Nostalgia(?)

[Steerpike]

[blockquote=(The Late) Natural 20]- The installation of daily review groups: Based on the old model of reciprocal review, a daily review group would see everyone in a group, made of 4 or 5 users, comment on any updates in the group, seeing that a small number of people see in-depth support and criticisms on their work. This idea is taken from the "Daily Sketch Groups" of conceptart.org, a well-esablished forum that uses this model to maintain motivation among aspiring artists.[/blockquote]

I think this idea could work really well.  What do others think?

Kindling, Knife's Edge is always worth the wait.

[SDragon]

And now, I bid you adieu, comrades.  I can be reached through the e-mail address rose(dot)of(dot)montague(at)gmail(dot)com

It's been a good run,

~ Natural 20, Rose of Montague, Crit

Are you leaving too?!

[Llum]

Thanks for the instructions!  I'll work on whipping up a Cadaverous Earth review badge...

[blockquote=Llum]...because its intimidating[/blockquote]

Heh is that primarily the "wall o' text" effect, Llum?

Actually not I'm afraid of the "wall o' text", I like it. The more to read the better. The main thing that intimidates me is that your setting is so well done in my opinion. I don't find I have anything meaningful to say, so I just kind of keep quiet.

To Seraphine_Harmonium

The main reason I haven't posted in your Avayevnon thread is that it has something like 5 pages of comments, and the way I am is I couldn't post in it until I've read every post (its just the way i am). I'm sure I'll get to it eventually, but I I haven't put aside a time to do it yet, so my apologize.

 [/url]  [/code]

"Tough Worlds To Live In? That sounds interesting
[/quote]

Thank you very much, I tried to make the title as interesting sounding as possible (its an ongoing experiment to see what a good way to entice people to post in my threads)

- Real criticism: The community here has gradually grown more opposed to any feedback that isn't overwhelmingly positive.  I know of quite a few settings that really should be scrapped and rewritten to save any dignity.  What the guild does is new and founded on innovation, but that doesn't mean there can't be any guidelines on making a good setting or improving a concept.  A setting can be judged just like any other piece of literature, and therefore improved.  Quite frankly, the users here deserve more constructive feedback than a "good job" every few weeks.  Put some teeth into your criticisms and maybe we'll see some improvement.

In echo of my previous statement, I support this whole heartedly, be brutal if you feel the need to be about what I've posted. I would appreciate it.

[Seraph]

[blockquote=(The Late) Natural 20]- The installation of daily review groups: Based on the old model of reciprocal review, a daily review group would see everyone in a group, made of 4 or 5 users, comment on any updates in the group, seeing that a small number of people see in-depth support and criticisms on their work. This idea is taken from the "Daily Sketch Groups" of conceptart.org, a well-esablished forum that uses this model to maintain motivation among aspiring artists.[/blockquote]

I think this idea could work really well.  What do others think?

Kindling, Knife's Edge is always worth the wait.

Review Swapping--granted, not exactly what was suggested here--had at least a degree of success in the past.  The issue (which is always going to be an issue) is getting people to actually follow through and swap reviews.  In any case, there's a thread for Review Swapping; a thread that may be in need of a little necromancy . . .

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Another issue of getting people to do review swapping is what does a person do if they can't think of anything meaningful to say, negative or positive?

[Wensleydale]

I, too, visit this site on a regular basis. However, I stopped posting setting information for two reasons:

1) I didn't want to start NEW settings and watch them crumble into inactivity after eight posts because I couldn't think up new ideas for them and had a different setting already in my head (remember the days when I was producing a new setting every few weeks?)

2) I felt I'd finished (or semi-finished) Wonders on the Wiki.

3) I find finding things to comment on in most peoples' settings extremely difficult. I used to look them over and say 'Very good! Would love to hear more on...' but then the community started to complain about such 'useless' feedback, so I stopped. I still flick through settings, but unless I can find some criticism or a point I'm not clear on, I stay silent.

4) I had less free time to devote to working on the guild.

