What is "The Forge?"

mythusmage said:

The question now becomes, how do you do it?

Has anybody seen an RPG that provides guidelines for getting the players involved?

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Well, any game that includes something like the Robin's Laws theory (e.g. DMG II) provides such guidelines. It's not hard to provide what will get your players involved, especially if you know them well. Steal themes and plot devices from their favourite genres of fiction or go by what they have done in the past, making a checklist of "stuff I need to include for player X, player Y, player Z". If you don't know them, ask. Most people know what it is they're looking for in a game and can tell you. Also, despite what it seems to indicate in DMG II, I think most people like variety. If you have a power gamer, a role player, and a tactician in your group, they'll probably each enjoy getting the chance to play their personal style, but being in a group with a tactician can make tactical play more fun for everyone.

The only other thing I'd add to the Robin's Laws ideas is just general creative writing guidelines for writing adventures.

Dr. Awkward said:

If you have a power gamer, a role player, and a tactician in your group, they'll probably each enjoy getting the chance to play their personal style, but being in a group with a tactician can make tactical play more fun for everyone.

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Exactly. In my experience, a mix of creative agendas makes for a better group; whereas the Forge argues the opposite.

I propose this thread and the other one for Archivisation. There is a lot of good game design theory in both of these.

fusangite said:

I don't know what these quotation marks are doing for you. But I'll tell you what they're doing for me: they're telling me we're definitely done here.

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Aren't you the guy who was complaining that when you went to The Forge for clarification they told you "you just don't get it, stop posting?"

I'm using quotation marks to set some concept of a thing off from its pure physical reality, in a rather obvious way, or at least I thought so. If you say gaming = G or N or S or some combination or subset of those things, when in fact my game = neither G nor N nor S etc., then my game != "gaming." I'm still choosing to call it gaming, but it's not "gaming," and it certainly isn't concerned with that concept (i.e. GNS) or about it in any way. This really seems like a trivial consquence of the disconnect between practices and theories to me. I'm going to keep doing what I do, and it really isn't about what some RPG theorist thinks gamers do in a broad sense. If you want specific examples, give me your theory, and I'll give you examples of where it fails to account for my practices. Without your theory, I can't give you those examples; all I can say is "do you have a theory that accounts for everything you do at the table?" If you answer no, you're already agreeing with that part of my argument.

fusangite said:

So, basically, you're saying that you can't actually support your own argument.

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What I'm saying is I don't have to, because you've already done it for me by expressing dissatisfaction with The Forge's theory. If that's "gaming," but that's not what you do, then what you do isn't "gaming." And if you take the small step of conceding that there's no all-purpose theory of gaming, then on a practical level there's no absolute concept of "gaming" for specific gaming practices to ever be about. Gaming will always be about the gaming that it is, but that doesn't mean it's about the gaming some theorist posits.

Warning: this post is a TANGENT.

eyebeams said:

I hear strong AI is just around the corner, now that analytical types have been nice enough to explain consciousness!

Everybody has rubbish. …

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I’m not sure what you’re claiming here. There are many interesting positions concerning ‘consciousness’ being advanced by contemporary analytical philosophers of mind. None of these positions have clearly emerged as the most plausible one – but at least they are presented in a clear, rigorous manner, and thus their claims can be critically evaluated and considered. Sadly, clarity and rigour are generally considered to be intellectual vices in ‘postmodernism’.

Also, there’s a lot more to analytical philosophy than AI, btw (e.g. philosophy of science, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of language, etc.). ‘Analytical philosophy’ describes a method, not a set of subject matter.

eyebeams said:

… It really does get quite tiresome to continually read people who read some postmodernists as an undergrad decide that they know the whole shebang and they may as well follow departmental fashion. …

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Thanks for the insult. Do you know me? No, you don’t. So don’t go making assumptions about my educational background or present intellectual pursuits.

My articles and research reflect my interests – not any ‘departmental fashion’ (and given how diverse my colleagues in my present department are, there is no ‘fashion’ to follow, even if I were so inclined).

eyebeams said:

…
This is where I suspect you get wierd thing
s like declarations that the Forge is both "totalizing," and "postrstructuralist," which is one of the few patently impossible configurations of poststructuralism.
…

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Um, whatever. (I certainly would never use those terms.)

END of Tangent. Please resume the Forge-bashing.

Wayside said:

Aren't you the guy who was complaining that when you went to The Forge for clarification they told you "you just don't get it, stop posting?"

I'm using quotation marks to set some concept of a thing off from its pure physical reality, in a rather obvious way, or at least I thought so. If you say gaming = G or N or S or some combination or subset of those things, when in fact my game = neither G nor N nor S etc., then my game != "gaming." I'm still choosing to call it gaming, but it's not "gaming," and it certainly isn't concerned with that concept (i.e. GNS) or about it in any way. This really seems like a trivial consquence of the disconnect between practices and theories to me. I'm going to keep doing what I do, and it really isn't about what some RPG theorist thinks gamers do in a broad sense. If you want specific examples, give me your theory, and I'll give you examples of where it fails to account for my practices. Without your theory, I can't give you those examples; all I can say is "do you have a theory that accounts for everything you do at the table?" If you answer no, you're already agreeing with that part of my argument.


