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Guild Profile: Ancient Mystic Order of Old Fogeys

Profile by Jay Watamaniuk, 19 Feb 2002

In September 2002, BioWare opened the Neverwinter Nights Guilds and Registry system to Neverwinter Nights game owners. Since then hundreds of guilds have been created and over 20,000 people have registered as members. The guilds range from roleplaying and gaming-based guilds to those exploring specific areas of the Neverwinter experience such as scripting, building or dungeon mastering. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank the thousands of players who have made this system an overwhelming success and profile many of the guilds which are enhancing the Neverwinter Nights community. This week: Ancient Mystic Order of Old Fogeys

Guild Name: Ancient Mystic Order of Old Fogeys Membership: 350+ Activity (week of Feb 19, 2002): Top 5 Guild Type: Role-playing Guild Owner: Curt "Moondrake" Miller Founded: Sept. 5, 2002

A group of BioWare staff , including myself, had the pleasure to spend an evening in a game organized by the expert gamers within the Ancient Mystic Order of Old Fogeys guild. The adventure was filled with everything a game should have intrigue, deceit, violence, romance, and, of course, plenty of thinly disguised conversations of dark deeds using assorted fish metaphors. Evil was cut down like a rabid circus monkey and left to stew in his own carefully cultivated wickedness on the kitchen floor like a sack of ripe entrails …not that I’m speaking from personal experience of course, no sirree, and the day was saved. Curses, foiled again! But who exactly are these "old Fogey's" anyway?

Ancient Mystic Order of Old Fogeys

1. Can you tell us more about your guild and what sort of gamer it would appeal to?

I am hopeful this guild will appeal to mature role-players. Obviously, we can't expect members to be too mature or they won't enjoy escaping from reality and stepping into make-believe worlds filled with monsters and magic. By mature, I mean able to play cooperatively and show respect and courtesy to one another. When the guild was quite young, I posed the question to members about whether we should have an age requirement. We decided that maturity wasn't necessarily associated with age. It was generally agreed that there would be a large group of people who wouldn't like being associated with "Old Fogeys", so the guild name has been largely responsible for filtering the membership.

2. Can you give us some background on the development of your guild?

It started very slowly. I created it on September 5th, the day I joined the Guilds and Registry system beta (the second sign up). Shortly after the beta ended, the owner of another guild expressed the desire to disband and merge guilds. Both guilds had 29 members at the time. All the members of the other guild didn't apply as AMOOF members but the membership grew to about 50 during the following day or two. Then Neverwinter Vault mentioned our guild on their site and the membership grew by 50% in a single day. Membership has been growing steadily since then.

3. Why did you start the guild?

I started the guild on a whim. There was this option when I joined the Guilds and Registry beta to "Create a Guild" and I thought, "Why not?". I originally expected it to be a small group of people who I already knew, but when there wasn't much interest from them I opened the guild to the public. The primary reason I created the guild was in response to the abhorrent behavior I kept encountering online. After repeatedly encountering rudeness, insults, disrespect, and intolerance from people who hadn't yet learned to police their own behavior, I wanted to create a group where respect and tolerance would be a requirement and where my contact with bad behavior would be minimized.

4. How do you see your guild developing over time?

This is a very difficult question to answer because the guild has already developed into something I never imagined it would be. I'm certain that whatever I imagine now will be just as wrong in six months. I hope it will develop into a community of friends who enjoy gathering together to play. I've met some delightful people since I started the guild, people I would never have known had I not indulged my whim. This has made the effort worthwhile even if the guild never serves another purpose. The number of guild projects is growing as the number of dedicated members within the guild grows. Our guild web site is looking better every day and people are actively looking for ways to provide more gaming opportunities to members. We currently have 5 guild servers that run 24/7 hosting modules requested by the membership for "drop-in" gaming, the number of regular campaign sessions is growing as we acquire and train more DMs, and some of the members have begun the planning process for creating our own persistent world.

