Classic Rant: How Exactly did the Forge "Help" Gaming?

Post Mortem After the Death Of the Forge, How Did It "Help"?

Now that the furore has died down regarding my victory announcement, and Ron Edward's absurd "victory" announcement where he shuts down the forge because its so "successful", many people have been analyzing Edwards' legacy. Interestingly, the vast majority are doing so in a fairly condemnatory way, even those you might have thought would side normally with the swine or would say some empty gracious platitude or would just not say anything.

The hardcore, the "going down with the ship" kind of Forge Swine, are always out there defending the "legacy". And I've already shot to pieces their various arguments that somehow Forge Theory was anything more than a hairbrained pustulent sore on our hobby, and almost exactly ass-backwards in terms of both what is True and what Works (seriously! take the "Forge Theory" essays, and do exactly the OPPOSITE of everything it tells you to do, and you'll have an incredibly successful gaming career).

But the Forge Swine always fall back on one argument: "well... yes, maybe Ron was utterly full of shit when it came to Theory but he was always mainly about PUBLISHING, and what he did that was so worthwhile was that he invented Indie Publishing".

No he didn't, you stupid shit. There have been ridiculous claims this past week from some people who should and others who definitely do know better, that make it seem like before Edwards came along the publishing field in the RPG hobby was a vast empty wasteland dominated by faceless megacorps. Yes, it was McDonalds and Glaxo Smith-Klein who were producing RPGs until Edwards came along and "Told us all" that we could publish our own games.

Its a load of utter bullshit. If you actually remember the 90s (and I do, vaguely), there were shitloads and shitloads of independently-published games. Ditto for the 80s, and of course for the 70s. In fact, our hobby started with an "indie game". The only thing Edwards did in that regard was invent a mentality that "indie games" have to in fact mean MORE than self-published, that they have to "represent" a pretentious pseudo-intellectual and elitist subculture.

So Edwards' defenders will claim "well, if he didn't invent it he was at least really good for self-publishing!". No, fuckers, the PDF was really good for self-publishing. Edwards, in fact, caused it incredible harm.

His takeover of the entire independent publishing arena for a while, garnering enough online influence to determine what's "hip" and what's not, the Forge Swine creating the IPR which for a brief while was where everyone who actually wanted to get their books out there to be seen wanted to be, all of this created an atmosphere of pretentious bullshit. The first step was that it alienated publishers who wanted to make regular rpgs. The more the Forge went on, the more outrageous the "standard" of what an "indie game" should be became. Sorcerer is an extremely mild and inoffensive game by Forge standards, because it was basically first. Compare that to My Life With Master, or Dogs in the Vinyard. Or those with the Shab al-hiri roach. Or those with Poison'd or Grey Ranks or Maid. At every step, Forge games became more exclusive, more divorced from anything a regular roleplayer would want to play or a normal human being would find appealing, more pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-artistic, and more generally degenerate focusing on abject suffering, torture, sexual perversion of the worst kind, even up to and including the infamous "cabin boy being decapitated and throat-raped" rule in Poison'd.

So soon, a normal Joe who wanted to publish a game didn't want to be associated with "indie gaming". "Indie gaming" was not a big open tent, it had become an exclusive subculture, that ultimately made itself exclusive by how disgusting it became. But this intimidated normal game designers, limiting their enthusiasm for publishing for fear that they would "fail" (because the Forge had made great propaganda about how their definition of "success" was the right one), for fear of getting branded as one of these degenerates, for fear of being mocked, or that regular games weren't going to get the coverage those others would. It was a massive campaign of intimidation on Edwards' part, and the goal was to STOP regular people from making regular self-published RPGs, not to "encourage" them. Edwards only ever wanted to "encourage" the people who fit his ideological mold, those who would be part of his revolution.

