By request, I have erected a discussion thread for this month's contest! Obviously, please keep discussions relevant to the contest itself. All other Guild posting rules also apply.

While I've already procured a writing partner, this would be the ideal place to put out a request for a writing partner!

I'm going to resist the urge to enter a story and instead vote. I would, however, not mind going over the entries together with someone.

Joint voting for joint stories. <3

I'm going to resist the urge to enter a story and instead vote. I would, however, not mind going over the entries together with someone.

Joint voting for joint stories. <3

Ah, actually, that's something I'm changing for the voting! Contestants WILL be able to vote this time. Decided that it wouldn't lead to any shenanigans(and if it does, I'm sure it could be caught).

@Frizan Only thing I see wrong with that is, say I enter but decide to vote for an entry that doesn't have a lot of votes instead of the one that I think deserves it. It doesn't ensure I'll win, but it does give me and everyone else a better chance of winning. I don't think voting like this is necessarily maleficent, but if every entry has 2 votes, they might as well not vote at all. But I do agree with you that it can't really do a lot of harm to let contestants vote. At the very least, it will let other contestants share positive interactions with each other, and will be appreciated if we have a small non-contestant voter turn out like last time.

However, the best type of vote will always come from a third party that has no stake in the contest. It is nice to see that you are taking feedback from people and even trying your own solutions to problems. Hopefully popularity will continue to increase, and I may one day find myself participating in one of your contests.

@Frizan Only thing I see wrong with that is, say I enter but decide to vote for an entry that doesn't have a lot of votes instead of the one that I think deserves it. It doesn't ensure I'll win, but it does give me and everyone else a better chance of winning. I don't think voting like this is necessarily maleficent, but if every entry has 2 votes, they might as well not vote at all. But I do agree with you that it can't really do a lot of harm to let contestants vote. At the very least, it will let other contestants share positive interactions with each other, and will be appreciated if we have a small non-contestant voter turn out like last time.

However, the best type of vote will always come from a third party that has no stake in the contest. It is nice to see that you are taking feedback from people and even trying your own solutions to problems. Hopefully popularity will continue to increase, and I may one day find myself participating in one of your contests.

I can definitely see where you're coming from in regards to the voting. There is a chance for aforementioned shenanigans, but I believe in the honesty of the community. A sort of benefit of the doubt. I will, of course, be continually receiving and considering feedback and constantly tweaking the contests as needed, and if the need arises to return to barring contestants from voting then so shall it be. I am even open to having a judging panel in the future, though that has its own share of issues. But that's what experimentation and feedback is for, and I thank you for yours!

@Frizan
>making it but not pinging me

=P

RIGHT!

What do I do if my coauthor isn't on RPG? *eyes a bunch of people*

Also @NEvix what think you, should we take a stab at this? I'm sure some number of people from our rp would qualify. Actually, I'd ask @Drakey if he was around, given that's basically the concept for Ziotea and Rodion, but...as I said. He's not about much. =/

Come to think of it, if I get permission to use his char and have him proof it, would that count? I'm not really clear on this whole twoauthors but it's okay if the writing is all by one person thing. @.@ But maybe that's just me. Could you perhaps clarify? Does creation of roughly half the characters or even just one MC count as sufficient contribution?

The formatting presentation you request here detracts from the story, in my personal opinion. If both parties are writing -- even if one person is doing most of it but getting snippets from the other party then it's very jarring to have a handful of places marked where party 2 did the word-for-word construction. If it's changing every few lines, that just becomes a disaster. If two people are each primary writers but not exclusively so for a given set of characters, and then some mostly shared characters, that can't actually be marked with just a note because there may be exceptions, and frequent ones. The only think I can think of is using some sort of authorship color, but even that detracts from a story, and it loses accuracy when color changes for edits (I've got a very active red pen).

Can we submit a clean version, and include another with writers marked as needed? Just so that it doesn't hurt readers' enjoyment?

@Kalleth yes, the idea was that, in addition to questions being open so everyone can see the responses, that finding partners could start here. ^.^

I'll be critiquing this round and casting my vote. We do need more judges plus I feel terrible about not completing my critiques for the last round.

After a bit of thinking, I've redacted the annotation requirement. Names at the top of the entries + confirmation from both authors will suffice.

@Frizan Huzzah! Thank you~

And clarification of how much contribution is needed for authorship to count? Creation of a character, but no actual writing? Initial character creation but the character long since being adopted by the first author, and perhaps a once over for proofing?

Can one author be involved in two works if they did only proofing for one (or something similarly low-involvement) and were the primary writer for the other?