5) I found my settings got very few reviews, especially after they'd stopped being new settings.

6) Some of that cameraderie has gone. Like Seraphine, I remember the 'good old days' when you could recognise any member's login name on sight and had a reasonably good idea of who they were. I don't know whether maybe it's because I haven't bothered to get to know newer members, or what, but I don't seem to know most of the people around here anymore.

And now everyone else seems to be leaving, or hardly ever around. Cymro, ElDo, Luminous Crayon, Crit, Darkxarth, Silvercat, Kindling - all members I hardly or never see online. There are numerous others, too. I don't know - I suppose I've turned into one of those old people who sit on benches and moan about the good old days and how kids these days don't know they're born and other similar rhetoric. I should probably make more of an effort to be around, but studying and work takes up a lot of my time.

[Steerpike]

To quote Luminous Crayon's very helpful "Art of Criticism" stickied in the Homebrew thread, which might have been forgotten:

[blockquote=Luminous Crayon]Part 1: Dishing It Out

It doesn't matter what you say if you don't get people to listen. Being antagonistic in your communication will alienate your intended audience, so that even if your ideas are absolutely wonderful, your readership will be less likely to take them to heart. I am of the opinion that no matter what you want to say about another's work, there is a way to say it tactfully and respectfully (and therefore, usefully.)

Start With Something Good
This might be the one thing I'll say in this thread that I think is most important, even though it may seem a bit trivial. But whenever you give anyone feedback, begin by pointing out something they've done well. Starting with negative feedback puts your audience on the defensive and makes them less receptive to the remainder of your ideas. So even if 90% of your review is going to consist of things that need improvement, the first thing you mention ought to be something from the other 10%-- point out one of the things you think was really on-target.

But It Doesn't All Have to Be Good
Many people walk on eggshells when they give feedback, because they are trying very hard to avoid offending anybody. This behavior is generally counterproductive, since negative feedback (that is, pointing out flaws that need to be corrected) is a very valuable tool. Imagine if I were to give violin lessons without ever telling my student when a note is out of tune. I might think I am sparing the student's ego, but in reality, I'm just preventing the student from improving her intonation, by not giving her the negative feedback that would help her polish her skills.

Obviously, there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. Waltzing into a thread to say, "Your work is terrible! Absolute rubbish!" will do nobody any good. It is not hard to give negative feedback without starting fights, however, if you are careful how you say things. (Personally, I tend to delete and rewrite large chunks of reviews-- sometimes three or four times-- when I think what I am saying has the potential to be taken harshly.) But I find that when I receive reviews, the most useful comments are the ones that point out the flaws in my work so I can fix them. So please, don't be shy about doing so-- just do it gently.

Be Precise
The more detail you can give in your review, the more useful it will be to the setting's author. Let the setting's author know exactly what you are talking about when you make your comments. (This is why my reviews of others' work are generally full of quotes of the original material. There are plenty of other ways to to it, of course.)

Here are some sample responses to an imaginary setting, all describing the same thing, but ranging in order from least precise and least useful to most precise and most useful.
'¦
Hey, I really like your race information.
'¦
Hey, I really like your version of elves.
'¦
Hey, I really like the amount of detail you put into elven customs and traditions.
'¦
Hey, I really like the whole idea of elven shazam tradition, and the way it affected the outcome of the War of the Three Tribes. In particular, I like the way your work on customs and traditions seems to be interwoven into history and global politics (see also: the lizard armies' behavior at the Council of Middlemarch), because it makes it feel very believable and real.


Embrace the Power of Questions
Especially because the work on these boards tends to be complex works-in-progress, a few well-crafted questions can be very effective. Questions serve many purposes in a review, and are probably the most efficient way to deliver a lot of impact in a very short comment. When you ask a question in a review, you are doing all of the following at once: 1.) pointing out something that may be insufficiently explained, 2.) encouraging the setting author to provide more detail on that subject, 3.) encouraging the setting author to consider some aspect of their work from an outside point of view, and 4.) indicating an are of the work that you find personally interesting.

