In reply to Ronning (msg # 33):

It's not just telling the difference between biased reviews.
You then have *if* they give balanced reviews of what was good and bad, not only what they didn't like
*if* the game the review is on has anything in common with the new game
*if* most of the players review the game, not just 1 or 2.
*if* the GM runs enough games, frequently enough for there to be a sufficient amount of information
*if* -and this isn't personal- you know yourself to be a person who does not have an unconscious bias toward negative reviews.


Particularly on that last point, many people do spend more time trying to decide if the negative comments will be true for them rather than the positive ones. It's a natural inclination to avoid unpleasant experiences.

I am very very glad that RPoL admins don't intend to implement any kind of peer review/rating system on RPoL. I'm not here to "win" at RPGs. There are a lot of people on here who simply don't run or play in enough games for this to be useful. I still believe this would only be useful to those people who play 3-4 D&D/Pathfinder/d20 games simultaneously.

There is nothing 'wrong' in wanting a rating system, or wishing there was some way to compliment (or complain about) other users, be they player or GM.  It's human nature, and it's very understandable.

I also think everyone here understands the reasoning behind RPoL's decision not to implement a rating system -- WHETHER OR NOT they agree with that decision.  RPoL's philosophy includes things like anonymity, the basic freedom to politely speak your mind about most things in the public forums without being attacked or trolled, and for GMs to run their games as they like and for players to have many, many possibilities for games.

While it's fine to share your opinion either way, please keep in mind that it should be just that, and that there's no need to convince anyone else to 'come to the dark side'.  We can agree to disagree on the point, and still be friends at the discussion's end.  :-)

Pertaining to this topic, I have a question for the Mods.

Would the Rpol rules support someone starting a 'Discussion' game where the purpose was to  discuss and/or rate GM's and players? It would be a 'private' system, in that it's in a game and not on the public boards. But would openly discussing players from one game, in another game, break the anonymity rules? Either in fact or in spirit?

RPoL would not support this type of game, no.

You simply cannot account for what a Player -- or GM -- may, or may not, take offense too. Peoples sensibilities also vary greatly. Sometimes an "insult" was not meant, rather, a poor choice of wording was made.

Yet another reason not to establish a semi-official rating system.

In reply to Mystic-Scholar (msg # 48):

And for some, it doesn't matter how it's worded, they will take it wrong.  In short there is no good way to rate players/GMs for a group, only for an individual.

You also have to account for perspective of people.

I was active in the game design boards for awhile before it shut down. Well I generally don't know who is saying what (due to no avatars, I tend to identify visuals rather than text) well one individual didn't like my discussion about their homebrew system and asked me to leave them alone. Well later in a different thread on a different topic, I responded, not realizing it was the same person. Well they seemed to think I was being rude and stalking them, when really it was just me not really knowing who I was responding to.

It didn't help that we never seemed to understand each other, constantly correcting misunderstandings about our ideas.

It was just an inability for us to have anything but bad communication, but very likely it would have led to very negative reviews, and from his perspective, totally legitimate negative reviews, though not from my perspective.

Multiply this by the number of people, and the rating system becomes unworkable as people give reviews based on anger or personal tastes that might not translate to what someone else would feel about that person.

Word.

I had a situation like that, where I player I ended up removing couldn't see why I had to do so, and if we had reviews, he would likely have many unflattering things to say, based on the last comments he graced me with before leaving.

As a GM, it would be disheartening to see someone's bad attitude possibly turn people away from my games due to one person's pettiness.

I don't see a way that a public review system wouldn't be abused and cause a lot of bad feelings.  It would be rather stressful for something I come here to do for fun.  You could solicit opinions from other players, but a public system I believe would cause more harm than good.

This is my main problem with reviews, ratings, whatever. I've been running games on Rpol for going on five years. I've brought four to a conclusion and closed one. I'm not sure I've had more than two dozen different players in those games, so I doubt you'd get 20 reviews on my five concluded games. You might get a half dozen and you mostly won't know those Rpolians at all.

Mystic-Scholar mentioned Siskal and Ebert. Those two guys reviewed hundreds of films in their careers and people got to know over time whether they could be relied on when choosing a movie to see. You aren't going to know anything about Gaffer and the odds that you can compare your experience with a GM to mine are pretty remote.

So the reviews are going to have no reality that you can judge them on and there aren't likely to be enough on most GMs to form a consensus.

In reply to Gaffer (msg # 52):

LOL Your comment about movie reviews reminds me of the critic who wrote for the newspaper we got back in the day I went out to watch a lot of first-run movies.  If he liked it, I wouldn't, if he panned it, I gave it a serious look.  So his critique worked for me, but in a backwards sort of way.  A rating system, however, wouldn't be so easy to work with.

Actually that does give me an idea.

Have one or a few that do reviews like they were reviewing a movie, with descriptions of a gm's style, as well as likely reason for failed games if any, and rate their creativity, railroading, etc.

Granted, it would be skewed a bit, but with consistency, readers could eventually learn whether they tend to agree or disagree with a particular reviewer's statements and can then make judgment based on that.

