| Welcome to Big Pete’s guide to keeping the peons in line. I’ll be your host, Big Pete. All jokes aside, as a staffer, you’ll at some point have to deal with player angst. Whether it be players abusing other players, disagreements over a judged scene, or people just pissed off at you for something, as a staffer you’ll have to deal with people who wont be in the best of moods. Its not the easiest thing to do, but hopefully this document will aid those who take Big Pete’s advice. Most of this is common sense, but it takes a fair amount of willpower to execute. The first, and most important thing, is to take control of the situation. You are the judge, the staffer. Whether you’ve been called in to mediate or resolve and issue, or a player is directly unhappy with you, you must plant your ass firmly in the controllers chair. This might sound mean and whatnot, but really, its easy to do. Players, by there nation, will get dramatic. They will go off on tangents and make wild accusations and embellish and get melodramatic on you. That’s their nature, because for one thing, they’re RPers. The second thing is, most of the time the issue (even trivial ones) immediately become the most important thing to ever happen to the player or character involved. Its an interesting phenomenon but it does occur pretty often. The best way of assuming control of a situation, at least in my experience, is to ask them to do one thing, and ignore everything else and continue to repeat your request until they do it. Lets look at an example. Player A and B have a disagreement on a player run plot. This argument has gotten sufficiently out of hand that it has spilled onto public channels, and has come to the attention of the staff. Firstly, you should page the GM and ask if you can +join. This means you’re not showing up unannounced, and also, in an unofficial sense, means you’ve been given permission to take over from the GM. Upon entering, the first thing you want to do is stop any OOC spam and chatter. By spam and chatter I really mean abuse and accusations, but you generally want to quiet everyone down. Now, there’s always one person who continues to speak after you tell everyone to quiet down. And then someone might reply to this. Then a third may tell the other two to shut up. During this, you simply repeat the request, perhaps to the tune of, “Please, I’ve asked you to be quiet while I handle this. I ask you again, everyone please stop talking”. Don’t move past this basic request until everyone is quiet. This first action establishes your authority on the situation. If you refuse to move past this first step until everyone is quiet, you will have eventually brought every player involved ‘into line’. This is more a symbolic thing than anything else, and I think it is vitally important so what you say next has everyone’s attention, and moreover, has the authority of someone who is in control of the matter. Control, however, extends not only to the scene but to your own person. You will be very tempted to get caught up in the charged emotions, debating points, arguing faults, and whatnot. You should refrain from this absolutely. Picking sides and allowing argument to continue will not help your situation and eventually threaten to remove the control you now maintain over the situation. You, as a staffer, are not interested in getting into arguments, and allowing the tension to remain. You are here to control the situation and determine the least damaging solution. In the cases of GM – player arguments, you ideally want the situation solved as quickly as possible to allow the Gming to continue. Activity on a MUX is very hard to create (especially in the case of PRPs and Player GMs) but it is very easy to destroy. So one goal is to keep the GM and their plot as intact as possible. The other thing you don’t really want to do is talk to two warring parties together. Why? Because when you ask one something, the other person is going to fail completely to restrain themselves from butting in if they think the other player isn’t telling the truth or they don’t agree…or they plain just don’t like the other guy. In situations such as these, it may be best to simple do what teacher does…send them to either sides of the classroom. Separating them can be a very good idea as it removes the immediate irritation and allows you to talk to each person individually without threat of the other player derailing the conversation. When trying to gather the details of the situation, you will likely ask a yes-or-no question, but receive several sentences in the answer. Don’t allow players to redirect, even subconsciously. You ask a direct question, and you expect a direct answer. Therefore, if a player cant give you a straight answer, you need to ask them a little more firmly. IE, once you’ve got a basic idea of what happened, instead of asking open, qualitative questions like “What happened” or “Did they cheat”, structure your questions so that the answer is yes or no, or quantitative. You don’t want to have to sort through opinionated and biased diatribe. Just the facts, ma’am. |