And ultimately, of course, it also went beyond intimidating the publisher to intimidating the customer. Soon, "self-published" meant "Degenerate book about naked underage slaves being tortured with broom handles", and a great deal of gamers decided "You know what, I'm better off playing it safe with WoTC products". People's ability to trust that they would get something they'd want if they bought an "indie game" was seriously hampered by the fact that the Forge "indie" movement wasn't really producing RPGs that people wanted (it wasn't producing RPGs at all! It was producing "storygames"), and that at the same time some of those games were extremely deceptive in their presentation, appearing on the outside like a good old-fashioned adventure RPG, only to make the reader find when he'd bought the book that it was actually about "the theme of coping with loss", or about the "conflicts and secrets in a small town and how one determines justice". Or just about boy scouts and girl guides seeing their lives destroyed before being brutally murdered by Nazis. You know, that kind of fun stuff that's great for an evening's laughs.

By alienating the public, by intimidating the real RPG writers out there, general pretentiousness and an atmosphere of intimidation and propagandist lies, Edwards did VASTLY more harm than any good to RPG self-publishing. Edwards came in, and tried to claim he invented something that had actually been around since the LITERAL day one of the hobby, and basically destroyed the very thing that people are trying to now credit him for "inventing".

It has only been in the last few years, because of places like theRPGsite, where non-Forge-Swine small-press publishers can conglomerate and interact with an interested audience and the Forge Swine are not going to be able to intimidate them out of existence, that small-press publishing of real RPGs has begun to make a recovery. The new movement of the OSR has vastly accelerated that, and now the "indie movement" has fallen all but into obscurity, its death rattle being Edwards' closing down of the Forge. But its telling just how much damage Edwards and the Forge really did to self-publishing that to this day, most of the newer self-publishing authors will try very hard not to refer to their game as an "indie" game.

RPGPundit

(Originally posted November 9, 2010)

Wild West Campaign Update

In today's session, the PCs didn't really have some kind of grand revelation about the wild-west.  Instead they seemed to be coming into their own.

Being a continuation from last session, most of this session was dedicated to a lengthy action scenario where they had to enter a rocky hilly area to confront a group of gun runners and the Indian renegades they were selling to.

We're talking Indian Territory (South Dakota) here, and when I mean rocky hills, I mean like this:

So there was a lot of careful stalking, ambushes, hidden dangers, and finally a stand-off with the gun runner chief who had managed to capture Sheriff Basset as a hostage.  One of the PCs managed to climb up one of the needle-like rocks and take a surprise shot at the chief gun-runner, disarming him. The rest of the outlaws traded him over in exchange for being let go.

They got back to Ft. Cheyenne, where the boss was ready to confess everything to the authorities, only for him to be killed in his cell.  No doubt by agents of Al Swearengen, who was involved in the highly illegal activity, and who has a very long reach.

One of the PCs also got infected with Smallpox, and nearly died!   He was glad to have survived, and that he was now immune, but this encounter with 19th Century disease scared the living crap out of the Players, especially while I was reminding the survivor of all the other diseases he could still die from.

That's it for today!

RPGPundit

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The Gods-Slaying Bundle Features Arrows of Indra!

It's shameless-plug time, as I promote a bundle that Bedrock Games has put together.

You can now pick up the Gods-Slaying Bundle for just $10!  It features the awesome Arrows of Indra RPG,  an OSR rpg set in a fantasy world based very closely on the Mythic India of the Mahabharata, which yours truly wrote.

You can also pick up Sertorius, which is a high-powered fantasy world game where you play 'exalted'-type demigods.   And Servants of Gaius, a spectacular RPG where you play secret occult agents in a monster-infested Roman Empire.   I've reviewed Sertorius and Servants of Gaius alike, so check those reviews out for more info about them.   Here's my author's review of Arrows of Indra while we're at it.

So there you are. Three awesome Bedrock RPGs, for just $10!  You can't go wrong at that price. If you haven't picked even two of these up yet, here's your chance.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking:  Neerup Hawkbill + Image Virginia

RPGPundit Reviews: Hardnova: The Intercosm

This will be a fairly short review.