Questions open up discussion in ways that mere statements rarely do, and because of that, they are particularly useful for keeping a setting talked about. Personally, if I am going to get a one-sentence response to some of my work, I much prefer a good question to a "Hey, good job!", because the question allows me to answer it, while the compliment just gives me an opportunity to say, "Thanks, glad you liked it."

Recognize Relativity
Music theorist David Lewin remarked that when writing about a piece of music, deciding between "I like it" and "I don't like it" is not as valuable or as useful as deciding between "This engages me (whether I like it or not)" and "This bores me." I'm inclined to agree with him. We all have certain pet peeves about this hobby, and some people are simply never going to like a high-magic world, or a steampunk setting, or a world with dwarves in it, or whatever. However, it's valuable to keep in mind that these are all opinions, and even an element you severely dislike can be very well implemented.

Again, there are useful ways and not-so-useful ways to comment about this. It is probably a good idea to avoid comments like "I stopped reading your setting as soon as I found out it has dwarves in it!" or "I suggest you get rid of all your dwarves," because the former is pretty pointlessly rude, and the latter is in direct contradiction to the author's apparent vision of the setting (and therefore, not very useful.) If you must discuss your rabid loathing of dwarves in somebody's setting thread, consider perhaps "Why did you choose to write dwarves the way you did?", which will hopefully open up a detailed and productive discussion about whether dwarves are strictly necessary, and how their presence in a setting could be fine-tuned and improved.

The two big pieces of advice on this subject are as follows: 1.) DON'T use someone else's thread to go on a crusade against some idea, and 2.) DON'T avoid reading somebody's setting just because it contains things that provoke a negative reaction in you. I won't name any names, but there are quite a few settings on this site that at first glance, I thought I'd dislike, but after reading a little more, I really cherish.

Take Your Time
Some of the work here is long and detailed, and we are only human. You do not have to read the entirety of Jim-Bob's Massive Campaign Compendium (all 500 mb of it) in one sitting. We are not marathon athletes here. We don't need to make every review an endurance battle.

If what you are reading is long, break it up. Do your review in short segments, or spend a week reading a setting slowly, then review it at the end. Consider a focused review on one aspect of a setting, and leave the rest for later (or if you prefer, for someone else. A limited review is better than no review at all.) The worst strategy is to be so determined to finish this all right now that your eyes glaze over, and you're getting only a handful of words per paragraph. "Read" a setting that way, and you'll miss quite a bit. Much better to take a break and come back the next day with a fresh mind.

Get Help
One of the neat things about this community is the ease with which we can contact each other. If a setting confounds you, you can always PM the author to ask questions, or to ask about a good place to begin. Many setting writers get asked about what particular things they want reviewed, and I've never ever heard a single one of them complain about it.[/blockquote]

On the subject of thinking of things to say, I suppose for me its a matter of asking questions of myself.  Do I like/not like the setting?  Does it bore me?  Does it interest me?  Does it do anything new, and how?  Does it twist anything old?  Does it suffer stylistically, grammatically, or structurally?  Are there major gaps of logic or plotholes?  Is there missing information?  Does a particular race, class, city, state, monster, spell, or whatever interest me, or was it done well, or poorly, or could it be done differently?  Is something unclear?  Is something broken?  Is an idea not fully fleshed?  Do all of the elements work together,or are there incongruities?  Are there comparisons to be made?  Suggestions of material to look at?  Concrete ideas?  Allusions that catch my eye?

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

How, though, do you get help understanding an element that everyone else seems to take for granted?  I've started several threads in the past for just that purpose, and I don't think it's always possible to reach that goal.

[SDragon]

...I remember the 'good old days' when you could recognise any member's login name on sight and had a reasonably good idea of who they were.

I remember those days, too. Even when some of us decided to change our names once or twice every hour or so-- and I'm not just talking about any one member, since we all did that, usually all at the same time-- you could still reorient yourself pretty quickly.

