Some recent attempts by one or two outspoken and polarising game designers to rewrite history has brought up an old post from 2009 chronicling the rise and fall of RPG Theory.
In short, RPG theory is a load of cobblers.
It started out with a handful of uncontroversial truths. It’s true that specific game mechanics encouraging certain styles of play. And having setting and rule elements that reinforce one another tends to result in a better game; we can all name plenty of games that failed due to a mismatch between the game mechanics and the setting. And baroque cruft-ridden complexity in either rules or setting is not a good thing.
But Ron Edwards and The Forge took it way beyond that, building a massive pseudo-intellectual house of cards out of incomprehensible jargon and undisguised contempt both for the vast majority of successful games and the people who actually enjoyed playing them. They styled themselves as the RPG equivalent of the punk movement in music, overthrowing what they considered as the pompous and overblown games of the generation before. But it was a punk movement without the equivalent of any three minute bursts of stripped-down primal rock’n'roll, which was ultimately the only good thing about Punk. Imagine no “Anarchy in the UK”, but keeping Sounds’ infamous one-star review of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and the iconoclastic bloviating of Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons. That was The Forge.
Saying that, I own and have played a few of the small-press games that came out of The Forge, and there were some enjoyable one-shot games of Inspectres and Primetime Adventures at Stabcons. But when you look at what actually happened in the game sessions the play experience wasn’t radically different from many a more traditional game. But none of these games really gave the impression they had the depth needed to sustain a satisfying long-term campaign, and more importantly none of them ever seemed to be much more that fifteen-minute wonders. Are there still people playing “Dogs in the Vineyard” in 2015?
A decade on it’s an open question as to the lasting influence of The Forge. Did Ron Edwards’ notoriety obscure more subtle influences on following generations of games? Or was The Forge largely irrelevant to people who make and play games rather than just talk about them on the internet? Certainly many have suggested the success of the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons was down to their purging of Forgeist taint that had allegedly ruined the fourth edition. I’m not entirely convinced of that one myself. But do other successful games like FATE or Cortex Plus rely some of the “narrativist” ideas, or did they just develop independently?
And who was responsible for killing off GURPS?
I want to say “console gaming” in answer to the last question, but the RPG industry, while much pared down, is still alive, but GURPS is now hardly more than a side hobby for SJG. (I think in his last stakeholders report, SJ said that RPGs amount to less than 10% of the company’s revenue.)
SJG has always had management problems, largely to do with maintaining a consistent editorial vision. (What, me bitter over the demise of In Nomine? Nah…)
I do think Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer was rather inspired and I’d still like to run another game someday. But I never got into FATE. And if I run a game nowadays, I’d be unlikely to use something like GURPS, despite my several shelves full of GURPS supplements, unless my group consists entirely of gaming grognards.
In Nomine is a good example of one of those games with a great setting held back by a mediocre system. Not tried a conversion but I think it would work well with FATE. GURPS was completely wrong for it, though.
I fell out of love with GURPS when it went from 3e to 4e. It had reached the stage where the amount of accumulated cruft from myriad supplements was making it creak, and it didn’t scale well enough to be a good fit for higher-powered games. But 4e seemed to lose too much.
There seem to be quite a few people here in NZ who are taking bits of Forge-ism and doing interesting things (“Monster Of The Week”, “Burning Wheel” etc. etc.) and lots of people seem to dig things like Fiasco.
That said, you’re right that the coherent bits of Forge-ism seem to boil down to “have a really clear idea of what your game’s about and try to make everything come into line with that” – which was probably a necessary thing to say post D&D-fading-into-Storyteller in the 90s, but does seem kind of obvious in hindsight.
I see a lot of The Forge’s attitude as a reaction against the excesses of the games that came before it.
The fashion then was to release a “core rulebook” that didn’t include important bits of the rules and setting you needed to actually play, which were then dribbled out over multiple sourcebooks, all of which you needed for a coherent game. Then there were the dreaded “metaplots”, where there was a storyline dribbled out over the same sourcebooks which people’s campaigns had to follow if they wanted to avoid being contradicted by the next supplement. And some of the systems were baroque to the point of unplayable (several elements of Deadlands still bring me out in hives!)
Burning Wheel is one of those games I own but have never played; It’s a bit of a hybrid; it’s got a lot of elements of a tradiional game, along with some stranger things like the explicit scene-framing mechanic and the scripted combat system. Since I’ve never actually played I have no idea how well it worls.
I hear good reports from people who do things, but have little time to actually play myself at the moment so don’t know. I have a real love-hate thing with Deadlands – so much awesome, and so many brain-crushing idiocies all at once.
Suspect the thing with Deadlands is that people fell in love the setting so much they overlooked the obvious flaws in the system.
First there was that obtuse dice mechanic that I’m sure was never properly playtested because it threw up way too many extreme results. Then there was ridiculously cumbersome combat initiative system that really bogged down fight scenes if you had a large group.
I remember one day-long convention-style one shot game where we never actually got to the end of the adventure because an incidental fight scene ended up taking more than three hours to resolve, and ate up too much of the session.
I’ve never “studied” RPGs, but I’ve been playing them for 35 years, using multiple systems from five different decades, and in that time I have deduced, through observation, one “rule” that I believe to be the only thing you need to understand to have a good game:
It’s not the rules, it’s the GM.
So in in the context of this blog post: if someone wants to evolve a “theory” of RPGs, they need to study people not rules, and educate GMs not design new rules.
David, I think you’re right in that a really good GM can make any system at all work for anything, but as Tim points out above in the case of Deadlands that means scrapping the rules as written for most mechanical situations. A GM could choose to use D20 Deadlands, but that’s a choice of system as well as a GM technique.
Great GMs are great (and awful ones can make anything suck) but supportive systems are still better than unsupportive ones, if only because they make the GM do less mechanical thinking and free them up for more fun-focused stuff.
I do like your distinction of “supportive” systems vs “unsupportive” systems. That’s probably the most useful way of categorising systems I’ve come across.