@Ratchet I tend to agree with most of what u said but I think there is a little flaw in the response to being too busy to play but not to host, which is very amendable.
I think for some players, multiple players actually, playing is in fact more time/effort consuming than hosting for several reasons, mainly:
- Active players will burn themselves out creating activity. Hosting a smaller to medium game can be easier for them and less time/effort consuming to just process actions and manage players/vote counts. When an active player chooses not to be active, they are heavily suspected, so it's mostly a requirement for them at a certain point and makes the game more taxing.
- On the other hand, lower activity players will be forced to read hundreds of pages of thread posts which seems like a chore to them, specially with half of these posts being fluff. If they choose not to read, they either get extremely suspects, lynched, or vigged etc.. ruining their gaming experience.
I do agree that playing or being involved with the community in one way or another should be sort of required to be able to host. At the same time, smaller games should be available for those busy players that do want to host so they can play in their limited time. Or perhaps limiting post count per day until EoD so players are neither forced to burn themselves posting or spend too much time reading = increasing their enjoyment in the game.
If you have time to host, you generally will have time to play a vanilla or small rolemadness game. It's really not an excuse to say you are too busy for those games, but are able to host a rolemadness game. By making more smaller games available we can assure more of our less activity player base can read the whole game and make contributions even if it was one hour per day.
I don't wanna make it mandatory and stuff, but honestly we really do need smaller games every once in a while, if not semi vanilla. Most of these recent games have been super rolemadness and those are really tough to play as is to host.