CharmsBestOfDiscussion

As a casual reader of the wiki, I find that I don't use the charms section as much as I'd like, because sifting through it all is a daunting task. Inspired by MartialArts/BestOf, I'm wondering what people think of the idea of creating some "best of" charms pages where people could vote for the best submitted charms. I'm thinking there could be a page for each type/group combination (e.g. "best of solar resistance", "best of sidereal archery", etc.). The voting in the best of martial arts page seems like it worked pretty well, with a couple of changes. In other words:

• Each user can add a comment listing five charms relevant to the section (e..g. "solar resistance") in order of preference.
• User's top choice gets five points, the second gets four and so on.
• Users cannot vote for their own charms.
• At the top of the page, a list is kept of the all the charms mentioned, with the sum of all the points it's been given, sorted in order of those points.

Unlike the martial arts best of (the point of which was the production of a PDF), this would be an open-ended list, a contest that is always running. Because of this, users would be able to change their votes, and adjust the totals accordingly.

The whole point here would be to give the casual user a quick entry to good stuff, not necessarily "winning" anything.

What do people think? Is something like this worth doing? If so, how should the links be organized? Has this been done already?

-- Wordman

--- Comments --- I think it's a great idea, but the issue is one of prerequisites. If someone writes 5 charms, of which the peak charm is awesome, and the rest horrible, how to deal with that? Do we simply say "Has 4 prereqs" in it? We really don't want to list all the bad prereqs, but to list the charm with unlinked (and bad) prereqs is weird too. Still, I like the idea. - GregLink

If the peak charm is great and the rest suck, vote for the peak charm and not the others. Storytellers can figure out how to integrate a good idea into their game in one way or the other. - Wordman

Nice idea. I've kinda wanted something like this myself. People could vote for entire subtree's, i.e. the way way martial art's works. One of the nice things about the MA contest was it got more peer review of the tree's, which makes me feel better about using them. (I figure if a bunch of people looked at it, its less likely to be idiosyncratic to one game). -FlowsLikeBits

I think the voting should be for finished Charm trees, not seperate Charms. Having a hundred Charms that aren't connected isn't much fun, no matter how good they are. Or maybe the best Charms for one ability could be stuck together in a tree once they've been selected? Resplendence

I generally create single Charms that fill some thematic gap for me, not whole Charm trees all at once - and in fact many of the trees I've seen have been a little too filled with speed-bumps, that slowly develop the author's idea rather than just getting to the point. Is it the intention of this project to rule out good Charms, if people don't make them into long, rambling trees? Further, just saying "all these Charms rock, make a 'Charms That Rock' tree" seems contrary to the spirit of Charm trees. -- BillGarrett