While on the train a few days ago, I had a revelation that I think is important to share. Please discuss this and let me know your toughts.
How does a community solve its problems and conflicts?That came up in my mind. One of the basic tenets of BM is "play like you'd play a board game with friends". So how do friends solve issues coming up during play? Questions like "is this move legal?" come up all the time in friendly games.
The general answer is:
Through discussion and by consensus.At least that's my experience. If you play with friends, and you aren't sure that your move is legal, or someone else made a move that you don't think is legal, you'll bring it up, everyone will contribute their opinion, and a consensus is reached rather quickly. Often not the one that is closest to the rules, but the one that allows the game to proceed best for everyone.
And I think that's what our Titan system is lacking and is why we're having so much trouble having it accepted by the playerbase. We're trying to tell them to behave like friends, but we're lording over them unlike friends.
Now - Reality Check - we have way too many players for the system that works with five friends to work. Which is where simple solutions come in. One game - Munchkin - has this rather nice solution to rules-discussion problems:
The player who owns the game decides.
Now mix this all and here is what you get - as a rough sketch - and what I think might work a lot better than what we currently have:
- Complaints should be open and public, with explicit notification to the one being accused of anything (though we may allow for complaints to be made anonymous, the complaint itself should be public)
- A forum topic is automatically created and players pointed towards it. The accused can post his view, anyone else who wants to add something to the discussion, can.
- The goal of the discussion should be to come to a consensus solution. As such, it should be strictly moderated. Such a discussion has a very narrow and specific topic and should remain strictly on topic.
- A Titan will make the final decision, basing it on the consensus and the discussion, so that a clear verdict exists in the end.
This would, I believe, make the job easier for the Titans, it would allow the accused his opportunity to present his points, and make everything seem a lot less arbitrary - by which I mean that I am certain we never were arbitrary, but that it sometimes looks like it because the players never see what's going on behind the scenes.
And it would cut down on abuse dramatically.
