Welcome to our final article of 2011, my twice-yearly State of the Stew rundown on our stats, milestones, and so forth for the past year. We do one of these in December and one in May (the site’s birthday), and while they don’t make for scintillating read or appeal to everyone, I’m a big believer in marking milestones, I enjoy reading these kinds of posts when other sites run them, and I think they’re useful to the Stew as an entity.
As of today, Gnome Stew has been running for over three-and-a-half years — we launched on May 12, 2008. Today marks our fourth year-end State of the Stew and our third full calendar year of stats.
The Numbers
- 4,030+ registered users, 100% growth (2010: 1,990+, 2009: 1,560+, 2008: 625+)
- 3,940+ RSS and email subscribers, 6% growth (2010: 3,700+, 2009: 2,940+, 2008: 1,230+)
- Nearly 156,000 unique visitors (33% loss) and 314,000 total visits (26% loss) (2010: 233,000 unique, 423,000 total; 2009: 182,000 unique, 345,000 total; 2008: 188,000 unique, 316,000 total)
- …of those 156,000, over 81,000 visited more than once (2010: 193,000 of 233,000; 2009: 164,000 of 182,000; 2008: 128,000 of 188,000)
- Over 583,000 pageviews, 21% loss (2010: 734,000, 2009: 680,000, 2008: 619,000)
- The gnomes have posted about 256 articles (1,075+ total; we posted around 260 in 2010, 300 in 2009, and 260 in 2008)
- …which have attracted more than 3,100 comments (13,900 total; about 3,000 in 2010, 4,800 in 2009, and 3,000 in 2008)
My Take: Ouch
First big year-end losses: This is the first time we’ve ended the year with losses, and they’re telling losses: unique visits, total visits, and pageviews are all down. Those are three huge barometers of a site’s success, and they tell me that we’re doing something wrong — I just don’t know what.
It’s not a drop in articles (256 this year vs. 260 last year) or reader engagement (3,100 comments vs. 3,000) or users (up a staggering 100%), so what is it? One other data point: comment volume went down in 2010 compared to 2009 (by 38%), and stayed flat with that number this year; that tells me that whatever we’re doing wrong, it’s likely that at least some of it began in 2010 and continued into 2011.
Not all bad news: Not everything went down: We doubled the number of registered members (and that’s not artificially raised by obvious spam registrations; I checked), which is fantastic, and the number of subscribers went up slightly. We get some single-visit members, of course: contests attract folks who may never come back, as does the urge to post a single comment and move on; that’s not a bad thing in my book. But even that can’t explain how we doubled our membership while losing so big in visits and views.
A huge archive of GMing material: The Stew remains the second-largest repository of game mastering content online. To the best of my knowledge, Johnn Four’s excellent Roleplaying Tips site (online since 1999) takes the number one spot, and my previous GMing blog, Treasure Tables, lands at number three (with over 750 GMing articles). Despite the terrible stats for this year, that still feels pretty damned good — this site is intended to be a free resource for GMs of all experience levels, and I believe it succeeds well at that.
Milestones
Our milestones in 2011 were actually pretty awesome:
- Gnome Stew won the silver Ennie Award for Best Blog: Thanks to you, our readers, the Stew won our second GenCon EN World RPG Award (ENnie) in 2011. As in 2010, we lost out to an excellent site — this year, it was Critical Hits. This feels just as amazing this year as it did in 2010, and we thank everyone who helped us win.
- We moved to a VPS: As of January 9, 2011, Gnome Stew has been hosted on a virtual private server (VPS), where previously it had been on my shared webhosting account. We made this move because we got so much traffic that it was dragging the site down, and asked readers to help pay for it by using the Amazon and DriveThruRPG links in the sidebar. On both fronts, this move was a huge success: The site runs smoothly, with no performance issues, and the cost — about $400/year — has been covered by Amazon and advertising revenue. Thank you to everyone who has helped out with this!
- Our millionth visitor: 2011 also marked our millionth unique visitor. A million people have read Gnome Stew since its inception — my mind still boggles at that.
- We published our second book: One the heels of our 2010 release, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, we published Masks: 1,000 Memoranble NPCs to Inspire Game Masters in 2011. Publishing books for GMs is part of our ongoing mission to help GMs have more fun at the gaming table, and we appreciate the preorders and subsequent orders that have helped this book gain momentum and sell well. Even after two books, being a publisher and publishing GMing books still doesn’t feel entirely real to me.
Thank You!
Gnome Stew wouldn’t exist without you, our readers. We’d probably still be writing GMing content somewhere — it’s in our blood — but not as regularly, and not with the focus that knowing people will actually read it brings to the table. We write the Stew for you.
Many, many thanks to everyone who has read, commented on, shared, and used Gnome Stew. You are, as you always have been, awesome.
The Elephant in the Room
The thing that’s nice, though sometimes also unpleasant, about numbers is that they don’t lie. I’m not an expert in statistics, or even remotely a math guy, but even I know that a website that sees the dip in visitors and pageviews we saw from from December 2010 to December 2011 is doing something wrong.