I don't know whether maybe it's because I haven't bothered to get to know newer members, or what, but I don't seem to know most of the people around here anymore.

I think this is sadly ironic, coming from you...

[Steerpike]

[blockquote=Silvercat Moonpaw]Things that turn me off: Anything that implies that life is harsh/brutal/cruel/a struggle/cannot be won/(I could go on). As soon as I read about large wars (i.e. wars that cover a large area or at least the main-focus area) that are happening or are about to, horrible demons/abberrations running amok, any emphasis on survival, and whatever else would fall under the previous sentence. Essentially if I could read about of version of it in a real-world newspaper I see no reason to need to encounter it again in a significant way in my fiction. Note: This also includes pretty much anything that falls under the word "intrigue".[/blockquote]

I assume you mean stuff like this, Silvercat?  I can see your conundrum.  While I might just counter with Luminous Crayon's assertion that just because you don't find an aspect to your taste in particular doesn't mean you can't give feedback on its execution, I'll perhaps go out on a limb and provide some of my reasoning for while I like some of the above, since much of it describes the Cadaverous Earth and my own taste...

I don't think that demons/abberations running amok and real-world newspaper stories have much in common, first of all.  Personally, I find the grotesque and the dystopian very compelling and even beautiful.  The violence in my campaign (and similar "dark" worlds) is quite distinct from real-world violence because, quite simply, it isn't real-world violence - it's aesthetic, it's there as part of an art.  It's the reason someone like Brom or Giger's art isn't "ugly" but beautiful, despite its grotesquerie - because it's fantastic, unreal, aesthetic; its why H.P. Lovecraft or China Mieville aren't depressing, despite being heavily, heavily invested in grotesquerie and horror  I personally don't find ruins and undead and demons depressing, I find them fascinating in their darkness and excess.  Evil is fun!  Sure points of light are important, but dystopian futures give such a lovely sense of degradation and apocalyptic devastation taht I find them irresistable: I don't get to live in those dystopian futures (nor would I want to!) but roleplaying in them is a completely different matter (hence also wy games like, say, Diablo or Half-Life 2 or Fallout are fun).

That said I can, however, acknolwedge and understand that the horrific, the demonic, or the grotesque isn't everyone's cup of tea, just as hobbitses, banality, dwarves, and pixies aren't to my taste.  So if it's difficult to overcome an "aversion to darkness," then I suppose its best to stick to settings without the survival/intrigue/demonic elements, or at least to ignore the dark qualities while giving feedback in favor of stylistic/structural/logical criticisms.

[Nomadic]

Well just to pop in for a minute I will say that I feel partly to blame about the lack of activity. I am currently wrestling with college and so the boards dropped down a notch on the importance list. :/

[Pair o' Dice Lost]

Well just to pop in for a minute I will say that I feel partly to blame about the lack of activity. I am currently wrestling with college and so the boards dropped down a notch on the importance list. :/

I have to agree with this.  I joined at the beginning of the summer, put up my campaign setting, kept going through the summer...and then let everything die when college hit.  I really wish I could contribute more, but between more work at college and the outstanding obligations I have on other forums, I haven't really found the time to organize my thoughts and post something worthwhile; usually I look through the forums a few minutes at a time between classes, and that's not as much time in one chunk as I'd like to have.

Aside from that, it was mentioned above that some people might have started playing in their worlds and don't need the CBG anymore.  Well, I do feel like I still need it, but I'm also going to be running my setting soon, and that's another reason I haven't posted in a while--I wanted to have the setting stay fairly static for a while until characters, background, and plot had been established.  If all goes well, though, I'll have plenty of material to add afterward.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

Lately I've hit something of a creative slump, and been working on GURPs krunch to boot. I've always recognized my feed back has been sporadic and unpredictable/somewhat random - way to many great settings out there, far too little time. Sadly, I also have far too many interests to indulge adequately, so often my responses here arise in result of someone posting a question which happens to touch on one of those interests tangentially - helps me decide what to focus on today. CBG (and the wiki) remain constant open browser tabs tho and I hardly expect to disappear in any relevant timeframe - got far too much setting material perculating on the back burners. . .

