I'm in favor of it. Most games get by with one thread; larger, more formal, or just more organized ones use an IC and OOC thread.
ER, meanwhile, is currently pushing half a dozen rapidly updated and frequently used threads. It's just on an entirely different scale than just about anything else we've got.
Mmm, done quite too much thinking on this. Piecewise, and probably anyone else pointing towards a subforum (subboard, is a much better term): Propose that it not be named something like the Einsteinian Roulette board, but as a category for RTDs which have such characteristics as novel-esque plots and multiple players.
Being the new curator of the RTD Library, the idea sprouted when I did my own work on the origins of the RtD: it's a forum-spinoff of tabletop games (Yes Sean, thanks for the leads You're awesome. Also, this page {tvtropes link} needs to reflect the origins, methinks. ). Meaning, that in order to not cross the line of specificity (personally? I think the quality of ER dropped given some players-with bargains struck to favor an imbalance between new and old but that's just my insight. *stares at the Doctor.* Though I'm not saying ER is bad. Noooo. :p The perseverance and dedication of the GM is something to aspire to..sans some jokes of his. :I But that's just me! ) or to give the notion that 'ER IS BEST RTD OVERALL', I ask to move for a more generalized board for these types of RTDs.
I'm supporting this proposal, of course. Just not making it explicit for one single RTD. Because that in itself offsets others who have high ambitions, and in making it generalized-it provides the space for future-RTDs of such magnitude to thrive in their own environment.
This is too vague for my tastes. An ER-only section has an explicit purpose- making ER easier to manage. A "novel-ish RTD" section is kind of hazy and serves the function this was originally brought up for only tangentially.
A distinction based on scale sounds good. Name the section "The Grand RTD Hall", and move any games large enough to require sectioning and organization into there. Of course, "large enough" may be subjective... it's not determined by size alone. A huge thread with a game like Multiworld Madness, for instance, even if it were akin to ER in size, would not require being moved - it's contained in one thread. ER is a game with large scale, and I see no other games of its kind around right now - a game with a mass of players that function in separate environments and at separate timescales, thus outright requiring being split apart into several individual threads, that progress at the same time. Not an IC/OOC split, but threads where the game progresses simultaneously.
I'd say if your game starts to grow beyond three equally important, regularly updated threads, it could be considered for moving into the Grand Hall.
And, of course, creating the subforum, whether as a Grand Hall or an Einsteinian Roulette section, has my full support. ^_^
The issue I have with this is that we've only got one of them and we've no particular reason to believe we'll be getting more any time soon. It seems strange to me to have a "Grand RTDs" section when the definition of a Grand RTD is "this game" or so bizarre that it's unlikely anyone else will ever use it. I'd rather just call a sentient space plague a sentient space plague at that point.
I didn't like this idea in the first place. If all the forumgames were in one big pile, nothing bad would really happen, that is what I think. A bit of chaos, of course, but a proper work of moderator placing inactive games in some kind of archieve could solve even that.
I think there's some merit to separating things out just for the sake of keeping them in reasonably-sized chunks. I'll agree that the distinction between RTDs and "other" forum games isn't always a particularly useful or informative one, but I still think it's convenient to have two boards with
some common qualities, each of which moves half as quickly as they would in one big pile.
Wait, wouldn't an ER subforum be a subforum of RTD, which is a subforum of Forum games?
At which point we'll need an OOC subforum for our ER subforum of the RTD subforum.
In any case, I believe the forum can handle nested subforums well. Well, mechanically well; I guess the social implications don't always work out so nicely.