SF and Gaming Blog

RPG guru Ron Edwards tries to explain what he means by “Brain Damaged”. I’m still not sure I agree with him, but since I’m one of those pesky Simulationists, what do I know? (See my earlier post on the subject).

Blogging has been light lately. I’ve given I higher priority to the online games I run, the Dreamlyrics games KLR and AEF, and my PBeM on The Phoenyx, Kalyr.

Some of this effort was spent chasing up players who had gone AWOL. Fortunately I managed to track three of them down, and persuaded them to post.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about The Forge. On one hand, they’ve got some very good ideas about game design, particularly when it comes to questioning assumptions and sacred cows. And they have come up with some interesting games. On the other hand, they do sometimes come over as insufferable elitists.

But when Ron Edwards comes up with something like this, I do have to wonder if it’s still possible to take him seriously. Is he becoming the Sid Vicious of RPGs?

I’ll say this: that protagonism was so badly injured during the history of role-playing (1970-ish through the present, with the height of the effect being the early 1990s), that participants in that hobby are perhaps the very last people on earth who could be expected to produce *all* the components of a functional story. No, the most functional among them can only be counted on to seize protagonism in their stump-fingered hands and scream protectively. You can tag Sorcerer with this diagnosis, instantly.

[The most damaged participants are too horrible even to look upon, much less to describe. This has nothing to do with geekery. When I say "brain damage," I mean it literally. Their minds have been *harmed.*]

The structure of lumpley.com makes it difficult for me to determine the context in which Ron made those comments. But it did result in a further posting by Vincent Baker

The purpose of this blog is to judge people’s fun. We begin by judging our own fun, but in doing so we will and always will judge others’ fun too.

I hold standards of quality to be independent of individual tastes. Accordingly, everyone who participates here must do so with the understanding that the fun that suits their individual tastes might be called crappy, broken, lame, sucky, wimpy, stupid, or even pathalogical. You may feel free to defend your favorite fun if you’re so moved, but you should do so in terms of its objective quality, without falling back upon “everyone likes what they like,” “all tastes are equal,” or “judging my fun makes you an elitist.”

I expect each of you to have the self-understanding and emotional maturity to make your own decisions about your participation here, given this. My experience so far has overwhelmingly borne this out, and I expect this post to make the process only easier for us all.

Which is why I’m responding on my own blog, where I set the rules. I think Ron Edwards’ post is a blatant troll, and I have every right to take offence at the idea that I’m somehow ‘brain damaged’ by the fact that I enjoy ‘simulationist’ style games. While I’ve also enjoyed Forge-inspired games like ‘Primetime Adventures’, Ron Edwards’ hubris-filled attitude is likely to make me take Forgeite-Narrativist stuff less seriously.

(Link from The Phoenyx Gamers List)

I’ve been spending far too long reading essays and threads on The Forge recently.

The site is a great resource for ideas on game design. There’s an attitude that game designers should take an engineering approach to designing RPG rules, rather than simply relying on trial-and-error or copying things that appeared to work in earlier games. They do have a really bad problem with jargon, such that the site needs a glossary to explain what they’re on about.

In challenging assumptions, though, some Forgeites seems to be far too willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They have developed a lot of games where they’ve thrown out virtually all conventional rules defining character abilities, and replaced them with very abstract meta-game mechanics allowing the players to affect the narrative. They also believe in redefining or reducing the role of the GM, which for me sucks a lot of the fun out of GMing. Some games even eliminate the GM entirely.

A case in point. There’s a current thread on The Forge about doing a Forge-style version of Call of Cthulhu. If I’ve understood it correctly, the proposed games has an ‘Investigation stage’ where you collect rather abstract ‘Plot Coupons’, and at some point trigger the ‘Endgame’ where you spend those Plot Coupons to defeat the monster.

I’m afraid all I can say is “Ugh!”. I find the original Chaosium Call of Cthulhu (I’ve managed to avoid the d20 version) works perfectly well for me, and I just don’t see how this pseudo-boardgame approach is an improvement. I’m told it’s very like the second edition of the boardgame “Arkham Horror”. Why not just play Arkham Horror?.

A post in this thread succinctly sums up their approach.

In most games, there is Rules Stuff (where the rules arbitrate what happens) and Soft Stuff (where players co-create what happens, using a variety of social dynamics, but with multiple options all equally valid under the rules).

In Task Resolution, “What you do” is mostly Rules Stuff, while “What it means” is mostly Soft Stuff. The dice tell you that you slay the giant. Then the group decides whether you free the kingdom from tyranny.

In Conflict Resolution “What it means” is mostly Rules Stuff, while “What you do” is mostly Soft Stuff. The dice tell you that you free the kingdom from tyranny. Then you decide that you slay the giant to do it.

OK, So I can see what they’re trying to do. But I don’t think that style of gaming is really for me.

Someone once asked if so-called ‘Indie games’ had any parallels with Indie music. I know I’m biased as a diehard classic rock fan, but Indie music seems to be based around reduction in instrumental complexity, an awful lot of angst-ridden navel gazing, and music which is more interesting to write about than to listen to.

I’ll leave it to cynics to decide whether there’s any valid parallel. But one of forum founder and moderator Ron Edwards’ posts in the thread I quoted from earlier had implied that once you’ve played these games, you’ll never want to play conventional style games again. Which is too close to comfort to the “Once you’ve heard The Clash, you’ll never want to listen to Pink Floyd again” line I used to hear from punk fans in 1980. I still love Pink Floyd today, and have never ‘got’ The Clash despite wasting money on a couple of their albums.

There’s one big difference between The Forge and the punk and indie music scenes. Punk and Indie were both thorough reactionary, rejecting sophistication and devolving into cruder, more primitive forms. The Forgeite scene is at least trying something new. Like anything experimental, some ideas and games will work, and others will fail. I would expect some of their games still to have cult followings many years after the majority have been forgotten. Perhaps one or two games using Forgeite ideas will become major hits. And maybe the next generation of more mainstream games will incorporate some of their ideas in combination with tried and tested features of more traditional names.

I’m certainly finding The Forge useful for clarifying my ideas, even if all I’m trying to write is a Fudge port.

Update: Carl Cravens has some related game thoughts here, here and here.

I’m currently working on the game mechanics chapter, which will (probably) be chapter three. I wrongly assumed this would be easy to write, because it would just be a cut-and-paste job from the Fudge SRD. I was wrong.

As well as deciding which of the myriad combat options I wanted to use and cutting out the ones I don’t, I also had to make sure I’m using consistent skill names compared with the existing character generation chapter. And then there were all those examples. Every one needs to be at least partially rewritten to be about Kalyran characters and situations rather than the varied genres in the Fudge examples. No Old West or Robin of Sherwood allowed! For the first draft I’m using player characters from the online games, and one or two actual situations that have come up in play.

It seems that editing is as much effort as actual writing.