What types of games are off topic?

Hello fellow admins!

I've moved this topic over here, so we can discuss this without the rest of the board joining in.

Personally, although he says it as if he were offended personally, I do think Lee has a point. Now, I don't want the board to become some kind of CCG design central, but I do think that it should be possible to discuss CCGs, and that they shouldn't be regarded as off topic.

Thoughts?

My knee-jerk reactions:

Lee saying "I'm not being snarky" breaks the irony-meter!

The thread to which Matthew and I replied read something like "here's a CCG trend, which would be bad if it happened in board gaming", and Matthew and I provided a board game perspective on the trend he was discussing. But then the OP sort of thread-jacked his own thread and made it entirely about CCGs, which I found less useful, and have dropped out of the discussion for now.

I feel that it's Darke's site, and it's his call. I do agree with Lee that making the policy unambiguous is a good idea.

My opinion, for whatever it's worth, is this. Discussion of topics pertaining to genre X (where X can be miniatures, CCGs, RPGs, etc) is ok as long as there is a clear board or card game-relevant purpose to the subject.

So, example possible topics and how I would rule:

"Need a tapping mechanic for my new CCG": Ok; discussions of mechanics could be relevant for board or card games.

"Where do I find good artists to do Card Art for my CCG": Ok; board game publishers might need piece art as well.

"Comparison of CCG and Board Game market trends": Iffy, but I'd let it go.

"How do I market my new CCG": Not ok; is not relevant to board or card games.

"Common/Uncommon/Rare distribution for my new CCG?" Not ok.

"Monster types for a new RPG?" Not ok; is not relevant to board gaming.

Now, you might rule differently on some of these issues, and that is fine, and I don't want to argue or quibble about how we might rule differently on these topics. In any case, I suggest we would not apply a terribly heavy hand in moderation, as that would just create more work for us, and as the others have noted, even some of us who like boardgames are interested in CCGs or RPGs.

To me, the idea is that we want to create in people's heads the following question before they post: "Would this be of interest or relevance to someone who is interested in board games?"

I think too many posters see this site as a quick-answer service for their questions. Many are too lazy to even attempt a forum search where their questions have been answered 1000 times. I think that by encouraging people to think before posting, we will both increase the quality of posts and will hopefully discourage people from posting topics that are OT for the site. Frankly, I'd take a well-thought-out, interesting analysis of CCGs or RPGs any day over some of the "how do I copyright my awesome new game?" posts that we frequently get.

That's just my take; I'll think about it some more and post again if my thoughts change.

-Jeff

-Darke

As I stated, I really *do* wish there was a CCG designers site somewhere that we could refer people to and thus limit our bandwidth on these sorts of questions. There are sites for RPGs, Wargames, Video Games, but nothing for CCGs. My greatest fear is to have someone with a lot of valuable information wave off the site because of too many threads about CCGS. My official stance is that yes, these threads are tolerated. Perhaps a CCG subforum might be nice, but then I think that might actually encourage more chatter about them. Officially the only thing that is not permitted is video game discussion.
-Michael

I was going to type a long post with my thoughts, but I think it all amounts to one single question: what makes a CCG different from, say, a standard card game in such a way that we do not want to promote discussion on the subject?

Right. But when a lot of the discusssions are about marketing CCGs, then they have very little to do with board games. And my humble opinion is that CCGs are a dead locked market and therefore moot to discuss in the first place.

Well, I was asking a genuine question rather than making a statement ;) But you implicitly gave the answer - it's the marketing aspect that makes a CCG different from an ordinary card game.

So, should we not allow discussion on the subject of marketing CCGs? Perhaps, but we allow discussion on marketing normal card games, so I'm not sure whether we can really "sell" that as a good reason, without getting any discussion.

I'm not a huge fan of CCG discussions myself, simply because I'm not interested in them, but I can't think of a logical reason to not allow discussion about CCGs. Perhaps we should simply allow it, and hope it doesn't become too huge a problem. It hasn't been a problem in the past, except for the occasional topic about CCG marketing popping up. And then, so what? Some members might be interested, and others can ignore it.

I don't think there we will scare away many potential users by allowing CCG discussion, but I do think we might scare some potential users away, and also lose some current members, if we explicitly forbid it.

A special forum for CCGs is not a good idea, I think, because it would actually promote CCG discussion, which is something we don't want. It does isolate those posts, but they will show up in the "latest posts" bar on the frontpage anyway, which is what most members check, I think.

So basically since we dont want to promote CCG talk we wont create a subforum, but at the same time we are going to allow the CCG posts to clutter up the other subforum areas?

Not sure that makes sense to me, but I do agree that having a *special* area might promote more talk about CCGs.

Darke,

I already registered CCGDF.com, ok just kidding. But if you want to have it available sure, why not make a place for people who like CCGs. It would not take much to just copy the new wiki site, db, code and rename it CCGDF.