In May 2011, I posted site stats for the preceding year and noted that we had losses instead of growth in key areas. We posed an open question to readers then — “What are we doing wrong?” — and the biggest common complaint was that our posting had dropped off; we weren’t hitting every weekday, our target, nearly as often as we needed to be.
We listened to that feedback, generated our ideas for improving the state of the Stew, held conference calls, and believed that we were back in a good groove. Even though we posted the same number of articles in the latter half of 2011 as 2010, they were more regularly spaced and we hit that every-weekday target virtually every week. We also made other improvements behind the scenes.
At this point, I’m honestly at a loss what to do. I love this site, I love writing GMing advice, and I love sharing that advice with our readers. Although I speak only for myself, I know the other gnomes feel the same way — it’s why we’re here and why Gnome Stew exists. We want to keep the Stew vital, keep it growing, and keep helping GMs.
I’m writing this article today, on 12/31; it wasn’t queued up in advance. And honestly, it’s depressing the hell out of me. This wasn’t how I expected to end the year.
We had two killer milestones in 2011, but the site is clearly not as healthy as it needs to be nor on a healthy path — and I don’t know why. If I’m missing writing on the wall, be it subtle or blindingly obvious, please let me know what you think it is. If you’re not comfortable doing that publicly, that’s no problem — just drop me a line (martin gnomestew com).
Thank you again for reading, and I’ll see you in 2012.
Hey Martin,
Do your pageview stats count people reading the full articles in RSS or email? You might only be getting part of the story. You might want to look at other stats too, like how long someone stays on the site and how many pages they look at while they’re here.
–Adam
I don’t believe pageviews include RSS readers, but I try to incorporate subscribers in these roundups by listing those stats on their own. They went up only slightly, so while those numbers haven’t fallen off there’s also no appreciable growth there.
Average pages viewed/visit is 2, as it has been since we launched (hit main page, click new article summary, read article = two pages), and average time on the site has also been virtually fixed at 2 minutes. I think those numbers are interesting, but they don’t change and therefore I’ve always assumed there’s no much I can learn from them in this context.
I can’t think of anything to get more people to come here. But would a firestarter at the bottom of each article help get discussions? Sometimes it is difficult to take an article and have a good point to make. Having something to help the discussion might help increase the number of comments. Some of the gnomes already do this, but getting all the gnomes to do this could help.
If this is already done, then ignore this and I’ll walk away feeling like an idiot.
@Razjah – I want to be sure what you mean by “firestarter.” Can you clarify a bit, or link to a couple of articles that do this well?
I don’t know how this factors into your trafic monitoring, but last year around this time, I started using Google Reader to keep up with websites I like. Anyone I like who publishes an RSS feed gets my attention that way.
@NoFairFights –
OOPS!
Someone beat me to it.
@NoFairFights – No worries. We track RSS/email subscribers (those stats are in this article), and don’t care how people read the site as long as it works for them. 🙂
I can only speak for myself, but here are my feelings on the subject.
Gnome Stew is still a major authority in the gm blogosphere, and one that I respect a lot (I’ve been following since day one).
That being said, I don’t feel like I’m taking away as much value from an article as I did 3 years ago. What’s more, it seemed to me that Treasure Tables had a lot more money for the run (although I have to admit I only started actively following TT a few months before the end, and so I mostly dug through the history cherry-picking the articles that were the most relevant for me).
But why, you ask? I noticed that blogging subjects follow trends, and certain periods in time focus on certain topics. Some that I distinctly remember were the enlightenment of “fun trumps all”, or the “social contracts”. In itself very meaningfull topics, but if the same bottom lines (“everybody should have fun”, and “respect each other”) keep popping up for months on end — and not only on the Stew, mind you — it tends to wear a little thin.
Also, most of the articles here on the Stew deal with meta-gaming issues: things that go on around the table, or reviews of products, or game experiences, or what have you. But what I personally am most interested in are articles with more meat: stuff that can actually be used in games, like maps, npcs, monsters, plots, new rules, art, entire adventures, random tables, step-by-step gm tutorials on — for example — improving your eloquence or delivering compelling descriptions or speeding up a combat round, … Stuff that I can cut out and tape into my “to-be-used-in-my-next-campaign” notebook, so to speak.
I realize that some of these suggestions are rule- and/or setting-specific and will only appeal to a limited number of your readers, but I myself certainly wouldn’t mind seeing parts of mechanics laid bare of games that I’ve never played before. Heck, if there’s anything that peaks my interest for unknown games, it’s the game mechanics.
If you could find a nice mix between the meta and the meat, that would already go a long way for me.
Nevertheless, I still believe you guys are doing one hell of a great job and I’m confident that these numbers are nothing to fret about. I wish all the gnomes and all the readers a fantastic, fun-filled, meaningful 2012.
Cheers (and sorry for the lengthy comment)!
@Sektor – No apology for length needed — that’s a great analysis, personal and well said. Thank you for taking the time to comment.
