The DWmegawad Club Metathread

[Catpho]

After reading the suggestions here, I'd say this is a pretty good format: once every August a previously covered wad can be voted in, and the wad's prior DWMC playthrough must be at least 5 years old (so we won't play Eviternity or Sunlust over and over again, hah). I think the concern that splitting the club can be burdensome is reasonable, so this could be a good compromise. The only downside is that this means revisits can be very infrequent, and the revisit month voting can be heated, for lack a better word, for that once a year opportunity (as opposed to the once a month chance for stuff that people really want to play). For my part, I'm not interested in revisiting stuff played in old threads, but the thought of a new generation stumbling into Eternal Doom is too good. Plus, I suspect Ribbiks got the motivation to make Magnolia, thus inaugurating a new phase in his career, thanks to the ED month.

Edited May 2, 2023 by Catpho

[brick]

3 hours ago, FistMarine said:

Thanks for understanding.

I like some of your ideas for framing the revisits, especially the title. Anyway, my personal take on the questions you raised:

1) I think we've done something similar (though not often), the one I immediately remember is when we played the Wormwood (at the time) trilogy. I can see this working really well when lots of individual wads are thematically joined one way or the other - like with Wormwood, or something like "Michael Reed's collected works" or "Kurt Kesler's vanilla wads" or "every pwad made for Strife". I think you'd have a problem defining the exact wads if the theme is more open though, but I don't think it'll be a dealbreaker as long as people like the idea.

2) Kind of the opposite approach, but I like thematic consistency above as much as the variety here.

3) I'm happy with other IWADs, it's one reason I nominated Hexen before.

4) I don't think there's anything keeping ZDoom wads out, but in a voting system on a community that favours vanilla and Boom I think they're just less likely to get a majority vote. A spinoff series would be a good place to play them actually - one of the "events" in that series could be "let's do a ZDoom-only vote" (or an EDGE-only or Eternity-only... hey why not)

5) If I have a preference it's not a conscious one, I pick from my (loooooooooong) backlog, or if it's late enough in the voting I try to nudge the votes towards ones I want to play more.

 

40 minutes ago, Helm said:

That's the feeling of the club for me, even when people don't talk about what each other wrote much - a byproduct of everyone writing their own report before reading anything else to not be biased - the feeling is one of a community of monkeys all trying to scale the same wall at the same time, if not together. Cognitive function is improved when animals attempt the same task in packs, as they learn from observing each other but I think a better framing is that of empathy.

Yes that's how I feel too. I sometimes edit my post when someone else's makes me realize I was plain wrong about something, but even if I don't mention them it's fun to read other impressions. I often play on HNTR, and I feel I live the UV experience through reading posts by those who can actually handle that difficulty. It's also just fun to see others complain about the same thing that bothered, or praising something that made me pull my hair out (or vice versa).

[LadyMistDragon]

4 hours ago, brick said:

 

4) I don't think there's anything keeping ZDoom wads out, but in a voting system on a community that favours vanilla and Boom I think they're just less likely to get a majority vote. A spinoff series would be a good place to play them actually - one of the "events" in that series could be "let's do a ZDoom-only vote" (or an EDGE-only or Eternity-only... hey why not)

 

 

 

Oh yessssssss....

 

Like I'm pretty sure March of the Speedemons is GZDoom only due to some scripting and that's just one example! There's a lot of quality ZDoom wads that don't mentioned in part because they're not vanilla enough or whatever.