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I did a forum search (albeit a brief one) and did not find a similar thread (sorry if there was one and I missed it) but I've been thinking for a while now that maybe DakkaDakka should have it's own set of rulings for rule disputes in YMDC that go out of hand.

Now obviously these aren't meant to be the "Fan Official" rules for the respective games, but to end endlessly cycled debates that occur in YMDC. What I propose is that if one of these circular rule debates (such as the recent "Does an IC get a special rule that affects the whole unit" debate) happen, instead of locking each and every thread there is, we'd put up a thread asking people to vote on what they think the correct ruling is and/or letting a panel of mods to judge whether the ruling is fair and in the spirit of the rules or not. Then if such a discussion would occur in another thread, we can simply point to this forum consensus and say "This is what we decided as a whole, now move on" instead of going into another 6-paged thread of namecalling and trolling.

I wanted to propose this for a few months now because recently almost every thread in the YMDC either devolves into one of those discussions and gets derailed, or are really simple questions that a quick glance at the rules would answer. I have no problems with the latter (people will miss stuff) but the former kills the chance of actually getting an answer for a specific complex ruling as people would inevitably go off on tangents and invoke the YMDC version of Godwyn's Law.

It's an admirable goal, but not really what YMDC is here for.

For one, people tend to look askance at self-appointed 'rules councils'. We saw this with the INAT FAQ, we've seen a similar reaction to the ITC. Anyone seen as pushing their personal view on other gamers (whether that's what they're actually doing or not) gets peoples' backs up.


For two, the 'community' is rather fluid. The fact that a contentious rule might get a consensus for one interpretation this week doesn't guarantee that the same agreement would be reached next week... and many issues are too evenly divided for it to be anything other than a subjective opinion from whoever has to make the call... and that, again, is going to make people cranky when the 'call' goes against their personal interpretation.


The vast majority of questions asked in YMDC are quickly and easily answered, and everyone moves on. FOr the more contentious questions that spawn the multi-page threads of discussion, the objective becomes less to come to a single resolution than to simply present the various arguments so that people can see all of the relevant information in one place and make up their own minds from that as to how they want to play it.

I see your point. My main intent was to cut down on the number of threads that just get out of hand and devolve into character attacks and have really nothing of value to add. For some reason they seem to be far more frequent now than they were 5 years ago (from when I went on hiatus from 40k) and unlike before they all seem to revolve around the same questions, rather than different set of questions each time.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
For some reason they seem to be far more frequent now than they were 5 years ago...

I don't think they are. If anything YMDC is much quieter now than it was some years ago (partly indicative of the state of the current game, partly down to the general decline in forum traffic that's happening everywhere as more people shift their social media-ing to Facebook and Instagram and the like...), and I think that just makes the bigger threads stand out more.


We do try to stomp on anything that gets too out of hand, and as a general rule threads are locked somewhere around the 5-ish page mark (as any relevant points are usually teased out by that point and people are just settling into repeating themselves), although some do get missed as most of the mods are far less active with 40K now than they used to be, so rely more on threads being reported by users when they have reached their useby.

I think the best you can really hope for (if you like to avoid people arguing the same points over and over again) is just to get general input on the topic.

Back when I still cared about 40k rules, I used to frequently post 'You Make the Call' voting threads, where I was basically just asking people to vote on how they play (regardless of any other factors) and trying to make the question and potential choices as neutral as I could make them.

The goal of that process (in my mind) was: if the result was lopsided 60%+ in one direction, then that is really the way you should probably be playing, regardless of what you think the rules seem to say, because playing that way is most likely to avoid arguments. Conversely, if the result is hotly contested (less than 60% in any direction), then this would indicate to you that its the kind of issue that you probably want to bring up before the game and talk about to see which way your opponent tends to play.

But even making these types of threads, you still have to go ahead and let people argue over the pure RAW if they want to, because that's what some people like to do!

Anyway, if what I've described sounds like something useful to you, I'd recommend you start to make those threads again. Here's a link to my article page where I collected links to all the YMTC threads of this type I made:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/YMTC_-_How_YOU_Play_the_Game_of_40k

I would actually be interested in doing such types of voting threads, if it's allowed.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
I would actually be interested in doing such types of voting threads, if it's allowed.

Of course! Even when I was doing them there were other people doing the same thing on topics I wasn't posting about.

If you want to use the format of my posts & polls, then feel free to even steal the name and style of the whole thing.

You can go into any of those old threads and 'quote' the original post in the thread and that will allow you steal all the formatting code, and then just replace whatever you need to make your new version.


A few tips:

1) Make sure you lay the questions and possible answers out without inserting bias to the best of your ability. The more 'leading' the question or answers are, the more people won't answer properly or will just blow up the thread instead of following it.

2) Make sure you include quotes for all the pertinent rules involved in answering the question. You cannot assume people will take the time to go and look things up themselves (assuming they even own the books necessary to do the research), so to get an accurate poll result, this is absolutely necessary.

3) Make sure you include an 'other' option as one choice for people to choose (and for them to post what their answer is in the thread). If you get too many people posting 'other' (because you didn't think of an obvious answer), you may need to ask for the thread to be locked and repost a new version of the thread with better answers as options.

4) Make sure you include the disclaimer (in big text), like I did at the top of the post, that people are to answer 'how they play', not necessarily what they think the 'RAW' say (because this is an important distinction), and also asking people to NOT argue about the RAW of the issue in this thread (they can start another thread to argue about the RAW if they want).


Good luck!

Noted, and thanks!