Mod Note

[playersofthedasmod]

Hello everyone! First, apologies for the late prompt, that may occasionally happen during the upcoming holiday season but I will try to be as prompt (ahem) as possible.

Second, we've reached our 10th prompt and I'd like to request feedback on ways to improve the community and encourage participation. Any suggestions are welcome, no matter how much they depart from our current setup. At this stage I am open to all ideas, including closing the community if there is not current interest in a prompt community for developing player characters.

I think the community may benefit from a more narrowed focus. "Any fanwork" is a broad category designed to encourage participation from many different types of creators, but personally I've found having to work within more narrow confines (such as limited word count) spurs creativity. 

There will be no comment screening on this post so members can communicate with each other, but if you have a private comment for the mod you may use the Contact a Mod post, which is screened.

Comments

[maramcreates]

I was waiting for your new post to say this, rather than let my comment get buried in last week's post, and now I wish I had replied sooner!

Basically: I love that this community exists! All of my writing time and energy has been funneled into this long DA fanfic that I'm working on, in hopes that I can get the meat of it done before NaNoWriMo (four days to go! eep!). The recent prompts have been helpful with this actually (Greatest Fear and Flemeth), and I'm working them into the fanfic in progress.

I'll have to think about what suggestions I may have for encouraging more participation (a worthy goal!), and I'll likely come back later to post them.

[playersofthedasmod]

I'm glad you've found the prompts useful.

One possibility might be taking the emphasis away from posting completed (new) fanworks to this comm exclusively and allowing links to WIPs on other sites. The prompt post itself could be a place for general discussion or headcanons or ideas, links to in-progress works where the prompt was muse fuel or inspo blogs, links to past works the creator wishes to revisit based on the prompt, and so on.

The fanworks posted here do not have to be 'complete'--sketches, snippets, drafts, etc. are very welcome--but that may not be apparent from the guidelines.

[sarasa_cat]

Seconding the importance+goodness of emphasizing any kind of fanwork, including WIPs.

[maramcreates]

Just to get this out of way --> I think I'm confused about this:
"completed (new) fanworks to this comm exclusively"
Do you mean that (a) the exclusive purpose of the comm is completing new fanworks, or (b) the fanworks we complete are exclusive to the comm?
Because if it's (b), then oops!

[playersofthedasmod]

Sorry, I worded that poorly.

Fanworks can be posted wherever the creators like, they do not need to be limited to this community exclusively.

The current guidelines ask that the content of the work be posted on the comm directly (in other words, no referring links to AO3 or Tumblr). This rule was made to encourage discussion on the comm instead of diverting it elsewhere, but I can see how it might discourage posts for prompts that inspired part of a larger ongoing work.

[sarasa_cat]

I wonder if there isn't enough awareness of the community. A single weekly cross post on tumblr is so easy to miss.

On DW, there are a handful of communities that are specifically for announcing new challenges, new prompts, and new community events. I haven't looked too deeply, but these are all active:
- http://fandomcalendar.dreamwidth.org/profile
- http://fandom-on-dw.dreamwidth.org/profile
- http://pimpmethis.dreamwidth.org/profile

More targeted, there is a new Dragon Age comm that just started:
- http://dragon-age.dreamwidth.org/
- http://dragonage-fans.livejournal.com/

There are also some older quieter DA comms on DW+LJ that still have significant membership.

Weekly crosspost announcements elsewhere on DW would help (admittedly, more mod work).

[playersofthedasmod]

The comm opening was announced on fandomcalendar and fandom_on_dw. Those two communities appear to get steady traffic so I would be willing to crosspost there. I do not intend to crosspost to less active/fledgling communities.

Members are welcome to advertise anywhere that looks promising, of course.

[phdfan]

I've been thinking about this. I really love the idea of the community, and the opportunity to work further on the characterisation of my PC. A large part of my slackness in posting is because I've been focusing on finishing the first draft of my thesis, and I can't promise that that will change any time soon so please take the following suggestions with a grain of salt!

For me, personally, I think having slightly wider prompts may help. A little bit more ambiguity about them gives the writer more leeway to read into them something that works for their player character. For example, prompt 4 "change of faith", could just be "faith". Or prompt 8 "greatest fear" could just be "fear". I would also personally suggest steering clear of prompts that heavily imply a certain type of player character - such as lock-picking, but maybe that's just me.

Another thing that might work for me, but I can totally understand if it wouldn't work for other people, would be to put a time limit on replies to prompts (i.e. before the next prompt is posted), but then have an amnesty round later on for any old prompts that people have written fic for. This is the way fan_flashworks works, and for me having that closing time is sometimes enough for me to get my butt into gear and actually finish/post something - PLUS I have the fun of working on older prompts more slowly while waiting for the regular amnesty round.

Again, I really like what you're doing and would love to participate more. Hopefully I will be able to find the time to squeeze some non-work writing time in, but as I said above, a deadline would help me to make it a bigger priority! :)

[playersofthedasmod]

Thank you for those suggestions. I can see the merits of streamlined prompts vs. more specific ones. Even broadening a prompt like "lock-picking" to "theft" adds opportunities (emotional theft/stealing one's heart, for example).

I will look into having time limits and amnesty. If anyone else finds that type of setup useful feel free to chime in.

[maramcreates]

I second phdfan's suggestions. I was able to work with the prompts in their posted form, but found that I had to loosely interpret them (for example, I know that knitting isn't actually a vice in the literal sense, but I still used it for "Everyone has a Vice"). I'm cool with continuing to do that though, if that's what works best for others.

[jaininae]

I like the idea of a time limit because it forces me to think about the prompt daily in order to get it in on time, which is something I have a problem with. I've started 4 other prompts for this comm, 2 art pieces, and 2 writing pieces, with 1 maybe worth posting in its current form. The others are a bit too sketchy to let anyone see. I'm cool with posting WIPs but these are kinda shameful.

If you need another place to advertise you could try the people over at the dragon age reverse big bang. The amount of writers participating is quite large (like 80 ppl) so that might be worth checking out.

[playersofthedasmod]

I'm the same way, deadlines help me stay motivated and prioritize what I'm working on. I'm looking at examples in other communities and thinking about how many rounds we'd have before an amnesty round.