Your point about trends is well taken. With 10 authors, we feed off each others’ interests, and sometimes that means stretches where several of us are blogging about pretty similar topics from different angles.
When I read your wishlist the first time, I thought “That’s not stuff that’s really in our wheelhouse.” On a second reading, though, it is — all of your suggestions could be system-neutral, save the mechanics-specific stuff (which is outside out wheelhouse). A different mix between meta and meat would be a really interesting change to make in 2012 — thank you for your suggestions.
I registered today just to comment here. English is not my main language, but I feel motivated to talk to you.
I have not played roleplaying games for the last 3 years, but now I am back to the hobby. I just found out about Gnome Stew and Treasure Tables. I added A TON of posts to my Instapaper account and I’m reading like 7 or 8 a day.
I have to say that, somehow, the posts from Treasure Tables are better. After reading them I feel great, I feel like I have evolved as a GM. Gnome Stew posts are kinda mixed.
I feel Gnome Stew is like a Seth Godin book. You read it and then you think “Wow, I should do this and this and this to be a sucess!” but then you realize “OK, but… I still don’t know how to do any of this”.
Seth Godin says stuff like “you have to create something indispensable”, but it gives you no real useable tip how to do it.
Gnome Stew says “you have to create great hooks” (just an example) and I think “OK, but I don’t know how!” Treasure Tables, on the other side, gave me hooks to use.
I’m not saying Gnome Stew is not a good blog. I find it the second best GM blog I found on the internet. The first one is the deceased Treasure Tables. You are a great blog, but you can be better.
I’m reading a blog about being a better GM because I need help. I already know I have to create great hooks, I already know I have to optimize my prep. What I really need is that you tell me HOW. With usable examples I can follow.
Just adding to my previous post: To me you don’t have to post every day. I prefer quality over quantity.
I agree with sektor and bighi. A lot of the articles are missing rubber to meet the road. Gnome stew is the only gaming site I visit regularly. Part of the reason is I like your attitude. I find other gaming sites too self serious or frankly just way too verbose and analytical about rolling dice and killing elves. I really dig that you get to the point and don’t bog down in, well, gamer BS.
That said, my favorite articles are the ones with specifics. Most recent examples is the design of settings. Specific tips for a part of gaming we all work with.
I thought about it for a little while and I realized that I enjoy the Stew for its mature atmosphere and positive spin on everything. You provide the type of online community that I enjoy posting on as well as reading.
What I feel the Stew lacks is a way to go through the archives to find articles on specific topics. Sure, there is a way to go through every article ever written, but that only works if you remember the article name. To me if I like an article I’ve got to bookmark it or after a few weeks I’m never going to find it again.
I know something like expanding the search abilities on the archives won’t attract new users, but it will be a step in the right direction for increasing the number of pages a visitor will visit on average.
Beyond improving the archiving I would suggest a forum and posting articles in it as well as on the main page and having them somehow linked. Forum posts would help people that like posting see that a conversation is still ongoing or that someone had a new comment on the topic. The reason I’m suggesting something like this is because with the way Gnome Stew is laid out a discussion based off an article seems dead within a day or two. I do see the ‘subscribe’ option at the bottom of every page, but using that could end with an inbox full of posts. It works for a discussion I’m excited about, not for everything.
The difficulty in finding old articles and the difficulty in following discussions after a couple of days are the two main concerns I have. These issues certainly aren’t going to stop me from reading, as I do get some great ideas from the articles from time to time.
You say that there is no loss in reader engagement, as the number of comments were up by about 100 over 2010. However, if you doubled the number of registered users without an appreciable gain in the number of comments it looks to me like a kind of disconnect. I work at a credit union and when I was first hired on we were always trying to add members as a way to become more profitable. We found various ways to increase our number of members, but until we concentrated on engaging them and showing them all of the benefits of membership, basically asking for more and more of their business, we didn’t increase our profitability.
Perhaps one way you could increase engagement is to start a regular feature where you respond to reader questions? Give the readers a way to send in problems that they have faced as GMs and you Gnomes can diagnose the issue and offer your advice for dealing with it, also encouraging other readers to jump in with their advice as well.
I agree with engagement. Opening up for reader articles was a great idea. Other random thought: DROID and iphone apps?
I agree with Sektor, more meat, less meta. Some of my favorite articles were the video clips. They were pure steak, with very little else on the plate.
I also agrre that GS needs a forum.
I think I’m one of the new members for 2011 (I could be wrong) and I only registered to reply to one article several months ago as the conversation was I thought I could contribute to. I’m not really a hard core poster to forums or blogs, nor do I actually read tons of them.
The opinion that is about to be expressed is mine and mine alone. Please take it in the spirit it is intended, as my personal experience with your blog which might offer insights into the experience of others.
That all having been said, let’s get to it. I’m happy that you have published your second book this year. I am not however happy when I get my Stew in my inbox and discover that it’s nothing more than an advertisement for your latest product.
