I used to browse /v/ in all of my spare time but then I decided 8 hours a day was too much and I stopped

Whining about people being mean to 4chan is just about the least substantive thing you can be saying right now while still remaining vaguely on topic.

Do we have anyone in this conversation right now from YMTC or Worldbuilding or the other RP boards? I feel like we could use some more perspectives here.

ymtc is working perfectly fine and nothing discussed here is likely affect anything there

As a member of any of those boards, my thoughts on this are the following: I thought our mission statement was "We're not the crappy Wizard's forum!" and that was pretty much it.

Do we really need a treatise on our perceived journey into the future of web foruming? I don't think so. We are a web forum of refugees who gather and talk about nerdy things (mostly Magic and D&D as that was the main focus of our former home). We are now the "home" of one of the best MTG flavor teams that doesn't actually work at WotC. Our D&D board is a little rough, but mostly because not very many D&D nerds made the journey with us. That may change in time.

Outside of "Hey, did you know there is an awesome forum that has most of the things you like about the WotC forums but with far less of the ****. You should come visit." I can't think of a "Mission Statement" that we really need to brand ourselves with.

Nope. Although I am mildly curious as to how you propose being destructive on the forums without modding powers.
Whoa there! Can we say "****?" Seriously, brah, "They're being mean so I don't want anything that doesn't exactly cater to my interests?" You really don't see what's wrong with that?

Ignoring that, what you got from the proposal for this place and what I, and apparently at least two other people, got from this place are very, very different. See, I was under the impression this is a refugee forum for everyone fleeing the sinking WotC ship. That includes OTTers, 4e players, or whatever other bizarre crap was going on at WotC that I didn't care about. And the fact that there's an OTR kinda backs me up over you, so you got a source on that "promise?"

Of course, judging from certain run-ins, I maybe have just missed some "No OTTers allowed" signs posted around, but that's an entirely separate subject.
Same.
Of course we'd actually need less ****, but that's still a good model to strive for.

I agree that these boards have no place for destructive discussion/behavior but I don't realistically see a place for such going away. And the mission statement should not simply be we are awesome or we are not bad like the wotc boards.

Yeah, "we aren't Wizards" is not a way to advertise ourselves in the long term, or even the short term really.

Like, how many people is that really going to net us? Not a lot, I think.

The point of having a mission statement and a focus is that it gives us something to attract new users with. We need that because if we DON'T have it, we will die slowly of attrition and probably won't last more than a year or two at best.

This is basically kind of pointless as a thing to bring up right now, since this rationale has already been explained many times.



The forums were pitched to F&S and YMTC as creative hubs. In fact, YMTC is where the idea of the forum's primary mission statement being to support creative works came from in the first place. I have not yet seen a single proposal that matches that as a mission statement. "Don't be Wizards" and "Be awesome" aren't mission statements, they're lazy applause statements and buzzwords.

Yarium is still probably closest to a strong mission statement, but I don't think it's yet specific enough to really distinguish this from Wizards or Salvation, who are our major competitors.

The only reasonable alternate proposal would be something BESIDES creation and showcasing that Wizards and Salvation don't already cover. Salvation has tournaments and spoilers, Wizards has official clout and lots of different sections for different formats, including MTGO and DotP.

What have we got that they don't got?

"Awesome" doesn't cut it.

Azure, if what you're saying about the D&D players is accurate re: not many of them joining us, don't you think it's worth considering why that's the case, and what we could be doing differently to attract them? Just saying "maybe that will change" isn't really that useful, right? What do you think has them staying away in droves?

My off-the-cuff guess would be because Wizards did a great job of chasing a lot of D&D players off to ENworld even before they nuked their own forums into uselessness, so there weren't that many left to come over here in the first place.

There is also a few big rifts in the D&D fanbase that aren't healing anytime soon. Trying to keep a decent amount of D&D players talking with each other without devolving into edition wars is an almost pointless exercise. Right now many 3rd Ed/Pathfinder players are already entrenched over at ENworld, 4th and 5th Ed fans are fighting it out on what's left of the Wizards forum, and 1st and 2nd Ed fans are too old to use a computer (I'm joking here, but still...). Unless we have a way to become the beacon of 4th or 5th Ed, we're not going to get any real D&D players coming in for much.

