a guild that lasts. It’s a sad but actual truth. But hey, if you’ve got a good admin staff, a good structure, and creative guild members, it should be a breeze to make fun stories happen!
However, I should once again reinforce a major ground rule when it comes to stories within guilds. It’s perfectly fine if you and your members of your guild pretend to be all of the Jedi Order or change an event in the canon (pretend, say, the Emperor is dead and is replaced by one of your own guild members, or one of your guild members killed him and took his place), but it must stay strictly within the guild and not mentioned outside of it. Other players outside of your guild could think you and your guild are powerplaying; that you’re pretending to be the most powerful and influential people in the galaxy and you have complete, total control, and everyone should look up to you, bow down to you, etc. That’s not a good image to have and it’s not great roleplay etiquette, but that doesn’t mean you can’t collaborate with guilds that don’t have conflicting stories or positions in power or role.
One of the greatest things to do in RP servers is get more than one guild together, especially cross-faction guilds, and start bouncing roleplays off one another and having other guilds feed your guild’s story. If one guild is okay with your conditions, and you’re okay with theirs, then totally start mingling and have a good time! A lot of the Republic guilds in Begeren Colony in fact collaborate and get together to interact with one another in various RP’s, and even come with the benefit of helping out in Flashpoints, Raids, and PvP too! Possibilities can potentially be endless if guilds play with one another to create some fantastic stories set in our beloved Star Wars universe, so be sure to give it a try sometime! Again though, remember to check with other guilds and see if they’re okay with what your guild’s story setup is, and vice versa for them.
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Okay folks! There’s my Stat Management article for the day. I hope you found it helpful in getting you and your (future) RP guild to create some cool, intense, and epic stories. If this helped you at all, or you’ve already come up with some really cool RP stories worth sharing, drop a comment! I’d love to hear about what kind of adventures you and your guild are having!
For now though, this has been M1SF0RTUNE wishing you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, more than likely a Happy New Year before my next article, and a happy Life Day!
’til next time!
-M.
