Standard Roles for Newbie Games?

[mith]

There's probably some wording changes I would make (I'll think on it), but obviously I approve of the idea.

[mith]

pj, I will keep your objection here in mind. It is

not

my intention to make everything on the site standardized, or to have too many rules, or anything along those lines. And if anyone ever feels I am going too far with something like this, feel free to shout at me whether by PM or in public.

I don't agree with you here, though. We're talking about Newbie games, which are for the benefit of the new players.

I have no doubts that you can run a game with your own version of the rules and roles and flavor and so on and not have any problems, but I also wouldn't have expected some other very experienced mods to get so carried away with flavor that it started affecting gameplay. And that's the whole point. I think it's gotten so ingrained into the community that "Mod is God" that mods have sometimes forgotten that their purpose is to

run the game

, not to entertain themselves.

I've seen too many cases of careless wording from mods, or seemingly minor changes to the rules that just aren't thought through at all, and we need to avoid that in the Newbie games.

That said, I think your suggestion of leaving the order and wording up to the mod is probably a fine one, though I do think we should have a good standard for reference, and some documentation (whether just in these discussion threads or written up somewhere on the wiki) so that everyone understands the intent of the rule/requirement.

[mith]

I remember when it first came up in scumchat when we were discussing it with Mith. The biggest factor was that it was confusing for newbies. This seemed to be the factor that caused Mith to go over the mini normals and such, to address the normal issue of flavor and such.

IH, what Flay is trying to explain to you is that the "Normal" guidelines have been there in their current form for over a year (before they were even on the wiki, they were sent to the List Mods for inclusion in the appropriate waiting list threads), and in some less-defined form for pretty much the entire 5 years this site has been running. The discussion thread that I started this week came about because there are a lot of people that don't seem to know what the definition is, and there are several that do know what it is and continue to ignore it. So, I started a thread to make it clear that those are the rules right now, and they need to be followed, while at the same time opening up a discussion on whether they should be changed.

The scumchat discussion didn't prompt me to go over the mini normals (or I would have done it then), nor was the scumchat discussion the first time "normal" had been discussed. I was just in Little Italy looking at some of the games (I don't even remember why, probably looking at the Opens to see how they were going) and noticed that over half of the supposedly Normal games weren't.

(Just to clear some things up. You should never assume things about why I do something. Particularly when your assumption makes any kind of logical sense. Just asking for trouble. )