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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaro" data-source="post: 6242148" data-attributes="member: 48965">Here's an interesting post excerpt from the Evil Hat website by Rob Donoghue (co-creator of FATE) concerning indie rpg's being equated with the Forge and his feelings on the Forge....  Since he clearly draws a distinction between himself and "members of the Forge" I'm starting to believe that Fate isn't a Forge game.  I have found similar comments by Fred Hick's concerning Fate and how it doesn't fit into Edward's GNS model.Indie == A particular design ethosBy this what’s really meant is, of course, games out of the Forge (an RPG community with a heavy emphasis on certain RPG theories and small press publication). Now, this absolutely fails in the face of it – there is no one I know of from the forge who would accept such a definition, and they would be the first to point to indie games which are not from forge members or which do not subscribe to the theories popular in The Forge. Despite that, this is an incredibly common definition because it seems like the obvious one. The Forge is the loudest voice of ‘indie’ design and many of the current crop of games that are thought of as indie are from forge members.I’d be ok avoiding this definition just because it’s wrong, but the problem is that this definition is actually actively bad. By equating a type of game with a group of people, that means that every game is painted with the brush of people’s past interaction with that group, and in the case of the Forge, there are a lot of horror stories. This is not intended as a sleight to the Forge – it’s a vibrant community with a lot of great people, but I’ll be the first to admit that it has taken me actually meeting many of these people face to face to gain the the ability to view it with some equanimity. The bottom line is that this definition is most useful to perpetuate existing bad feelings, so it deserves to be pitched with great enthusiasm.</blockquote>

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