This really wasn't supposed to be such a big deal.
John, your suggestion is kind but not practical.
First, I believe that Eric is running two games, Scott at least four, Harry one and you one--that's eight games in which I am not involved, to people per game, two posts per person (by your suggestion), and thus potentially thirty-two posts per day that I would have to read. As Adam observes, sure, those can be one sentence each, but they're not likely to--and particularly if everyone is limited to two posts per day, that would mean most people would attempt to cover as much ground in them as possible. Frankly, one post from Maxx, or sometimes Eric, or any of several others, can be a small article at times, and if I can cut out reading thirty-two posts on a busy day, I've saved myself a significant chunk of time.
Besides, I'm hoping to encourage more people on this board to take on more people on this board. I hope for a day when there are a score of referees running fifty games, and that would be two hundred posts a day that I would not be able to read and stay atop everything else. My decision to stop reading threads in which I am not a necessary participant is inevitable; doing it now makes it less awkward later.
On top of that, the two-posts-per-day limit is unfair to the posting styles of too many players. Scott and Maxx, for example, will go days, sometimes a couple weeks, completely silent (and Scott does this with many of his games, although several of his players are part of his "In Real Life" life so they get to play live games sometimes). Then they will abruptly post in a flurry of blows and parries that adds pages of long posts over a few days, and then one of them will again go silent for a while. When Eric is on a roll with one of his world ideas, he's chomping at the bit to get the next piece posted, and people want to read it. I think, too, if I were running only one game, I would be inclined to post several times a day when running combat, just because each frequently detailed post covers a very short fragment of in-game time, and so much of the information for each post is based on calculations in the previous one. I drew the line at one post per game thread per day long ago to cut back on my own workload.
Mike is right, though: you're doing pretty well, and if you have questions you can flag me and I can get up to speed quickly enough. For what it's worth, if I were to cut back to only one game thread for my own enjoyment, right now it wouldn't be Zombie Apocalypse Horror (not a genre I savor, and I've run Quest for the Vorgo often enough to sate any appetite I might have in that direction). (It would probably be Oak's mysterious wizard job--he seems to be the paranormal paranormal investigator of that world, which is a really fun and appealing concept to me.) You and Mike are taking advantage of your own schedules to get a lot of game posts into a limited time; I suspect that Mike will slow down when his own schedule changes, but the point is not for me to limit how much you play, but for me to make it possible for you to play as much as the two of you can manage.
The thing about role playing games ultimately is, Ed is right: the rules are pretty much whatever you agree the rules are. The system, according to the Lumpley Principle, is whatever rules exist in the social contract by which all the participants come to agreement concerning the content of the shared imagined space. We all want it to be as consistent with the Multiverser rules as possible, but in case you hadn't noticed the Multiverser rules are already something of a toolbox approach in which the referee frequently is allowed to decide exactly how he wants to determine an outcome and given several options by which to do so.
So if you're not sure about something, you can ask; and if Mike's not sure whether what you did was exactly kosher, he can ask.
And I can save an hour or two from my busier nights by skipping directly to the threads that actually involve me, instead of reading the stories and then finding myself too tired to focus on the games I'm supposed to be running.
--M. J. Young
I find many of the stories fascinating, but there have been nights when simply reading all the
