Thanks for watching and/or joining! I'm going to lay out the rules and purpose of this site, post by post.
First, the MISSION STATEMENT for this site: This site is a place to loosely describe Role Playing Games. Specifically, new ways to play RPGs and new ways of approaching the hobby. This site is meant to be a relaxed, non-threatening, non-confrontational environment to discuss the above.
This first post discusses the RULES of the forum.
The rules for joining: * Strive to treat other participants with respect. * Strive to talk constructively, even on fun and fluff. * Criticism and Discussion of ideas is kosher. * If you are bitter about something, do not express that bitterness here. Find another venue for bitterness.
The rules for communication: * Go nuts * Discussion topics: Anything tangentially related to gaming, or that can be folded back into a gaming discussion. * Don't bicker. As I mention, Criticism and Discussion of any idea that rolls through, even "brutal but friendly peer deconstruction", is cool (Friendly > Brutal). Bickering is not kosher. Bickering or snark directed at other members here ruins the zen. If you mess with the zen, you'll be kicked (possibly warned first). * Swearing and the like is fine, but * Please do not swear at other people. Disagree, disprove, "don't take their crap", all are fine. Namecalling, finger-pointing, anything that would cause people to lower their voices and look over at you at a cocktail party, all that is right out. This goes back to the theme of respect. * If someone consistently pisses you off, email/Whisper them and work it out. Or whisper me ("Andy"). Or take it off-site. In most cases, it comes down to a simple miscommunication fostered by The Internet.
The Rules for Grievances * Try to work it out amongst yourselves. Again, maybe use a respectful way of saying, "Cut it out", "We will have to agree to disagree", etc. * Email me. Check my profile (Andy) for my email address.
The Rules for Recruiting People: * Please feel free to tell people about this place directly. Please don't spam other groups or mailing lists, but feel free to link to threads and discussions here. * And pass along these guidelines to those you recruit.
The rules for Improvement: * Feel free to make suggestions, particularly about potential Categories or category splits.
Who to listen to: * Minister Overmind is the Master Admin account. You will probably never see him post again after 1.20.2006, unless something big is happening. * Andy is my Real Account, which I will use for posting, handing down admin verdicts, etc. We are the same person. My rule is cruel but just. Maybe a little of both, or a lot of neither. We'll see.
This forum was basically created to be a midway point between RPGNet and The Forge.
This site is a place to loosely describe Role Playing Games. Specifically, new ways to play RPGs. New ways of approaching the hobby.
I love the friendly geeky discussion on RPGNet ("What game would be best for Firefly???"). But I don't like the bitterness, the attitude, the bickering and the screaming.
I love the directed discussion of gaming theory-as-practice and actual play, gamebuilding of The Forge, but I also want my geek friendly gaming chatter, too.
So this is basically a discussion playground for role-playing games. Here's some ground rules about ettiquette and the use of these forums:
* LEARN HOW TO WHISPER. This is the first thing you should do. If you use "Whisper your comments to (optional)" when you post, that means that ONLY THAT PERSON can see your post. If you whisper to yourself, only YOU can see your post. If you see a post in a thread that is Another Color (yellow, brown, etc) that means that someone is Whispering to you. You can tell because after their name it says "to you". You can Whisper Back to them by clicking the "Whisper Back" next to their name in that post.
It can get awkward if you reply to Everyone when replying to someone whispering to you.
* If you really want game solid "from the ground up" building advice, go to The Forge, RPGNet or TheRPGSite depending on your flavor. Seriously, the Forge is the workshop for that stuff, and I'm not going to try to recreate that community here.
* Throwing us an idea about a game you have in mind? Are you a part-lurker who had some Little Idea you had to get off your chest and get some feedback for? Awesome. We'll try to help. But again, if you join this forum for the sole purpose of getting help with your game design, this is definitely the wrong place to start. Again, see The Forge, RPGNet, TheRPGSite.
* If you decide to stick around, become familiar with your Accounts page. You can change your stylesheet to a format which works for you, add RSS2 links to your gaming blog, and lots of other fun stuff. You can connect to others, all "Web2.0 style".
* You may bring to life agian a "dead" (old) discussion by posting to it. Someone may point out, "Hey, since that discussion there was this OTHER discussion Over Here (link) that you may want to post to instead", but otherwise there's no problem with reviving dead discussions, especially with new ideas. I would suggest, though, that if that old discussion was huge, or you had a change in thinking since that previous discussion, feel free to open a new discussion on the same or similar topic to keep them logically seperated.
* You can select what type of coding you want to use when you post: Plain Text, HTML, BBCode, Markdown. HTML is the "default" for this site (though Plain Text will always be supported as well), and the rest is in there just for comfort. There are some limitations to BBCode and Markdown which you may discover by trial and error.
