I love the work that has been done on this, and I can't wait to play. Reading the wiki and forums I'm not clear if L4W is ready for play yet? I know this sounds impatient, but how close is it to being ready?
We are ready to start now. It's a setting in progress, the wikis aren't perfect, there will probably be confusion about creating characters but honestly we're done.
Since most here think we're ready to open L4W, don't we just need to confirm it by voting on a poll to make it official? (or is that even needed?)
We actually adopted a system a while back that said "for things the facilitators think are non-controversial 4 "yeas" and no "nays" means it passes.
There have been lots of "yea" like posts and nothing that resembles a "nay".
As I understand it, the setting is supposed to evolve as new material is added, but it seems that Daunton and the Proximate Isles are more hardwired than the rest of the setting. What if you want to use a NPC that occupies a unique role of authority in these locales, but he/she hasn't been introduced and agreed upon among the L4W group before launch, yet you would expect most people in the setting to be familiar with him/her?
For instance, what if I run an adventure and want to use Daunton's captain of the guard? Should I make a formal proposal for the NPC on the forum and wait for consensus to be reached, or should I just go ahead and use him/her?
Actually I think there is a bit of a middle ground. When you submit the adventure you should mention key NPCs; so if the captain is new then we have a chance to see him "in advance".
If he matches the setting then he's all well and good, and we'll probably put something up about him on the wiki.
If you say "the captain of the guard is actually based around my first character, and he's the 13th god, who's just pretending to be mortal and his pet dog is actually the oldest wisest most powerful dragon ever and..."
Then the judges will have a chance to talk to you about that first.
If it is a big change, but the judges think its such a good story we should think about doing it (say a flying castle appears over the skies of Daunton) then we can make a proposal and discuss it.
With regards to how LEW does it with the small number of judges that have changed over time is exactly as Covaithe put it. One judge will be needed to judge the game and thus cannot play or dm it. Given that one of the other judges is the dm and he cant approve the adventure, the last judge is required to approve the adventure. When this was the case in LEW either a fourth judge was available for comment, or the approval was sent to the other judges in two sections. One spoiler free with very minimal info on hooks, length, and general purpose. Then a spoiler section followed with very detailed information. That way the judge playing didn't have too much advance knowledge but could still pass judgement that the adventure would not break the world or unbalance the characters. And also the judge judging had enough information to do the job of judge should it ever become necessary. Its a little complicated I know and certainly easier if there are 4 or 5 judges.
It actually seems like the only sane way to do things.
Just another procedural thing: One should create a fake "Living 4th Edition" user and use that to create posts like the creation guide and such. This allows all the judges/facilitators (who will be given the password) to edit it; as is, only Graf (and forum moderators) can edit it. This will work in this group, but if this gets promoted to a full forum, then I doubt they'll keep that moderation (I'm not a LEB moderator, for example).
I think rgladwell has it right.
Why not just use a wiki page for this?
We will do that.
The character creation page just got a forum post because we can use sblocks and I can't do that on the wiki.
(And I panicked a bit when I heard that Cov is going away for a while -- I can do board posts a lot faster than wiki pages).
