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RuneScoop.com  >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide for RuneScape       >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering            >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering - Raid Mechanics

Starting the Dungeon, Floor Preparation and Determining Roles Teamwork and Considerate Gameplay

A computer industry pundit once famously quipped that managing programmers was like herding cats. Managing a team of players in Daemonheim is even worse. It’s more like herding rabid wolverines or something. :)

But even though it isn’t always easy, it still has to be done. A team without a leader is like a boat without a rudder—it will keep moving, but there’s no way to tell where it will end up. Leadership is too large a topic to explore generally here, but I’ll try to give you some specific thoughts to keep in mind in the context of leading a Dungeoneering team.

This is a famous quote by Thomas Paine, and reflects the fact that groups need leaders who will lead. If they aren’t willing to lead, they should be prepared to follow, or at the very least, not impede the progress of everyone else.

Some players seem to think that being a team leader only means that they were the one to stand around saying “f29 5:5 large trade me” a bunch of times. Once the floor begins, they just grab items off the starting table and start exploring the floor, without trying to figure out roles or come up with any sort of plan, leaving everyone else wondering what’s going on.

If you form a team you are made the leader, and you should be prepared that others will expect you to act accordingly. If you aren’t willing to act as the team’s leader, don’t start a party and recruit people—join someone else’s party instead. If you’ve already started a floor and don’t feel up to leading, or you need to devote partial attention elsewhere due to unexpected real world demands, then promote someone else to leader in your place.

In general terms, if you’re the leader of a party, you are ultimately responsible for ensuring that the floor gets done in an efficient and enjoyable manner. More specifically, you should be willing and able to do the following:

• Ensure that all players are on the same page with respect to the overall floor clearing plan: will you clear all rooms except dead ends, clear dead ends also, are you rushing through the floor or not, which monsters should be attacked first, etc.
  
  
• Volunteer for, or assign, all of the necessary roles for the floor. This includes checking that someone is carrying tools, and someone has the ability to cure poison.
  
  
• Check if any players have special needs, such as requiring someone to make them runes, a bow or armor.
  
  
• Make sure players get the food and other items they need so nobody dies.
  
  
• Keep the team together and focused on the task at hand, without being so bossy that you piss everyone off.
  
  
• Use the “Mark” option to direct players to specific monsters to concentrate on.
  
  
• Carry Gatestone Teleport runes so that you can easily go back to the home base if a potion or other item is needed, and then return quickly.
  
  
• Deal with interpersonal conflicts between players.
  
  
• Keep track of the locations of important resources, especially prayer altars.
  
  
• Make sure everyone has enough food and other supplies to successfully deal with the boss.

This sounds more complicated than it really is. Most of these bullet points are just common sense; I try to do many of them even when I am not the leader. With experience this will all become second nature.

Everyone likes a good leader; nobody likes a pushy boss. Remember that even though you’re a team on a mission, this is still a game. You need to persuade people to act in the way you want, not try to push them around.

I’ve been on floors where the leader was constantly barking orders, telling people to go to this room, not that room, and don’t pick that stuff up, and they were going too slow. One idiot kept a timer going and kept announcing how many minutes had elapsed since the floor started. Another expected me to run into the boss room of a level 400+ boss with only six pieces of food.

People react badly to this sort of leader. My personal response is usually to say something like: “If I feel the need to be ordered around, I’ll talk to my wife.” That’s a stereotype, though: even she rarely bosses me around, because she’s smarter than that. :)

This is a fancy word meaning “members of a team refusing to do as the leader directs”. One of the unfortunate realities of leading a Dungeoneering team is that you have responsibility but little authority. You cannot make demands, only requests, and if players don’t want to listen to you, there’s little you can do about it.

Your job as leader is to keep the team working smoothly, so anyone who refuses to be a good teammate effectively falls into this category. Most troublesome are the players who just decide to go off and do their own thing without any concern for the team, and have no interest in working together. These are usually people who stand out because they are trying to go much slower or much faster than the rest of the party.

As leader you can try to kick a stubborn or uncooperative player from the team, but this option is rarely used. In fact, as of level 76 Dungeoneering, I’ve never been on a team where someone was kicked. Not only is it somewhat distasteful to do this in general, but since most teams play with “5:5” difficulty, this means there’s a chance of the floor becoming completely unplayable if a player is kicked and you come to a challenge room that requires 5 players.

Putting five players who barely know each other into a team means the chances are high that some of them won’t get along. Again, this can sometimes be due to a player not acting like a proper teammate, but sometimes personalities just clash.

As the leader you have to try to resolve these conflicts if at all possible. There is no hard and fast formula for this; what you need to do depends on the particular situation. Take whatever reasonable steps are required to resolve the dispute and get everyone working together. Sometimes this can be as simple as giving a player who needs healing some food, or offering to go back to the home base to make a piece of equipment. Other times it can be much more complicated.

Again, any one player has the power to make life very difficult for the entire team simply by quitting, so try to smoothe over everyone’s feathers.

A team without a good leader will be one with less efficient and generally unhappy players. In the best case, the floor will take a lot more time than you expected and not be much fun; in the worst case, you’ll have a mutiny on your hands and end up not being able to finish the dungeon at all.

Experienced players will figure out pretty quickly if they are dealing with an incompetent or just uncaring team leader. Usually one of two things will happen as a result: either someone who is competent and does care will step up and assume the role of de facto leader, or everyone will just rush off in different directions, resulting in utter chaos. Obviously the first situation is better, and if you’re a good player in a bad team and nobody else is willing to lead, you should volunteer. (Even if you aren’t made the leader formally, acting like a leader is what is most important.)

In extreme cases, players will quit a team that is not being run properly. This rarely happens, for two reasons. First, players don’t want to have to write off the time they’ve already invested in their current floor. Second, once again, quitting a team often means that the remaining players are effectively hosed, as they often will not be able to complete the floor if they hit a challenge that requires the player who quit.

I’ve endured some fairly awful team leaders in the past. It’s not for the first reason mentioned above: usually when I get to the point of wanting to quit a team, I’d actually save time by starting over. It’s mainly for the second reason: I didn’t want to leave other players in the lurch.

That said, I have quit teams a couple of times, including the morning I wrote up this page (ironically enough). Some level 130+ player started a large floor 35 dungeon with 5:5 difficulty, recruited four players, and then apparently thought he was playing solo. Not only did he not lead, he wasn’t even a good teammate. He kept disappearing on the team, and wasn’t even responding to in chat. In one room he was mining ores while everyone else was fighting the monsters. And so on.

That was annoying but tolerable; the final straw was when we came to a collapsing tunnels challenge room. It required 99 Mining and he didn’t have the level for it, but he did have the pickaxe. We naturally expected him to drop it so the maxed-out miner in the party could clear the room. He didn’t, and when asked why, responded that “he still needed it”. At that point I said enough was enough and quit the floor: better to start over than spend another 45 to 60 minutes dealing with a team “leader” that selfish and idiotic.

Starting the Dungeon, Floor Preparation and Determining Roles Teamwork and Considerate Gameplay