mythicfox | Just some musings

This isn't inspired by anything specific or recent, but I wonder from time to time if the folks who manage and moderate the White Wolf forums have ever considered devoting a forum or sub-forum to folks who want to discuss homebrew or 'monster-garaged' mechanics. If people had a specific place to go to discuss some of this stuff, then maybe by getting it out of their system they wouldn't feel the need to answer a question about regular mechanics with "Well, we do it this way in our game and it should be good enough for you, even though it's not applicable to anyone else's game because it requires a custom rules/setting hack that I made up myself." And then Rules Hack Guy would have a place to run off to and cry when people suggest that his rules hack might not be helpful, rather than defensively lashing out at everyone else on the forums and ensuring the original poster will never get his question answered.

Seriously, that's half the reason why I don't post there if I can help it. If you've got a rules question and someone hasn't given a clear, sensible answer in the first five responses you're not going to get one. Because by then the thread will have been jacked, often because of someone's personal interpretation of the setting or rules material sparking an argument. If you're lucky, the question can be solved out of an existing book or a writer/developer chimes in quickly and that's the end of it. Otherwise, just give up on the thread after five replies, because it's going nowhere.