RoH Staff Prime Directives 1) Do not interfere with players' gameplay. 2) Do not have unnecessary contact with players - do not chat with them, do not tell them things - we are not their buddies. 3) Remain invisible at all times, unless policy requirements require you to identify yourself. 4) If you must talk to players, do not ever do it in a public area - bring them to your room. Keep it short and to the point. 5) Do not argue with players when they violate the policy. Just act on it: explain the situation, identify yourself if required to, and get the hell out of there. Do not give them a chance to argue with you. You can't win. 6) Do not respond to player broadcasts in any way, unless such broadcasts require our obvious attention..ie a massive bug. 7) Caretakers and DMs do not play characters. Ever. Our job is to run the mud right now - not play it. If we ever get a bigger consistent amount of players on (i.e. 40+ all the time), then this might be changed. As has been proven time and again, contact with players, where they can begin to see us as "equals", will always cause us to lose out in the end, and lose players as a result. This is not because players are stupid necessarily, or because we have been tyrants, it is because we are people, and we have reactions too. We have been acting like players, with the exception that we have ultimate power. We are above players on this mud. This means we hold a position of sometimes worship, sometimes contempt. Both are bad. The way it needs to be is players just simply should not know what to expect from us, because they never deal with us. It's kind of like the addage where there's 20 guys in a bar, but you know all about each one of them, so you'd mess with them in a second. But this one guy with them, you dont know jack about him, so you're more cautious when dealing with him, because you have no clue what to expect - and he never lets you get to know him, so you never ever know what to expect. As a result, you "respect" him when dealing with him, out of ignorance of him. We cannot act like players. We will need to rely on our watchers to do the player to player interaction, since they ARE players. They are quasi-staff members who are liasons to us. They intercept all the stupid questions players have, and are the ones who tell the people asking them that they are stupid questions. They can get away with that. If we do it, we're "the asshole DMs on RoH". If they do it, then they are just "that dickhead". They are players' representatives to the staff, although not chosen by the players themselves.