5. How has BioWare's NWN Guilds and Registry system helped in developing your guild?

The activity ranking made the guild more visible because we immediately showed up on the list of 20 most active guilds (which was a shock to me). We've been steadily receiving new requests to join since it was implemented and membership requests have exploded since we moved into the top 5. I really don't know what is responsible for our consistent ranking in the top 10 most active guilds. We have quite a collection of Fogeys who really enjoy forum discussions, so perhaps our ranking is due to our being a large group of "motor mouths". *grin*

One way the Guilds and Registry system could help more in developing our guild would be to enhance the guild calendar system so that it can collect and manage the information needed to set up a gaming session. It collects the date, time, and description but we can't manage the list of players/characters and alternates, server IP addresses, game passwords, etc. This makes scheduling games difficult and some of our members have turned to Neverwinter Connections to fill this void. This is workable, but undesirable due to the need to maintain two guilds and two membership lists for the two sites.

6. What is different about playing with a guild than simply playing a multiplayer game or even the single player game?

It is different than playing an open multiplayer game because, in a general sense, we know who we are playing with. The guild is composed of people who like to role-play and work cooperatively together to achieve a common goal instead of people who, for example, like to hack-up nearly indestructible characters and kill one another. It is different than the single player game because we get to perform (role-play) for an audience (our fellow adventurers) and have fun developing our characters' personalities.

7. What has been one of the difficulties in keeping a guild active?

Finding ways to promote active participation is the most difficult. Only about 15% to 20% of the membership is actively involved with the guild. This involvement includes such things as communicating on the forums, running servers, working on projects, making suggestions, pointing out problems, and scheduling and/or participating in gaming sessions. I sometimes wonder why the non-participating members bothered to join. They don't communicate or participate in the activities that make the guild enjoyable, so it is difficult to tell what the guild means to them. One problem we have encountered is that we have more players than our active Dungeon Masters can accommodate. We are trying to encourage players to learn the DM Client, either on their own or by participating in guild DM classes. We hope that soon we will be able to host more DM managed sessions, which our players seem to desire.

8. What suggestions would you have for people thinking about creating a guild in the NWN universe?

Be prepared to invest time in it and in the members. Very few days go by that I don't communicate with some guild member. The task of managing the guild is simplified if you promote those members who have an active interest in the guild to officers. When I did this, I ended up with a group of committed individuals who enjoyed the challenges of creating a successful guild. It was very gratifying when I realized what I created had stopped being "my" guild and had become "our" guild.

9. Do you have any advice for NWN fans that want to join a guild?

Find a group that enjoys your favorite play style and is populated with compatible personalities. Also, don't belong to more than 2 or 3 guilds. You won't be able to invest yourself in any guild or feel like part of a guild community if you spread yourself too thin.

10. What is the strangest thing ever to happen in a guild game?

This was very difficult to come up with. I even solicited the guild members for submissions and didn't get a thing. "Strange" apparently isn't common in our games.

I can recall a pretty strange thing that occurred in one of our Thursday evening sessions. The eight party members were milling around after having an NPC conversation. We tried to regroup before continuing our journey... except one of the party members was missing. We didn't have a clue where Milith was and we couldn't find him anywhere in the vicinity. I thought I would look around a little, so I walked south along a stream. To my astonishment I discovered Milith lying dead in the middle of the stream. I ran back to the rest of the party and announced my discovery. I led them to the fateful location and we all tried to figure out what had happened. My mind's eye conjured an image of Milith walking innocently along when suddenly, a malevolent entity appears from out of nowhere, overpowers him and holds his head underwater until he drowns. I have no idea what everyone else imagined for an explanation. Our cleric used the power of his faith to raise Milith from the dead, but Milith was unable to tell us what had happened to him. Our party is still in danger of finding out, as we haven't ventured into the building where Milith's memories abruptly ended. And how did he get from that building to the middle of the stream?