I can’t actually tell you how many times I’ve gotten this feeling, but it’s been often enough that it’s memorable. I’ve opened the email and gotten maybe through the first paragraph and then just hit delete.
I certainly want you to promote your products, more products for GMs are a good thing and I will fight to the death to protect your right to promote them on your blog. But do something else in that issue as well. And not something that’s really just a white washed sales pitch.
John Four does it too, he talks about his products in a blurb, and then he moves on to the meat of what he’s putting out in that issue. I can’t honestly tell you if it’s true that you have whole issues devoted to Masks, but by George it sure felt like it, and so much so that when I recommend the blog to new GMs I warn them that the issues are sometimes a bit self advertising.
I agree with some of the other comments here about the meaty content. It’s your blog and you should write what is swimming in your heads so it can swim around in ours. Also, there was a comment about a way to find old articles. If the tags aren’t cutting it, perhaps you need more. Thank you for having tags, since some bloggers don’t and when I’m on the prowl for certain kinds of inspiration or info I want to be able to follow a thread trail without spending hours picking through blog posts. No tags = No trail.
Some insights into your stats you may not want to hear. A 2 minute average visit is great for a site, if it serves out a lot of info to the public in small bites. Seems a little short to read a blog post, unless it’s very short. Or it’s one I don’t care to read. Also, you comment the average page visits is 2, and the logic is main page and then current article. That certainly reinforces the comment that most people aren’t prowling through your archives.
Also, ghost subscribers. I am, by nature, a lazy SOB. I know there are things I’m subscribed to that get instantly deleted when they arrive. You doubled your subscribers numerically, but it’s possible that the increase isn’t really that much. This is actually good news, which I’ll try to make clear.
Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner. You get cable service, email, internet. Then you move. You get a new internet provider, and that means a new email. You go back to the Stew (and other places) and subscribe. You probably didn’t unsubscribe your old account. So the fact that you had a balloon of new subscribers but not in comments or registered users really isn’t a big deal. Also, double subscription. I get the Stew in my inbox, and if I wanted it on my iPad I might subscribe with a second email address so that the article is there to read when I’m away from WiFi. So you might have a number of doubles.
In the end, and I’m sure you’re happy to hear that I’ll soon stop, you shouldn’t worry about numbers. If the only people that read your blog are your loved ones, and you’re still happy and enjoying blogging then just keep doing it. It lets ideas out of your head, and if your blog posts help one GM resolve one problem or find one idea then you’ve done a good thing and everything after that is just icing.
Write what you feel like writing. Be as interactive with your community as you feel comfortable with, and have fun. When it’s “Work” it will suffer. Don’t focus on the numbers. A friend of mine has a saying about statistics. “Stats are like a bikini. What they reveal is interesting, but what they conceal is crucial.” Focus instead on what you guys love.
I love Gnomestew!
I rarely comment but wanted to throw in a few general observations.
As others mentioned, more and more of us are using RSS readers, especially as smart phone usage increases and work computers block blog access. Speaking of work computers, some don’t block blogs but do block the ability to log in and leave comments. And once you start reading via RSS, leaving comments requires one too many steps when time is of the essence. Requiring a custom login (rather than signing in with Facebook or Twitter) probably also lessens commenting.
My friends run quite a few blogs and in general my understanding is direct blog viewing and commenting are down in general (although my sample size is small here and possibly not relevant to your audience).
Another trend I’ve seen is people are more likely to read a blog post and then comment on it via Twitter, Facebook, or G+. In some cases privately among their own circle of friends rather than communicating with the authors directly.
For me, this is all positive. More convenience, more control, more personal. From your perspective, stat wise, it may seem like a negative. But I read almost every article you create but none of my activity is reflected in your stats. And several of my friends have purchased (and more importantly enjoyed) both Eureka and Masks after my recommendations, which would have never happened if I didn’t keep reading your blog.
Keep up the great work. You are an inspiration and a joy to read.
Happy new year!
As a contributing author for GS this feedback is great stuff! What I am hearing is that you guys want more meat and less theory, and that is the kind of input that helps me tremendously.
I’ve been working on improving the Video Gnoments and hope to post one early this year. Do readers more of that type of content?
I ask that any Gnome Stew reader who wants to provide me feedback (not on the site but on my articles and style) please use the following site:
http://sayat.me/pbenson
You can always leave a comment here on one of my articles of course, but with the above link you can provide me anonymous feedback that I can respond to if you enable that option. You do have to join the site to enable the reply option.
The reason that I am asking readers to use this site is because as an author I know that I’m going to get feedback on the topics that I choose, but rarely will I get feedback on my overall style and work as a whole. I’ll be including this link at the end of every one of my articles from now on so that if you as a reader want to bring something to my attention that does not quite belong here on the site you may do so.
Martin has worked his ass off to make Gnome Stew a great site. I want to live up to his standards for delivering great content that GMs put to use in their games. I cannot speak for the other gnomes, but I believe that they feel the same as I do.