[limetom]

So I decided to write some long-winded crap you all might wanna read.  Or not.  Whatever.

I am very sad to see old friends go.  At the same time, I am also glad to see them move forward with their own lives.  I know that in the past year and a half, though I haven't talked about it much, my life has completely changed directions.  I went from a very short term plan that, if you had asked me about three years ago, I would have thought was great, to a very long term plan that I feel much more confident about.

Like many of my old friends, I too have slowed down of late in my creation efforts.  I too haven't played a game either offline or online in over a year.  My interests have also changed over the years: I went from very overtly Tolkien-influenced setting design in my first setting on the WoTC boards Sûl, to what I consider much more a setting of my own kind of fantasy, drawn together from lots of different, and sometimes unexpected, influences (Celtic and Japanese mythology?  Meh.  Evolutionary psychology?  What.)  This is just how life is.  I have just enough free time now to write my own setting on top of all the other stuff I do.  If a player never sees my work?  So be it.  I'll call it 'art.'

For the past two years or so, I have always felt a little apart from the CBG.  However, this has nothing to do with anyone on the site or anything about the site.  In that time, I have moved from Maryland to Hawaii.  Though you might not think it, the difference in timezones means I'm just posting as everyone else is going to bed.

God... sometimes I have to remind myself that we've been at this for years now.  Years.  Plural.  I remember when this was just a crazy idea that I saw some dude named 'Xeviat-DM' had on the Wizards of the Coast forums.  And I thought it was a great idea.  And I even put 'CBG Member #6' in my signature.  And then we started our own website.  And then we moved to another site.  And then we got another website with that awful Dreamhost hosting service.  And then we moved here.  (Did I miss anything?)  I remember having an internet argument with CYMRO right before he left.  Looking back on it, I blame me for being a stupid ass.  If he was still here, I'd apologize.

Over those years, we've grown.  I've seen some amazing authors put things down on paper that makes me wish I could write even a pale imitation of what they do.  And recently, I've seen some of them leave.  I have also seen a trickle of new members grow, somewhat recently, into a small stream.  And everyone has had, and still has great ideas.

In the past few days, I actually went back with the 'My Posts' link, and went through the 80+ pages of posts I've made and looked up some old stuff.  Some of it made me wonder what I was thinking when I wrote that.  I might have gone back and edited some of it (granted, if you wanted to embarrass me, I probably missed a lot.)  Some of it made me proud of me.  In all, I got a good laugh out of it, and found that I had changed as a person in these short years since the CBG started.  Also, I realized how filtered of a view one can present to others through the internet.  If one wanted to learn about me from some of this old stuff, they'd have some pretty out of date ideas about me.  I don't remember writing some of the stuff that I wrote, and wished now that I hadn't wrote some of it.

And I remember fun in almost everything I've done with the CBG.  Has the fun ever left the CBG?  Has the CBG slowed down like ElDo and the others claim?  I really don't think so.  I think it has changed a lot, the biggest change being the fact that many of the original people left and the very close knit community we were all used to changed into a bit of a looser grouping of people interested in the same kinds of things.  Is this a bad thing?  I don't think so.  We're still here.  And almost everybody is still contributing something.  Even if it's just little old me chiming in with a joke at Ishmayl's expense when I feel like being silly (Psst... I always feel like being silly... Don't tell Ishy...)

I am proud of you, CBG.  [Insert motivational phrase here.]

[Ninja D!]

I think that the CBG is still going strong.  Maybe not perfectly, sure, but strong nonetheless.  And even if things slow down, what of it?  As long as things keep going in some way, that's something.  Right?  I was saddened to see ElDo go and now apparently Crit but communities grow and change.  We may not be big and active like EnWorld or anything but for what it is worth, the fewer posts that we see here probably have better content than all of them there.

I'm here and don't plan on leaving.