This post has been a long time coming.
I'm writing this more as a journal post than an official Admin post, because it's not a combined message of all of the admins or upper staff. Most of them don't know what I'm writing and might not share any opinions or outlooks on any part of this post.
I'd like to propose this as a review of my time as an Admin on CD. Or, if you'd prefer, my time as a DM, sDM, and then Admin, because I've been here a long time.
Twelve years, in fact, and 7 of them as a DM in some form or other. I started on CD in November of 2013. My father passed away in April of 2014. I remember this, clearly, because it sucked and it was more or less a turning point in my life and my memory gets crappy for about 2 years afterwards because I was dealing mostly with paperwork involving the estate and living alone back in my childhood home and taking care of the dogs. I became an aDM around January of 2018, not too long after I finally finished the probate and estate stuff. I got made DM around 4/15/2018, after a few small plots and Arya's help teaching me the client, along with Dismus, Bella, Lady, et al.
I got made sDM in late 2019, around August. The reason I'm mentioning this here is that my memory is bad and I had to actually go look things up because it's easy for me to lose track of dates and get my years wrong. Some of this post may be out of synch, but that's more because I am human and I have a whole host of faults more than any intentional deception. I became admin in January/February of 2023, after Fox left.
Though I have run a number of plots in the past, I've been burned out on running more and fighting against imposter syndrome every time I've tried for the past several months, on top of just being kept busy by both real life, sDM/admin things, and just general mental hangups. This is something that I need to fix and get over, and probably the sooner the better, because it doesn't do to just sit around and not pull my weight. I have a plan in my head and a general writeup for a fey based plot, as well as some ideas written up for a second round of The Factions of Old, which is my fiend plotline. Some of you might remember this. A lot of you don't, because I haven't run all that many full, public plots since the server went over to Enhanced Edition. That is a shame on my part and I would like to apologize mostly to my fellow DMs that I haven't been doing as much as I should.
Now that the present has been addressed, I'd like to jump back to the past a ways and write about how I started out. My first plot was a tale of vengeance and redemption. I had a sorcerer character who had fallen in love with an Eilistraeean half-drow woman in a little village out in the Semberdale. The villagers, being distrustful of Drow, claimed she was a witch. When that didn't chase her off, they killed her. This awoke terrible power in the sorcerer, who basically burned the entire place down. The inspiration was the song Wildfire by Sonata Arctica. Many of my plots are based around inspiration from music, and this was the first. I had built a mirrored area where one side was perfectly normal and idyllic. The other side, utter ruin and destruction. My players would investigate one half until they found something out of place, and the illusion would break to show them the real world. The plot ended with the party killing the sorcerer. They found him in a tomb with his beloved, and they actually tried to raise/resurrect both. The sorcerer was beyond caring and refused to come back, though the Eilistraeean woman did. I left off a thread of her walking away from the village, to try to piece back together her life, and never followed up on it. This seems to have been a pattern with a lot of my projects both in-game and out of game.
A lot of my early time on the server was marred by my own actions and activities. I knew how to break the game, I'd been playing it just about every single day since 2002. I saw people that were so far ahead of me and my characters and getting away with things that I thought it'd be perfectly fine to do the same. A bit of item muling here, a bit of corner-sneaking there, who was it harming? Eventually this got me into trouble to where I lost every single item on every single character, and had multiple DMs put me on their shit lists, more or less. A lot of people thought that I was a total ass both in game and out, which is entirely fair. I've never been particularly great at reading people, though I'd like to think that as the years pass, things have gotten a bit better.
There was a lot of concerns about actually joining staff. Several of the DMs back then thought that I'd only DM stuff for 2-4 different players, and nobody else, and use the position to bolster my own characters into taking the leading role in All The Plots. Thankfully, I think I can say that hasn't happened overly much. I don't even look at the announced quests section of the forums anymore because I don't want to take spots from people who might have earned or wanted them more. Sign ups are kept to plots with direct invitations or open invitations, if that. I will admit to taking Kimbell's role a bit too seriously/far, but I've also tried rather hard not to try to put undue influence on her by my being a DM - That is, I don't run plots for the Red Wizards, because I don't want there to be favoritism considered towards the faction that my own character is a part of.
