HoME General Discussion Thread

[White Knight]

But as for the overall organization, I still feel your counter-proposal is way too complex and will bog us down in a single design that gets nowhere.

I don't want all that organization, at least not in the beginning.

Some general thoughts on your proposal

1) The fellowship of the ring has always been intended to work together in some way, but we were designing them one-by-one instead of as a faction. I think having only one or two designs going at the same time really limits the designs, because they have to stand alone and yet work seamlessly with the rest of the fellowship. Because of that, I'd at least like to get the whole fellowship into design at the same time.

2) With less than 10 people, all that organization is just not necessary.

3) I really don't like the idea of a ruling council, at least not in the beginning. Why should 5 people have more power than any other person joining the group in the beginning? What is wrong with majority votes?

4) We are too small to be exclusive. We want people to come in and feel they are an important part from the beginning.

5) If we want to follow a model, I'd prefer something similar to the SoV type of model where a lead designer proposes a design and then judges playtest the design and vote on the design. In our case, we could have a lead designer for each card who submits the card for playtesting and then ONLY the playtesters get to vote on it. I see no reason why someone who isn't putting in the playtesting work should get a vote. And honestly, what makes me or you more qualified to vote on a design than anyone else who is willing to put in the work to do playtesting?

6) The more cards we start to brainstorm at the beginning, the more momentum.


So to summarize, you're counter-proposal is still much to complex and controlling for me. I want to produce good quality cards that are well playtested and compatible with classic Scape. But there are other ways to get there that will get more designs on the drawing board and into playtesting much faster. And then if we limit veto power, we should able to make good progress.

[caps]

1. I feel like we're talking past each other on this point somehow... I'm concerned that doing *all* of the fellowship at once may be too many moving parts. But I agree we should be doing multiple designs at once.

2. I think you're being too pessimistic. I think this organization will scale well to more than 10 people and I think we will have more than 10 people interested. I also think this process scales down fine to a smaller number of people; most of the process would seem to disappear at that point. But having it there is nice for if interest grows and more people chip in.

3. This makes sense to me so intuitively that I'm having a hard time explain it. I may have to come back to this, but... I guess it's kind of like the idea of a board of directors for a charity. The charity may be able to welcome anyone off the street to be a part and volunteer, but that doesn't mean they want every volunteer voting on board meetings, setting direction, etc. That's not a great analogy. But without some kind of central authority I'm very concerned the project will end up with an inconsistent product.

4. What I proposed is very inclusive. It would be the most inclusive project out of C3V, SoV, C3G, and HoSS.

5. I don't think the SoV model would work here. But the irony here is that SoV judges function a lot like an ERB in their own way. And they're very selective about picking new judges. They don't let just anyone playtest and cast votes. It's a pretty important part of the project's success.

6. I agree here, as well. We need to temper it so we don't get overwhelmed. Momentum is good, but these projects are a marathon, not a sprint.

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I think maybe I went into too much detail up front. My proposal is that we work on designs in groups. The people working on the design would have collective authority over the design. Anyone in the community could nominate and then vote for people and designs to be in these groups. Because it is a group, no single person would dominate the vision, and the absence of a single person would not grind progress of the designs to a halt (a real-world problem of your single-designer proposal).

In addition to this is a council that participates in the design groups to enforce consistency. They get a kind of weak collective veto at the final vote but otherwise aren't that different from other members.

It's not complex at all. Look at the AotV subforum and the threads there. It is working very smoothly, and they're working on a lot of designs at once. I think around a dozen.

[caps]

Originally Posted by White Knight

I agree some of the HoSS cards are very complex, especially for beginners. I threw a HoSS Heroscape party and invited some friends at work to come an play. But boss, who has the least patience, choose Han Solo, Chewbacca, Farmboy Luke, C3PO, and R2D2. Those cards are not for beginners.

But other HoSS cards are much easier to understand. And not all classic cards are one or two power cards. Some of them get complex.

I really don't have a preference on cards. I want the figure to be fun to play. Some abilities are very wordy, but in practice they are very simple (such as Stealth Flying).

As for generals, I don't have a preference right now.

Sorry, I didn't mean we do a poll in this thread. I mean we literally create polls for Heroscapers to vote on. Leave it up for a couple weeks and try to get it as much attention as possible. Then use that to define the goals of the project. I was trying to figure out if there are any other key conflict areas in terms of goals. I feel like there was a third but I can't figure out what it is.


