Saturday, December 15, 2012

When There's Not Enough Adult to Go Around

I've been running age play and spanking groups for over fifteen years now. While I've loved every minute of it, the fact is that no matter how well run the group is, at some point there simply are not enough adults to go around. In the year and a half that Birchwood Isle has been open, I've learned a lot about the strain that is placed on group managers to provide the number of adults necessary to maintain a group while still keeping up with a high level of role play and quality discipline.

Over the past year and a half that we've been running our group, my co-admin and I have learned to be very reliant on one another. Members come and go, and when it comes to finding long-term placements for long-term kids, we often try to put them with our own adults in order to ensure lasting placements. This means that if we feel that a child character has "staying power" they usually find a quick home in a family that is controlled by one or both of us.

The problem arises when we begin to realize that not only are our own child characters getting flushed out in this process, but that we cannot possibly maintain a high level of quality in our discipline and parenting when we're taking care of dozens of (external) children ourselves. Our goal as admins should never to be to totally avoid the other members of our sites in order to play with one another, but instead to find a balance that allows everyone involved to make the most of their play time and helps the members and the admins to get the most enjoyment out of the game.

Our current solution to this problem is to actively seek adults before we take on any more children. With the two of us running the two children's homes on the island and being in control of roughly two dozen entire families between us, we desperately need help. At the moment our strategy is to put out advertisements looking for adults to fill the roles that we have available and then to accept those applications which look good to us. Hopefully if we can build solid cooperation and a team of people truly willing to work with the kids (and not just who create adults to buy more kids), we will have a group that works together to make this the best experience for everyone involved.

For right now, if you're interested in applying to play an adult character at Birchwood Isle, please click here.

What kinds of solutions do you have to your problems as an admin? Do you have ideas to help solve the problem of too few adults in a group with too many kids?

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