Arya was kind enough to take me under her wing and show me the ropes to DMing. She got me through my first few plots and I had a lot of fun running them. During that summer, most of the DM staff were busy with real life things and it let me run a lot of different events with a lot of different people, such as the plot I ran for a party that was originally meant for Calabask's character just after he got banned. There were other events right around when Swordmage was introduced, and a lot of fun stories and anecdotes that live in my head regularly. As I'm writing this, I'm realizing just how little I've actually ended up doing and that I should try a lot harder to actually get back into active plotting, even if it's going to be hard to manage with other obligations. Running plots is fun. Telling stories is fun. Getting to see characters flourish is a core part of D\&D, if not the core part of the game, and I'm realizing that I don't get to see it nearly as much as I used to while sitting behind a metaphorical desk dealing with paperwork, approvals, and other decisions that need making and implementing.
When I became an sDM, I had a great amount of fun helping the other apprentice dungeon masters learn the tools. I enjoy teaching, I used to do so at Blue Rock Elementary in New York. The biggest subject was poetry and writing. I've either taught or helped teach almost all active staff at some point with some part of their orientation or other, or helped supervise their earlier events, or helped refine their processes through quest approvals. This hasn't been the case nearly as much the past two years, but I try to help when the other sDMs need it or aren't available. They've all been an incredible help. All of the staff has. We could not keep this community going without volunteers, both players and aDMs/DMs/sDMs. Those of you that keep things active, drive roleplay, drum up interest, and push for more plots and events? You're what keeps CD what it is, what it has been, and what it will be. This place would be a graveyard without everyone that puts their hours in to make interesting tidbits for others to follow.
However, all of that pushing and imagination and driving roleplay takes a lot of time and energy and devotion. We're all humans, and many of us with various neurodivergent quirks that make regular socialization hard. Note: This is NOT a condemnation or calling anyone out. We're a bunch of nerdy people playing a game of math rocks and imagination. It's not a far stretch to realize that a lot of us have trouble with social cues. Text is an imperfect medium. We get on each other's nerves once in a while. We make mistakes, miscommunications, missteps, and often pass one another like ships in the night. Back then, and now, too, I'm sure that a lot of people will find me a brash jackass who doesn't take anyone else into consideration about anything. This isn't looking for empathy, sympathy, agreement or disagreement. It's simply a fact of life. My old orchestra teacher used to say that you had 10% of people who hated you, 10% of people who loved you, and 80% of people who couldn't give two shits. Over the years we've had tens of thousands of cases of players not getting along for various reasons. People come and go from the community pretty regularly, for both serious and mundane reasons.
Many of those reasons have to do with how the community is run, from the top, and who is allowed to have a say in various administrative bureaucracy-type decisions. Because we're all volunteers, and players, we (I say this as the royal 'we', not any admin or sDM or DM or anyone in particular) fuck up. All the time. We make decisions based on half-truths and information that we don't fully understand, or with things that are intentionally misleading. We make decisions with biases based on our individual histories and interactions with people. We make decisions based on hearsay. We make decisions based on rumors, or feelings, or whether or not we've had enough vitamin D that day.
That rambling has led to what I would think of as my own worst times as a DM in the past few years. I'd like to dive into them, because there's two that stick out. 'The Underdark Situation', and the leaving of Melody/Blackheart. I'll cover them both in time here, but to start with, I'll cover TUS because it's more relevant to my becoming an admin on the server. Back in the start of 2023, we had a couple of players get in trouble for breaking the mature content rules. (Notably, the 'rule 10' that we used to have.) At the time, the admins had asked me as an sDM to look into it, because my 'other job' is running a learning and discussion group for kink and alternative lifestyle people. Think a library of experiences and how-to guides on relationships, negotiation, how to tell your parents/friends that you're not heteronormative, that kind of thing. We're up to ~600,000 people after several rounds of user purges for inactive accounts. Mind, that's not important except to say that I've had experience in moderating content that gives 'normal' people the squicks on the regular. So it wasn't any huge surprise that the admins threw the information to me, I looked it over, and gave an 'expert' opinion that the players in question had more or less gotten the okay from each other and everyone involved, and that it was 'technically' within the rules-as-written, or RAW, at the time. My recommendation at the time was to fix the rules, slap the players on the wrist, and move on, since they weren't broadcasting their activities or forcing it on anyone unwilling. Since nobody was directly being harmed, I figured that should have been the end of it. However, privacy was still violated and there were hard feelings abound as well as some departures from the server.