@Frizan Huzzah! Thank you~

And clarification of how much contribution is needed for authorship to count? Creation of a character, but no actual writing? Initial character creation but the character long since being adopted by the first author, and perhaps a once over for proofing?

Can one author be involved in two works if they did only proofing for one (or something similarly low-involvement) and were the primary writer for the other?

My stance is that if two authors work on an entry, they both did something for the entry, and they both agree that the other did their fair share(whatever that may be), then it's acceptable. There are some issues I can foresee, but I can't really force people into my view of "fair share". I'm also faithful in this community's common sense, so I don't expect one of the two authors to write one sentence and do nothing else, and still say "it's fair!".

As for your second question: No. I don't want people spreading themselves out into several works(I'm not assuming malice, of course) as that could end up causing problems during the voting, as one person could possible make themselves eligible for the winning vote multiple times.

@Frizan okay, so two people actually doing the writing. Got it. YOur initial explanation in the contest post seemed much less balanced.

Oh, my collab writing guide got a like. I wonder if they are thinking about joining this contest? I will have to revamp it with all the ample data I'm going to gain from this contest.

Anyway, don't be shy. It might be interesting to hear from some of the contestants who are working on stories. For obvious reasons you shouldn't reveal too much about your story, but it would be interesting to see who is participating and how far along they are. I suspect it will take a bit before things get very far along.

@BrokenPromise I'm Shy but not shy; will that do? =P

I will not be lending my critiques this time around, for a number of reasons, some of which hail back to RPGC #15. Call it a decision made in protest (though pointedly without malice; consider this an opinionated rant).

I do not feel the parameters of the contest are sufficiently permissive to make feedback necessary or helpful from me. A 7000 word ceiling cap for a co-authored piece, for those of you who do not frequently collaborate with other writers, is paltry. A written piece is always exactly as long as it needs to be, no more or less, and forcing writers to constrain themselves where a better story might otherwise be conceived is pointless as anything other than a challenge in and of itself for the sake of itself, invalidating the nominal pretense of the contest parameters in favor of an assignment of brevity. There is no legitimate reason to impose any kind of wordcount limit except for that specific purpose. I include in that assessment the time and ability required of judges to evaluate submissions. If somebody submits an 800,000 megabrick, the judge should be up to the task of evaluating the whole story in a timely fashion - after all, the writer themselves was called to the task of creating aforementioned brick in a limited span of time.

Additionally, the arbitrary rule against gratuitous violence - which in and of itself does not violate Guild Rules - is just that. An arbitrary imposition of the judge upon the writer based on personal preference, which constrains writers in a similar fashion to a wordcount limit (the judge may impose such a rule freely, it is their contest, but that does not change that the rule is arbitrary). Ideally, the judge would not constrain the content of a story beyond the narrow tailoring of the challenge parameters themselves and what is forbidden by Guild Rules.

I may lend critique to submissions in future RPGCs even if these policies do not change, but for the moment I have no interest in evaluating the subjective merit of stories that have been unduly constrained by needless guidelines.

@Terminal I believe "gratuitous" in this case means enough to call into question the suitability of posting the story openly, as opposed to some other arbitrary standard. The guild does have a rule of good taste and a general rule that 18+ content (which does include violence when applied to other mediums, so I don't see why it wouldn't here as well) must be kept to PM. It's not technically included in as many words, but there's also the issue of what people are willing to read. Can't have a contest without judges, yeah? I personally would rather have a couple "arbitrary" rules rather than no opportunity at all. And since this is more of a community vote thing, setting sensible limits seems entirely reasonable to me.

It should be noted that any contest is going to be a matter of what the judges feel they can do fairly and well, at least if they're doing their job right. Just because you are able to dedicate the kind of time to read massive entries doesn't mean all of them are. Remember also that this is not a simple pass/fail standard, but rather competition -- restricting entries so that comparisons are easier to make can assist the judging process. It is not pointless, it's just not a writer-centered call. All rules are imposed equally. While perhaps the point of this competition is not to challenge the writers in the same way yours are, it does not make it a less worthy competition. And again, as this is community driven and I know that there are a lot of people out there that go "lol tl;dr", restricting length actually encourages fairness. It decreases the likelihood of people reading only the ones that didn't exhaust them and then only voting between those and not even considering others because of length.

I will admit that perhaps a higher limit would be *nice* when two authors are involved, but...in the end, there's practical concerns to consider.

@AngelofOctober and I have just put up our story. I wonder how we'll do.

Entry submitted. I won't stop fidgeting until the reviews start coming in.

I haven't read any of the stories yet, but I'm eager to start once the voting pole opens.

*wriggles*