Table Of ContentPalgrave Games in Context
Series Editors
Neil Randall
The Games Institute, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Steve Wilcox
Game Design and Development, Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford, ON,
Canada
Games are pervasive in contemporary life, intersecting with leisure,
work, health, culture, history, technology, politics, industry, and beyond.
These contexts span topics, cross disciplines, and bridge
professions.Games are pervasive in contemporary life, intersecting with
leisure, work, health, culture, history, technology, politics, industry, and
beyond. These contexts span topics, cross disciplines, and bridge
professions.Palgrave Games in Context situates games and play within
such interdisciplinary and interprofessional contexts, resulting in
accessible, applicable, and practical scholarship for students,
researchers, game designers, and industry professionals. situates
games and play within such interdisciplinary and interprofessional
contexts, resulting in accessible, applicable, and practical scholarship
for students, researchers, game designers, and industry professionals.
What does it mean to study, critique, and create games in context?
This series eschews conventional classi�ications—such as academic
discipline or game genre—and instead looks to practical, real-world
situations to shape analysis and ground discussion. A single text might
bring together professionals working in the �ield, critics, scholars,
researchers, and designers. The result is a broad range of voices from a
variety of disciplinary and professional backgrounds contributing to an
accessible, practical series on the various and varied roles of games and
play.
More information about this series at http:// www. palgrave. com/
gp/ series/1 6027
William J. White
Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and
Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012
Designs and Discussions
1st ed. 2020
William J. White
Communication Arts and Sciences, Penn State Altoona, Altoona, PA, USA
Palgrave Games in Context
ISBN 978-3-030-52818-8 e-ISBN 978-3-030-52819-5
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52819-5
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Preface: The Skein of Hephaestus
Several years ago, at a little Persian restaurant across the street from
the hotel in Morristown, New Jersey, where a gaming convention called
Dexcon was being held, I was sharing a meal with my friends Michael
Miller and his wife Kat in between game session slots. ‘People are
forgetting the Forge,’ Michael said.
The Forge was an online discussion forum where people came to
talk about ‘indie games’—that is, independent tabletop role-playing
games (TRPGs): designing them, publishing them, playing them. What
‘indie’ meant depended to some degree on who was talking, with the
strictest de�initions focusing on games where the creator’s ownership
and control of their own intellectual property was the only criterion,
regardless of the game’s other properties. Others understood the term
‘indie RPG’ to refer to games with experimental or innovative
mechanics, often focused on producing a story-like experience as the
object of play, in contrast to ‘traditional RPGs’ like Dungeons & Dragons
(TSR 1974) although the term ‘story game’ had come to be viewed by
some as the more appropriate designation for such games—but that
term was resisted by others as an invidious label that could be used to
claim that story games weren’t ‘real’ role-playing games. Still others
used the term as a kind of metonym for a social circle of gamers that
had its origins in the Forge—the ‘indie scene’ of tabletop role-playing.
In 2012, declaring its mission accomplished, the Forge had closed to
new posts, though its archives still remained available for any who
cared to examine them. However, the Forge was suf�iciently opaque as a
repository of information that digging into those records required a
great deal of persistence. Furthermore, over the years, it had generated
enough antipathy among those who found its insights unconvincing or
its adherents annoying that, as newcomers entered the scene, their
inquiries about the Forge would likely be met by fairly dismissive if not
actively hostile reports. To give only one example, a blog post that
ostensibly sought to provide an unbiased summary said that the Forge
‘spent a lot of time trying to elevate tabletop RPG criticism and theory
to academic levels. They ended up coming up with a bunch of
contentious theories that on the plus side led to the development of
some interesting games, and on the downside led to some
in�lammatory statements being made, including some truly abhorrent
stuff about brain damage and child abuse.’1 From my perspective, this
sort of account of the Forge—the kind that implies that the Forge was
fundamentally about indulging intellectual pretensions, and that its
most controversial moments emerged directly as an articulation of its
core beliefs or values—is not only wrong but wrong-headed. The Forge
that I had experienced, as a more or less peripheral member of the
‘indie scene’ surrounding it, was rather about making role-playing
games better, in a variety of ways, and its moments of ‘controversy’
devoid of actual scandal.
