What is "The Forge?"

[Teflon Billy]

Just a quick note on Dogs: the setting isn't what's important. It helps keep the game focused, and it totally reduces prep-time for the GM (to about 30 minutes per 4-hour game), but the game is all about the mechanics.

The guy goes to the trouble of creating a game about "Mormon Cowboy Occult Troubleshooting Gunslingers in the Old West" and you say the setting isn't important?

The setting is the draw man

 

[Teflon Billy]

Hang on, though, dude - it can't all be BS, or people like me wouldn't get any use out of it.

I'm willing to say that it is of limited use, and that some people who espouse that terminology or frequent the Forge may be BSers, but I believe that there is some use to the theory.

Agreed, but in a situation like that at The Forge, the ratio of "Noise" to "Signal" is so high that it's hardly worth listening closely for the gems.

...or is that too jargon-heavy

 

[LostSoul]

...or is that too jargon-heavy

To quote the Simpsons: It depends what your definition of "is" is.

 

[Teflon Billy]

To quote the Simpsons: It depends what your definition of "is" is.

LOL

 

[Henry]

The guy goes to the trouble of creating a game about "Mormon Cowboy Occult Troubleshooting Gunslingers in the Old West" and you say the setting isn't important?

The setting is the draw man

Mormon... Cowboy... Occult... Troubleshooting Gunslingers.



Now THAT's the kind of thing that needs to be in the ad copy.

 

[Teflon Billy]

Mormon... Cowboy... Occult... Troubleshooting Gunslingers.



Now THAT's the kind of thing that needs to be in the ad copy.

...You see what I am saying here Lost Soul?

 

[Henry]

Heck, even if Dogs' wasn't your thing, you could drop that puppy into Deadlands or Savage Worlds without batting an eyelash.

Ron Edwards seems to be the type who espouses "tool the game from the ground up for a specific purpose of play." I have a friend in our group who is the gamer equivalent of the mechanic who takes a Pontiac Grand Am, reinforces the suspension, drops in the largest size engine she'll hold, adds an NO2 injector if he can get away with it, puts track-grade tires on it, and finishes it off with a high-end speaker-system tackily installed and plugged into a CD-player taped to the dashboard. She ain't pretty, she needs a constant low amount of TLC, but she's a lot more fun than anything "custom-designed" and he can maintain her himself inexpensively. I've seen Star Wars d20 mated to Star Trek, Feng Shui mated to GI Joe, D&D mated to WW2 action movies, and in all cases, we had a LOT of fun.

 

[fusangite]

The Forge, without a doubt, has made some positive contributions to gaming. It has helped people to develop more precise ways of talking about gaming by offering a body of theory developed by volunteers. It has helped to provide a network for clever people who think about RPGs in an academic way. It was, most importantly, created a community of people who facilitate the design and publication of some very innovative games.

Unfortunately, with that goes a lot of crap. Ron Edwards' GNS theory is a perfectly good model for analyzing RPGs and learning something about them. But unfortunately, Edwards and his followers propose it as a totalizing model. By totalizing, I mean that it is to gaming what Marxism is to history or economics -- it purports to be able to represent and analyze virtually all gaming phenomena. When confronted with modes of play or understanding that the model cannot handle, its defenders become hostile, suggesting that, if a game doesn't fit into the model, it isn't being described properly or is so flawed as to be unworthy of categorization. Because GNS purports to be a theoretical umbrella under which all RPGs are covered rather than just a useful toolbox of terms and ideas, what insights it can offer are seriously undermined by its excessive claims.

Secondly, the discourse on the Forge is steeped in poststructualist academic blather. A post in the now-defunct theory fora, if properly written, would begin with a 2000 word essay defining the terms in the post, sometimes with an attached bibliography. As a result, people would be bandying about words that (a) most posters didn't know the meaning of (e.g. the great bricolage wave), (b) were neologisms that didn't mean what their cognate word indicated (e.g. narrativism pertaining to theme rather than narrative) or (c) were common words onto which people attempted to impress an excessively precise meaning (e.g. only Claude Levi-Strauss's definity of "myth" being acceptable). Needless to say, this results in the theory fanboys of the site talking incomprehensible nonsense at anyone who appears to threaten GNS hegemony.

