Steve

Thanks for correcting me, it's good to know more about this. Well, us Gloranthan folks were invited by Rick to come over here and say what we'd like to see improved about these forums, without warning us that there's a lot of history here and no doubt hard work done by the admins, moderators and so forth. So without knowing that background it's easy for us to cause offence and suggest things that simply don't fit in with what's gone before. So it seems that the TDM stuff would fit in fine under a Chaosium banner, but plenty of other stuff won't. So that's another reason to keep the BRP branding. But HeroQuest doesn't fit into that (the BRP banner) either, and that is a Chaosium product now. I'd like to here Rick's and MOB's views on this.

Those products (at least, the TDM ones, I know nothing about Revolution D100) use licences from Chaosium, so they're just part of an extended family of Chaosium products. I don't see why they couldn't sit in a Chaosium-branded forum, with their own sub-forums.

Right, after having read some more threads here, I can now see the problem. These forums aren't owned by Chaosium, and the owner wants to keep the BRP name for now. Which is of course his decision, fair enough. But I'd suggest to Chaosium that there's already a conflict here, in terms of the way that the BRP forums have been existing and successfully running for a long time, and how something that is BRP-branded fits the needs for Chaosium's community outreach. I would suggest that for BRP-based games like CoC, it fits very well. But for non-BRP-based games (such as HeroQuest, and general Gloranthan discussions that are non-rules-based), it fits somewhat less well. Rick, you asked for solutions to be suggested as well as the problems themselves. Here you go - rebrand the forums totally as Chaosium.

The SEO would surely be strengthened through using the Chaosium brand name in the URL, no? Also, the Chaosium range of products is far more than BRP, so again the BRP name doesn't seem to fit that too well. I've raised some further points in the thread started by Rick on this, but my biggest question is about whether these are now the new official Chaosium forums. If so (and Rick said they are, right?), then surely the BRP name (as evidenced by the banner picture showing an out-of-date range of games at the top of the page) is not so appropriate? Edit - ah, I've just realised (through further reading) that these forums are not owned by Chaosium. My apologies to the owner of the site if my comments seem to not acknowledge his own hard work. But I'm still struggling with the whole BRP vs Chaosium thing.

There are also some interesting views being expressed in this thread. The whole BRP vs Chaosium thing seems very confused. Are these the official Chaosium forums now? Because if so, calling them basicroleplaying.org sends out a strange message, because not all Chaosium games use the BRP system (and Chaosium is more than RPGs anyway, with fiction, board games, computer games (licenced ones like King of Dragon Pass), etc. It also doesn't help that the banner at the top of the forums is an old BRP one, and again doesn't reflect the current line of Chaosium products. I think that this needs to be re-looked out, to decide if these forums are sending out the right corporate message. For example, how is it going to attract players of HeroQuest? Talking of HeroQuest, if the aim is to get those players on board, along with all those interested in Glorantha, the forum structure is going to need tweaking. On glorantha.com we have eleven sub-forums for various Gloranthan subjects. As well as HeroQuest we have RuneQuest 2&3, Runequest 6, plus the imminent 13th Age, plus of course general discussions about the world of Glorantha that have no rules involvement. Having a single forum for all Gloranthan subjects is going to be very confusing (e.g. someone posts about a subject that you initially think is RuneQuest but then a bit later you figure out is HeroQuest). Right now the forums for Glorantha are full of very out-of-date postings (again, unattractive to newcomers), so it would be good to get content copied over from the glorantha.com forums or at the very least update the stickies (e.g. the list of current products). I think that the idea of having a single set of forums for the new Chaosium is an excellent idea. It looks like a convenient solution was available by adopting the pre-existing BRP forums (sorry, I am ignorant about the history of the BRP forums) but without looking at how well they fit the needs of a new set of Chaosium forums. So the execution seems poor so far. However, this can be fixed by addressing these issues, and those that others have outlined.