Fast forward 2-3 months and something similar happens, again. The activity that we told the aforementioned players not to do was repeated. However, it was in the Blue Draykn's old build, which had the 'leaky' doors. How did we find out about it? An anonymous player, who left the discord right after, stood around for 40+ minutes listening in and then posted screenshots publicly into the General channel. This was an IMMENSE breach of not just privacy, but also triggered/disturbed a large number of players, both because of the content and the fact that it was posted in public with no spoiler tags, no warning, and nothing to prepare them. So on one hand we had a rules break, which we had already talked to the players about, and on the other, a massive breach of privacy and what seemed like a targeted, carefully crafted incident. Notably, the first incident was followed by a voice chat in which the players were told that the roleplay was problematic and in no uncertain terms not allowed on the server. However, because it was combined with the notice of breach of privacy, I personally think that the message was either not communicated directly enough or that it wasn't understood well enough. This is why I will no longer ever be giving admin rulings or the like in voice, only in text medium. Either way, the admin team (with me still being freshly added, having never been an admin for a NWN server before) was put into a hell of a bind with half of the playerbase calling for a straight ban due to conduct/content, and the other half saying the breach of privacy was the bigger issue.
The admin team at the time decided to try to appease both groups, and this was my own personal fuckup. The instigating player in question was removed from the DM staff, and the others involved told in no uncertain terms (in text that time) that the problematic activity was to never happen again on the server, including denying an application of theirs to a character that could have tangentially been connected to the mere appearance of breaking rule 10. We also set rapidly to searching out all areas on the server with 'leaks' and trying to fix them up as best we could, which is why I spent 30 hours rebuilding the Blue Draykn from the ground up. Half measures rarely ever work, and we still lost yet even more players to our apparent inaction, or not harsh enough punishment. In hindsight, we probably should have just issued a ban from the very first and cut off the hydra's head. However, that doesn't exactly change history, does it? I still don't really know who made the post, as it was likely a burner account and I couldn't find much about the character they were on in game, either. The server still hasn't *really* recovered from that, either. We've simply moved on, which has its own benefits and drawbacks. We lost a good fifth of the DM team either because of the whole mess, or shortly after with it being a contributing factor. But we've also gained more volunteers since then, and the server has moved on with clearer, better (in my opinion) written rules, better policies for dealing with those situations, and lessons learned.
Since then, there have been rumors flying around that Fox was somehow doing a bunch of silly things behind the scenes during this period using her tech know-how to harm the server. (Anyone remember that we had a spam of like 2,000+ forum posts of goatse? So many that the automated delete function couldn't handle them all?) To this, I can unequivocally say, no. None of that is true. Fox is a rather wonderful person from every experience I've ever had with her. She left for her own reasons, which I cannot in good conscience share, and I ask none of you to pester her about it because its her own business and she'll tell you if she wants to. She also helped us, immensely, with getting the server in a place where it could continue without her. Someone would never do that only to turn around and start attacking players. I'd also like to take this moment to thank Spacepope and Raysiel for stepping in and helping out with dev work. Without them, we'd be nowhere near as well set as we are now. We'd have far less progress and be less of a server without them and all the other volunteers.