It would be like reading gameinformer to decide what games to investigate further based on seeing what games are your style and such.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 54):

Well the only way for that to work would be to objectify traits and set down rules on how to express them right? I heard somewhere that a 7/10 game review is supposed to be like rating a game four stars for instance. That has to be clear at the get go.

That being said, I am the last person to ask about a numeric scale. I got to confuse a poor gm a while back that used one of em in their rtj.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 54):

RPoL is not interested in setting up or running any kind of review system, or in permitting users to do so on this site.

In reply to bigbadron (msg # 56):

Good to know.

In reply to bigbadron (msg # 56):

Thank You BBR. It's been ten years or so since I last said it. You rock man!

I was not aware this was such a hot topic still, but my question was answered by BBR on the second post. I don't agree with it, but I respect it. Maybe when I learn how to program such an in-depth site as this, I'll do anything I want too it, but I'm not unhappy because I don't get to put a like on someone's game or whatever.

Honestly not to concerned either way, I just like making ideas.

Might put together some guidelines for describing gaming styles though. Could be helpful to have a well known set of descriptors for gaming and gming styles to make finding good matches easier. So a gm could use them to describe the game and their style, telling potential players what to expect on that side of things.

I don't see that stuff mentioned ahead of time, but I only look at ads or ICs that catch my eye.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 54):

Setting aside BBR's declaration, this suggestion is still extremely problematic.  Who makes up this hypothetical panel of reviewers? What happens when someone requests a review of a game that none of them are interested in?  How long are they expected to spend analyzing a game before reviewing it?  What is expected to become of their games while they're working on the review?

The questions of 'how much analysis time' and 'at what point in the life of the game' are two huge sticking points...if they look at a game for an insufficient amount of time, the review won't be complete or will miss some very significant details.  If they review a brand new game that's still looking for its precise 'voice, the results will be massively different than they'd be once the game has really hit its stride.

Because you're likely to get reviews from either extremely pleased players, or extremely disgruntled ex-players if you don't have appointed reviewers.  I know I'd much rather spend my RPOL time participating in my own games than analyzing someone else's game and writing reviews, and I expect the vast majority of players and GMs feel the same, so creating a 'panel' of reviewers is an iffy prospect, at best.  I don't see any satisfactory solution to those problems...which is the primary reason I wouldn't trust reviews if they did decide to use them.  And, frankly, I'm perfectly happy with the flat refusal to add a review system.

It would take that review panel quite a while to get through all 7,000+ games on Rpol, let alone through all the 9,000,000+ posts.

And our product isn't like a commercial game or book or movie or play that everyone wants reviewed because they might purchase. By the time my games get to IC posting, the 'new players' tag is down, so what good is a review, which before that has precious little to look at.

No matter how you shape this function it is, at best, useless.

I meant to review GMs, specifically in as objective a way as possible, as in to note objective aspects about how they run games, such as whether they are exclusive to premade content, homebrew, or if they mix the two. Comments like saying they are good or bad wouldn't be part of the revieGMsurther, you would only really need to review GMs who are looking to run more games. There are far fewer GMs then games, and fewer still that will be making new games anytime soon, and even fewer still that have enough content posted to give a fair review.

The idea being that a player could find info on how the GM tends to run their games, to discover any incompatibility in playstyles before even bothering to rtj.

If rpol ever became a pay-to-play site, I would really like to see a rating system of GM and players. But then I would see that the best rated GM would only invite the best rated players...

Does this sound like the future we hope to see?
I do not

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 63):

I still consider that a Herculean task.  Yes, there are fewer GMs than games, but there's still a truckload of GMs and new ones joining all the time.

And what if you have a GM that doesn't necessarily use the same style to run games of different genres?  What about GMs who may be running pre-written material, but it's in a system that none of the reviewers are familiar with and therefore they don't recognize that?

And it still doesn't address the question of who does the reviews...and why would they bother with them, rather than focus on games which they themselves are running/playing?

Big task? I agree.

This isn't really about systems. Besides it isn't the hard to ask if the GM is using a module, as for system the reviewer can, and shoukd, look it up. Most of a GMs style won't change regardless of system, setting, or pbp vs tt. Example, one old GM of mine was very descriptive and high energy, this held true in every system he played, and as a player as well.

Some GMs stick with modules because they don't feel comfortable improvising their way through.

As for who would do reviews? People who want to of course. You can find lots of people who do reviews on all kinds of things, for free even! You could ask the same question of them, why do they make reviews? Well it isn't for the money.

I guess this is going to be one of those 'agree to disagree' things...because I still see nothing useful in what you're suggesting.  For every GM I can think of that would be screened by what you might write about them, I can think of another one who would get the same basic review...but was a drastically different experience, in terms of playing with them.

Based on my personal experience, a review like what you're suggesting would serve only as a drain on the time of the person writing the review, without providing anything helpful to a person reading it.  I mean, if you're only going to assess objective details about the GM, the GM can answer all of those questions on his own, in his game ad ("This game will be utilizing the Black Ice adventure module, for a basic premise...but I will be adding in a lot of my own plot details and players should not expect the game to run exactly as listed in the module," for instance...I've seen several GMs do exactly this...)

Since RPoL will not organise an onsite review/rating system, and will not permit anybody else to do so (or allow anybody to advertise an offsite one that they have set up), there seems little point in continuing this discussion.