10th Anniversary Classic Rant: The RPG-Forum Heartbreakers

Its funny, the number of people who've tried to create new webforums that sprung up out of or in reaction to theRPGsite. A few of them, the ones that are tied to specific ideas, are basically ok and could even be useful if they pull it off; like the forums for D&D 3.x fans, or Levi's Gamecraft forums. But even these, clearly, are fighting an uphill battle. 

I think a lot of people don't realize just how much fucking WORK it takes to actually make a forum succeed. It takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. So even if you do have a concept, like the Gamecraft forums, its very very hard to get the critical mass going and then dedicating the time to maintain it. Its not something to be done lightly.

So imagine, if those guys have trouble, what it is when you just get some wanker with a hate-on for me, wanting to create "TheRPGsite without RPGPundit!!", and said jerk-off is driven not so much by dedication and ability, as much as by a pathetic desire to outstage me or "take me down" or whatever.

Case in point, Blue Devil's forums, "the RPG lounge". They showed up, made a big hulabaloo, Blue Devil took every opportunity available to shill his forums (in which the basic selling point was always how I wasn't there), the forums were a fucking carbon copy of theRPGsite (except that the featured game with is own forum was D6 instead of Amber), and of course, to no one's surprise he failed. He never got more than 77 users, and when people quickly figured out that they could get pretty well everything on the RPG "lounge" from theRPGsite plus Blue Devil was sort of a dick, the whole thing fell apart.
The hilarious footnote to this pathetic story is how apparently, Blue Devil claims to have "sold" the forum. I would imagine that one of the more technically-minded proxies out there could actually do a search to find out if this is true, but its certainly the sort of pathetic self-aggrandizing kind of statement that makes these kinds of "rivals" to me seem so sad. If he did sell it, it was probably for what... a coke? a Big Mac? How much is a useless failed website worth? With a bit of luck, it might be a bottle of anti-depressants; I get the feeling Blue Devil should really think about making use of them.

So it seems that theRPGsite has started its own particular phenomenon: theRPGsite Forum Heartbreaker. How many people, I wonder, will think they can do what I have done, and will try to make their own sorry little clone of theRPGsite, arguing that the lack of my evil and tyrannical presence destroying all hope of fun/dialogue/ricepudding/whatever the fuck the idiot in question is on about, will end up making his replacement-clone forum a stunning success that will quickly outshine me, and of course he'll get all the glory and get to rule and have power and finally prove that he's better than me.

Come to think of it, I'm pretty stunned that James McMurray hasn't tried this yet, what with the penis-envy and all.

RPGPundit

(Originally posted October 1st, 2007)