Subject: A partial response.
Author:
Posted on: 2014-05-24 18:27:00 UTC

To the cons, naturally:

* The current (new) system already solves the problem of showing vs. telling about the characters; that's what the prompts are for.
True - but things like, in this very thread, Wells having previously suffered from depression and now being on speed are still being told, not shown. Also, this is more of a pro of Permission 3, not a con of PerMission 4. ;)

* Missions take more work to write.
Again, true - but it's what people are going to be doing. Someone who doesn't want to put in the work to write a mission... er... doesn't need Permission, because they're not writing missions. :D If what you mean is 'which is work you may have to scrap and redo', then yes, that's true. That's the main reason I'm suggesting parallel systems, rather than straight replacement.

* Missions take more work to read and evaluate.
Also true - but a bad mission will probably not require reading to the end. It may well be that the hallmark of a successful PerMission is that the PG reads right to the end. ;)

* Lack of serious betas. (In my experience, plenty of people are willing to skim for obvious SPaG issues, but not so many are willing to grapple with major structural concerns of the sort that require cutting and/or rewriting to fix.)
This could well be a problem - but surely that's an opportunity to improve, not a problem? I mean, we want all PPC members to be expert writers-slash-betas-slash-reviewers, no? So something which promotes that is good? ^-^

* People could leave up bad missions and we wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
True - but people could post NC-17 smut labelled as PPC missions and we couldn't do anything about it. They could start Facebook groups and we couldn't do anything about it (just for example... oo). One possible 'solution' to this - as a general problem - is to expand the role of the Wiki. If we state that all 'canon' agents have to be listed on the Wiki, then any post-2013 missions featuring non-wiki'd agents can be safely ignored. (Alternately, a category for 'uncanonical' agents could be set up - which would also let people build their wiki page before they have Permission. See? Opportunities!)

* This is sort of a free pass to start writing a mission whenever you feel like it, even if you still have to wait to actually ask for Permission. This could cause (more) confusion over what's allowed before Permission and what's not.
True, and that's probably the main argument against it. However... I have this sneaky suspicion a lot of people do that anyway. Certainly we have a lot of first missions which come out the equivalent of six months after the wedding. :<br>
* Quantity should not be preferred over quality.
Absolutely - but if we're talking an extra 24 missions a year, half of which are good quality, and the other half of which are immediately discarded or rewritten (ie, treating Permission Requests as a sort of semi-open beta), then I'm not sure that issue arises. Certainly a higher quantity of the same (high) quality is good, right? ^
~

[A smiley in every response... yep, fun]

hS

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