Games take a lot of work, particularly on the development side. Sometimes, no matter how successful your staff recruiting, you need some extra help. Where are you going to get it?

Theoretically, if you put a bunch of monkeys at a bunch of typewriters and give them infinite time, they'll write Shakespeare. The bad news is that you don't have an infinite amount of time. The good news is that you're also not trying to get Shakespeare.

But how do you get the monkeys?

Wranglin'

"Is it a monkey?"
"It is better than a monkey."
"I don't know... it has to be pretty good to be better than a monkey."
- Penny and Morgan, Geekin'

I'm not, of course, actually suggesting you get monkeys to help with your game. Monkeys are actually fairly inefficient at game design. Not to disparage monkeys in any way, but you have a source of potential labor that might be much better suited to the task: players.

There are three tricks involved in getting players to help you develop and run your game.

The first trick is getting the players interested and committed; many players say they're willing to help, but only a handful will be any good at turning in work when and how it's useful. While some players will totally help out for pure, altruistic love of your game, in many cases a bribe is much more reliable. The cool thing about players is that you can reward them in ways that enhance their play experience; it's much harder to cheaply reward volunteers that won't actually be playing your game.

It's important to keep these rewards low-key. If the players that help out quickly get characters that vastly outstrip non-helpers, there can be problems. On the one side, players may feel that volunteering is actually obligatory. You'll get players offering to help just to keep up their characters' power levels without any investment in producing a good result. On the other side, you'll get players that cease to pursue the rewarded activity, or drop out of your game entirely because they can't keep up. In a game I helped run, player rewards came in bonus material resources. Many players ignored the crafting system; it was easier to get gear through volunteering, and the players with the most volunteer resources could craft much better stuff than anyone that used game-acquired resources.

Good rewards for player assistance will vary from game to game. When you start looking for player help, consider things that would be useful to the players you'd like to help you, but which will not seem to unfairly increase their power over non-volunteers. Ideas might include extra time spent on the player character's storylines, cool but non-overwhelming in-play trinkets, or simply announcing what a good job they've done to the other players.

The second trick is finding the players that can do a good job; it's not worth the help if you have to spend a ton of time editing the player contributions to fit into what you wanted for the game. Like staff members, players will excel in different areas of use to your game. Some may be excellent idea-creators, but have trouble writing these ideas up. Others might have no problem churning out player handouts as long as they have other people giving them ideas with which to work. Some might be incredibly good actors, deft at playing complex NPCs, but inevitably die in any combat. Others might be great at creating a fun combat, but not be good at quickly creating a believable NPC encounter.

Acting ability and combat system prowess are easy to note in play if you have time to observe your players. Writing and idea-creating skills may be harder to judge. You can probably find the better writers if you have a game forum or mailing list; look for the players that make long, interesting-to-read posts. The idea folks can be found by listening to the players when they discuss your plotlines; the ones that toss out the best ideas, even if they're wrong, may make good recruits for unrelated plotting.

The last trick is keeping the setting mysterious for your helpers; if players discover too much in helping you out, they may become de facto staff members and be unable to have a good time in games that hinge on uncovering secrets and such. For writing, this is not as much of a problem. Generally, you're only getting players to write things that players will see, so you only have to give them the basic ideas that players will know.

For NPCing, it can be very hard to give a player enough information to play a particular role if that NPC would conceivably know things about the setting that the PCs don't know yet. In these cases, it's best to have a staff member play the role, and give volunteers less connected NPCs. If absolutely necessary, you can tell the volunteer, "you know a good deal about X, but are unwilling to share that information. Be misleading and vague if the PCs ask you anything that seems related."

At issue, of course, isn't whether or not your volunteers can be trusted to keep what they know out of game from influencing their in game play. Players are trusted to do this all the time to one extent or another. The problem is simply preserving the enjoyment of your volunteers in discovering game mysteries on their own. If your game doesn't focus on uncovering secrets, or your volunteers aren't worried about it, you have a much freer hand in giving them the information they need to portray NPCs.

As alluded to in the various tricks, the impact of player help will vary between whether they're assisting with documentation or with running the actual game.

Writin'

"Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don't."
- Lord Raglan

People get paid to write game settings. They don't generally get paid as much as people who write novels, or screenplays, or articles for popular magazines, but they do get paid. That's because writing is hard work. Lots of people have cool, nebulous ideas floating around in their heads, but it's a different beast altogether to boil them down into useful concepts and then write them in a way that others can easily interpret. When you're looking at documenting an entire setting, and making it be something the players would love to imagine living in, the work can be overwhelming.

If all goes well, you can get your setting basics written out by your staff. Obviously, you can't foist documentation work off onto players before you've actually got players. Once you're running the game, though, you might not want to devote development time to everything the players happen to be curious about. What are the religious rituals of a given church? What is the political structure of a nearby government? What do different types of monsters do when the players aren't eviscerating them for cash prizes? All of these questions add immersion to the setting, but perhaps not enough to justify time and stress for your staff.