Thanks all for giving me the chance to share my ideas and thoughts with you! Your comments have helped me to become a better writer and GM. I hope that I have helped you too.
@Martin Ralya – A firestarter is something at the end of the article that gives a focus for comments. The firestarter can be a question, or a jumping off point for discussions.
Some Gnome Stew Articles that have a firestarter:
http://www.gnomestew.com/gming-advice/social-skills-evil-twisted-or-misunderstood
This one has a firestarter, but it blends into the article.
http://www.gnomestew.com/gming-advice/mashing-genres-rodian-rogues-and-minbari-paladins
This article also has a firestarter. This has a few questions and it generated a pretty good number of comments. However, this too blends into the article.
http://www.gnomestew.com/gming-advice/gm-as-sommelier-pairing-settings-and-systems
This article has a very nice firestarter, in my opinion. The article has a heading asking a question to the audience and two paragraphs asking for our stories and experiences.
I hope this helps and that the links work. I’m not using my computer right now so I apologize if the links don’t work properly.
Ok, I just created a new password to log in again and comment on this, so I’d better make it a meaningful comment.
I am reading the Stew since day one, as an e-mail subscriber for most of the time.
First I have to confirm the comment that commenting on an article after reading it as a subscription, not on the page itself, is usually too much of a bother for me. I have to have strong feelings on a subject to do that. Over the whole time I’ve read the Stew, this has happened about three or four times.
Secondly, I have to aggree with Sektor’s analysis and say that many articles of the last year or so had very little interesting content for me. Many of them seemed to repeat points made better in earlier posts or were just stating the obvious in my opinnion. Now I know that what is obvious to me might not be so to others, just like some things that are completely clear to just about everyone else seem like great new ideas to me, but over the last year or so, there were just a few too many of those obvious things for my tastes.
Thirdly I want to complain about your reviews. Now, I really like reading reviews of products I’m mildly interested in, to find reasons to buy them (I know I want to buy most of them before I start reading reviews, I just need reasons to justify it to myself), but for some reason or other, almost all reviews I’ve ever read on the Stew just left me cold. There was little concrete information and sometimes the conclusion, that it was a great product for GM’s, felt a bit too forced. An exception was the Dresden Files RPG review, which had a lot of useful information on the product and the conclusion that it was a great book, just not for everyone, felt more honest than most of your other reviews.
Fourthly I too was not too excited about the ammount of posts about your books. I know you are not only promoting these books, but you just are excited about writing books and actually publishing them (I know I bloody well would be), but around the last month before the release it felt like every other post was about Masks.
Ok, I hope this wasn’t too harsh, but I think honest feedback will serve you the best and I am not going to stop reading this blog any time soon.
I wish you guys all the best of luck with the Stew in the new year.
I’d just like to say I think there have been some good suggestions made here. I too appreciate the high standards of respect and insight of the community on this site. I’d also like to say a big thank you to all the Gnomes. Good luck for the year ahead!
My feedback is three-fold:
* I rarely come to the site because I prefer using the RSS feed so I can read at my leisure. That also means I don’t comment often
* As far as content, I agree with Sektor mostly, more content that can be used in an ongoing campaign, less theory social contract stuff would be useful for me. I do, however, enjoy and find value in reviews
* I felt the site got a little ad-heavy promoting its own stuff for a bit, to the point of over-doing it. It soured me on GS for a couple months
Everyone’s mileage will vary, but I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that GS just falls off the radar at times. And honestly, I don’t know why.
I generally keep to a set routine of reading the same 5 blogs every day, saving GS for last. (If you want to say that I’m saving the best for last, that’s your choice.) What I’ve noticed for quite awhile now has been this: GS is almost always updated with new content, whether that content is interesting or not (which is just my perspective on what is interesting and nothing more). Other blogs are rarely being updated at all.
My point is this: I get bored seeing little to nothing from the other blogs, so I’m apt to think “well now, I’d have more fun looking at porn” and might follow that shiny thought instead. When that happens, I miss out on GS updates. I don’t see this as a problem with GS. I see it as a problem with the community of blog sites as a whole. I’m using other blogs as a lead-in for GS… and those other blogs (remaining unnamed) are seriously failing. But GS is not. Far from it.
@Tomcollective and @bighi – I slept on your feedback, and now that I’m up I think it boils down to “more meat, less meta,” which seems to be a pretty common request. Thank you! Speaking for myself as an author, I can make a mental shift and try to avoid writing meta posts unless something just won’t get itself out of my brain, and instead focus on creating how-tos, guides, and other more directly useful articles.
I think the meta stuff is useful (I never write anything I don’t think is useful here, unless it’s April Fool’s or otherwise intended not to be), but your feedback is well taken.
@Svengaard – I’m not honestly sure how we could make finding old articles easier than it is without completely overhauling the thousand that have been written (adding new categories and tags, for example) — our search box is Google-powered, and works just as well as a Google search. I occasionally can’t find something I know is there on the first try, but it’s pretty rare. What kind of improvements are you looking for?