We don't have someone keeping this forum up to date with news from WotC. There are no threads for Monday's "Legend's & Lore," Tuesday's "Wandering Monsters," or Friday's "Rule of Three." We don't have a thread complaining about the current shuttering of both the Dungeon and Dragon monthly e-zines for DDI subscribers. We really just don't have a good amount of D&D players to talk about these things with to generate a critical mass of posts to lend to the idea that people should post here.

Why not?
No one's answered my question yet: Why? Why do we need one?
Something similar has worked for Google quite well.
Only if by "strong" you mean "terrible."
Why not? They suck, we don't. Minmax is surviving quite well, and they don't have other content.
Recruit them? Or we could make handbooks, start things like Tempest's Weekly Optimization Showcase, or just googlebomb to get fresh blood.
Because nobody knows or cares about this place right now. Nobody but me and draco were PEG/PEO regulars who moved here. Nobody else bothered to more

So how hopeless is the D&D situation, in your estimation? How could we be providing content that would draw people here?

Magic has the advantage that three whole communities decided to transplant themselves. Are there any smaller, insular D&D communities that we could poach?

No idea how to get around the Edition Wars problems...

Wait, is there a way we could become a "beacon for 5e?" Leaving aside the question of whether or not we SHOULD which I'm sure people will have strong opinions about, is it even possible? What would we have to do?

Is it even worth trying to attract D&D players, or should Magic just take over as the official core of the site? Maybe trying to be a general gamer hub isn't actually going to work.

Outside of stuff everywhere else, we really can't.
If anyone wants to try poaching PEGgerland back at WOTC, I'd bet we could nab a few people.
Uh, by not having them? It's not that complicated.
We really can't. I mean, I guess a few of the theory-minded people here could write ****, but I think anyone with enough understanding of the game to do that will probably hate it beyond words.
Yes.
Hell no.

In order:
1.) All is not lost. If you want this to be a place D&D folk go, a good first step would be offering them content. Appointing a person to post weekly/daily Mothership info with links back to the content would help. We all know WotC doesn't really read or care about what is discussed in those threads on their own site. Just having the info here to talk about beats having it there.
2.) For insular D&D communities, I'd aim for "What's a DM to do?" "What's a player to do?" and "Character Op." I'm pretty sure we probably have some OTTers here already.
3.) Really, avoiding those is contingent on who ends up here. Being a big fan of both 2nd and 4th Ed, I won't go out of my way to disparage 3rd Ed, but I can and have been drawn into edition war fights defending my games against the idiotically incorrect and uninformed things people have said about them. My guess would be judicious moderation and people willing to not be jerks.
4.) I have no idea how we can become a beacon of 5th Ed players. Right now I don't think it's going to be worth ever righting about. That being said, with 5th Ed soon to become a thing, 4th Ed players are going to be looking for a home soon. That and maybe a stronger flavor forum for D&D might be a good start.

Would you be able to do outreach to those insular communities?

Is there anything we can offer that... what was it, ENworld? Is there anything we can do that they aren't already doing better?

One of those insular communities wont be coming over here due to an issue with moderation, even when the mod team did offer a compromise.

ENworld. And I'm not really sure since I'm a 4th Ed player and not really their main demographic.

"Don't be evil" is actually Google's Code. Their Mission Statement is, "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."


It has the benefit of being similar to two other proposed mission statements. I would hazard a guess that many of us are thinking along the same lines, and were led to believe it would be the case by miss_bun.

Yarium: “To be a stable and organized site where members are free to discuss and create content for the games they love in a respectful manner.”
Me: "To serve as a creative hub for fan-generated tabletop gaming content."
Tevish: "To be a friendly and functional site for members to discuss topics regarding and engage in projects related to Magic: the Gathering and/or Dungeons & Dragons."

I feel like there's generally a shared interest that can be derived.


When you ask again how people without mod powers can be destructive for a community rather than constructive, remind yourself of this quoted comment.


Links to the mothership would be a good place to start within the forum, just for sparking discussion. But I think a front-end, something of a "main site" as a way to ensure that creative content is visible to newcomers, something that lets people know at a glance what this site is, is best.


Not being well established, this site in a much better position to keep it from rearing its head here, with good moderation.


