Update on the Community Monster Manual…
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First of all, still looking for name suggestions. Just toss out anything, even if you think it’s stupid, no limit to how many ideas you can give. Post suggestions at this post.
I’m going to stop accepting suggestions some time later tonight, probably around 9:30 or 10 PM EST. Then I’m going to put up a poll which will remain up for at least 24 hours.
I’d like to shy away from names which explicitly refer to monsters, as it does limit the project unnecessarily, but I’ll still put them up for vote if they’re suggested.
The vote is going to take the form of approval voting; in a nutshell, you can select as many entries as you want, and indeed you should select everything that you like. In the end, the winner is the one which most people approve of
This is in contrast to the normal one person, one vote system, which is frankly one of the worst possible ways of voting for anything. As an example, say you’ve got 5 people voting on strawberry, chocolate or vanilla ice cream. All 5 like vanilla, 3 of them hate chocolate, and 2 of them love chocolate. If they each only vote once, then the 3 who like chocolate will win, and the other 2 are stuck with a flavor they hate. On the other hand, if they all select everything they like, vanilla would win and everyone would be happy, even if it wasn’t necessarily everyone’s favorite.
So anyways, I said this in comments already, but here’s my basic plan:
Sometime Wednesday night I’ll end the poll and put up forums. If time allows, I’ll put up a wiki as well, though that might not be possible due to my schedule. At the latest, the wiki should be up by Thursday night.
After that’s all up, I’m going to start pimping this project out. 
Once the forums are up, we can discuss it a bit more, but I’ve been thinking about it a bit and here’s what I’m currently considering the best “option.”
We have a two-tiered setup; anyone can submit anything to the Wiki (subject to legality, of course). Then we have a vetting process (including making sure everything is legal and compatible with whatever license we use, and that the monster has had some nominal amount of playtesting and appears fun and balanced), and anything that passes that vetting process is moved to a more permanent home. Once we reach a critical mass, we release a PDF compilation of these vetted entries. The PDF is available for free, and it’s also available through a print on demand company like Lulu at cost. For a 300-page black-and-white book, that’s $10 softcover or $23 hardcover. Not bad. Let me reiterate, though, that no one affiliated with this project (including me– note that I don’t do any advertising on my site) will make any money off of it.
I agree with you about approval voting for this task since it is what we could call a singular goal. That kind of voting is less good for choices with multiple goals like polical parties but I digress.
If you have server costs please let me know, this is a project I definitely want to support, financially if needed.
I don’t even care if the PDF ever exists - it’s the wiki that will be the most powerful component of this. I’d like to have a 3.5e section that people can contribute to or not - if you want to focus on 4e that’s fine, but there’s no reason to arbitrarily limit the structure we have available.
Will you be putting the license up for a vote too or just picking one? If so, which one? Choosing the right license is crucial for building a community like this. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the forums of Dundjinni.com some time. They chose a license on those forums that says, essentially “Anything original that you post can be used by anyone for any purpose.” Rather than pushing people away, it has made those forums an INCREDIBLE resource for artwork (sadly, most of it is top-down and thus not so useful to me). People post there knowing that others will be able to use their work, and people go there knowing they can pull stuff and not have to worry about copyright violations.
@Skylar: Don’t worry about the costs. For the time being, I should be fine with the same server I use for my personal website and Encounter-a-Day. If it gets popular enough that that becomes a problem, well, it’s an enviable problem to have.
@Cory: It’s something to discuss, but I can all but assure you that it will be something along those lines. Sadly, if we want to be able to use creative commons content (which we really, really do, for the sake of artwork), we’ll probably need to use a creative commons license (as opposed to a more free-form “do whatever you want” license). But I don’t think it’ll be a huge problem.
CC is definitely a good direction to go, I agree. Can we avoid CC-NC and CC-ND? Derivatives and commercial uses should definitely be on the table.
The art I have collected is all compatible with CC-BY.
How about vehicles in it too? I would love to have more of those for my games.
Rifken: Why the hell not? This is ours, we should be able to throw just about anything into it…
Cory: Why not just have dual statblocks for 4e and 3.5 in the same profile?
I would think it would be easier search wise to be able to say ‘i want to search all 4e monsters’ or ‘all 3e monsters’, etc. That way whomever is performing the search gets the info they want instead of wading through any unwanted editions. If we are to include more than one edition, I say why not include all editions, or at least the potential to do so. Plus, I think it might add confusion to the playtest section of each entry if all editions were included on one page.
Mdonle is right. It’s better for the project and for the audience if we’re focused.
RPG Ike’s last blog post..3E/4E Hybrid Statistics Experiment