On tracking discussions without generating too much email, that sounds like an area where improvements can probably come in the form of a plugin or two — I bet other options are out there. I’ll see what I can find.
@Connallmac – You’re absolutely right — this is how I know I’m not a stats guy. More member and flat comment counts does mean less engagement. It makes perfect sense.
We need to overhaul our current reader request option, the Suggestion Pot. It’s hard to stay on top of, we tend to lag waaaaaay behind, and I’m frankly not very good at keeping up with it. Right now I’m leaning towards an email option, tweaked to match your suggestion: We take emails, or questions on social media, and answer them roundup-style in regular posts.
If an idea or a request begs for a whole post of its own, that’s likely to be a subset of them and could be handled on an exception basis. Thank you for the excellent suggestion!
@Tomcollective – Mobile viewing is on our list for the upcoming redesign.
@KnownWorld – A forum, unfortunately, is not. I ran a forum once; Patrick runs it now (I turned it over to him). I found the longer I ran it, the less I enjoyed it — it’s work in a way that running a blog isn’t.
That’s not to say that it wasn’t a great community, because it was. We had good users, good threads, and lots of quality posts came out of it. But I hated running it, and I have zero interest in jumping on the bed of nails here.
@secretoracle – I’m not quite sure what to make of this. We promote our books in ads on the site, but RSS readers don’t see those. To sell books, we need to mention them so that people know they exist. Except for promotional posts — the ones devoted to drumming up interest in an upcoming book — we try to mention the books only when they’re relevant to the subject matter.
I feel like this may be a case where we can’t please everyone. If more feedback along these lines (too much self-promotion) comes in, that will signal that I’m wrong!
@jenskot – Very, very good points. We have an email discussion going about this behind the scenes, and the arc its following is one that leads to us having a more distributed presence: GS remains the hub, where all the content lives, but the discussion and engagement can happen here and elsewhere.
That dovetails well with our mission to help as many GMs as possible, so it’s kind of a facepalm moment. We should have been spreading out more already!
@Razjah – Thanks! That’s what I thought you meant, but the term is new to me. I can’t speak for others, but I include questions on articles I feel engender them. Sometimes I write something just to put it out there, and it may not really lend itself to an ongoing discussion. But doing firestarters more often, even if I don’t think the article needs one, sounds like an easy thing to do.
@Raf Blutaxt – Not too harsh at all, just very useful. I’ll have to mull your review feedback over; I don’t do a lot of reviews, and the site as a whole doesn’t do a lot of reviews.
I know see at least three folks commenting on over-promotion of Masks and Eureka, so message received loud and clear! I’ll dial it back and try and strike the balance between keeping potential customers informed and not annoying readers better.
Thank you all, both here and on G+, for the informative, eye-opening, blunt, and useful feedback you’ve given us. I don’t feel nearly as glum as I did yesterday and the day before, when one of my first reactions was, “Maybe I should quit and hand the Stew over to someone else, since I’m clearly steering the ship in the wrong direction.”
Thus far, I’ve heard very little that we can’t fix, and that’s fantastic. Thank you.
@Martin Ralya – I don’t see your mission here as fixing the blog, so much as taking it to the next level. You Gnomes give out a lot of great advice, which I as a GM appreciate.
On that note, I think one thing that might help is if you as lead Gnome take more of a strong hand at the tiller. Give each week a theme and have each of the Gnomes give their take on it. Maybe one week you all write about pirate themed games, the next week how you incorporate tech into your games (or even why you stay away from tech!) and the week after how to write and play test a convention game. A bit more cohesion of this sort would give a synergistic effect; where I would feel my time would be better spent reading the blog, rather than a series of one offs.
One thing I would like to see more articles on is how to set up good sandbox adventures. I usually have an idea in my head about how an adventure should play out, and so sometimes I feel like I’m a being a bit railroady. I would love to hear from the Gnomes how they do sandbox well!
Like I told Martin over on Google+:
I’m getting a lot more of my gaming stuff from there, including GS and interacting with the GS guys.
That’s me, though.
I got the most use out of articles that pointed me in the direction of new technology, new and or creative gamer bling, such as tokens, props and the like, and that pointed me towards gamer oriented products i did not know existed. These topics were very, very useful.
There was also at least one article that discussed networking in order to reach more gamers. That one was very useful.
Also, the bit about opening up and accepting submissions has the potential to be a great idea.
Especially if coupled with the sort of leadership mentioned in Conallmac’s post above.
Finally,
Thanks. I appreciate the work you all put in to provide me with material and resources.
@Martin Ralya – Just to clarify what I and others are saying: I mean “less meta”, but not “no meta”.
I also think meta is useful, but not in excess.
Focusing in less meta, you also focus on writing only about important meta.
and just to keep things in perspective, if you gnomes are doing something wrong, it’s still a wrong which is the envy of many, many other gaming blogs. cheers.
