What is "The Forge?"

[Ragnar_Deerslayer]

What the Forge Taught Me

1. Some Forgites are arrogant jargon-spewers.
2. Some Forgites have worthwhile things to say about gaming.
3. Some Forgites are both.

What I’ve learned from the Forge:

1. There are many ways of playing; other people may want different things out of play than you do. Some styles of play are almost mutually exclusive. (“GNS”).
2. System does matter. Systems support a certain style of play. (“System Does Matter”)
3. Many problems among gaming groups occur because players are expecting different styles of play and not getting to play the style they like. Some problems can be resolved by acknowledging different styles of play and discussing up front the style of play that will be dominant in the game. (“Social Contract”)
3. The GM cannot “author” the game while the players also simultaneously have control over their characters. Someone has to give. (“The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast.”)

I have been roleplaying for 16 years, and did not realize most of these things until they were pointed out on the Forge. Whatever weirdo claims about “influence” in the industry certain Forgites make, whatever disgusting “elitism” is shown, these things have been invaluable to me, and I will keep going back to the Forge to learn.

Heck, I’ve had my share of arrogant and jargon-spewing grad school professors. If I stopped listening to someone because I disagreed with some of what they said, or how they said it, I would be seriously ignorant.

Ragnar

 

[Kanegrundar]

Issues such as Social Contract and (to a lesser extent) System Does Matter weren't new concepts that the Forge created. They may have been the first, or at least the most prominent of websites to really delve into the concepts, but I would find it extremely surprising if anyone told me that having a base concept for the game that all playing in can get behind was suddenly new to them upon reading about Social Contract on The Forge. After all if there's a game where the DM wanted to run a RP-heavy court intrigue game with players that were looking forward to a campaign based around everything from killing monsters in a dungeon to pirates on the high seas, then it shouldn't suprise anyone that the campaign will very likely fail to be fun for anyone involved.

 

[eyebeams]

Secondly, the discourse on the Forge is steeped in poststructualist academic blather.

I cordially invite you to tell me what you think poststructuralism is.

 

[LostSoul]

How are the mechanics special?I can understand that, particularly in light of the following post:

Some of the "mechanics" are more like what you'd see as setting. But there's something in there that talks about judging your character. It says that your character can only be judged by you.

This allows the player to take a moral or ethical stance on whatever issues that he or she is facing. Compare that to a Paladin, who must act Lawful Good or lose his powers. A Dog is a Dog, no matter what he or she does, until the player of that character decides otherwise.

There's also a rule for the GM: Say yes or roll the dice. Which is a sweet little thing that forces you to get down to what really matters instead of having conflicts over things that don't matter.

In a more concrete way, there are the Escalation mechanics and the Give mechanic. When you start off Just Talking, there's no chance that you're going to end up dead. When you start pushing each other, that raises a bit; more when you're using weapons; and even more still when guns are involved.

Now since you can see all the dice on the table, you can make a reasonable judgement as to whether or not you are going to lose the conflict or not. Or how much the conflict is going to cost you.

If you see that, just by talking, you can't win, then you have to decide: is this conflict worth fighting over? It continues to escalate: is this worth killing over? Possibly dying over?

And when things are just too hot for you - you don't want to die for this conflict, or you don't want to hurt whoever's opposing you - you can Give. You lose the conflict, but don't suffer any additional ill effects.

To put this in perspective from actual gamplay:

I was playing in a Dogs game. The townspeople had formed a lynch gang and were coming to string up the guy we were protecting. Guns came out.

Now I had rolled crap, and I saw that if I kept fighting I was going to get shot. I looked at my dice, and thought, "Well, I can just give." But I decided, "Screw that, they'll only lynch this guy over my dead body."

That sort of choice is less obvious in other game systems. And it's that sort of thing that Dogs is about, in my opinion, not "Mormon Cowboy Occult Troubleshooting Gunslingers in the Old West". (Which is cool, because then you can adapt it to other settings easily enough.)

 

[eyebeams]

Not being employed in academia does not prevent one from behavign like an "academic type". Convergent evolution happens, you know.

Not in this case. When folks shoot the breeze about culture in an academic context there might be some odd language, but they also talk about things like how being black or poor affects one's experience of a culture, or how real world history affects our perspectives. The Forge starts from the basis that gaming is separated from history and culture completely. Contemporary thinking about culture is pretty much entirely opposed to the idea that we should pretend that there aren't real people and events (including abstractions substituted for reality) informing what's happening.

This is the result of a destructive subtext in thinking about RPGs, which is that gamers are, in the wider world, often ashamed of the intellectual affort they put into gaming. If gaming is trivial, than ideas about gaming cannot be about anything that really matters, so it must be walled off fromthe dangers of relevance.

 

[The Shaman]

*snip*

I admit I'm not 100% sure what some of the examples mean - "There's also a rule for the GM: Say yes or roll the dice. Which is a sweet little thing that forces you to get down to what really matters instead of having conflicts over things that don't matter." - but I can get a general sense of how the mechanics are designed to produce a particular feel in play.

I think I'd rather play S:R Mormon Cowboy Occult Troubleshooting Gunslingers.

 

[jdrakeh]

That's not true. Jargon exists to facilitate discussion of difficult concepts.

I can get behind that - the problem with jargon at The Forge is that it isn't used to faciliatate the discussion of difficult concepts, but to 'dress up' rather mundane concepts to make them sound more intellectual than they really are. I've seen dozens of non-Forge designers discuss Forge concepts using plain Enlglish and not lose anything in the translation (except, perhaps, for the pretension). In some cases, an antire lexicon of jargon isn't necessary - game design seems to be one of those cases.

It's not jargon that's the problem, it's people who use jargon to try to indicate that they are superior to others.

This is somewhat true - as I state above, however, jargon is part of the problem. A lexicon of invented terminology and/or re-definition of existing words isn't necessary to elucidate the things that The Forge espouses. Plain language will work just fine, but it is passed over specifically in favor of more complex, invented, jargon (much of which lacks objective definition). There is no doubt in my mind that this choice was made to 'sound important' - why else would you invent new terminology when words already existed that could easily explain your ideas without confusion? Jargon is part of the problem, but not the whole problem.

 

[Teflon Billy]

I think I'd rather play S:R Mormon Cowboy Occult Troubleshooting Gunslingers.

I'd buy that. Sidewinder: Recoiled is my Cowboy game of choice

 

[ZombieButch]

...the problem with jargon at The Forge is that it isn't used to faciliatate the discussion of difficult concepts, but to 'dress up' rather mundane concepts to make them sound more intellectual than they really are.

This one sentence pretty well sums up my real beef with the Forge. I think discussing RPG theory is nifty, but I do think some folks have a tendency to try and put a dress on the pig and call it a prom date.

 

[Kanegrundar]

I'd buy that. Sidewinder: Recoiled is my Cowboy game of choice

You aRE such a gamist!

Edited for a total lack of proofreading.