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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5502809" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree that the Forge is the opposite of the casual gamer. I don't follow the Forege webpages enough to know to what extent 4e has registered there - I know there was discussion of 3E play there in the past, but obviously it's not the focus (apart from anything else, no version of D&D has been indie since the original booklets!).But as to whether it represents a meaningful segment of the market, I don't know (although I do pessimistictically suspect). You can certainly play narrativist without being self-conscious about it - I had a GMing approach before I found the Forge, for example - it's just that some of the stuff on the Forge helped me get a better handle on why some of the issues I was having with various games and various mechanics came up in the way they did, and why some GM advice and some descriptions of "good roleplaying" didn't really speak to me, or didn't seem to help me with the game I wanted to run. (In my day job I'm an academic lawyer and philosopher - I also think that makes me the sort of person who is likely to be attracted by a serious attempt to theorise the creative activities that I'm enagged in.)I agree with you that WotC were looking for new players. But if I understand you right and correctly remember other posts of yours, you think they were aiming at WoW (or WoW-ish) players.I've never played WoW, but have a number of friends who have been pretty serious players. I've seen it played and heard it talked about quite a bit. My impression of WoW is that it is mostly analagous to a tactical boardgame or highly structured wargame, with a lot of fantasy colour. I assume that this is more-or-less how 4e is seen by those who say it's really a boardgame, or a tactical skirmish game. I also get the feeling that this is the direction in which you, and perhaps Raven Crowking, see 4e as having tended, although I don't think you say that it has gone all the way there.I really don't see this when I read the 4e rulebooks - or rather, to see this, I'd have to disregard all the discussion of the non-mechanical elements of PC creation, the discussion of skill challenge resolution in both PHB and DMG, and a lot of other rules text as well. But maybe I'm projecting (that's a common human trait, after all).A notion that has floated around the Forge is <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">hybridization</a>, including the idea that a game might bring in players based around one play purpose, but in the course of play lead them to a different purpose. Maybe WotC thought that WoW players would be attracted by the rules structure plus fantasy colour, and stick around when they discovered what it is that an RPG (including, in my view, 4e) can deliver that WoW doesn't, namely, the opportunity for players to engage the fiction and treat it as more than just colour.This is all just conjecture, but I'm not sure it's merely academic. If the player base of RPGs is to grow, for example, games have to be written and distributed that offer potential RPGers an activity that the might want to participate in. The Forge take on GNS is one attempt to think seriously about what the activity of RPGing has to offer (this is why, unlike Umbran, I find it more interesting than the WotC market research, which tries to identify what aspects of play existing players enjoy in the game, but doesn't attempt to characterise what the point or points of RPGing might be).</blockquote>

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