Every year Paizo holds their RPG Superstar contest, which is a cool competition/talent search for commercial RPG content writers. I've been following for several years, and even though I don't play Pathfinder or even like D&D much, it's a really fun opportunity to see the challenges of commercial game design and how people deal with them.
The competition is usually announced before December, and then there's activity up through April-ish. I'm wondering if an event like this might be an opportunity for RPG.SE.
One obvious way we could be of assistance is branding RPG.SE as a place to ask design questions, but I think that'd go over poorly - it's a competition; competitors are meant to do their own work and research, or at least not farm it out to a public Q&A site.
But lots of design and mechanics questions come up throughout the contest - often in retrospect, when trying to evaluate a particular piece of work. We could chime in there, and discuss mechanical issues as they arise, throw a few links into the Paizo discussions, and hopefully demonstrate that we're a cool, useful, friendly resource.
There are disadvantages here - more focus on Pathfinder, "competition" with the Paizo threads where the same questions will be discussed. But it's such a good event. And the people following it are great people who are genuinely interested both in the intricacies of game design, and (very often) in fleshing out cool ideas and dramatics far beyond what most D&D is typically geared for. So it's a great crowd to pitch to - if we find a good way to.
Suggestions?
