So what is stopping us actually doing another chapter or two of the BRCS? The chapter about the Gods should be easy to sanction, though perhaps a reference or two to Laerme would be good.
In my view, Chapters 2, 5 and 7 (bloodlines, domain ruling and realm magic) are the most important sections of the book.
I am available to help in anyway. I do think the Gods section is an easy one to approve.
-BB
I’ve moved these two posts into a different thread, so that any take-up of this idea does not derail an already highly sensitive topic.
Thoughts please!
What’s the purpose? Are you talking about updating the rules? Or adding material on theory, game aids, backgrounds, statted characters/creatures, etc?
At the moment we have chapters 1 &2 voted on, if contentious to some.
The boards have never stopped arguing to agree the rest.
I agree that it would be good to agree on what we can, or at least agree ‘base’ and ‘variants’.
correcting typo’s and the like would please the pedants (me and others who know who they are).
The down side is that laying down the law on what is official tends to annoy those who were absent during the poll, were too busy to feed in, or voted against.
With the wiki we can probably make any changes we want and show any number of variants - the ‘agreed’ brcs would then emerge by usage. It would take longer, and be bottom up not top down, but it is easy to do, and good ideas can always be added later as more variants.
Either way, we do need to have some sort of standard set, even if that is only Ruins of Empire and the 3.5 SRD. I know of at least one group that takes the BRCS as the sole canon for 3.5 BR rules, so we should at least try to “sanction” a few more chapters.
Am I a pedant though? Guilty as charged 
“BRCS Chapter 4: Gods and religion” already has alternate versions of bits of it on the wiki. Some are minor changes, some are extensive. It will not be a simple vote on what is there. It will require the editing committee to review all the changes already proposed.
It will also require decisions to be made about whether some of the changes rely on things added to the wiki (e.g. Church histories) or whether they can be stand-alone in the BRCS.
But I have now finished marking all the BRCS parts of Ch 4 on the wiki so it should be clear what is old and what is new.
Sorontar
I still think the ‘voting’ part for sanctioning is utter rubbish - yes, forum discussions - polls even - have a place in laying the foundation, but the rest should be up to the development team. Otherwise we get lack of focus, lack of direction, lack of consistency.
If you want to restart the BRCS (which is a good idea I suppose, since it has a completely different role that does the BRwiki) try to do it ‘right’:
I’m reluctant to offer to help - I know BR well and I suppose I’m Ok at writing both rules and setting material, but sadly I don’t know the BRCS rules very well…and I’m a VERY bad case of ‘my house rules are better than yours’ 
Unfortunately you weren’t part of the original process - there was heavy, heavy criticism and personal attacks that resulted while the “team” was assembling the initial information (heck I and Jan (Mark_Aurel) weren’t even on the original team but were added later (by request) when several of the original group dropped out for personnel reasons).
That is what led to the polls, etc. - to give the inclusion authority to the masses and not a “select” group of people in the back room.
I can absolutely state that the attacks were very, very personal.
irdeggman, you gave very good job in the process. If we do re-start brcs, you are THE man of the situation 
Hmm…I didn’t know that. Personal attacks…over a GAME that people are spending time and energy on, with no compensation??? The world never ceases to amaze, does it?
Sadly I was to preocupied with my own version of BR at the time (I suppose I still am) …and I can’t say I agreed with everything that was done, but that’s NOT the point…the point is that I always liked the CONCEPT of the BRCS…didn’t matter that it didn’t always fit my view of things.
And I still think a coherent BRCS downloadable in pdf format is a great boon to any would-be BR player. Combined with cheap downloadable original material and an increasingly cool BRwiki it might actually get some new people playing
Maybe my contribution could be as a recipent for all personal attacks…my views on, for example, bigger province size makes me an excellent choice for such a position 
:eek:
Birthright setting must get new fans to compensate for the loss of veterans due to real life problems. To achieve this, BRCS is a basic requirement. With a basic rules document, I find it hard to imagine anyone becoming a fan of Birthright.
Both the “power to the masses” and the “select few developers” models have their own appeal, but I think the best thing is something in between. How many “select few” can guarantee that they will not abandon the project for reason? On the other hand, giving the same amount of power in decision-making to the hardcore long-time fans and to the casual and temporary players seems unfair.
I’d like to suggest a model used by AGCEEP, my favorite mod for one of my favorite games. Basically, the whole community is free to submit their own works and ideas. A basic idea is not enough because it requires someone else to complete the work on it. For a valid submission, a community member must submit a complete work, ready to be included in the project without much editing. In this case, a complete work would be a complete class write-up, a complete article about something, or something like that. The compilation of the project and inclusion of submitted works is in the hands of “select few” called the High Council in AGCEEP community. Aside from maintaining the project, the members of the council are free to submit works of their own. In case of disagreement of community members on whether some work should be included or not and in what form, the High Council is called upon to vote on the matter, and their decision is final.
It would be easy to recognize the few exceptionally active forum members to form the initial High Council. The High Council would be open to accepting new members if someone shows similarly exceptional devotion and activity in the project.
