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[OneFiveSix]

Just a little something to satisfy my curiosity!

[Scattercat]

Mind you, even a game with a well-written, clear Prologue and Rules and several first posts complete with cool formatting and appropriate pictures will still often suffer from fatal GM-Rot. One would think that putting in all that effort at the start would inspire some sort of durability to the thing...

[Alhaja]

Too true, alas.

I like to think that a well-written, well-thought-out rules and prologue bode well for the longevity of the story (and perhaps it helps) but all too many games that look so good fall apart very quickly.

[Shay]

This was a fairly easy one. 

It primarily boils down to the story line, for me.  A long, detailed prologue can be nice, if the storyline actually calls for that, but it is completely meaningless if you have a crap storyline.  Since I mostly play in free forms, the rules section doesn't rank very heavily, beyond that I can get some feel as to whether the SC has enough attention for detail and order to keep things going. 

Spotting an SC I already know is capable of running (and maintaining) a good game can definitely be a real plus, but it usually isn't make or break in my decision. 

The other stuff listed is relatively meaningless to me.  Oh, except that I find games with a lot of graphics and that sound like they are supposed to be an ad for a movie tend to tank within the first week. If they get off the launch pad at all. 

[Xeron Brigs]

The main factor for me to join a story is whether the plot and setting are interesting to me. You can have an amazing set of rules and a highly detailed prologue, but if the story is about being a traveling insurance salesman in Arizona, I would probably skip it. 

The way that I see it is that the prologue is used as a sample of what you can expect in the story, sort of a hook to draw prospective players in and get them interested and enthusiastic about the story. A Storycrafter who doesn’t bother with a prologue, or only types in one or two sentences, is probably not dedicated enough to actually run the story.

[Aristotle]

I went with the ‘The overall storyline interests me’ option, which is true to an extent: the premise/storyline is the first thing that will grab my attention, and make me investigate a story further. My next stop, however, is probably more important when I’m deciding if I’ll apply or not. I’ll head straight over to the Cast section, and take a look at the characters that have already been accepted. From that I can decide if I’m on roughly the same page as the Storycrafter with regards to what makes an interesting character, standard of writing, etc. Generally, it’s the Cast section that provides the clincher for me (which in hindsight means I should have selected ‘Other people have already joined it’. Ho hum).