The first goal of any community tends to be whatever it was designed to do. In our case, that means roleplay and fun. Our first goal is always to keep the roleplay going and the story working together in a way that everyone can find some facet that they enjoy. The second tends to be to either retain or grow a group population. Considering that Neverwinter Nights as a game is over 20 years old, this has mostly shifted towards retention more than recruitment. A lot of our decisions and direction for the server has to be geared towards making the largest number of players happy enough to keep playing in order to keep the roleplay going and the story progressing forward. A lot of the time, this works just fine. It means that we add features that player request. We run stories that players find fun. We streamline processes and get rid of inefficiencies where we can, while trying to keep everything more or less consistent. However, this also comes back to bite us in the ass a lot of the time. It makes us gun-shy of actually taking big steps. We have to worry, constantly, about how a person leaving is going to drag their friends along and how its going to affect the ongoing story. Very rarely does anyone step out of the server in a vacuum. They take with them their characters, their ongoing plots, the stories untold, their friendships and history. The above incident had enough players leave that we'll likely never fully recover, because a lot of what was lost just can't be replaced. Some of it shouldn't be. Which leads me into the other series of issues that we've faced recently.
That being the lead-up into the server plot 'ATAE', and a number of back-end issues that most of you haven't heard of or had any experience with. To fully explain what happened and why, there needs to be a bit of explaining as to the DM team and how things work on the back end. Essentially, we are a paperwork machine. Why is this? Because people leave. Whether they mean to or not, they take a lot of information with them when they go, whether it's by choice or because real life has its demands. We have a simple rule and setup to get around this. Every DM has their own thread in the "DM Chronicles \& Notes" section of the forums which most players don't have access to see. Every DM MUST log their events, who was in them, how long they took, and a summary of what went on with those events. This is so that anyone that comes afterwards can at least get a general idea of what happened in your plot and where things were headed. We also have a set of instructions and rules to get various parts of your plot approved of - Notably, anything that's going to have a significant effect and impact on the server needs to be approved by the admins. This means anything that kills off a noble NPC, anything that destroys a town, countries going to war. The stuff that would have a paragraph in a source book also gets a nod from the upper staff. This is so that we can coordinate server changes, balance what DMs want to do, and who gets to do what with which NPC. It wouldn't do to have Vangerdahaast playing cards with the castle hounds at the same time he's saving the world from a far realm threat. (Or maybe it would, that might be a fun plot. Thanks, brain.)
When we approve big, server-level plots, there's a lot that goes into them. We have to account for all the different things players might like to do. We have to keep in communication so that we know what's on the table and what endings are possible. DMs can't, of course, prepare for any and every little possibility. It takes time and effort to create areas, NPCs, plotlines, and work everything together to where consequence and action meets in a way that is satisfactory for a good yarn. Anyone can say what they will about any others, but I will say that the 'HWC' plot was very well organized and had a lot of player agency. A lot of DMs have also run other similar events that have had a lot of different ways they could have gone. The various 'Runelord' plots come to mind, as well as a number of others that I don't want to get into because I don't want DMs to feel left out if they're reading this. I do NOT want anyone thinking that this journaling of my thoughts is to rag on anyone in particular or insult their abilities as a storywriter. I did, however, want to explain some about the problems that evolved surrounding server plots, Melody, and why they left the team and server. They are/were a good storyteller and did a good job crafting some of these intricate, high-intensity plots with all their different possibilities.
The problems that led to their leaving were a sort of amalgamation of a lot of different facets. They might tell you different than I am here, and I'm certain they likely will at some point, as I know that they have lurking accounts both in the Discord and on the forums. These are my internal thoughts and impressions, and I am no psychic or illithid to be able to pull someone else's impressions out of them. Somewhere between HWC and ATAE, I believe, they started feeling like (Or it accelerated) they were being persecuted by the rest of the staff for a number of reasons, punished and argued against and unappreciated for all of their efforts to craft good stories. From the position of upper staff, I can espouse that some of the frustrations were mutual, if from different causes and different results. We try to stick to treating everyone the same. If you can apply for a character on CD, anyone else can apply for that character. If you can have your character do something on CD, anyone else's character should be able to do the same. If you can get a reward, everyone else should be able to get that reward as well. Seems simple enough, right? It's harder in practice than reality sometimes, because life is never particularly simple. People aren't simple. People have different levels of activity, different opinions of their own efforts, and different opinions of what's fair or not.
