Holy Crap!

[Guinness]

I'll admit, I'm distracted, so I'm behind on the seventyzillion threads that have exploded this week. I'll do my best to catch up.

I'm sure this has been said, but I'll go ahead and say it again: There has been a lot of work on "Navalism4" that has gone on over approximately the last year between several people. It started as a way to allow some long-time players to express their feelings and ideas about what hasn't been working in Navalism3, and naturally took on some legs.

Privately, I've asked those who have been involved in that effort to accomplish a number of steps and goals before any decision on moving forward. If we do move forward on the Nverse4 idea, I see the process working like this:

1. An advanced draft of the ruleset will be published. Comments will be welcome, but wholesale changes would be unlikely at this juncture. Included will be the "Nverse4 Startup Plan", and some document describing how Nverse4 governance will work.
2. After a period for gestation and comment, we'll post a poll. The gist of it will be "Do you want to play Nverse4 in the form that has been proposed?"
3. Depending on the results of that poll, we may ask the question "Do we want to keep playing Nverse3 and start a new game, or do we want to end Nverse3 with Nverse4?"

Please don't reply answering those questions now. Give us a chance to get all the material we've produced so far organized so you can read it and judge it in it's entirety as a body of work.

Also, from what I've read so far, there seems to be a lot of emotion in many of our posts on this subject. I encourage everyone to take a few deep breaths and relax. In the end it's a game, and we should try to remember that and approach the entire enterprise with the appropriate attitude.

Finally, having said all that, I'm taking my oldest offspring on a grand rail-born adventure to the Northeast next week for his 4th Birthday, so I may not be around here next week.