On Thu, 15 Dec 2005, Roger Burton West wrote:

> (Insert here my standard rant about how blogs and web-BBSes are
> reinventing newsgroups and mailing lists, only _really badly_.)

Web boards, yes.  Bulletin boards developed by people with no 
background in them.  What amazes me is how popular they are.

Blogs are a different creature... or a multitude of different 
creatures.  I post essays on a website.  The technology I use to do it 
is mostly irrelevant.  That I allow comments on my essays...  I've 
considered turning that off, because I don't _want_ to have long 
conversations around my essays on a website.  The comment system is 
primarly for feedback to the author, not round-table discussion. 
I've considered piping the relevant comments into the TAORP mailing 
list.

A big difference between blogs and mailing lists is an important 
one... there are times that I _don't_ want everyone's thoughts on a 
subject.  If I want to read Vincent Baker talk about game design, I 
don't necessarily want to read the thoughts, opinions and arguments of 
two hundred other people.  In fact, Vincent's blog has an interesting 
rule... you are only allowed to _ask questions_ in the comments on his 
blog.  (Though he's got this weird "side note" system in which you can 
make "asides" that aren't shown with the regular comments.)  Vincent's 
blog is very much about exploring _Vincent's_ ideas, not the ideas of 
his readers.

I'm suffering from information overload... I don't have time to read a 
hundred _discussions_ a day.  But I do have time to read the distilled 
thoughts of certain people whose opinions I respect.

Of course, there are blogs that ought to be mailing lists... 
sometimes my posts generate a lot of discussion that I really didn't 
expect or even want.  That's when I wish there was an easy way to push 
that discussion onto a mailing list.

> Looking at "What's the game about?", I find that I'm hearing a lot of
> this "basic story" idea recently - the pitch-style description of "what
> do the PCs do in the game". While this may be OK for some of the very
> specific games we're seeing these days (DitV is a canonical - sorry -
> example), I think it does a disservice to many of the more interesting
> worlds.

But in my case, we're not talking about the story dictated by a 
published game, we're talking about the story of _my campaign_. 
There's a big difference between the author telling me what the story 
should be about and me deciding for myself what it should be about.

My campaign has no feeling of coherency to it.  No strong reason why 
the PCs fight crime together.  I'd hoped to develop that in play with 
a couple strong plot threads, but it's not developing as clearly as 
I'd hoped.

-- 
Carl D Cravens (raven@phoenyx.net)                Gamers List Owner
   [  My Roleplaying Blog -- http://raven.phoenyx.net/mutterings/  ]
* Sysop ('sih sop) n.: The guy laughing at your typing.
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