While I do agree with you, we also need to be careful about this. We need to do a better job of making sure that IC stuff stays IC, and that we need to make sure we avoid even the impression that the forum is somehow be used as a surrogate for IC action/discussion.
Agreed.
When the locals were removed, you may recall (or may not), I wasn't very vehement against it. They were getting pretty out of hand.
But how things are now is not a solution. It's worse than it was with the locals.
Let me be clear: Battlemaster is not a fun game. I don't mean that pejoratively; I mean that the mechanics of battlemaster, the button clicking, isn't that fun. We all know this; it's rare that players get their primary enjoyment of BM from button-clicking. What Battlemaster is is a really fun framework for an awesome community of storytelling. And removing the locals did a lot to make that a whole lot harder.
ALSO:
I've been reflecting on when I joined BM. When I joined BM, probably 50% of the message chatter in the realms I was in was OOC. We had no forums, but that didn't mean we we did more IC: it meant that in-game interactions were more out-of-character. We gave orders that referred to mechanics, chatted about realm matters in OOC headings, and after-battle banter was as frequently a bunch of drunkass college kids good-naturedly heckling each other OOCly as it was high-minded RPers doing so ICly.
But the last several years have seen a SYSTEMATIC AND INTENTIONAL in-characterization of Battlemaster's in-game experience. OOC chatter is frowned on even outside of Dwilight. Explicit references to game mechanics are not usually encouraged. The in-game OOC component of BM, which could substitute for BM, is no longer a big part of BM culture, and that kind of rapport and habit takes a LONG time to build. So eliminating the forums has left us with an OOC-socialization vacuum we've never had before.
Also, I should say, I think the in-characterization of the in-game experience is mostly a good thing. The problem is that we allowed an in-characterization of the out-of-game experience.