I am a huge fan of the Stew but do not comment much. When I first discovered the Stew I was also a daily reader of a few other GMing blogs. Over time, due to their lack of posts and content that wasn’t so useful, I dropped them from my daily reading. The only one that remains is the Stew, and I do read it every day. (If I miss a day I go back and catch up.)
Having said that, there is room for improvement. I’ve also noticed the lack of meat to some of the articles lately, and personally I have to say that the meat is my favorite part of the Stew. I love examples. The articles that demonstrate how to implement their ideas by example are by far the ones that I learn the most from.
I do love the meta articles too, but like everyone said, there’s only so many times you can say the same things over and over again before they get stale. (I do realize that I am doing the same thing by repeating other people’s comments, but I feel it’s the only way you know that we find the same faults with your product.)
But thanks so much for having such a great site! I will continue to check you guys out every day. And by the way, your self-promotion does not bother me one bit. I’ve noticed it, but I drank the Kool-Aid (or ate the stew), and love your books. So it doesn’t matter to me. Thanks again.
I just wanted to say that I love GS. Read it daily. I think that people have some great ideas, but I would caution not to change too much too quick. Start with the weekly meat, focusing one article a week on a specific game system or hook/inspiration context. I think that the success of the Engine publishing books is testament to the fact that GS fans sometimes need some inspiration or hooks.
In addition, I think the already announced detail of adding some guest posters periodically will add spice and expand the GS set of niches. I would even say that if guest posts don’t expand on the niche provided by the gnomes, it may not be that worthwhile to add. One of the great aspects of the Stew is that there are so much variety in the opinions and voices. I think that is an area that could continue to expand.
Martin – The Gnomes in the um, ‘pantry’ are not happy about the rumors of more meat in the stew.
Just thought you’d like to know…
shut up and put your ring of regeneration on. 😀
@Martin Ralya – I do not mind the occasional promotion of the books you have written if they are used in a context that provides meat to the subject. Take ‘Masks’ and use an excepted character to show a GM (like me) how I can build out an encounter (meta) in a fantasy world and then use the same NPC in a Pulp setting. Same goes for using Eureka in the same example.
As for more meat, I run Savage Worlds, ICONS, Play 4e and Star Wars Saga. I would love to see articles that deal with individual settings in the form of short stories/seasons. Take a setting and walk a newbie GM through the creation process of an encounter and even hand hold them (me) through a sample combat. Teach us! Help us handle these settings and the situations.
You can even use the settings to point out areas that could trip up a GM. Ubiquity although it is like FATE, FUDGE, and Savage Worlds (and others) has its tripping points. For the systems that you guys know well then walking us through the areas that can provide trouble would also be a great help.
Just my two cents.
I’m a little late to the party here, having more or less failed to read any blogs over christmas despite having more free time than usual.
I’m a new reader in 2011, and I’m fairly sure (from memory) that I joined up off the back of the Ennie, for what it’s worth.
I have to say that I do not agree with the comments about more meat. I play and run a range of systems and settings, and largely write my own material in terms of NPCs, plots and so forth. There is nothing that would interest me less than a set of pre-written NPCs or monsters or whatnot – I just would not use them. What is far more valuable to me is tips on what makes an interesting NPC, a challenging monster, or an intriguing plot. Articles of this sort are the ones I read. Insights rather than stock material. I’m not sure if that’s quite the same as “meat” vs “meta”.
Like some others, I mainly read via RSS. This means I don’t get the pictures, sadly, and I don’t see the comments unless I’m moved to click through. I guess it also reduces the number of hits you’re getting compared to if I was a browser reader. I read the stuff I find interesting, skip the stuff I don’t. To your credit, I don’t do a whole lot of skipping.
Anyway, I guess I’m saying I like your work and I hope you won’t start unpicking it out of paranoia that you aren’t doing as well as you could be.
Everyone: Is your definition of “meat” system-independent or system-specific?
In other words, would an article on my workflow process from session to session, detailing my note-taking, emails to players, campaign documentation, and general prep be ‘meaty’?
Or would y’all like to see exactly how to make an interesting and challenging opponent using the Savage Worlds rules?
FWIW, Gnome Stew is intentionally and explicitly system-neutral, although a bit of system does sneak in from time to time. (Hey, it’s not easy dealing with a systemic infection!)
Well, let me dissent from the direction that comments are running, but just a little.
I think “meta” stuff is fine, if it’s connected with something that’s more personal and emotional. The most powerful writing I’ve done, the best posts, often come from posts where I write about specific things that happened in a game, and then what they mean in a larger setting.
That is, I start with something that’s concrete and emotional, and move from there to meta.
I generally like the meta thrust, but if you just start out in the abstract, it will be dry and unengaging.
Point two is, don’t avoid controversy. Don’t wrap up with platitudes, wrap up with your own slant on something. Be fair, but don’t shy away from “I don’t like that”. So many of us geeks instinctually avoid any conflict, it seems. Let a little seep in, you’ll survive it.
First of all, I love your blog. I bought both of your books. I have been a RSS subscriber for around two year (I guess), and I rarely read stuff directly on the blog itself. I did not find the advertisement for your books too heavy-handed.
