The Gamers

Just had a look in at The Gamers. There are 18 pages of The Gamers. There are 18 The Gamers per page. That makes 324 Gamers. That's cool.

I have a range of Games that I am DM/GM. Just looking for some players. Go over to Games Tavern and see if you want to fill some of my games. I think I have about 10 spaces to fill across 8 games. There is a variety of genres of games. Hopefully, you find something that catches your eye.

I feel like there should be filters for the gamers page. Like by date joined, alphabetical order, number of games joined, number of games ran, etc.

Yes, we need leaderboards for this site xD

A "number of total posts," "average posts per day," and "date of last post" would also be extremely useful in determining how reliable a player/GM is.

The "leaderboard" discussion has cropped up a few times. Ironically, we must be careful about those trying to gamify the system to prop up their stats. And this inevitably leads to further discussion and suggestions of how to combat such, whether it is quantifying quality or what have you, and that just adds more complexity.

If we seriously want something indicative, I feel we ought to stick to a basic "date of last activity" metric. The "zzZ" by the username is certainly a quick-glance indicator, but since that triggers after about... what is it, a month of inactivity? Having a "last active" date would help determine how much longer than a month said person was away.

Speaking of away, I know we have the Absences thread, but maybe we could have a "vacation message" linked to our profiles?

Yeah, I don't know how much sense it makes to actually have a leaderboard. It was mostly a joke. And I believe that if you go to the profile of an inactive user, it will show the last time that person has been active.

Fancy that! It's been a while and I guess I didn't pay attention to the change.

At times as a DM/GM it can be a little frustrating. Then you hear a member of the party say, "Has he been standing there for that long. Wow!" or "Hey, where did our Cleric go?" just at a critical time of healing or even "Wow! Has he been in our party the whole time?"

I don't sit by the keyboard waiting for a post so I can respond however, I don't like runs, adventures, modules, campaigns to become stale, boring and uninteresting. I like to move the group towards fun, adventure, surprise, suspense, intrigue, value, rewards, challenges, and interaction. Yes, at times causing some friction along the way but that is part of the challenge. I would cringe if any player called even a PBP boring or not fun. Isn't this why we play, DM/GM.

Let us not allow distance to cast its long shadow upon the sunny filled hills and furrows of gaming! (Gee! Bit of a writer it would seem!)

By the same token, sometimes a single-game player's game gets caught up in a scene that his character just isn't involved in. Sometimes the right move isn't to make a move, where making a move would trash the dramatic or narrative flow of a scene. Sometimes a game gets fouled up in mechanics, sometimes a character dies and the player has to wait for a new opening.

There are plenty of reasons for a player to have a low post count or have spent some time idle. Making those stats visible just encourages people to do what's best for their profile and not necessarily for their games.

I currently play on two other RPG forums that are vastly larger and have been around a lot longer than this one, and they have great tools to help with player and GM selection. I have not encountered anything like people "doing what is best for their profile" by post spamming. I'm sure it does happen, but it has never been an issue for me. Maybe I'm just lucky.

By contrast, on those forums, I can see how frequently someone posts, and I can see a list of all the games a player or GM has played in or run. With a click, I can read up on those games, see how the individual posts, how frequently, how substantially. I can see how that person runs games, see how they respond to conflict, see if they keep ghosting from games they start or join. That does encourage people to do what is best for their reputation—stick with games, craft well-written posts that actually engage with the narrative, be polite, treat players fairly, know the rules, etc.

I'm all for that. Your millage may vary.

I'm less concerned for people pumping their stats, and more concerned with perfectly good players being left out in the cold because of stats that look lackluster, but hide their strengths as players.

Totally agree on that one. I just haven't seen any evidence that obscuring as much information as possible about players and GMs (e.g. posting frequency, posting history, games run, threads started, characters created, posting quality, etc.—all of which are available through standard forum features and have been for more than a decade) will accomplish that goal.

I agree, that the info above, is very valuable even from a player's standpoint when deciding on a GM. I was in two games, not here, where a GM that had recently joined, put up 4 games, had at least 10 applications per game and then ghosted. So, for me, I will avoid that situation in the future by going first to the stats. Stats taken together with a new player's introduction of themselves, can be an informative part of gaining a good picture of a player/GM. If the player has low stats, you can always ask him/her why. I can't see any reason why having these stats available could be bad.

He has kind of disappeared as I was in the Star Frontier game and it died due to him not posting. If he has returned and resurrected it that is another story then.

The first time he disappeared, he came back later saying he'd been in the hospital. Perhaps that's happened again.

I hope that that isn't the case but after the second disappearance, none of the group stuck around.

Understandable.