CALL FOR VOTES on rec.games.frp.pbn From: fabbott@athena.mit.edu (Freeland K Abbott) Date: Wed, 12 Jul 1989 22:16:58 +0000 It is now July 12-- has been for a while, in fact-- and since I've already had to turn a few votes around, I'll officially open the polls... if you already sent me a vote, it will only count *after* you re-send it. Sorry, but them's the rules. One of the other rules is that voting must run at least 30 days, so the polls will be eligible for closing on August 11th. Whether they will close then or not depends on my vacation schedule, which is still indeterminate. The topic of the vote is the formation of a new newsgroup, rec.games.frp.pbn, inspired by Steve Gabai's "Broad Axe Tavern" game, which is currently (and somewhat tenuously) in rec.games.pbm. The charter for the group would run as follows: REC.GAMES.FRP.PBN: a forum for role-playing play-by-mail games, in which it would be specifically permissible to post a fraction of the game's correspondance, specifically any character moves which are publicly visible in the game. In addition, rec.games.frp.pbm would also be a place to discuss PBM role-playing in general and to post announcements and summaries of games, which are now often cross-posted to both rec.games.frp and rec.games.pbm. The forum would be unmoderated, but it is expected that all games would operate under a consistant header which does not duplicate any others currently in use, and that they should provide a contact (the poster of the game announcement and/or the offending article, in all likelyhood) for complaints. And praises, of course. Arguments against the formation of the group center on the cost of posting, arguing that a mailing list is the appropriate format since the players of a game are presumably known, at least to the person running it. Since posting a message netwide is expensive, if the interested parties can be separately identified it is better to mail to them using a central mailing list, which is perhaps harder on the machine with the list but is far easier and cheaper to the net as a whole. Proponents respond that, as some people enjoy watching the game, the interested parties aren't necessarily known, and so that a newsgroup is an acceptable format. They also argue that there is no substantive difference between posting moves for an RPG (role-playing game) and posting moves for a more traditional PBM game (r.g.pbm has many of these, although they are actually moves for all players in one larger post). Most of the traffic of the game-- conversations, questions, moves under many if not most circumstances-- is in fact done by mail in any event; they argue that the smaller but more frequent postings are roughly equivalent. They also rebut a lot :-) VOTE FORMAT: email your votes to me. They *must* be emailed, and they *must* be clearly marked as pro/con the vote. They also should follow the format below; if they don't I may or may not count them... Votes must arrive via email to fabbott@athena.mit.edu; getting it there is your responsibility. The subject field of your vote must contain the word "vote" and one word from the set [pro|con|yes|no]; it and the body may contain anything else that you like (these will be parsed by awk, then filed and otherwise processed). You may vote as often as you like, but only the most recent vote will count. Freeland K. Abbott fabbott@athena.mit.edu 454D 410 Memorial Drive MIT Undergrad (Comp. Sci. nerd) Cambridge, MA 02139 USA "stop the world, I want to get off..." Referenced By Up