Thirdly, the Forge, over time, sharpened the definitions in GNS so as to go from being a useful analytical tool to a means of judging styles of gaming. Over time, narrativism went from being a useful way to talking about games in which mechanics can act, unmediated, on story to being a very narrow category of games that excluded larger and larger portions of games whose mechanics acted directly on story but not in a way that the Forge members liked. Basically, they decided that to be narrativist, a mechanic had to act directly on story for the purpose of foregrounding a thematic question -- thus, games that built mechanics that let players act directly on story like Buffy that, in my view, could be properly viewed as narrativist, were excluded from the category. I find this especially ironic -- besides original Warhammer and a handful of other systems with fate mechanics and the like, the Forge really contributed to the rise of games that mechanically reflect some people's desire to make their RPG sessions into collaborative storytelling enterprises. But in the end, they categorized these games as "simulationist" or "gamist" if players weren't using the story control mechanics to ask questions like, and I quote the Forge here, "Is it more important to save a friend or rescue a stranger?"

I did not enjoy visiting the Forge. In part, this is because I don't like game systems where players can act, unmediated by the world's physics, on story. To me, system=physics -- the rules of the game are also the rules of the game world and my suspension of disbelief gets messed up when there is a gap between these things. I'm not interested in seeing my games as a committee-based script writing session; I'm interested in exploring a world that the GM has made, not building it with him as we go. Mostly, however, I did not enjoy the Forge for the same reason I wouldn't enjoy a MENSA meeting -- an ugly social dynamic arises when you have a small group of people who are genuinely clever and a bunch of hangers-on who are there to pretend to be clever. It's also ugly when people are doing unpaid academic work; when people do that, they almost always compensate themselves in the same way: with an inappropriate sense of importance and authority.

I met Chris Lehrich in person, by the way. And although the rest of the evening went pretty well and I ended up quite liking him, our initial argument expresses my difficulty with the Forge. We got into an argument about postmodernism. It turned out, after a while, that we were actually having an argument about the definition of postmodernism; I held the view that postmodernism meant what people who use the word generally consider it to mean; he held the view that it meant what Jacques Derrida defined it to mean. We then debated what we should call the thing that the majority of people are referring to when they use the term "postmodernism"; he would not accept "postmodernism" so I called it "folk relativism," and we got on with our evening.

All in all, I have a positive view of the stuff produced by indie-rpgs. Although the stuff isn't to my taste as a player or GM, I can see the value and creativity there. I do not, however, have a positive view of the theory forums at the Forge and think Ron was correct to shut them down.

EDIT: And thanks, TB, for all the complimentary stuff about me on page 1.

 

[The Shaman]

Well, then, allow me to be the first:

/me points at The Shaman, stifling a laugh at his weak gamer-fu.

I absolutely earned that.

Just a quick note on Dogs: the setting isn't what's important. It helps keep the game focused, and it totally reduces prep-time for the GM (to about 30 minutes per 4-hour game), but the game is all about the mechanics.

The guy goes to the trouble of creating a game about "Mormon Cowboy Occult Troubleshooting Gunslingers in the Old West" and you say the setting isn't important?

The setting is the draw man

I'm absolutely with Teflon Billy on this one - I looked over the game handouts to see what was covered and how, and I didn't see anything that made me say (in my best Keanu voice), "Whoa?!?"

How are the mechanics special?