This is a review of the RPG setting sourcebook "Hardnova: the Intercosm", a setting book for the Hardnova RPG. It's published by Precis Intermedia, and written by Peter Spahn. This is a review (as always) of the print edition, which is a softcover book, about 60 pages long. It has a full-color cover of a couple of planets with a star in the background.

 The interior art is black and white, mostly small pictures, done in a comic-book style (and mainly consists of depictions of the setting's aliens).

I should note that I have a business relationship with Precis Intermedia, including their being the publishers of my Lords of Olympus RPG, and I figure anyone reading this should be aware of that. I don't think that this will make me biased in some way that would affect the quality of the review, but in the interest of disclosure I'll mention it anyways.

Now, I've reviewed this product before. You can find that review here.

It seems the publisher forgot that I had reviewed the earlier edition, so I could have skipped this altogether, but I figured I'd at least make his shipping costs worth it by bringing the product up on here.

And there are some changes.  For a start, the previous edition was a staple-bound booklet; while this version is a full softcover.
Secondly, the organization and layout has been improved.  Some images have also been changed in location and if I'm not mistaken a few new images may have been added.

Now, obviously, if you already own the previous edition of The Intercosm, it's not worth your while to get this one for those largely cosmetic revisions.  But if you haven't bought this book, check out my earlier review to see if it's up your alley; and keep in mind that this edition is slightly nicer to buy.

Anyways, that's it this time.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Gigi Bent Billiard + Image Virginia

Political Wednesday: Post-Trump-Win Wrap-up Analysis

So Trump has got the nomination in the bag. Cruz has quit the campaign; the entire U.S. Senate is in mourning because he will be coming back to them.

Nothing short of the most egregious cheating on the part of his opponents could prevent him becoming the GOP candidate for the 2016 election. I don't know what your Twitter is like, but mine is full of conservatives of all stripes, and it went INSANE last night.

You have the Trump Triumphalists taunting everyone who said it'd never happen. You had a ton of the "anyone but Trump" group (an eclectic mix of Fundamentalist Theocons, Neocons, highly zealous Libertarians, and the few fans of the Establishment GOP machine) declaring that they were going to sit out the election, vote Libertarian, or a few even saying they'd vote for Hillary. Some were calling on this or that Republican to run as a third-party candidate against Trump. A few were presenting fantasy scenarios where somehow Kasich could take the nomination.

The thing I found amazing, from both the Trump-hating Right and of course the Left and the mainstream media, is just how enormously people continue to misunderstand Trump, his movement, what his people are about, and what he is capable of doing (both in terms of winning elections, and in terms of his effect on American Democracy).

Many pundits, including very smart ones (like my friend Brian Garst, who I had a Twitter Debate with last night), still imagine that there's no chance of a Trump Presidency happening.

But the thing is, it very much could happen.  Outside of the hardcore Democrat Establishment, people hate Hillary. Even many of the true "progressives" who adore Bernie Sanders hate her. Yes, a lot of people hate Trump too, but I think Trump has a lot more room to maneuver to change their minds.

And Trump's power to subvert and manipulate media at all levels is really stunning. He hasn't really even started to go at Hillary. And if he nudges his unfavorables down a bit, he can become President if he wins over just a part of the white centrists, some of the working-class Democrats who feel betrayed by their party, and even a sliver of the 'ethnic vote' (which is not nearly as hard as the mainstream media has made it look: Trump consistently won the Latino vote in the GOP primaries; a lot of legal Latinos who actually vote like him because they know he's not wrong about some of the massive problems illegal immigration brings, usually to THEIR communities).

People think that the media will favor Hillary and tear Trump apart; and of course most mainstream media people like Hillary way more than Trump!  But the facts are that Trump doesn't try to win over reporters, he tries to make news. He's gaming the system. He knows how to FORCE the corporate news media to talk about him, and he doesn't play by the leftist reporters' rules.  They have already thrown everything they could at him (because the mainstream right-wing Media didn't want him either), and none of it stuck.  CNN won't win where Fox News failed.  He knows how to manipulate corporate media and social media alike to get what he wants.
Trump isn't stuck with the media. The media is stuck with him.

