The Best Of 2014 Pt 1: January-June
It gets harder and harder to cull these lists down to something reasonable. This problem is exacerbated this time around because there were a lot of standalone articles in this period, and not many series.
Which actually placed me on the horns of a dilemma that I had managed to avoid even noticing previously – standards vs a relatively flat population. If I were to include everything that was of a similar standard to the items selected in the past, 2014 would be way too large to be completed in a single article, I would need to split it (and, probably, subsequent years) into two parts. On the other hand, if I were to cull to the same total – trying for 20-25 links, maximum, from the year – an awful lot of good, useful, content would be cut.
I started preparing to go either way, planning to make the decision after I saw the actual magnitude of what would be affected. But by the time I got April done, it was fairly obvious – gone would be the article about generating adventures from everyday assumptions, and the ergonomics of non-humans, and how to use Dreams, and how to construct and implement a unique answer to the question “What Is Magic” – in fact, entirely too much would be lost. So my choice is Option A, and that’s why this article is “Pt 1: January to June”.
2014 was another good year for Campaign Mastery on a great many fronts. Readership stabilized at a nice, steady, reliable number, 1500+ every week. This was 20% down on the 2013 numbers, but those had declined mostly because Johnn was no longer promoting Campaign Mastery in Roleplaying Tips, which made a difference of about 25%.
Over the course of this 6 months, over 25K unique visitors made almost 40K visits to the site, viewing 66K pages in the process. Reader loyalty remained at a magnificent 40%, four times the typical rate. That took the grand combined total to 307K visitors*, 483K visits, and 863K page views – figures that I never expected when we started the Blog!
Part of the reason was that I was really starting to hit my stride as a writer. I turned out a lot of articles that I am very proud of (and still refer to regularly, as do many others to judge from the readership analytics) in the course of 2014. And so, to this listing of the best of them…
* FYI, in the coming week, the number of unique visitors to Campaign Mastery will tick over the 400K mark!
The Best Of 2014 Pt 1: January-June
By my count, 23 of the best. The road into the archives in search of platinum, gold, and silver starts here! As always, this list is very subjective, and you may not agree with my choices.
Scoring 10/10:
The best of the best of 2014 (part 1).
- The Application Of Time and Motion to RPG Game Mechanics
- Growing Plot Seeds Into Mighty Oaks
- 3 Feet In Someone Else’s Shoes: Getting in character quickly
- Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep
- Vampire’s Creep and other stories: Working With Places
Scoring 9/10:
There’s a whole host of reasons why this article or that falls short of the standard set by those listed above. It could be useful to only a subgroup of the readership, or it might give advice that’s good in theory but takes a little bit of work in practice, or contain ideas or techniques that were tricky to explain clearly. Or maybe it just didn’t ‘grab’ me quite as much when I re-read it! In most of these, I don’t think that I could improve them with my current standard of skill.
- Quantum Entanglement and the Tech of Tomorrow
- I See It But I Don’t Believe It – Convincingly Unconvincing in RPGs
- The Envelope Is Ticking: Insanity In RPGs
- Brick By Brick: Base Rules Made Easy
- Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 1 and Part 2
- Inversions Attract: Another Quick NPC Generator
- The Blind Enforcer: The Reflex Application Of Rules
- The Premise Of Falsehoods – Luck Vs Skill in RPGs
- Stream Of Consciousness: Image-based narrative
- Domino Theory: The Perils and Practicalities
Scoring 8/10:
There’s an equally-great variety of reasons for these to score just a touch lower than those listed previously – whether that be practicality, or relevance, or whatever. They are all good articles, just not as universally useful as the ones above. In many cases, the principles or techniques are fine but the explanations don’t seem quite good enough, or there are minor tweaks that could be applied to improve the article; where that’s not the case, they just aren’t quite beneficial or relevant enough to the majority of readers.
- The Hierarchy Of Deceit: How and when to lie to your players
- The Fields Of Magic
- The Personal Computer analogy and some Truths about House Rules
- The Pillars Of Assumption: A Source of Plot Ideas
- Dream A Little Dream – using Dreams in RPGs
- Ergonomics and the Non-humans
- Ask The GMs: My table runneth over (too many players)
Honorable Mentions: Scoring 7/10:
These are all good advice or interesting discussions, but not quite good enough to make the cut (I’ll explain why in most specific cases as I go):
- Ask The GMs: The Passage Of Substantial Time – The advice is rather specific to a problem not everyone will experience.
- The Loss Of Innocence: Some unexpected insights – not everyone agrees with the observations that fundamentally underpin this article. So it got relegated.
- Strangers sharing ideas: RPG writings in a Collaborative World – an excellent article on Crowdsourcing ideas that made the cut until the very last second.
- Ten Million Stories: Breathing life into an urban population – the system works and it works well – but I’m not sure how clearly it is explained. You can work it out, but I felt (on re-reading it) as though you had to work for it a little harder than you should. It needs expansion and more illustrations.
- Writing to the limits of longevity – Right on the edge of inclusion, this was in and then out and then back in and then out again throughout the preparation of this article.
- Ethics For Sale? – The Role of Native Advertising – Everyone should read this. But it doesn’t do much to serve Campaign Mastery’s primary mission.
- By Popular Demand: The Ergonomics Of Dwarves – The sequel to an article that did make the cut, but this doesn’t offer how-to-do-it-yourself advice (which was all in the first article), it’s simply an example of putting what I described into practice. So, for all its’ popularity (and it was very popular), it doesn’t quite make the grade.
- Prodigious Performances Provided In Due Course
- It’s Not ‘Just A Game’: The legacies we leave – I stand by every word of this article, and it’s a great note on which to end this list. But it has little practical value.
Part 2 of this list may be some time away, or it may be quite close. I have a number of lengthy/intensive-effort-required articles scheduled for the next couple of months; I’ve tried to schedule these on a fortnightly basis, to keep the schedule viable. This was supposed to be one of them (The Google Image Search article was another), but then I made the decision (explained earlier) to cut the workload in half – so the other half is short enough to drop into the schedule in place of an article that won’t be done in time, but too long to work as a substitute for a shorter article. We’ll just have to see how things go…
- The Best: 2008-9
- The Best Of 2010
- The Best Of 2011
- The Best Of 2012
- The Best Of 2013
- The Best Of 2014 Pt 1: January-June
- The Best Of 2014 Pt 2: July-December
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