Shattered Kingdoms

I like seeing discussion on the forums, so I'd like to bring up something that is common knowledge among my veteran LARP friends and tabletop crew, that I find many new players don't know much about - Bleed Barriers.

You might know Bleed Barriers by another name, or you might not know it at all; allow me to define it: A Bleed Barrier is a Player's (or DM's, or Staff's, etc) ability to keep in-game actions and relationships from bleeding into the real world, and vice versa.

An example of this: If Jack's character steals from Tasha's character, it's totally appropriate for Tasha's character to be angry at Jack's character. If Tasha gets angry at Jack, however, it means Tasha has a Weak Bleed Barrier, and is letting events from the game bleed into real life. There is no gray area with bleed barriers - Strong Bleed Barriers are good, Weak Bleed Barriers are Bad.

Talking about Bleed Barriers amongst your tabletop crew is important, but in large communities such as LARP organizations and MUDs, it is absolutely instrumental (even moreso in SK, in my opinion, because of the nature of the game, and the possibility of Character vs Character conflict).

The two most important things to strengthen a player's bleed barrier is for that player to come to know their fellow players, and for that player to mentally separate themselves from their character.

In regards to coming to know your fellow players: In a tabletop game, this is easy - you see them sitting across from you, you hear their voice, you likely know them personally, or have a mutual friend through your DM/GM/Storyteller. When playing online, and ESPECIALLY in a roleplay enforced game like Shattered Kingdoms, our only opportunity to do this is through the Forums. It doesn't matter if my character and a blue-skinned sprite are constantly at one another's throats. I know the SK community is full of great people, and even if I don't know exactly who plays the sprite (we often don't know who plays who on here), I know they're among the awesome members of the community; if you do end up getting to know the player in question on the forums, even better. Seeing your friends' character succeed (even at the expense of your own character) is not a bad feeling.

When mentally separating one's self from their character, I don't mean to not be attached. It's good to be attached to one's character! Their success and their failures hit harder to home, and enriches the experience - and if you can translate those emotions into RP, it enriches everybody else's experience too. When I talk about mentally separating yourself from your character in terms of maintaining a strong bleed barrier, I mean don't mix the two of you up. When you talk to your friends, or spouse, or whomever about that time you went to the Dreamscape and slew the demigod of nightmares after getting your butt handed to you by an animated spoon (god, I love SK), try to think in terms of "my character went to the dreamscape" and "my character slew the demigod of nightmares" and "my character got their butt handed to them by an animated spoon". This will help you foster a healthy & strong bleed barrier.

Why should we care about bleed barriers?

The main advantage of having a community of gamers with strong bleed barriers is maintaining a positive out of character community. If all players have a strong bleed barrier, they'll be able to be friends with one another, congratulate the victories of the other players' characters, even if it's at the expense of their own character. In a small group tabletop setting, it allows for more elements being able to be incorporated into games, that would otherwise be impossible (character vs character plots, and inter-party conflict). In an online community like Shattered Kingdoms, this will help with player retention and the positive attitude reflected in the forums will likely help attract people on the fence or those thinking about returning.

The secondary advantage of having a community with strong bleed barriers is a better in-character environment when two people play who already don't care much for one another. In a small group tabletop game, this can (and always should be) handled on a case by case basis. In an online community - it's not quite as feasible to do so (and it might not be apparent that two players have issue with one another). If these players have strong bleed barriers, however, their personal quarrel will (or should, at any rate) remain personal and out of character.

Because I haven't seen much activity on the forums, it's difficult to judge how strong the bleed barriers are in the members of the community.

Please feel free to argue, contribute, or ask questions about anything I've said here. <3

I haven't heard the specific term "bleed barrier" before, but I like the concept.

SK has always supported this concept by encouraging only one character and (assuming you ignored that encouragement) rules that prohibit you from taking actions on one character based on actions from another of your characters. And yet, historically there have still been a lot of problems here where people identify too strongly with their characters, to the point where they base their pride and actions as a player entirely through the lens of their characters. It's a tough issue to solve. For what it's worth, I think the current player base is better in this area than the historical average.

The term bleed was coined at Ropecon 2007, by Emily Care Boss, and quickly became a term used in the LARP academic circles then spread out to other forms of gaming (and RPGs in particular). I do want to share that not all Bleed is bad, and some games utilize the concept to their advantage (Nordic LARPs come to mind right here). There is a really good article on Bleed, and while it's about LARPing, the the concept itself that it talks about is the same regardless of the platform or style that the game takes: https://nordiclarp.org/2015/03/02/bleed-the-spillover-between-player-and-character/.

In the past I'd have to say that for some players (and some very "vocal" ones on the forum at the time) there was a lot of bleed-out as they would quickly turn to parts of the forum that are no longer around (and thank goodness) to find fault OOCly with another player for IC stuff going on. That's been some while back, and as I'm newly returned from a significant hiatus myself I really can't say much for now. That being said, what I've seen has shown significant improvement of the playership to keep IC stuff IC and OOC stuff OOC.

This paragraph sounds like you're trying to place most of the blame on previous players and the existence of the General Discussion forum. That's pretty presumptuous.

In my experience, while General Discussion did sometimes consist of people complaining about people 'losing', those who came onto the board feeling slighted were told 'handle it IC instead of whining here' most of the time. That naturally didn't stop any name-calling and flaming from happening in the process, but to say that the removal of GD is a primary reason why people don't carry conflicts across characters sounds like you decided on your conclusion and then found some flawed logic to get there.

It's much more likely that the sort of people who are looking for a competitive game just aren't attracted to SK anymore because PK is essentially dead or uninteresting with the lack of kill securing potential and the ability to instantly rez/redeem call armor. For those who remain, since avoiding PK is so easy since there aren't many active PKers anymore, you're less likely to get beat up and get bent out of shape about it.

Or that nowadays, those who would have normally used GD to vent just vent to their friends through discord like civilized people.

Just finished reading that article - thank you for sharing it! It hadn't occurred to me that some people would consider a weak bleed barrier (or, as the article put it: more bleed) to be a positive thing. Though the article's reasons didn't change my stance on the subject, it did open my eyes that some people might be purposefully letting their game and their real lives bleed into one another.

As for the Forum change, and the lack of General Discussion... it took me off guard when I returned (a week or two ago), but the Bazaar is here, and it's pretty much what I used GD for. And I swear I laughed out loud when I saw that Favorite Quotes got it's own Forum.

The bleed from in-game to out of character on SK wasn't any worse than other gaming communities I've been a part of since (I feel like the National Parlor LARPs I've been in have had it the worst out of any community I've been in).

Thank you all for contributing!