On Guild Management By Faust Chapter 4 - ">1 GM = Bad"

I'll attempt to be brief.

Just about every successful guild I know of has one Guild Master. Counsels and Tribunals are very cool concepts and have some neat role playing aspects but they don't seem to work so hot in our genre. Decisions often need to be made quickly and there isn't time for votes and discussions. We all know that there are different opinions about what to do on any given course. Usually there needs to be one guy (or Lady) which calls the shots - everyone else needs to follow the directions or find another guild.

This is not to say that the single GM shouldn't have ample help from Sub-Leaders, advisors, and take a lot of input from the members at large. I'm just saying that if a Nation is to survive it will need ONE person to be its focal point.

The main communication medium for online gaming guilds includes Email, Posting, Chat room style in-game communication, and etc. They all have something in common: One author. Its hard for one author to say "WE, the Tribunal, want you all to sit down a meditate for the next few minutes."

In Shadowbane there will be large Nations of guilds with the opportunity to merge several "sub guilds" under its banner. I feel that this will be difficult for most guilds. If there is one guy or central guild calling the shots for nation then all sub-guilds will need to follow his/its directions or the chaos will be disastrous. Outgoing people typically run guilds with their own ideas about how things should go. Even sub-guild leaders will have independent ideas about how, what, or where something should happen.

What if SubGuild X decides to merge with Big Guild Y. SubGuild X's resources go to the greater good of Y. So if SubGuild X finances a Wizards Tower which becomes a focal point of the big guilds City/State… what happens when GuildMaster of Y and X have a falling out? Civil war, I guess. The Tower can't be simply uprooted and moved to another place. The explanations on how things will be handled on this level are still a little murky.

In my opinion SubGuilds sound cool but are a recipe for trouble. If you're an OverLord of a subguild and the Sub-GM goes bonkers… how will you extract HIM from the equation? Well, you'd have to pair off the SubGuild rather quickly (make them KOS or something) because they have access to your stuff and maybe the SubGuild GM is mad at you so you'll need to take precautions. So you just booted a SubGuild and what about the members of that SubGuild who are NOT mad at you? How will you trust the SubGuilds members? How will you collect them all and get them re-added to the guild? What about the SubGuilds Tower which they own (not sure on the rules here) but you don't… but its sitting in the middle of your City? Do you knock it down And start over?

Perhaps all these questions will be answered when we have gameplay information for Shadowbane. However, my thoughts still lean heavily away from SubGuilds just because of the potential for nightmarish hassles with administration and organization under two "Guild Masters". Okay, so one will be a SubGuild Master but if I were the boss, I would be enormously careful about who or what made up a SubGuild.

Lastly, it may turn out that a sub leader will be needed to run a second city within a Nation. If this is going to be a trusted subleader of the GM's then it will need to be someone, obviously, close to the top of the guild's food chain. My hope is that this will be the case. The obvious work-around to complications on this would be for the GM to have a second account… and to me, that kinda works around the main premise of the game.

I've said before that the spice of Shadowbane will likely involve a great deal of internal politics and issues which generally manifest themselves behind the curtains of a guild's outward appearances. With luck these confrontations will take place within the game and the out-of-game work-arounds will be limited… at least, it will surely be more entertaining if this is the case.

So, there you have it! Counsels don't work so hot and SubGuilds might not be so great in Shadowbane.

Ladies and Gentlemen please keep your hands and arms inside the cart at all times. Your seat is a floatation device. In the event of a crash please breathe slowly and we'll be back. Let the flames begin:

Discuss: Your Thoughts?

Read Part Five: Win & Spin