My thanks to everyone who expressed and interest and contributed ideas in the comments here, and to the folks who joined the project. We’re currently full up on participants.

I’m also happy to join in on the action if it gets hosted elsewhere. Nor does it have to be an exclusive — there could be several teams.

Few balls get rolling without a nudge, though, so I’m going to start a forum for the VTGE (do we need a better name? I think we need a better name) on the TT forums. It’ll be a closed forum, assuming I can figure out how to do that.

If you want access to it, and are interested in giving thie project a try, please email me at martin(at)treasuretables(dot)org. I’ll need to know your forum name, so I can give you access to the sooper seekret forum.

I also agree that we should keep whatever ideas aren’t used. After the first, who knows, we may all enjoy it so much that we want to do another!

However, I will suggest d20 as a means to publish (if such is the decision at a later time) because of the OGL. Submitting for Palladium, WW, Hero, etc, etc seems to be harder (as I know exponentially less writers -freelance and contracted- for non-d20 publications). Just a $.02 on that topic.

My last comment is on the implication of mass involvement. I have seen it both ways in projects… but prefer to have more than less. This may simply be personal pref., but I rather enjoy the diversity and input from many as opposed to the struggling of few. It would also provide an ‘inside’ play-tester base if we had more.

So, if I get a couple replies here or a few emails, I will get that board set up and will either post the link (not preferred) or email it to the individuals who would like to join.

As for bandwidth and size… I have 100GB of space and 1000GB of bandwidth (of which about 1% -more than likely a fraction of a percent- is used).

It does, however, need to be linked to a specific system. Particularly if you are going to run it at a con.

Allow me however sow a tiny discordant idea.

Collaborating with multiple people, you are bound to get lot of different views and ideas that are good but just don’t fit in. Keep these. The adventure is just a byproduct.

Eh?

What is one piece of excellence in Dogs in the Vineyard? The set up setting. If you want a DitV adventure, you just pick up the source book and lo, there is a step by step guide how to build an ‘adventure’: First, you pick name for a town and then you follow few design steps picking out sins that plague that town and relationships the townpeople have. This works because every ditv adventure is about a town plagued by a sin. (look it up. DitV has lot of towns published here and there and lot are ready to be played by any group.)

And now you guess what I want. Pick a plot premise from, for example, http://www.io.com/~sjohn/plots.htm, and build an adventure. Then carefully write up all the steps that got you there, strip the redundant bits, focus on the essentials, narrow the genre and the mood, exemplify ideas and shoot for a ditv style adventure builder for this single style of plot.

I definitely think a forum is a good choice of venue. Blog comments just aren’t organized enough for brainstorming. I could see a wiki being very useful as well.

As far as being on the same page (Frank’s point), starting out with a one-shot seems like it would resolve this fairly well. At least with my group, we can always squeeze in a one-shot between sessions of our ongoing game. Even if it’s two sessions (chargen + background, then play), that sounds doable to me.

It might be fun to try this with a limited-access forum — IE, one that only the participants had a password to. That way the end result, after playtesting, would be a surprise for the rest of the community.

On the flipside, an open forum (no password) would encourage folks to pop in with random ideas, even if they weren’t signed up to actually run the first draft of the project.

Would everyone who has expressed an interest so far be willing to sign up for a free TT forum account? (I know several of you already have one. )

I’m glad this idea isn’t totally baseless. I’ll let it simmer for a couple of days, mainly to get weekday commenters involved, and then go from there.

As for generic vs. a specific system, I would say you could do all the plot development generic, and then smaller groups, who play the same system, could take the material and stat it out for specific systems.

A few years ago I did an experiment with a wiki where a group of 10 of us generated material for a campaign world. It was quite interesting. It worked much better than I thought, and though no one took the material and ran a game with it…yet. It turned out some pretty interesting material, plenty for a campaign world. So I am a big fan of group generated work.

The system matters-not -for the most part- for me… as I’m fairly well versed (although I admittedly have my favorites).

You can email me at my website (I just linked it because it is for a game that I’m in… and I made the site). Please forgive the frames, I was lazy.