The standard procedure on AGCEEP forum is to make a formal submission 10 days after discussion on the topic has died out. I realize that BRCS is not a mod for a game, but I’ve seen this model work very well and I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for BRCS if it is adequately adapted to the nature of the project.
Well, we could just take the Paizo approach that they ate taking with the new Pathfinder RPG (effectively D&D 3.6). We put up some rules, encourage others and have a very public feedback phase. The Powers That Be then get together and synthesise hard rules, if with various listed options. It has the advantage of unified authority throughout the whole BRCS and allows a great deal of feedback.
Besides which, I’m often on hand to purge any vitriol as necessary.
I haven’t been posting a lot lately, but I have been lurking about…
Personally I favor the development team approach, with a public review process and allowing for the submission of works by the community at large for review by the development team. There might be certain procedures that can be undertaken to hold down the level of “disclusion” that some people might feel.
I wasn’t on the BRCS team, but I remember the vitriol well. Eventually, many of the development team simply stopped participating on the forums, and I personally don’t blame them for that. This was unfortunate, because many of the them were among the core participants in the community. So it was a bad situation all around. The wars over the BRCS resulted in permanent, lasting damage to the community.
I was, however, on the d20 Atlas team, and can speak to some of those experiences. We had about 15 authors, but most of them never contributed, they apparently only wanted to see their names on the project, or else simply didn’t have the time to write anything. Further, there were authors who apparently believed that “editing” was illegitimate; that no one had the right to edit their work (both for spelling/grammar, and for more setting related reasons). Eventually the project just ran out of steam. But a lot of that work has re-appeared on the wiki.
I also have another question. Forgive my ignorance, but why do we need to re-boot the BRCS? Certainly I only use certain parts of it when I play, but given that this is the official BR website, shouldn’t the bulk of our energies be focused on the current edition of D&D (BR is, after all, a D&D campaign setting)?
Don’t you think the hack-and-slash, CRPG-optimized 4th edition would fail to capture the essence of Birthright setting?
BR.net is no longer the official Birthright website and I for one refuse to devote any conversion time towards a new game that has next to no social interaction, almost no scope for multi-classing and barely any fluff about monsters and so forth. I’ll take a big pass on the alleged 4th Edition of D&D.
I would think we need to work on 4th edition and we could most certainly make it work and work well … but certainly their are going to be some obstacles.
We should keep a 3.5 or 3.75 version that might take a few good ideas from 4th edition roll them into 3.5. Much like the Paizo version which seems pretty good.
Make 4th edition actually be 4th edition and not 3.5 with a 4th edition coat of paint. If we have a strong 3.75 version hopefully this won’t happen. When someone who only is familiar with the 4th edition of D&D reads the 4th edition version it should feel very comfortable.
Break up the BRCS to multiple downloads. The information presented in BRCS is great but more than slightly overwhelming to someone new. We should mirror downloads to match how D&D create their books. The players rulebook should really contain information on how to play and basic rules.
A good example of too much information is the gods section. A lot of great info but to a starting playing far too much. A single downloadable rulebook should contain the basics only and then the wiki can expand the rest or we put out a separate download of the gods.
-BB
Thelandrin - I do think we would need to be very creative in a new social interaction system. To be honest, does 3.5 edition have a great social interaction system? If so what makes it better than 4th edition? The combining of some skills doesn’t really kill social interaction all that much.
I guess I am saying. Is is possible for us to create a roleplaying / social interaction system that is compatible with 4th edition? I think so, but we would need to have some creative ideas on our part. Heck many of us are DM’s and being creative is what we do best.
-BB
For 4e we can do pretty much what we like for social interaction as its not going to feature in standard 4e.
So we could have ‘social background’ classes with social skills, feats, etc, etc - as long as it didn’t hit adventure play it would be a simple bolt on as long as it used similar mechanics (D20+skill vs DC basically, maybe DC + L/2 if we have to) or use any other mechanic we wanted.
Similarly we could streamline skill challenges for social use, create ‘debate hit points, attack bonus and armour class’, etc.
To me however it is more ‘why switch?’ 4e is clearly going down the pure hack ‘n’ slash route, while BR sounds like a good match from the initial publicity puffs, in reality BR was never a hybrid of D&D and old-style wargames, it was instead D&D + politics + simulation of a real world, etc.
3e is a very versatile system, it seems popular, and 4e really hasn’t gone down too well on the boards - I’ve tried contributing, even bought the books and ploughed through them, but frankly I see zero improvement and several retrograde steps. If my expectations of the economic chances of 4e are anything like close I’d suggest waiting for 5e and doing a big push then…
This is why I am so pro-wiki and against ‘4e BRCS’. I like BRCS, I’d happily have paid double the odds (even at modern WOTC prices) for it. I toyed with my own version and never mustered the energy to do anything about it - brcs wasn’t perfect but it fitted a gap and did it fairly well. But having read some of the old posts, heard some of the older members, and so on I don’t know if the forum would survive another brcs attempt. Frankly if someone wants to do their own thing off the boards and safe from the venom great, they can come back, wiki it, and say please ‘guys, see if you can beat this - please, I’d love to enhance my game - in the meantime be inspired’.