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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6587390" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Here is the thing though.  The world is overfilled with agenda.  Everyone has an angle.  I'm not worried about the purity of motives when I read any text (historical, philosophical, or a work of fiction).  Hell, if I was, I'd never read anything again.  I'm merely trying to derive signal from noise.  I feel I'm rather up to that task.  And there is A LOT of signal amidst some cantankerous noise.Edwards specifically (and the Forge generally) was clearly annoyed by the idea of "incoherency" in gaming, of which White Wolf and AD&D2e were the "leaders of the pack" at that point, particularly preoccupied by the issues of "force" (of which illusionism is the most insidious variety - the covert kind) and "agenda/system drift"...and how TTRPG design might go about addressing those issues.  That is a good conversation to have and a lot came out of it.  Because people felt it was elitist means absolutely zero to me.  I'm in no fear of being a "Kool-aid" drinker.  I have endured WAAAAAY too much bad stuff in my life to become enamored of/invested in any form of "RPG xenophobia" to justify whatever tribe I think I'm in.  This is merely the intellectual pursuit of a TTRPG phenomenon that I vehemently agree needed exploring in order to produce mechanics/play agendas/GMinging principles - system - for people who wish to play free of "force" and/or "drift".  If that rankles some feathers because some TTRPG players feel like its a passive-agressive/agressive shot from the bow which indicts their (years-long) mastery of techniques/systems that promote force and/or agenda/systemincoherency (I posted above on this specific issue...with certain aspects of agendas being at tension or diametrically opposed with on another if the system doesn't account for those tensions with "mechanical relief") ...then so be it.  It still has value, rankled feathers and bruised egos or no.  Beyond that, I don't accept that The Forge is Gamism-averse.  If anything, a huge part of The Forge's momentum in exploring these things (beyond the effort to distill the nature of Story Now gaming and produce systems that truly perpetuated it) was due to that late 80s/90s era of the Gamist agenda being slammed by a large strain of the TTRPG mainstream culture.  It was almost a direct response to derogatory epithets by that culture such as "munchkins", "roll-playing not roleplaying" and that culture's indictment of the metagame-nature of classic, pawn-stance dungeon-crawling with disposable characters named Bob005 and truly neutral, challenge-based refereeing and metagaming players (Gygaxian Skilled Play).  You were there during that time.  I know you're very aware of that culture clash.  It reminded me so, so much of the 4e edition wars.</blockquote>

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