* Editing your posts for grammar, spelling, or to reprocess your thoughts, or if you accidentally posted to the wrong discussion, etc is totally cool. Please don't overdo it with editing your posts to completely change the nature of your post.
* If you see something awesome at another forum or on someone's blog, post it here in the Links category. People can feel free to jump over to that area to discuss the topic there. Or, if you want to meta-discuss it here (as in "Why it's being discussed over there), that's cool too.
* If you want to tell us to look at something awesome you are working on, please use the Directed Self Promotion category.
* Actual Play: "Cool gaming moments" are fine. You don't have to build up a huge story to tell us the one or two awesome things that happened at gaming last night. A paragraph, a few sentences, are totally fine for an Actual Play post.
* Theory discussion here at Story Games: This isn't much of a "Theory" forum, it's more of a Praxis (in the Marxist sense: Discussion of unalienated gaming labor tied to practice and acts) place, where we talk about stuff but apply it to games directly. Discussion specifically related to creating, marketing, publishing, selling etc games is totally fine. I'll eventually put my foot down if I see too much theory not tied to practice with gentle moderation ("So, what does that have to do with gaming?" etc). There's plenty of other awesome places to discuss "theory before it hits your game or the table".
* Political, religious, sexual, or other topics that don't involve a game or gaming go Elsewhere. If you seriously relate them to gaming, then awesome! ...but tread lightly.
* Keep the taunts, bickering and personal attacks to a minimum: Like "Zero". Also, we're buddies with other forums and playgrounds.
* Finally, one last ending note on Whispers: Whispers are cool, but they are quite unlike "Private Messages" on other forums: You can't erase them yourselves. So if you get into a Whispered Discussion that you think is going to take a wihle to resolve, please feel encouraged to take the discussion to email. Mainly because it's going to be harder for you to come back and find/reference those discussions.
* There currently is only one moderator: Me. A few others have the ability to approve users (to cut the lagtime down) and edit posts (see why below), but they are not "Administrators/Moderators" for Story Games.
* No one gets banned here unless they mess with the zen of this place. It's up to me to decide what constitutes "messing with zen", but you'll probably be warned before you're banned. At the top of my head, only "starting a bunch of shit", "totally disregarding the purpose of the site", or "treating others with a lack of respect" would be bannable at this point. Banned users become Entombed.
* The Moderator (me) and the helpers can Edit Others' Posts. This is because if you forget to close a tag in HTML, or have another bizarre Markdown/BBCode mismatch, it can affect the rest of the posts in that thread. We can go in and fix your post if there's a technical problem. Otherwise, we would only edit your post to put a "thread starter" in the correct category.
* The Moderator (me and me only) has the ability to see Whispered comments. While I don't wade or gleefully follow private conversations, I only retain this feature to make sure the site isn't getting loaded/bogged down with private discussions (that may be best taken to email if they go on too long) and other general Anti-Terrorist Sneaky Surveillance and Legal Reasons (User A to User B: "Let's Conspire to Gang Up on User C!"/"Let's fly airplanes into the Story-Games Server!"/"Let us concoct and consume crystal methamphetamines while uploading cihld porn to Story Games!"). Your private discussions will remain private, but if the thought that I (and I alone) may wander in on a private hidden note to someone, please feel free to take your discussion to email.
Again, I don't abuse that ability (the forum doesn't seperate "Whispers" from "Normal" discussions in a meaningful way), but I wanted to be candid in the fact that I do have that ability.
* User or discussion Moderation: I may ask of you to stop some behavior that I find harmful/zen-killing. Please abide. For discussions, I wouldn't kill a discussion, but I would (rarely, though) ask for participants in a discussion to "get to the point".
* Finally, from time to time I will take minor/unimportant discussions (mostly "Forum Discussion" topics that have been Long since answered or simply don't apply anymore) and nuke them to keep the database light. Do not be alarmed, no "real" discussion will be targeted in this way.
Story Games... is the name of this website/forum, dedicated to the discussion of playing Role-Playing Games.
A Story Game... is another word for A Role-Playing Game. Defined as "A game where you play a role". This covers a lot, A LOT, of ground.
Most of the games we discuss are tabletop roleplaying games, much more than live action roleplaying, or computer/console gaming (not the focus of the site).
While all role-playing games are kosher to talk about here at Story Games, you'll probably see a lot of discussion focused towards smaller press games, or "dirty hippie games", like roleplaying games that focus more on relationships, or story-building, or on "our story" over "my character". That's cause there's not a lot of other places to discuss those sorts of things, so folks interested in that tended to gravitate here: Beyond that, exploring cool new ways to play any sort of game is a welcome topic here. The lesser-known games we discuss here often are no more important or "better" than other games or game styles (adventure games, etc). Nor by definition must the games we discuss here contain certain rules or playstyles, emphasis or de-emphasis on a central game-master, light/crunchy rules, etc.
Story Gamers are not better. We are not the Chosen Ones. We simply do things a little differently.