In any case, it seemed to us that the disappearance of the Forge as a
communal touchstone for the indie TRPG scene was something of a
loss. The Forge had brought us together. Michael, whose projects as an
indie RPG designer included a game about gunpowder-equipped
Romans called FVLMINATA (Thyrus Games 2001) and a superhero RPG
called With Great Power (Incarnadine Press 2005), had been an active
participant in the Forge community online since shortly after its
inception, particularly at the Forge Booth at GenCon, a big gaming
convention that drew an international crowd every year. Kat had
created the �irst Games on Demand event at GenCon to help promote
‘indie’ TRPG play and had co-created a police procedural game with
Michael called Serial Homicide Unit (Incarnadine Press 2008) where
each player was both a potential victim of a serial killer and one of the
investigators on the criminal’s trail. At that time, as I recall, Michael was
working on an updated ‘Master Edition’ of With Great Power
(Incarnadine Press 2016) that ‘hacked’ another indie designer’s rules to
make his own game more streamlined and faster to run, Epidiah
Ravachol’s Swords Without Master (Dig A Thousand Holes Publishing
2014).
I’d also participated at the Forge, posting in threads and designing a
game for one of the early ‘Game Chef’ competitions held there that I
later revised and published on my own. When Michael and Kat began
organizing an ‘Indie Games Explosion’ to showcase indie TRPGs at
conventions like Dexcon, I’d shown up one year and kept coming back,
mostly without exception. I had learned a lot at the Forge, and I shared
their sense of loss.
The story of my introduction to the Forge is typical. In early 2002—
as a newly minted Ph.D. still on the market, with time to kill—one of my
�irst posts at a discussion site called RPG.net was in a thread where the
‘original poster’ (OP) was a game designer who was trying to work out
the kinks in a game system he was building. ‘I think the distinction
among dramatic, karmic, and random resolution modes is a good one,’ I
told him. I hadn’t yet learned that these terms had been coined by
Jonathan Tweet in the rules to his game Everway (Wizards of the Coast
1996) and adopted by the Forge to refer respectively to (a) making
decisions about what happened in the game based on what was ‘needed
for the story’ or ‘best for the story,’ like letting investigators simply
break into a locked drawer to �ind an important clue; (b) relying upon
dice or some other randomization method to determine the outcome of
some action, like drawing the high card to decide which suitor the
princess found more appealing while perhaps allowing the better
looking suitor to draw more cards; or (c) comparing relevant attributes
or abilities to determine outcomes, like allowing the runner with the
greater Dexterity, should such an attribute exist in the game, to win a
footrace. I told the OP that I thought that ‘the choice about which one to
use in a particular instance is what I'm going to call a potential
“metagame con�lict,” requiring some mechanism for
resolving/negotiating, even if it's only “GM's Choice.”’2
The same day that I posted, a message with the subject line ‘Hey
Bill’ showed up in my private message inbox at RPG.net; it was from
someone I didn’t know named Jared Sorensen. Jared’s message said:
‘Ah, you invoked the Drama/Fortune/Karma thing. Cool. Just in case you
haven't checked it out, hop over to The Forge if you have the time.’ He
included a link. As I would later learn, Jared—whose game Inspectres
was an in�luence at the Forge—had led a lot of people to the Forge. ‘It
was where I was,’ he told me, years later, as I was preparing this book.
I registered at the Forge the next day, according to the records, and
posted to one of its threads a few days later. I didn’t participate much
more than that over the next few years, but I was paying attention to
the Forge and already thinking about it as a potential object of scholarly
inquiry. In a thread in 2004 about the prevalence of quasi-academic
jargon at the Forge, I posted to say that, as someone who was interested
in the sociology of knowledge, I saw the Forge as a knowledge-