I think that the most important contribution by Ron et al to the gamer community is that RPGing goes way beyond "learning a system" and by doing what you do (ie. sticking to one system to play "all" games) *might* be a recipe for trouble. For a specific example, playing "dogs in the vineyard" with d20 modern (or past) rules will be a game eons away from the dogs in the vineyard "feel". That's what the big model tries to teach: before choosing a game, identify your gaming priorities as a group and then find the game that fits (and if it does not exists, create your own )

I can understand that, particularly in light of the following post:

I can't speak to Dogs In The Vineyard, since I haven't played it, but My Life With Master is a good system for what it seeks to accomplish. Play involves essentially sitting around and narrating scenes without regard for the mechanics of the character. The character's actual abilities are left abstract, and their traits are essentially purely narrative ones, by which I mean, only things that can change the outcome of a scene are included, and these are heavily abstracted. The character's traits are also all based on conflict-inducing factors, specifically, Fear, Self-loathing, Weariness and Love, which means that paying attention to the game mechanics turns you back toward the narrative thread of the game, which is essentially interpersonal conflict....My point is essentially that the MLWM rules contain only what is necessary to play a game that elicits the kind of game that MLWM seeks to generate.

Please forgive me for paring this down so much, Dr. Awkward.

I can definitely see how the rules-system can be used to help create a particular gaming experience - the Call of Cthulhu Sanity mechanic comes to mind.

I tend to look a bit sideways at this approach to gaming for exactly the following reason:

A problem with this is that MLWM has limited replay value. Eventually all the games start to feel the same. There are only so many variations on the master and the minions that are original and interesting. But it's really good while it's still fresh.

Versatility and what Dr. Awkward terms replay value are very high on my list of important system attributes - I would rather muddle along with a more generic system and tweak it to get the feel that I want to create than have such a finely-tuned game that only takes you a handful of places. Put another way, I'd rather have a Maglite than a laser pointer.

That's not a criticism of the latter approach, just a matter of personal preference.

This is why I haven't played much Call of Cthulhu, actually: after the first few times, the games started to feel very flat to me - how can I contrive a situation to drive your characters mad this time? I prefer a more open approach, perhaps - horror, yes, but with more options than just see monster, lose SAN, roll new character, which is what CoC becomes after a fairly short time for me.

A final thought:

I can't see this kind of play working as well in a system like d20 modern. The reason for this is that the MLWM system is pared down to include only what you need to get the kind of game that MLWM provides. Adding more rules on top of it would complicate the game unnecessarily, and with many things that don't need to be there. Not to say you couldn't play that game, but abstracting away the details of conflict allows you to focus on the conflict and not the details. There is no reason why a MLWM character needs a constitution score. That simply doesn't matter to the outcome of the game. If I were going to play MLWM using a different system, I'd probably pick another heavily-abstracted system like FUDGE, rather than a detail-laden system like d20 Modern or GURPS.

One of the Mike Mearls posts in the RPGnet thread mentioned this as well, something along the lines of, "If I want a game to be about encountering aliens, do I really need a mechanic for how much fuel the starship has in the tanks? Does this improve on the contact aspect of the game that I want to keep in the forefront of the players' minds?"

It's an interesting question, and one that deserves consideration along with genre emulation and simple playability in game design. I believe that every gamer has sweet spots along contiuua such as roleplaying v. game mechanics, complexity v. simplicity, and so on. Tailoring mechanics to achieve one or several specific effects is certainly elegant and stylistically intriguing, but for me, there needs to be a certain universality to a system as well for it to be appealing. IMX, a more generic system is easier to strip down or build up as needed - a CON score may be irrelevant to MLWM as written, but can I also play a Modern game in which ability mechanics are subsumed by the interpersonal conflicts of the characters? Can I make Fear, Self-loathing, Weariness and Love the basis around which a Modern game revolves without specific conflict resolution mechanics designed for that purpose?

 

[LostSoul]

I can't disagree with that...

But in the end, they categorized these games as "simulationist" or "gamist" if players weren't using the story control mechanics to ask questions like, and I quote the Forge here, "Is it more important to save a friend or rescue a stranger?"

...except maybe here. I think that this is a useful definition of a "Creative Agenda" - or let's just say the kinda thing I want out of my gaming experience. (Except perhaps the word "narrativism" which implies something different.)