Once again, folks that are using a published setting have the advantage over the home-brew types. But even materials for an established setting might not cover everything players might want to know. And if this information might come up again, or would add depth for more than one or two players, it's worth writing it down and sharing it with the other players.

So you identify volunteers as described in the last section. What do they do now? Any information that they need to base their writing on is locked in the brains of the staff, right? And the whole point of the volunteers is so your staff doesn't have to agonize over the details.

For this to work, you're going to have to let go of a bit of authorial control. Give your volunteers a few points you want them to be sure to include or steer clear of, and then let them go. If they've been paying attention at your games, their writing shouldn't introduce anything vastly out of theme for the setting. They may even add something cool that you hadn't thought of yet.

There are two main things to watch out for. The first is getting written into a corner. Material created by the players shouldn't contradict any upcoming plotlines, unless it's easy for you to explain away the contradiction when the time comes. For example, you may have plans for the religion of the shadow elves to involve Lovecraftian horrors. In this case, it's probably better if the player-written description doesn't paint them as misunderstood moon-worshippers unless you can show that as a deliberate elven lie as soon as the horror plotline begins. However, if concepts don't contradict anything that's already in your forecasted plotlines, don't reject them out of hand.

The second issue is PC-seeding. Some players may feel the urge to set up anything they write so that it can involve their player character at some point. It's important to watch out for elite orders that the writer's PC meets the requirements to join, ancient prophecies that may refer to the PC, and so on.

This is not to say that you should immediately quash these seeds, since they may give you cool ideas on how to get the character immediately involved in more plotlines. However, you should carefully examine them to make sure they aren't going to create hard feelings amongst the other players. You probably never want to hear players complaining that they didn't get to write their own characters deeply into the setting.

In general, if you're going to get players to help you write, let them help you write. Your team editor shouldn't be doing much more work on player-written handouts than he or she would do on staff-written ones; otherwise, you might as well just write them yourself.

Wanderin'

"Wouldn't it be awesome just to come home and know that somewhere in your place there's a monkey you're gonna battle?"
- Dane Cook

Alright, I was really reaching for the last W, there. Anyway, the other major reason you'll want help is NPCs. Even in a tabletop gestalt game, you might have trouble roleplaying enough NPCs to keep all the players engaged in a particular scene, or you may need help running your side of a massive combat. In LARP, it's unusual for any staff member to portray more than one NPC at once, so you have a hard time putting a large number of NPCs into play for roleplaying or conflict. All of these issues can be mitigated with player help.

More than with writing, gestalt games tend to need a lot of help in the NPC department. The more players you have, the more NPCs you generally need to put into play to keep them all engaged. A lot of games try to get full-time volunteers: individuals that aren't privy to the full knowledge of staff members, but who don't play PCs. Unfortunately, it's hard to get a lot of full-time volunteers; staff members get to see their stories implemented, and players get to improve and explore their characters, but full time volunteers really have to enjoy the process of acting out one character after another with few other benefits.

So when you need more bodies to fill out NPC roles, you often have to get players to help part-time. Any game has times when some players aren't doing anything especially important with their PCs, and they can take some time to portray NPCs instead. Games that feature lots of combat may need a lot of volunteer NPCs to round out fights, while games that feature player vs. player interaction may be easier to manage with the existing staff.

As with writing, there are two important issues to watch out for. The first is making your volunteering non-voluntary. Games that need a lot of extra NPC help may begin to make it mandatory for players to NPC for a certain period every game. In these games, you don't receive a bonus for NPCing, you receive a penalty, such as lost exp, if you don't do so. A lot of games swear by this approach, but it is not for everyone. Many players resent being forced to do what they perceive as work after paying to play your game, and, because they're not enjoying themselves, they will put in a poor showing when NPCing if they don't quit your game entirely.

Be sure you're not going to alienate a lot of players if you put in non-voluntary volunteering, and it's better to include this at the start of your game instead of implementing it once you get a lot of players. Making such a large change once players have begun to enjoy your game may be regarded as a bait-and-switch.

The other issue is volunteer accountability. When staff members play NPCs, they generally have an idea of what will be the best for the game as a whole. They're unlikely to take actions that will drive off players if they can help it. Players, even good-intentioned ones, generally have less an idea of what is good for the game and more of an idea of what's good for their characters. And, since their characters tend to be out of danger while the players NPC, it's hard for them to do anything that's immediately dangerous to their PCs.

That is all to say, when you have players NPCing, be sure to give them firm guidelines as to their purpose for going in play. This is especially true in games that feature player vs. player tension; be sure players aren't taking their time as NPCs to hurt their rivals without risk to their own PCs. Even if this is not intentional, it may be hard for players to avoid unconsciously forward their PCs' agendas when they are switching in and out of in-character play.

And all of that is my advice on getting player help in your gestalt games. Next month, I'll tackle a few more odds and ends in the final Gestalt.