I have no strong opinions on trash content and eras (well, I used to, but I was probably wrong). Just wanted to post with four basic points: 0. The more recent your content is, the more you have to worry about shelf life. A well-written pack (either trash or academic) should still be about as playable two years from now as now. 1. Trash isn't a license to write questions that are butt-hard. The problem with a bonus on Max Headroom characters has relatively little to do with how accessbile Max Headroom is. I was around for that show, may have even watched it a bit. Asking about characters from it is STILL way too hard. In general, people write ridiculously obscure questions about the things they know well. Don't do that. 2. Treated as guidelines, what Princeton wants from its packs makes perfect sense. If someone were to write a guide to writing a good trash pack, they might consider whether and how much to adopt Princeton's approach. (Say, for example, Mike Burger's guides for the Ann B. Davis or the Monty Burns. He already includes a whole lot of detail in the distribution; this would be one more thing to be heads-up about.) 3. Treated as hard-and-fast rules, they're needlessly complicated. Speaking as someone who used just make just *byzantine* pack submission demands, I now realize just how stupid that approach is. The more anal you make your regulations, the more likely people will be to throw up their hands and not even try to meet what you want. I suppose you could do something like what the ACF writing guide used to do (as of what John Sheahan wrote up many years ago; maybe the document I'm thinking of is still in reference) and say that good writers know what good packs contain but at the same time give an extremely detailed distribution as a set of mileposts.
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