I struggled a bit with wording this post, because I sympathize with a lot of your sentiments, and I understand a lot of your intentions. One of the things I value about our community is the freedom and creativity it allows — and part of that, to me, comes from not putting up too much red tape. I value, for example, how anybody can get started with roleplay even while their map claim is pending. And I similarly value how anybody can jump into creating a storyline without needing to apply for approval or have all the details figured out.
Wars
I think there’s a difference between moderators keeping an eye on our rules, and getting too heavily involved in what storylines are and aren’t allowed. Having a neutral third party is valuable, but I’m more skeptical of putting up an approval process and limiting the freedom in our community. To me, it feels like we now have a better recognition as a community that, maybe, we all have more fun when we actually plan out our wars… and I think that we’d be better off working towards that goal communally, rather than litigiously. With any rule, we’d probably end up in a gray area or with different interpretations at some point, and while not seeing eye-to-eye is perfectly natural, I am a bit concerned that we’d end up with petty squabbles over the ‘letter of the law’ rather than the intentions.
Perhaps there’s a path forward that doesn’t involve putting up more rules or restrictions? I’m thinking we could maybe have a stickied topic on roleplaying wars that recommends things like planning in advance, being extra careful with the consent rule, and so forth. I found guides like “Realism and Population” and “How to Write the News” to be extremely useful, and I would imagine one on wars would be useful as well.
If we have lingering concerns over the state of our war storylines — and it seems like we do — we can and should have open, honest conversations about that, and work towards deciding and adopting ‘best practices’ as a community. In general, we rarely need our mods to put their foot down and override a player’s own wishes, and that system works because we all have good intentions here. With things like realism, for example, a lot of ‘enforcement’ just comes from discussing and listening to others’ feedback.
Wiki
I’m also skeptical of the wiki requirement, for a few reasons:
- Not everyone values the same kind of information. GDP might be a ‘critical detail’ for someone who’s more interested in trade and economics, but maybe not so much for someone who just wants to write stories about their country’s official religion.
- Making people produce data doesn’t mean it will be high-quality. We already have issues like this with voluntary data submissions (if you have an HDI over 1.000, I’m looking at you
), and I’m concerned that if we put new roleplayers on the spot and make them come up with a number, those values might not be so realistic. - Not everyone has the same style of roleplay. Some of us may value worldbuilding through narratives, stories, and characters, while others may value laying out facts in a wiki-like format. I’m wary of prescribing a ‘right’ or ‘required’ way of doing things.
I’m afraid that I have to disagree there. Both platforms have their advantages and disadvantages. For example, the forums are much, much easier to pull data from, and that makes it possible to do things like compile the national survey answers automatically into a spreadsheet. I’m skeptical that would be possible at all with the wiki.
Moderators
I’m more ambivalent on this — I trust our current moderators, and if it’s something they’d like to pursue, I wouldn’t mind.