In my opinion, this is possibly the most important discussion we could be having to improve the game culture.
1. The forums, in their current form, actually discourage a roleplaying atmosphere in-game. This is because players seem to want to share in-game information about their charactersand what is happening in their realms, etc. If we are reading these things OOC, it eliminates the need to do many things IC, and creates what some call 'metagaming', which in this case is not exactly etymologically correct, but essentially means that the player's character knows things they shouldn't.
What personally disenchants me the most is when players define their characters and actions OOC. For instance, some players might be talking about events in a Locals channel, and one player says something like "It looks like Realm A and Realm B are going to war. I wonder how Ruler #1 is going to react to that", and then the player of Ruler #1 says "Well, ruler #1 is a stubborn old bastard who doesn't like it when his allies get attacked, so...."
Instead of actually playing your character as a 'Stubborn Old Bastard', you're just saying it. And now that all the people on the forum know that, they will act accordingly with their characters. No one needed to do anything in-game at all, because an unimaginable number of RP opportunities were passed up because of one sentence in one post by one player.
Do you see how insane it is that we have entire channels devoted to this? In my opinion, players should not be discussing game events in the forums whatsoever. 'Playing' is better than 'saying'.
2. Because it is players talking, it becomes personal. In the game of Battlemaster, we get to play as corrupt, conniving, or downright wicked characters Oftentimes those are the best characters: just look at the Himoura Family: people don't hate the Himouras- they LOVE to hate the Himouras! And that's a good thing, because we're talking about Medieval Lords, not saints- the type of people who would be considered thugs and criminals today. I think one reason a lot of people play Battlemaster is so they can act out that heedless ambition or bloodthirsty drive to conquer.
But when you remove things from the game, its no longer a character talking to another character in a fantasyland 1,000 years ago. It becomes more 'real', and the anonymity of the internet certainly doesn't make people any more polite. Actually, it has been proven that it makes people less likely to be friendly. Possibly because you're talking to strangers, not friends. And don't even get me started on how the IRC feeds into this.
Yet we have a basic rule: "Play the game as though playing a board game with friends." This becomes more difficult to do when the people you should be treating as friendly adversaries are treating you like crap.
Basically we need to reign in the boundaries of this system to accommodate our human flaws.
3. As Tom pointed out, most of the people who play Battlemaster do not post on the forums. Personally, I envy those people. I wish I had never started viewing the forums, and would rather return to a more naive state where I am not disillusioned about virtually every aspect of the game.
My point is that the forums are inevitably going to be exclusionary. For a game where in-game discussion and character-building is not important, like a First-Person Shooter, for instance, this is entirely fine: the game itself is not being affected by anything that happens in the forums. But for a game like Battlemaster, where writing is 90% of the game itself, it makes little sense to encourage players to be writing outside the game.
The true joy of BM comes from the politics, character-building, and roleplaying. So it isn't the 100-200 forum frequenters who are the "elite" of BM- it's everyone who isn't on the forums, who is having a good time playing their character.
Conclusion- I would recommend discouraging two things on the forums/IRC: discussion of game events, and insulting other players.
