This is the Leadership Test, Test of the Rally as proposed by Anien
Test of the Rally
Overview
In this test players will build a simple soapbox some distance from civilization. They will schedule a speech, get players to attend and give the speech. Afterwards attending players will vote on the speech. Many leadership tests obliquely tests a person ability to speak and persuade others, this one directly tests it.
The Soapbox
The soapbox will be a simple building requiring boards, nails and a 1 leadership microphone. A player participating in the test of the rally can request one leadership mic from the University of Leadership once per week. They are only used for building a soapbox and will have no other use. Mics will be tradeable so a player could acquire more than 1 each week to give multiple speeches. A soapbox can not be built within 1000 co-ordinates of a Chariot Stop (Or some other reasonable large distance, ideally 1/3 the average distance between any 2 CS's ).
The Rally
At any time a player may click on a soapbox and "Start A Rally". At this point a 5 minute timer starts in which any other player may choose to "Join the Rally" by clickiing on the box. When the timer is up, everyone who joined the rally will be given a chat tab that works like a Mic chat tab, except only the owner of the soapbox can speak into it. This tab will last for 5 minutes (or whatever turns out to be a good time for a short speech to be typed ). When the speech timer is done the tab will go away and players may now click on the soapbox and vote for the speech much like a thought puzzle with a scale of 1-7.
The Scoring
A player will score points equal to the (number of votes) * (the average vote). So giving a good speech is important, but so it getting a lot of poeple there. 20 people voting an average of 5/7 would score 100 points. 70 people voting 2 out of 7 would score 140 points. Standard passing options can apply.. Top X passers each week, with or without some kind of carry over on points depending on how limiting the test should be for passing.
Final Thoughts
I really like the idea that this will test both the players power of persuasion (convincing large numbers of people to run a good distance out of their way), and someone's ability to give a good speech. This will also give people a forum in game to talk about whatever they feel should be brought to people's attention, e.g. Support for pyramid building, research in technology X, etc. While the speech could be on things outside the game, nothing but a pile of random jokes and thoughts, or just 5 minutes of blank tab I suspect these will garner a low average vote. Finally, and I think most importantly, they give a leadership test that people uninterested in leadership discipline could get into. I for one am totally uninterested in DP, True leadership, etc. But I would attend quite a few rally's just to hear the speeches and thus would participate in the discpline even if I wasn't actively passing the test myself, much the way a person can attend a fireworks show even if they don't do art tests themselves.
Opinions
Any critiques are welcome here
- Very interesting, although I note that the smart player who wants to say a lot, with quality, will have their text prepared ahead of time. However you can't have more than can be read in the allotted time either. So it won't be typing speed that limits it, it will be reading time. I wonder if it would be worth considering a cap on the number of characters in a speech? Say 1,200 words or so...kind of depends on people's average reading speed. (BTW, 1 word = 5 characters for word count purposes in professional writing, so that is a 6,000 character limit.) ~Shivani
- I'm not sure any official limit is really necessary. On the test page description on the wiki, people can certainly comment about a good length for a speech to allow people to read it comfortably. However, if people want to type faster than people can read, that's their choice. In a real speech, people can easily talk faster than is comfortable to listen to if they have too much to say, but their speech quality just suffers. The same is true here. I think this would be a good addition to the leadership tests though. -Meidori