Obviously we are having conflict about how the process should be, but that is different.

[White Knight]

If you really think a council is important, then since you and I were very vocal in the first group that stalled, I suggest that you and I do not apply for the council positions. Lets get some fresh blood to lead the council and get us on track.

You and I can start off as playtesters and eventually earn our spots on the council, if spots open up and we earn them.


Also, you seem to think that we'll get more than 10 people. But the original HoME had 9 active people. And HoSS right now has about 5.

[caps]

I think the council thing is important, but I could be wrong about it. It's mainly a deterrent from people wandering in "off the street" and derailing the project from it's originally stated purpose.

Let's set that aside and talk about design, though. I think it is important that each design be owned by a small team of people. Let me give you a concrete example of this. I'm on "pod 0" of AotV. For the last 3 or 4 months, I've been too busy to actively participate. If I were the sole designer, those designs would have been just sitting there that whole time. But they weren't. The team was actively working in that time on refining and simplifying the ideas. Now that I have time I've come back and hopped right back into the swing of things, doing my part to push things forward. Attrition and real life interruptions are inevitable on these projects. We should set up a system that is resilient to them.

Membership can be handled however, but designs should be owned by more than one but no more than at most seven people.

[Shiftrex]

I think the project can definitely get a lot of interested people if it is properly advertised (forum, discord, facebook) and if the goals are clearly defined.

[caps]

Originally Posted by White Knight

If you really think a council is important, then since you and I were very vocal in the first group that stalled, I suggest that you and I do not apply for the council positions. Lets get some fresh blood to lead the council and get us on track.

You and I can start off as playtesters and eventually earn our spots on the council, if spots open up and we earn them.

I was planning to apply for the council but I think you should definitely be on it. I think I have learned a lot since our past failures, and I think the right process can also help stave off what happened before.

[caps]

Originally Posted by White Knight

Also, you seem to think that we'll get more than 10 people. But the original HoME had 9 active people. And HoSS right now has about 5.

AotV, which follows a model similar to what I described (with a council of like 7 people) has a total of 16 people actively working on 12 cards + 1 destructible objects + 3 glyphs. The project is less than a year old. It started with that council of 7 and brought the others on as the project was ready to start additional design pods.


I don't think they require everyone to playtest to participate, although many of them are playtesting.

[caps]

In line with your idea to just let anyone in; what if, at the very beginning, the Council is formed of literally anyone who wants to be on it? If there are too many (which I know you don't expect) we could vote for a top 7 or top 5 or top 9 or something. That's basically what AotV did to get their "council." It was the 7 or so people that were showing up in the thread at the beginning and cared enough to get it off the ground.


Going forward after that the council could be more selective about replacing members. Or not. Their call.

[Shiftrex]

So. What needs to be accomplished to get things going and set up this poll to pick our direction? Is putting the word out first priority then?

Or is the structure/organization something that needs to be talked through for a few days?

[caps]

Personally I would prioritize getting a shell of a process in place. Then get the polls up. And while we wait for the poll results we try to pin down our initial personnel.

[caps]

While we finish hashing out process, any feedback on these two polls and how they are worded? I would like to get them started.

Originally Posted by capsocrates

I also think many of the goals should be determined by public polls that we heavily advertise and leave open a long time. We can determine Valhalla generals vs custom generals, simple powers vs detailed and complex powers, compatibility with classic vs self contained universe, etc.

The Council would then be responsible for maintaining those goals.

I have strong opinions about each of those things, but the project should serve the larger community. Some people (including me) may see the results and decide not to participate after all. And that would be fine.

Originally Posted by capsocrates

So, polls. I see several issues to resolve.

They boil down to "Design HoME figures as if they were summoned to Valhalla OR as if we are using Herocape rules to play skirmishes in Middle Earth" but that doesn't communicate very well. So let's break it down further:

Generals:
Design with Valhalla generals (with Middle Earth general cards available) OR Design exclusively with Middle Earth generals
Either way we will have cards that use a different style and pallete and have their own general names; the question is whether these will be "alternate" cards or the *only* cards.

Complexity:
Stay within the bounds of classic 'Scape OR make cards and powers that are more complex and detailed (like HoSS or C3G)
A "metric" for this that works as a kind of eye test is average words-per-power and average powers-per-card.

Are there any other points of disagreement on the goals, really? @White Knight @infectedsloth