What I'm saying is I don't have to, because you've already done it for me by expressing dissatisfaction with The Forge's theory. If that's "gaming," but that's not what you do, then what you do isn't "gaming." And if you take the small step of conceding that there's no all-purpose theory of gaming, then on a practical level there's no absolute concept of "gaming" for specific gaming practices to ever be about. Gaming will always be about the gaming that it is, but that doesn't mean it's about the gaming some theorist posits.

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Well, thank God I was wrong about Forge member's propensity for Academic navel-gazing.

Akrasia said:

Warning: this post is a TANGENT.

I’m not sure what you’re claiming here. There are many interesting positions concerning ‘consciousness’ being advanced by contemporary analytical philosophers of mind. None of these positions have clearly emerged as the most plausible one – but at least they are presented in a clear, rigorous manner, and thus their claims can be critically evaluated and considered.

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This is the same slippery talk I hear from proponents of memetics and would-be poltical philosophers, as well: that it's just one position out of many and shouldn't be taken too serious. Then of course, they take it seriously enough to casually insult other positions and disciplines -- like you did.

But the analytical stream produces silly humdingers *all the time.* AI-related nonsense is just part of it. It's when you get into things like the utilitarian justification for the free market that you get some seriously faith-based loony stuff.

Sadly, clarity and rigour are generally considered to be intellectual vices in ‘postmodernism’.

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There are two Bogdanovs and a Schon (with an umlaut!) for every Sokal Affair. Do me a favour and describe a specific position. The fact of the matter is that postmodernism just isn't concerned with the same things as analytical philosophy. Analytical types like yourself falsely think that postmodernism criticizes the ideas of objective reality and assumes that attempting to understand it is futile, even though such thinkers are a part of the field's fringe minority, much like the guys who propose we are all lying when we say we are conscious. Like the simplest behaviourism, radical deconstruction is really more of an embryo from which more developed ideas emerge.

I'd say that the core ideas of postmodernism -- that our thinking is deeply influenced by our subject positions and that communication is tenuous because of it -- is quite useful, fairly straightforward to justify and leads to a number of tools that we can use to recheck our assumptions. We just don't use it to redo math.

Also, there’s a lot more to analytical philosophy than AI, btw (e.g. philosophy of science, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of language, etc.). ‘Analytical philosophy’ describes a method, not a set of subject matter.

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Never said it didn't.

Thanks for the insult. Do you know me? No, you don’t. So don’t go making assumptions about my educational background or present intellectual pursuits.

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I think your position on postmodernism is simplistic and erroneous. Your statement was based on making much broader assumptions about an entire discipline, so your offense is misplaced.

My articles and research reflect my interests – not any ‘departmental fashion’ (and given how diverse my colleagues in my present department are, there is no ‘fashion’ to follow, even if I were so inclined).

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Everybody says that about their departments and themselves. Were the world so truly full of snowflake-like distinctions in attitudes. Of course, the postmodern way of talking about this is to describe this as a logocentric ruse to give privilege to certain ideas without real analysis, but I don't think you'd like talking about that.

Wayside said:

Aren't you the guy who was complaining that when you went to The Forge for clarification they told you "you just don't get it, stop posting?"

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I on the other hand, am the guy they told, "We know we aren't making any sense, but go screw yourself anyway."*















*This in response to, "How is Heroquest indie, exactly?" and "Hey, that's not how us mainstream guys write stuff."

eyebeams said:

This is the same slippery talk I hear from proponents of memetics and would-be poltical philosophers, as well: that it's just one position out of many and shouldn't be taken too serious.

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Do you think memetics (and political philosophy, but I care less about that) are dead-end avenues of inquiry? Or is it more accurate to say that just because they're sexy doesn't mean they shouldn't be subjected to careful analysis before they're used to explain everything ever?

eyebeams said:

I'd say that the core ideas of postmodernism -- that our thinking is deeply influenced by our subject positions and that communication is tenuous because of it -- is quite useful, fairly straightforward to justify and leads to a number of tools that we can use to recheck our assumptions.

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I really admire this formulation. I'm going to quote it elsewhere in an argument/discussion I can't finish having until I get home and have access to USENET.

mhacdebhandia said:

Do you think memetics (and political philosophy, but I care less about that) are dead-end avenues of inquiry? Or is it more accurate to say that just because they're sexy doesn't mean they shouldn't be subjected to careful analysis before they're used to explain everything ever?

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No, I think they're interesting but pretentious fields, in the sense that they are sometimes constructed as embryonic sciences with little justification. Memetics is especially bad for this, since it is fundamentally non-falsifiable. It's also rather Forge-like in that its flagship cheerleading journal *also* declared victory and closed up shop.

Basically, as long as we think in terms of a community of ideas that criticize or support each other, and that these kudos and broadsides are not always rational (since they are being expressed through self-deceptive, venal, silly human agents), we'll muddle along.

I really admire this formulation. I'm going to quote it elsewhere in an argument/discussion I can't finish having until I get home and have access to USENET.

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Thanks. I won't defend every part of the postmodern/phenomenological-existential stream canon, since some of it is bollocks, but Some of the stuff that looks like it is, isn't. That stuff is often building off the ideas in other texts that talk about playing with language and the text as an exemplar of the process of thinking, rather than abroad argument about what one ought to think. For example, Foucault's Madness and Civilization is, in my view, most useful because of the method, where Foucault tries to boil the history of mental illness in society down to narratives about what kind of people the "mad" are and what relationship they have to everyone else, and how this acts are the template for power relations. Some of the history is bad, but MF is also saying," Try this out with your own research," by presenting a multiplicity of instances along a common theme.