Yes, it's worth trying to attract D&D players. And general tabletop gaming players. I worry about "general {medium-agnostic} gaming" because I don't think we have the core to step into the video game world, or the contact game (sports) world.

I think our focus should be fan-generated content; a "mod" community for both mechanics and settings.

Which sounds a lot more like "have a kickass forum" than everything else that's been suggested.
So, to you, "destructive" means "right?" Ooookay, then...

No. It doesn't.

"Have a kickass forum," is a good overall goal, but it's virtually meaningless. It's an applause light. Someone says "kickass forum" and we're all supposed to cheer. "Don't be evil" is similar.

That doesn't work. What's a kickass forum anyway? What's it for you? For me? For someone new that comes here?

A mission statement says something about what we want to actually do. "Sure," you'll say, "make a kickass forum." But as I pointed out, that's meaningless. How are you going to make it? In which direction are you going to take it?

That's why you need a clear mission statement. It gives you a direction. It makes it clear what this community is all about.

Unfortunately, I don't really have a lot of time to dance tonight, but it should be obvious you've purposefully misrepresented my words, in another great example of destructive resolution. So instead, I'll just suggest some reading.
http://faculty.smu.edu/chrisl/courses/psyc4341/5361consvsdest.htm

In any case, "make a kickass forum" would be an alright mission statement if there wasn't the level of competition for such a thing as there already is. Also, making a kickass forum reads much more like its about the functional mechanics of the place, which is right now being voluntarily built off of PHPBB code. I don't see us making a gamechanging forum anytime soon, with forum features unlike anything that's out there. It makes it sound like our focus is on the functionality of the forum itself, rather than its community.

I have liked the "kickass" part, though. But I feel the statement needs to be more focused than just "forum."

A bunch o' stuff. I'm going to reply to them out of order, because I want to have some things up near the top.



We don't need one, not in the literal sense of the word anyway. We certainly could lock this thread and keep on chuggin' along.

What a mission statement does is give things a focus. When questions come up such as, "Why do we have filters?" or, "Why isn't this against the CoC?" the mission statement helps to start the process of answering them by getting everybody on the same page right from the beginning of the discussion.



PS covered Google's mission statement; I actually thought "Do no evil" was their mission statement, but then the "index blah blah" sounds familiar. And I'm too lazy to, er, Google it right now.

"Be awesome" could very much be a mission statement. It's vague, so it doesn't offer guidance when there are questions. But when it comes time to add new features and such, "Be awesome" could very well offer guidance.

So yeah, I agree here. Short, "hip" statements can be a mission statement.




Yep, this is what needs to be done to get D&D, Pathfinder, whatever RPG here. They need to know about it; and then once they know about it, they need a reason to want to stick around.



I'm not sure what PEG and PEO are, but yes - I agree with this sentiment as well. Nobody knows, so they can't care.



I think the idea that somebody else mentioned - WotC drove them away before this fiasco - is part of it. The Char Op group, for example, pulled up stakes and left WotC long ago. A poke through the player advice thread a bit ago didn't turn up any sign of the community that was there - character design contests, etc used to be hosted there on a regular basis.

We need to do two things, I think, to get that area rolling.

1) Advertise. Whether it's links in sigs at other places, or popping into threads on WotC, GitP, Paizo, etc and drop links, or whatever. We need people to know we exist. As you said, getting the Magic folks was a bit easier, because Bun was able to grab three entire communities and bring them all here with their projects. That gave it all instant benefit - they had the space and the will, and off they went.

2) Content. It doesn't do a damn bit of good to get somebody to come over if they get here and find nothing in the RPG section except chirping crickets.



I'm not too worried about edition wars, to be honest. If we end up with edition wars here, it means we attracted people. The quick solution is to just split the forum at that point and give each edition that's warring their own space. So I think this part is manageable if and when it happens.



Yes, it would be possible. We'd have to do almost exactly what EN World did for 3e/3.5 - a daily news round up, lots of discussion, etc. That's how they built themselves - by simply gathering up links of news about 3e as it came it. New releases and their release dates, errata links on the site, articles about whatever on the site, interesting threads. All that was collated on EN World, and that drew an audience. Then the forums came after I believe.



Some have already answered, but I'll chip in. Yes, it's worth trying to get RPG folks of some sort here. That makes the community larger, more diverse. And that makes for more interesting conversations.