IMNEWS NEWBIEHELPING ASSUMPTIONS
II. Don't Take Anything for Granted
After you play here a while, it becomes easy to take too much for granted when dealing with newbies. For example:
-- Don't assume that they know how to say, page, or talk on com channels.
-- Don't assume that they understand common abbreviations like LA and OOC.
-- Don't assume that they know what roleplay is, much less the difference between IC and OOC.
-- Don't assume they know anything about Tolkien theme.
-- Don't assume that they are native speakers of English. They might be laboring under a huge ESL disadvantage.
-- Don't assume that they are necessarily adults in good physical and mental health.
Basically, the less you assume starting out, the better, because a lot of problems we have with newbies happen because we assume they ought to know something before they have a chance to learn it.
It's good to ask three questions of newbies: 1) whether they've played on a game like this before, 2) how much Tolkien they've read, 3) if they have any rough idea what their character should be like. The answer to these questions helps you to determine very quickly how much you can assume they know while you're working with them. If they're clueless about MUSHing, but are great Tolkien fans, or know little of Tolkien, but have extensive MUSHing experience, they usually do fairly well. It's the ESL players, underage players, and people who wander in here expecting the game to be like a MUD or an RPG who create the most problems when newbies. You can usually determine very quickly how much help a player needs, and guide them toward the information they need.
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