ATAE was one of those plots where, I believe, the admin team has failed to live up to what they should have. From the approval onwards, there were issues. We certainly aren't going to be doing any more 'kill off this character temporarily so people can't complain about why they aren't a part of this plot' shenanigans. The original plan had the plot smaller in scale. 'We' (again, the royal, I wasn't on the admin team then) had suggested that it be expanded and expounded upon to involve more players and characters rather than involve the relatively few regulars that would have been taken in for the original idea. It was ambitious, as large as HWC if not more so, and had far more reaching implications for our writing of the Realms. However, when it actually got to running, there were a plethora of player issues as there are with almost all large scale plots. Some teams had a lot of really important, impactful character development and story involvement. Some teams barely had any involvement at all. Some had player infighting, some had a lack of impetus, some were so active and gung-ho that they blindsided their DMs with difficulties in keeping up.
The problem that I saw as upper staff was inconsistency. When there are some groups changing the world, actively, and others who barely feel connected, something probably should be done to try to address those differences. Before anyone claims that I'm trying to throw this all at the running DM and say that Melody's style was bad, it wasn't on its own. We, as admins, should have taken the player criticisms and addressed them more firmly in order to make sure that people feeling under-utilized during quests got more 'air time'. This could have been done by getting more involvement of other DMs, taking on more of the event load ourselves, or seeing if we could find some new part of the story that they could fit in better. It should have been more of a collaborative thing. Again, though, hindsight is 20-20 and we can't exactly change the past. There were a number of things that were a part of the plot that either never got through the approval process, or should have been and never were, such as various characters being empowered as the avatars of various deities. Such a momentous bit of divine magic should be rare and special. As such, how do you be fair about letting some characters take part in that and not others? Do you decide by who has more hours played? More events? On one hand, you don't want favoritism. On the other, if a DM isn't going to have their friends take part in their stories, then why are they DMing? Where is the line and how do you define it? Do you allow it at all? With certain rules? How do you figure that stuff out if it's just *done* without those considerations beforehand?
So we butted heads about that sort of thing, repeatedly. We'd get complaints, try to address them, and it was stifling quest progress and various bits of the story that they wanted to tell. We kept having issues with things that were approved or not, some players getting vastly different treatment than others, and through all of this we had to fight, constantly, to get things logged and recorded. We still don't have records, even now, of a large number of plots run over the course of that quest. Not who was in them, not how long they took, no summaries. It can be a pain, sometimes, to stop what you're doing and write out everything that should have been obvious for anyone paying attention. Running an event is hard work. Sometimes when you're done, especially if you're running multiple events a day, you just don't want to have to sit and do boring paperwork. Yet it has to be done for things to work smoothly. We require it of all the other DMs. Yet we tried to be lenient and let it go, because such a big plot took a lot of time and energy and effort. This is another of those lessons that we have had to learn the hard way - If a DM isn't doing what everyone else has to, it's not fair to anyone to let it go on. (And why I need to get back into running plots more regularly, we do have a 'would like' minimum of one event per month for everyone else. This gets set to the wayside if we have other pressing projects like dungeon building, dev work, etc.)
In the end, the culmination of having to nag them constantly to follow the things that every other DM did and does seems to have been quite the burden. Scheduling often ran over others' plots, booking characters for the same time slot without communication. Logging. One of the final straws, though, was something that the admins actually disagreed about rather heavily internally. That is to say, we had a lot of long discussions about how we could reward long-standing characters and those that have put a lot into the server. We'd already implemented hereditary nobility, the epic reputation system, and DM items for DMs that ran far more plots than they were in themselves. We still, to this day, disagree some about how much is too much, and that's okay. We don't have to agree on everything, as long as we can work together. The proposal that was given to us by Melody was basically a super-special, one-per-player(not character) super item that went above and beyond tier 6 in properties, dubbed the 'artifact system'. Basically a best-item-possible thing that could only go to specific players and characters- Generally, those level 30s that were sole characters of people who didn't play alts, ever. Now, there is something to be said about rewarding people for sticking with a concept and a story and giving the server some longevity with in-character personalities who can keep setting lore and event tales alive. However, the admins were split enough on the concept that we went to upper staff and as a majority we(the royal, again), decided not to go forward with it. MAYBE it was going to be discussed as adding additional roleplay properties, or something like an extra bane type, but we weren't comfortable with giving a clearly-superior item to some certain chosen players and not others, because that felt like it would be straying way too far into the field of favoritism. We still are looking for other ways to reward dedication and playing, though, so if anyone has any ideas that sidestep those issues, we're all ears.
