Village Newspapers

Age : 29 Posts : 4301

With there being various proposals being currently considered within the Staff Lounge, we would like to gain some form of opinion from the members about certain new additions. One of the subjects being considered is the introduction of, what we're calling, Village Newspapers. What these basically are is, like a newspaper, a source of information that will update the population of the village on events that have transpired throughout the past month. In other words, summarising the past months roleplaying topics into one big topic for the village to be updated on the events transpiring within their homeland.

It would mean members from across the village would be able to find out if someone had died, someone had left the village, two people were marrying, a shop had been robbed and much more without the worry of performing metagaming actions. We hope for these newspapers to hold one main topic, which is again like a newspaper, that would be classed as the headline for that month's newspaper. This story would hopefully be one of great significance that the whole village can get involved with, if they wished. With each news segment, a link to the original topic would be provided for further reading.

A matter the Staff are currently debating is who would be responsible for these monthly updates. One idea is for the Evaluation Moderators to handle the summary of the topics, while another is for you, the members, to submit your own topics to be considered for the monthly newspaper and also attach a summary of that topic with it. This is where we'd like for your opinions to come out and tell us if one, whether you even like the idea of these newspapers and two, which method you'd prefer to handle the monthly papers, if you like the idea of course.

Age : 29 Posts : 1585

I personally like and support this idea. I believe the evaluation mods are more capable of summarizing a whole month in a news topic, but why not accept the help of a volunteer. In either case, I believe the admins should also take part in this if it were to be implemented. I am pretty sure you are capable of creating such a topic using the evaluation mods and the members' help. It has to be official and quality work. Also, consider creating them in the form of articles, as this will help all members be up to date by reading a short summary of their village's news.

Age : 30 Posts : 1012

How about a Nukenin Varient? Like, dead drops of certain information they pay funds to know, or something of the likes?

Age : 33 Posts : 718

I support this, but there should be some kind of disclaimer that the only IC information people get from these are whats in the summary themselves. We wouldn't want someone confusing this as an excuse to know about an opponents techniques before hand(Unless that is the main subject of an article) The new paper's information should also only be available IC if the character was in the village during that months edition. So along as all the necessary precautions against bad metagaming are taken, this will be an excellent help to make innocent metagaming used for plot set ups to be justified. "Rumors" about so and so's clan could be actual rumors instead of fluff written in to make an introduction more believable.

Age : 109 Posts : 179

I like the idea of a village newspaper.

Because I just do. Must I have a reason?

Age : 28 Posts : 3145

I think there would quickly arise an issue of which topics are fitting for the newspaper and which aren't. Personally I would hate for there to be ever an 'article' (?) in which my character is in any way mentioned or analysed. That's jut me though.

Also I'm not sure how IC appropriate these would be. Villages are military organisations and newspapers can be gotten hold of by people who may not wish the village well.

Plus is it fair to drop more work on evaluation mods when the number just went down to 3? :/

Not trying to be a downer but I just don't feel this is really a priority or something that the people have been asking for. Not really sure who suggested it in the staff lounge and for what reasons. .-.

Age : 30 Posts : 1637

Cross wrote:: How about a Nukenin Varient? Like, dead drops of certain information they pay funds to know, or something of the likes?

I'd have taken nukenin into consideration as well, but it's a lot harder to justify since nukenin are by nature going to be a lot stingier with their information.

Mugen Kousen wrote:: I support this, but there should be some kind of disclaimer that the only IC information people get from these are whats in the summary themselves.

That's definitely the idea. It's meant to be a general overview of the larger events or things that affect more than just the people involved, such as the marriage of important village figures, the abandoning of the village by important figures, etc. Some smaller, less village encompassing events may find their way into the paper as well,l which is the case with most real world periodicals as well, but the main point is to keep everybody updated on the village happenings OOC and important information IC that the character should come across.

Chris wrote:: I think there would quickly arise an issue of which topics are fitting for the newspaper and which aren't. Personally I would hate for there to be ever an 'article' (?) in which my character is in any way mentioned or analysed. That's jut me though.

Also I'm not sure how IC appropriate these would be. Villages are military organisations and newspapers can be gotten hold of by people who may not wish the village well.

Plus is it fair to drop more work on evaluation mods when the number just went down to 3? :/

Not trying to be a downer but I just don't feel this is really a priority or something that the people have been asking for. Not really sure who suggested it in the staff lounge and for what reasons. .-.

I won't be addressing all of these in the order you wrote them, but bear with me here. xP

It was lumped in with a handful of other suggestions, and while it might not be something that was widely asked for or as heavy as a system change or addition, it's meant to be a more fun addition that gets people active in more OOC things and help people get an idea of what's happening in the villages without having to dig through every single topic.

The idea wasn't to shove it onto the eval mods to do the work. While that was talked about, the more popular choice was to open up to have people volunteer to participate in the writing of the newspaper, as most agree that eval mods already have enough of a workload with evaluations as well as working on other tasks they may have.

As for being IC appropriate or not, I was originally of the mind that it would be mainly for OOC information purposes. There are some things that happen in threads which are likely to go unnoticed by a lot of people unless the thread is Topic of the Month, even if it's information that everybody in the appropriate village/faction would benefit from. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that instead of just being a paper that's distributed ICly, the information in it will cover things that any character in the village should have access to or has a high probability of coming across, like the promotion of an important village figure, for example. Or in the case of Konoha, the marriage of Amy's and Nuke's characters. On that note, the topic selection wouldn't be just at random, and your character wouldn't be mentioned unless it was something that everybody in the village should be aware of.

All in all, this topic is first and foremost to gauge the interest in the general idea of it, and secondly to discuss how it would work. None of the stated ways of it functioning are set in stone right now.

Age : 31 Posts : 1490

I'm just going to slide this away for the time being, if the idea progresses any further, more input will be requested. Solved.