2011: A Year of Change

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In the grand tradition of The Superhero Hype! RPG Boards, apart of being intergrated within our little community of writers is the strive to constantly improve the way things function. And since we all saw a considerable amount of vocal support in the effort to come up with new rules in order to boost activity and make the games more welcoming of new players in The RPG Soapbox, I came to a decision in order to improve the quality of the RPG forums as a whole. About a month ago, I reached out and contacted three individuals that will now serve as apart of a four man team of forumrunners designed to help keep ontop of the ever-changing policies and guidelines that will both keep a strict reign over slacking players and endow a sense of freedom for our all-important newcomers.

Together, we've been coming up with a list of new rules to add to the old set, and with their permission, I will periodically release the new rules that will go into effect as of today. The gentlemen helping me in this little endeavour? You know their names well...

Byrd Man

wiegeabo

Keyser Soze

And of course, your's truly, Batman.

It is with great pleasure that I welcome these three in the monthly task of reviewing the state of the boards and offering new rules, based on your suggestions, to help reshape the forums as a whole into a more orderly fashion that shows little tolerance to slow-runners and support to the enthused gamers that have helped run this forum for the last three years of it's existence.

With that said, the first announcement is this.

SHORT-TERM RPG APPLICATIONS WILL NOW BE ACCEPTED

With a minimum of a trial five running short-term (or, "shorties") games at a time, anyone can now apply for this specialized type of game for any section. Though the approval process will be quite different from what's usually been seen, with a voting system that we shall establish, our hope is that these new games will allow new players a fresh start with their favorite characters, and old players a fresh start with new characters.

Look for more to come in the next few weeks.

 

The Walking Dead RPG is exempt, as far as I'm concerned. It was the proto-Shortie, so it might aswell stay and finish out it's run.

As far as the voting process, I say we should wait for the votes to come in. See how many votes each RPG gets before deciding that, and then run off from there to judge the future voting sessions accordingly.

 

That's true, though it'd be a shame to have to wait a month when the interest is so high now. Perhaps if we allowed the concepts that didn't go ahead to be fleshed out further in their application threads, the RPG's creator could continually work on the concept to submit for another month's vote.

Go right ahead. It was your idea, so it's only right that you be the one to see it through.

 

Alright, since it's been a week since the last new rule addition, it's past time for another. And since I'm feeling that there's a drastic need to get things going at a much quicker pace, I'll start doing them numerically - IE, 2 new rules this week, 3 the next, 4 after that, ect.

The two for this week...

Three Strikes, You're Out
Inspired by Andy C.'s admirable work in All-Star Marvel, aswell as input by wiegeabo, this is a new guideline to ensure the eradication of consistently fickle posters. Once anyone applies for a character they're expected to post, but some constantly apply, post once or twice, and leave shortly after. While real life is an understandable issue, three instances of this is enough for an RPG to have to withstand per season. So the rule is thus: You flake three times, and you can't apply for the rest of the season.

D&D Leniency
Basically, this rule allows Gamemasters to be far more assertive and actively involved in IC-based events. GMs will now have the control to move slower arcs along by bunnying mass NPCs, dropped characters, and even frequently inactive PCs in order to establish a more player friendly point of continuation. If you're planning an arc that involves several different PC's from all across the game, it will also now be a requirement to submit a basic rundown to the Gamemaster of the particular game for approval.

 

To be honest, you hadn't even crossed my mind for that one. I'd say you're in the clear for it's depiction of the flakers.