Not All Clusters are Created Equal - Dark Jedi Brotherhood

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Good evening everyone,

I just spent the last several hours entertaining my wife's co-workers. If you know anything about me, you can imagine the painful experience I just endured! But, alas, DB business has saved me from any other painful spouse duties tonight.

Earlier today a decent discussion occurred on Telegram concerning the awarding of Clusters of Ice and Clusters of Fire for Competition Organizers. This discussion was sparred by the recent by some confusion on the topic and I wanted to take the time to clear up any misconceptions.

Clusters of Fire: The Fist does not prohibit Clusters of Fire from being awarded to competition organizers during gaming events. Period.

Clusters of Ice: The Voice limits the awarding of Clusters of Ice to multiple/co-op fiction events. Individual fiction events or poetry events will not award Clusters of Ice for competition organizers; however, run-ons and the ACC will award Clusters of Ice to organizers (due to their multiplayer-like aspects).

These policies have been determined based on member feedback, GM/DGM/MAA/Voice/Fist discussions,and as a result of some pretty lame exploitation of some of our old award systems. They also make a clear distinction that Clusters of Ice and Clusters of Fire/Earth are not equal. I'm okay with this.

Once again, I appreciate the question Lonewolf asked on Telegram today because it resulted in a healthy discussion in #db Telegram as well as on the DC mailing list.

One thing that I would ask, and remind everyone, is that when you engage in discussion on Telegram, please do so in a civil manner. We all have opinions, but we should make an effort to have a better informed opinion....especially prior to criticizing or challenging the dedication and effort of our tremendous staff.

Outside of all that....Santa Sarin (throwback!) will arrive this weekend with some presents for the deserving. I look forward to publicly recognizing our outstanding team of leaders across the club.

GM Pravus

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.darkjedibrotherhood.com/news/djb-news-not-all-clusters-are-created-equal

MarickTyris

Sounds good, boss.

SelikaRoh

Seems like a sound policy from where I sit.

Andrelious

Thanks for the clarification on this, Sarin.

Malik

It’s good to get clarification on this issue.

It does remind me of a question I asked myself months ago and then forgot though, how exactly does CIs work for poetry submissions? Some forms of poetry doesn’t really work well with the 500 word minimum required for a CI I imagine.

Lonewolf

Thank you for clearing it all up. And Malik does have a good question there as well, didn’t even think about that one.

KeirdaghCantor

I would believe that given the fact that words carry over these days? A word is a word is a word.

Honestly I think that is a mistake. CIs for any competition entry whatsoever, except ones that have word limits are easily spammable by simply writing more words, whether they added quality or not. Everyone’s always known that, and it was one of the biggest arguments against giving CIs out for regular fiction entries. But it was decided in the end, that people should be awarded for their efforts. For this… I mean, we have the Voice staff go through and approve CI counts. They in theory go through and check the entries for the amount of words being accurate. Providing that we have some higher authority checking to make sure the comp runner isn’t just submitting CIs for himself that he didn’t earn, and that he wrote the words he said he did… where, I ask myself, is the downside in letting them get CIs for their efforts?

I personally don’t see any, except for some paranoid idea of people running competitions for fiction entries they already wrote just so they could get CIs. However I would venture in that case… there is yet a higher authority still to which we could appeal: the CoJ, for cheating. Because that is what that would be.

Anyways, that’s my opinion on the matter. Regardless of my disagreement with policy, thank you Sarin for at least clearing up confusion some folks may have had.

StangMach

I’m new so this wasn’t a big issue for me, but clarifications are nice. I’m not sure why you can’t earn CIs on your own competition if you write an entry, but a policy is a policy