Ok, let's try this again! The hack destroyed our beautiful new forum, and with it the introductory post proposing what we were trying to do.
To reiterate, this forum is about discussing games at a higher level than "I need a combat mechanic"; it's about exploring similarities in games that we find good, or problems that seem to recur in games that we find "bad". I am envisioning that we'll have an "official" discussion once per week, and these will happen in "series". For example, we could do a series on "game mechanics", and the schedule would be something like:
Week 1: Action point allowance
Week 2: Auction
Week 3: Roll and move
Week 4: Simultaneous Action selection.
Or we could do a series on "common design problems", and it could look like:
Week 1: Kingmaker
Week 2: Analysis paralysis
Week 3: Multi player solitaire
I think, based on the feedback I got before the hack, that this will be "moderated", and people will sign up to "host" a week's discussion, which will involve little more than just writing an introductory couple of paragraphs indicating the topic at hand.
Of course, random posts to this Forum are welcome but they must be discussions about the craft of game design itself. Posts asking for help with a user's specific game mechanics will be moved or deleted. Posts asking about copyright info will be deleted unceremoniously.
To get the ball rolling, I'll start a thread proposing a "series", in which I'll discuss the kinds of things that could come up in such a series of discussions. It would be great if people could follow the model of that post and propose some "series" of their own. Once we have some suggestions, we'll pick a starting series and go with that for a few weeks, then switch to something new.
Of course, alternative suggestions of how things could/should work are also welcome!
Hope this will be a success!
Best,
Jeff