Sektor said it well early :
“But what I personally am most interested in are articles with more meat: stuff that can actually be used in games, like maps, npcs, monsters, plots, new rules, art, entire adventures, random tables, step-by-step gm tutorials on — for example — improving your eloquence or delivering compelling descriptions or speeding up a combat round”
I am especially interested in “methods” to do things, those “tutorials” Sektor talked about. I believe that they are the most useful and interesting articles you publish. The posts he categorize as “meta” are not all equals : according to me, some should stay, and some should go. Reviews are interesting, and the “how to solve that problem with your players”, even if I don’t really dig them myself, may be useful for some people if they are well written (and here on the Stew, they are). The one type of article I automatically skip in my RSS reader with a sigh is the one I label “psycho-pop”, where the author seems to give grand pearls of wisdom without any instruction on how to accomplish it. Blghl said it pretty clearly earlier :
“Gnome Stew says ‘you have to create great hooks’ (just an example) and I think ‘OK, but I don’t know how!'” I am a teacher, and those remind me of the consultants telling us to “just make students love the subject matter” without EVER saying I we should or even could do it. You’re not nearly as bad as them though (and not nearly as well paid!), so don’t be too disappointed with yourselves 🙂
So, basically, my comments are not new :
– Great blog, thank you!
– More “how-to’s” (I am especially fond of story and prep related articles)
– Less “psycho-pop” giving “pearls of wisdom” without any actual way to get there.
Keep up the good work, and happy 2012!
I want to also add that I favor Meta over Meat (feels weird to write that).
That said, I prefer solid examples with my Meta and step by step procedures on how to implement. I do think Meta can be a bit dry, so using emotional content to spice it up can be useful.
@Kurt “Telas” Schneider – I don’t believe that either of them would fit my taste, actually. What i believe is good stuff is articles that explains “how to make stuff”; your own experience may be used as examples (that helps a lot), but I am not really interested in reading someone else’s campaing notes if it is not to show me his method of organizing and taking his notes. The same goes for system-specific stuff : I am more interested in articles telling how to make interesting NPCs (or whatever else), using those you created for SW (or another system) as examples, than in reading stats block. Of course, I understand that advices may be more useful for some systems than other (and that is all right), but at least aiming for the universal advice is better and more suited to Gnome Stew mission.
I believe Gnome Stew is a great place to read some system neutral-stuff; if a lot of system specific stuff crawled in, it would not be an improvement.
I agree generally with the “less meta, more meat” theme that’s been expressed. After a couple years of output, meta articles tend to run together and express the same ideas. Like Sektor noted, “Have Fun” is a good message but can’t really support a lot of articles. It also isn’t engaging, because it’s not novel or controversial.
One series I’ve really come to like is Fair or Foul. These articles take a single GMing decision and ask the readers to discuss it. I think this a great way to get the readers thinking about their GMing style proactively, and that’s a big part of (what I understand) Gnome Stew to be about.
Another thought is that the commitment to system-neutrality may hinder the site. No GM runs a system-neutral game. I’m not suggesting that GS become a Savage Worlds or D&D blog, but that articles can talk about specific settings or systems and how they facilitate GMing or not in particular ways.
I think a lot of readers would appreciate it. As I read through some meta articles, I notice that while that post doesn’t mention any particular rule, the comments jump right into different systems. That tells me that the readers want to talk about how the system they use affects the way they GM.
@Kurt “Telas” Scheider:
I like a bit of both system-neutral and -specific. Neutral because — obviously — it’s universal; specific because I would like to learn a bit about other game systems that I’ve never played before (which is, I shamefully admit, a lot).
To clarify my original point a bit, I also prefer the “methods”/”tutorials” you use for the different aspects in your prep, play, and running, but a specific example or two can inspire me. A few examples of some of my personal favorite topics:
* New mini-rules for specific systems (e.g. what Paizo regularly does with the Pathfinder system, such as their Haunt rules or Settlement stat blocks; or rules on how you to incorporate a Tarot deck in your game)
* Random tables for various things (e.g. what Dungeon Magazine before 4E often did: a random table for the contents of a library, or a random table with food and drink from an average tavern)
* Tips (and personal examples) of how you organize your game table, GM notes, how you handle NPCs behind the screen, how you make sure the background story comes across to your players, … (although these kinds of tips already appear on the Stew, so there’s nothing new there)
One final thing, when I made the distinction between meat and meta, I didn’t suggest to drop the meta in favor of the meat, but instead find the right mix. I too am interested in reviews and personal experiences and the like, every now and then.
By the way, as a testament of the Awesomeness of the Stew, I love how you guys take all these comments to heart. I’m anxious to see the follow-up articles of John’s new “Meet the Meat of my Game” series.
@Kurt “Telas” Schneider – I agree with most of the comments on the system neutral approach that is currently underway. I was just suggesting that sometimes including system specific information might provide less hand waving (neutral) descriptions by showing how it fits in a system that folks might be aware of or interested in.