Keeping your players in the loop & developing your community

Roleplaying is great. Characters, story, worldbuilding. Great!

But what also makes it great is roleplaying with friends. People we like and trust, and enjoy chatting with. This is why it’s often important to develop your community outside of the roleplay too. Better communication between players means you’re able to come up with ideas easier, and also avoid arguments.

Ways to develop your community:

• Chat by email – This is the easiest way to contact other members, as you can see your fellow members email addresses. You can email others individually, or create a group email – although make sure everyone in the group agrees to this, or it might annoy someone if they suddenly get hundreds of chatty emails in their inbox.
• Befreind fellow players on Facebook – A definite easy way to chat with your fellow players, and see what they’re up to. if you’re friends with all of the roleplayers in your group you could have a group chat about your game.
• Join the OW Elite Facebook group – Here you can chat with other OngoingWorlds members without having to be friends with them on Facebook. You’ll need to be invited by an existing member though.
• Find fellow members on RPG-Directory – This is a really popular social network for roleplayers. Some members of your game might have an account already, which you can use to message each other, or chat in the discussion threads about roleplaying.
• Create a monthly/weekly newsletter – Using something like MailChimp you can send a message to all your players at once. You might want to do this to show some news, give info about your game – Here’s some ideas by Elena who does this already.
• Schedule a weekly/monthly Skype/Hangout group chat – There’s loads of ways you could have a chat, I’ve mentioned the 2 most popular ones I know. But the key is to schedule a time, so that everyone knows to meet up at the same time, then you can chat about your game, future story ideas, or anything.

Can you think of other ways to develop your game’s community? If you do anything else I haven’t mentioned here, let us know in the comments below!

Top photo is from “The Guild”, a TV show about an online community. Have you seen it?