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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4453735" data-attributes="member: 42582">That cartoon sent me to a Forge essay I hadn't read before ("<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/12" target="_blank">The Nuked Apple Cart</a>"). An interesting essay. I think Edwards is spot-on with his reference to "fiction thinly disguised as source material". This is an annoying feature of a lot of RPG supplements - there is no meaningful discussion of how to use the "source material" to actually play a game.There is also the following final pragraph, which I found interesting:As a final note: I am a customer as well as a designer of RPGs, in fact, far more so the former than the latter. As customers, too, each of us faces a personal decision: are you a practitioner of an artistic activity or a consumer of a advertising-driven product? I urge you to consider your role in roleplaying economics, and to consider whether a shelf of supplements and so-called source material really suits your needs, as opposed to a few slim roleplaying books with high-octane premises and system ideas.If my RPGing is art, it's not particularly good art. I don't think myself as particularly a victim of commercialism either. But because RPGing is a group activity, I am certainly constrained in the direction I can take my gaming by the tastes and preferences (genre, thematic, "artisitic") of those I game with.Btw, I don't really understand the Forge-hate. The essays are comprehensible. Whether or not they're mostly true or mostly false is a matter of opinion, like so much else in the cultural sphere. But blatant attacks upon the Forge, or upon theorisation in general in the domain of RPGs, reminds me of attacks upon serious reviewing and theorisation in other domains of culture - a little bit knee-jerk and anti-intellectual.If you don't like the New York Review of Books, don't read it. There's no real need to hate it. I'd say the same about the Forge.Also, and just to come back on topic, the most recent discussion of "Kickers" - a Forgist technique set out be Edwards in his Sorcerer RPG - that I saw was one by Mearls, talking about his use of the technique in a 4e game.</blockquote>

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