Somewhere between the rejection of that idea and having to revisit how we allow a lot of things during quests, organization of large plots, and requests, it seems to have driven them off. Of course, none of us were happy with that particular outcome, but it also came with a feeling of somewhat relief for me personally. I don't like conflict. I put things off because I don't like dealing with them and I don't like change. The server lost something when Melody and BH left, because they were good storytellers and good DMs for the most part. We aren't going to get that back. I can't really throw shade at them for feeling the way they did or do, because I understand exactly what led to that and we can't always see every side of all the different issues we face in life. However, I do wish to throw a little shade on some actions since then, that have driven more players off of CD. That, I can't condone. If you don't like the server, that's fine. Not everyone does or has to. If you don't and leave, we'll simply wish you well and hope you find somewhere else you'll have more fun. However, it has come to my attention that they've been sitting in various chats and trying to draw people away from the server even now, weeks/months after they've left. This has been done through very careful, deliberate chats with logs of what seems like every interaction on CD, often with important bits cut out, or their own statements edited/removed while leaving others' intact. This has even included keeping recorded audio files from people who did not consent to being recorded. I can forgive things done towards me or administrative flubs and frustrations. I find it a lot harder to forgive deliberately manipulating people using falsified evidence. This, funny enough, also came about with an incident that springs to mind. Unflattering things were said about a player's character (saying that they were doing a Galadriel impression badly), and screenshots of it got out to that player, along with some information as to why they weren't yet being considered for epic reputation. We looked into it because we do have DM rules about leaking DM chat without cause, but apparently that wasn't good enough. A bounty, of real life U.S. Dollars (four hundred of those at that), for a witch hunt to start looking for whoever spread Melody's own words. One of the smarter admin decisions we've had was to not allow that to continue.
That all being said, I'm still not going to cast any insults or call any names, merely mention why they've left from my perspective and my side of things and a tame version of what I've seen/been involved with. I am not blameless in any of this business. The proper course of action would have been anything *but* my inaction. We've had a number of good, even great, storytellers over the time of the server. With that come all the benefits and pitfalls of humanity and the human condition. None of us are perfect. I will say that Melody and Blackheart were good storytellers and did a lot of impressive things for the server that we're *still* studying and trying to learn from to train the aDMs better. I will also wish them luck with their RL endeavors to be published and successful, and that they find more fun elsewhere. Likewise, Fox was a wonderful, creative DM and I'll be lucky to ever run across her or more people like her. I will miss the fun that was had, but sometimes its for the best to move on.
The lessons I've learned since joining the admin team have usually come at some cost to the server. However, hopefully they'll be handy in the future.
To summarize:
* I've fucked up repeatedly in waffling on taking action when server rules have been in question.
* I have let things slide when I shouldn't have, out of an abundance of caution and not wanting to rock the boat.
* The future should involve running more plots, getting into being an actual dungeon master again, not just a pencil pusher.
* Reiterating with the DM team that we all follow the same playbook. No more playing nice with not logging things or going off the wall without approvals.
* More work is due in clarifying rules/wtv wherever there's questions. If we get the same question more than three times, it should be rewritten better.
* The list here isn't exhaustive. I'll probably think of something to add later and come back to add it in, or just keep it to myself because this is too long already.
This rambling post has gotten to be about thirty three thousand characters at this point, so I'm going to try to cut it off here. My time on CD has been wonderfully nice at times, and downright foul in others. Yet I'd say overall that it has been a rewarding journey. You, reading this, and the rest of the playerbase keep making it worthwhile to log in. The DM team that spends a lot of time volunteering and taking work off my shoulders have been wonderful. We aren't perfect, and a number of the things we have done to try to keep the server going have backfired in one way or another. But we'll keep trying as long as there's fun to be had and people willing to spin a good tale. If you have questions, please ask and we'll try to answer.
See you, Space Cowboy.