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[EuchreJack]

As Real Estate in the the Forum Games & Roleplaying section is scarce, I'd like to dump the broader discussions onto General Questions.
Novel (Scoops) shouldn't have a monopoly on spamming threads in General Questions, after all...

[TamerVirus]

Why don’t we just bring back the old Gaming Block thread.
Who cares if it’s old and over a couple hundred pages!

[RoseHeart]

Why don’t we just bring back the old Gaming Block thread.
Who cares if it’s old and over a couple hundred pages!

Fine with me.

[Man of Paper]

Aren’t you supposed to have taken a break?

[NUKE9.13]

Aren’t you supposed to have taken a break?

As I mentioned elsewhere, there's a difference between being annoyed at actions that are inherently annoying, and being annoyed at trivial actions just because a specific person is doing them. While I agree that roseheart should probably be taking some time off to calm down, it's not your place to mandate he do so.

To get a little more on-topic with regards to forum games, the basic point I wanted to make earlier was that there isn't really a critical difference between forum games and other art forms where professionals do exist, so a career in forum games doesn't seem entirely impossible of an idea (and apparently it already exists, as Nuke mentioned in their examples). How feasible it really is right now is another consideration though.

There is an important difference- not an insurmountable one, but a significant one- audience size. The average forum game has a pretty small audience- for many, the audience is just the people playing. And often, the more players a game has, the less enjoyable it becomes for each individual player (and the more work it becomes for the GM to manage).

[Chevaleresse]

y'know i feel there's actually something that hasn't been addressed properly here: the section is called Forum Games and Roleplaying as if those are the same category but they're really not. There's definitely two distinct groups of people, one for each of those things, with very different norms and ideas about how games should be run.

Not really sure where I'm going with this but I think acknowledgement of that divide is good.

[Iris]

There are definitely different corners of Bay12 - the people who play Arms Races aren't usually the people who play FEFs. I... also don't know where I'm going with this, but it's something we should be cognizant of.

[EuchreJack]

y'know i feel there's actually something that hasn't been addressed properly here: the section is called Forum Games and Roleplaying as if those are the same category but they're really not. There's definitely two distinct groups of people, one for each of those things, with very different norms and ideas about how games should be run.

Not really sure where I'm going with this but I think acknowledgement of that divide is good.

While there is certainly considerable overlap, Roleplaying generally gets the short end of the stick being shoehorned into Forum Games & Roleplaying.
So yeah, maybe two different categories would make sense. Even though that would lead to the inevitable "Your Game needs to be in THAT topic, not THIS topic"

[Man of Paper]

This whole subforum exists as a mercy gifted by Toady. They overlap well enough in that they're forum-based gaming on a forum not in any way actually meant for that. There's no real need to talk about how different they are when we gotta stick together anyways.

[EuchreJack]

This whole subforum exists as a mercy gifted by Toady. They overlap well enough in that they're forum-based gaming on a forum not in any way actually meant for that. There's no real need to talk about how different they are when we gotta stick together anyways.

Fixed that for you. 

But more seriously, I recall when this was part of Other Games.  So the Other Games section is who got the real gift.

[RoseHeart]

I've been diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum myself.

As someone who is also a state-certified autist

I will observe though, this is statistically significant. 2% of the population are like us. So that all 3 of use were attracted to hosting forum games is something, rather than say, we all met up on an Autism discussion forum or something.

I'll let someone else do the math but yeah, that's nuts. I never thought of this hobby as a natural or organic destination to arrive upon, just a random string of freak occurances and this was where I landed.

I think I like it...

(let alone "high functioning" specifically)

Holy crap. Temple Grandin made a forum game for cows.

[Chevaleresse]

This whole subforum exists as a mercy gifted by Toady. They overlap well enough in that they're forum-based gaming on a forum not in any way actually meant for that. There's no real need to talk about how different they are when we gotta stick together anyways.

i personally think it would actually be better to separate them out, if only to make it easier to communicate intentions when posting games. there's a WIDE gap in expectations and it makes it difficult on occasion to get stuff off the ground, or prevent conflict when the GM and player are operating on different standards

I've been diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum myself.

As someone who is also a state-certified autist

I will observe though, this is statistically significant. 2% of the population are like us. So that all 3 of use were attracted to hosting forum games is something, rather than say, we all met up on an Autism discussion forum or something.

I'll let someone else do the math but yeah, that's nuts. I never thought of this hobby as a natural or organic destination to arrive upon, just a random string of freak occurances and this was where I landed.

I think I like it...

(let alone "high functioning" specifically)

Holy crap. Temple Grandin made a forum game for cows.

i am autistic, fuck does this mean

[Iris]

There's something about these kinds of online spaces that attract people with autism - myself included - to them. Personally, I think it might have something to do with difficulties in social situations, and how it is much easier to deal with people over the internet.

i personally think it would actually be better to separate them out, if only to make it easier to communicate intentions when posting games. there's a WIDE gap in expectations and it makes it difficult on occasion to get stuff off the ground, or prevent conflict when the GM and player are operating on different standards

Hmm. Do you think it would be better to have, say, one forum for mechanics-focused games and one forum for narrative-focused games?

[NUKE9.13]

I am [not a great forum game host], but I am better than I was last year, and the year before that. And I bet you wern't born at your current level.

So, setting aside the drama involved in that post, it does raise an interesting question- how does one improve at running forum games?

One aspect is obviously writing. Better writing makes for a better game, all else being equal. Improving at writing, at least in my case, is a matter of A)reading a lot, B)writing a lot, C)compulsively re-reading stuff I've written and identifying mistakes (spelling & grammar) and awkward flow (like using the same word several times in short succession (unless it's done intentionally)- English has so many synonyms that it is almost always possible to avoid doing so. Like, instead of using "said" every time someone says something, I use "said" "explained" "answered" "asked" "exclaimed" "conceded"... you get the picture). I think there's also an element of 'talent' involved- talent is a loaded word, but I mean, like, I'm obsessed with details, so it's probably easier for me to notice my own mistakes.

Another aspect is gameplay. Like, all the writing in the world doesn't matter if the gameplay sucks. I'm less confident in this aspect. Improving gameplay is probably the same basic process- playing a lot of games, running a lot of games, and self-examination of games I've run to identify issues. I've not run that many games, which is why I'm less confident about gameplay.
I think it's probably possible to break this aspect down into smaller aspects. One such aspect is considering what a game looks like to someone outside of your own head. I know what I'm going for when I run a game, I understand all the mechanics, but someone who's coming in blind has no idea. Even if the game is perfectly balanced and ingeniously put together, if I can't make it clear to a player how things work, it's not going to run smoothly. Chiaroscuro had this issue, I think, where I didn't communicate how Influence was supposed to play out properly, which led to players being unsure of how to approach it.

I think this is a more interesting thing to discuss than the mystery of why autistic people would gravitate towards a small insular community connected to a niche game where you need to salivate at the idea of details to enjoy it, and it could be useful for folks looking to improve their game-running ability. Myself included, actually.

[Chevaleresse]

Hmm. Do you think it would be better to have, say, one forum for mechanics-focused games and one forum for narrative-focused games?

More or less what I'm suggesting, yeah.