hilarity aside, here's my first take on your document
@HypthtcllySpkng :
-Inconsistent writing voice. You go from casual to irreverent to academic and back. I get that this is just a treatment, but still... it reads like a blog post.
-Kind of seems like you're letting Mr. Colville run your first lesson for you...
-It seems like you're curating rather than creating practicum. It's cool if you are, I just need to be sure. Like you're first objective is to collect a huge list of links, then sort them by subject, and then create units where you write a brief introduction summarizing and highlighting your points and then send the reader on to the relevant link primed to absorb key information.
-Is this going to be a book or a blog/website?
Indeed.
1. The writing voice is an issue of a lack of editing, and it is half-written to potential contributors and half-written as a part of the guide. I'll separate that out, and clean it up soon.
2. Oh, it'll be a lot more than Colville. Per your third point, it will likely be a combination of practicum with heavy curation of lessons from others. There'll be Mercer, Perkins, Gygax, and just about anything else I can find in written or video online, including links to people's blogs and so on. The idea is, as you said, to summarize what'll be in the link, calling it a "lesson" and the summary will add additional thought as we decide it's necessary.
For instance, what would you do to teach someone about Traps in D&D? Well, first you throw in the trash everything 5e presents. There's gotta be a solid 10 articles and blog posts around that have great thought on the subject, and of course, Mercer and Colville and Perkins have all made statements on the subject. Gygax did. Etc. So we assemble all of it, in some cases literally tweets, cherry-pick the best thought, summarize the rest in the guide and point them to the best and most relevant 1 or 2 articles. An "additional reading" bit at the end of the lesson, and of course, some "examples of great traps" to cap it off and you have a lesson. There'll be in course 101 a Traps for Dummies with more basic advice from famous and entertaining people. And then in 301, more "dig into the philosophy of a trap" Advanced Trap Making for the Experienced Grognard. *sips tea*. That'll be a little less famous GM's and a little more obscure but thoughtful GM no ones heard of, I imagine.
The summaries then will be individually hand-written, and thought contributed could come from a dozen different sources. Contributors to any given lesson receive credit, per typical internet rules.
3. Goal is for it to be a reasonably updated pdf, and to have its completed form seeded around the internet in strategic locations. A few subreddits, some back alley forums, maybe tweet it at Colville and Perkins and pray. Its home location would be a G-drive link or something and I'd just leave that up and occasionally tinker with the file and throw up a changelog. If it caught on -- and it probably wouldn't, we're dreaming here baby --maybe a site funded by donations just to host it? But the idea is I'm using other people's content and throwing my own thoughts and the thoughts of other friendly GM's from around the net on top of it. There are legal issues if I make it a book or whatever, and a blog doesn't concentrate everything the way I'd like, though I'm open to the suggestion I suppose, maybe once a semi-complete version of the doc is out, a blog could help further enhance the content.
If even one GM did the whole thing, and it helps them, guides them into better gaming, and supports their table, I'd be happy.
The Angry GM's
first four or five posts on adjudicating actions are brilliant (his website slowly goes downhill after that, though).
Indeed. I like his monster building articles, but they are enormously long-winded. Helpful in 5e when the monster design rules are such ballsack.
A
question, to guide further thought and give me some early goals:
For Course 101 - what are some things, just rapid-fire, that we think we would want every beginner GM to know?