Ive been thinking about making a open rp group for harvestmoon and stardew valley but I really struggle with running groups. I don't know where to start. Any advice?
Is there anything in specific you struggle with? I have run closed groups, but I’ve only been members of open rp groups myself (and by 'open’ I assume you mean, open to indie blogs, not a closed group that requires that the blogs only interact in that group). Here are some general tips/things to consider that I can think of:
Usually, I see these kinds of groups treated more like a verse. Which means having an accompanying tag for all the members to use. Since they’re most likely going to be indie blogs, their dashes will be full of other blogs, so it’s important to have a tag where members can see all the threads.
Promotion. This is the one I always struggle with. You can put posts in the tags all day, but it’s often better to rely on personal reblogs. Unfortunately, that’s kind of hard. This fandom, especially indie side, is kind of small so I wouldn’t have high expectations of a huge group. You can always send the group here, of course, and I’ll reblog it/affiliate with you if you want.
A small group isn’t bad though! I’ve known this fandom to be pretty friendly indie side. You’ll also want to consider what kind of blogs are okay to apply, such as multimuse blogs and sideblogs. Do you just want hm and sdv canons or are ocs also okay (and not just the protags)? What about canons from other series that have a crossover to fit in your scenario?
Communication is key! People are going to have a harder time starting threads with others in the group if they don’t have a place to talk and you can’t expect people will use the IM feature. I would recommend a discord server as those are pretty popular to use.
I’m not sure what premise you’re thinking of for your group, but having events people can participate in is always good.
Activity checks are another thing. You may want to be more lax about this or require members post a certain number of posts (tagged with a certain tag, I imagine, as it would be very hard to find them otherwise. something like ‘groupname replies’) or any number of things. It’s kind of up to you and how you feel the group atmosphere should be. After years of roleplaying indie side, I’ve realized how lax people can be, which is good because it’s a hobby, but you also don’t want your group to be inactive cause other people won’t have others to do replies with and then it just kinda starts sliding downhill. Whatever you pick, I’d suggest sticking to it.
A main blog, whether a sideblog or its own, is also good to have so members have a hub they can go to for information or send questions. This means information about the verse, the tags to use, a masterlist of the members, and stuff like that. You could also utilize google docs to keep track of internal information for the group or anything else.
Personally, I think another open group would be great to have around! I don’t know how much any of this helped, but it’s the kind of stuff I think about when I run my closed group.
If you have a more specific question, I’d be happy to answer~