And of course, Trump's opponents still dismissing him, even now, as a "buffoon" is part of how he wins. Hell, I understand that instinct. I did it too at first. I couldn't believe anyone would take him seriously. But everyone assuming he's not smart is one of the greatest weapons he has.  While the elites on the right and left laugh at his 4th-grade level speeches and declarations about "loving the poorly-educated voters", that's how he wins.  Hillary, who is supremely arrogant, convinced of her own destiny, and totally out of touch with almost everything, is bound to make the same mistake.

She's not the only delusional one, though.  Hillary is not doing well even in her own party. She's having a really hard time beating a 74-year old Socialist who is about half as good at social media as Trump is (which, I'll note, is STILL really good, and about twenty times as good as Hillary).  Spiteful declarations that somehow Hillary will inevitably wipe the floor with Trump are at the least extremely premature.

Then there's the people worried about how this will all change the GOP, or America itself. I'll be talking more about that in another blog entry in a couple of days.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti Oversize + H&H's Beverwyck

Classic Rant: Emulation and Realism

Some people still seem to be unclear what's the difference between "emulation of genre" and "realism". Someone recently made the argument to me that there is an "unwritten assumption" in a game setting that anything that isn't explicitly known to be different in the setting would work according to normal "realistic" physical or social laws.
Except that's not the agreement. The agreement is "everything not explicitly included should work in such a way that it doesn't fuck up the genre being emulated". THAT has to be the agreement, or you're ruined.

For example, comics. If everything that was unwritten about comics were assumed to be normal physics, then the whole superhero idea would come crashing down. I had one player in a supers game who's a science geek, and he started pointing out that his speedster should be able to do stuff using the force of inertia that would basically have made him, and not the superman-type, by far the most power character in the game.

Ditto on the social/psychological level. Again, in a comics world we're pretending that people are reacting to superheroes in an extremely nonplussed way most of the time (see "Watchmen" for a more accurate depiction of how humanity would deal with, or rather fail to deal with, a real superpowered being), and yet burst into panic at other moments. Whether they do so or don't so is not on account of real-world psychology but what makes sense in crazy comic-book world.

Things that are not explicitly described in the rules but where someone could bring in the "realism" question (the blast patterns of fireballs, the chance of a weapon breaking, the speed of reading something, the hunting radius of a dragon's lair, etc) are all things I would not make "realistic" rules for but that I would house rule, and those house rules would have as their PRIORITY ONE not to fuck up the game and setting. "Realism" bullshit slows down the game, lets would-be smartasses essentially cheat by warping the mechanics in way clearly contrary to the original intent and all game balance, and generally have very little pay off in return ("well, it took us six hours to figure out the "realistic" burn pattern of that fireball, and it killed half the party as it turns out in the most boring way possible, but on the plus side Melvin the Wizard is now a wankerish hell-spawning monstrosity that makes every other PC in the group useless, and the whole thing is technically slightly more accurate even though there are MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of other things we haven't bothered to consider in the fucking fruitless search for "realism"").

It fucks up setting, too. A good rule of thumb I use is "is there any other character with the same abilities as the PCs who has done this, or gives a shit about it? no? Then its not "realistic" to the emulation of the setting".

Example number one: Melvin the wizard wants to claim that "realistic" physics should let him do some special trick with a fireball that allows him to take down a large number of opponents at once. Now, there are probably a million other magic-users n the game setting, and if Melvin's player was right, and this was "realistic" in the emulation of genre, then either every single one of those wizards (and all others throughout past history) is a moron, or they'd all be using this same tactic and the world would be a fiery hell hole. So doing what is "realistic" in this case DIRECTLY DAMAGES Emulation of Genre (because Melvin getting what he wants means that either something no one had seen in the entire campaign is actually totally common place and all the consequences of that ought to be present everywhere, creating a paradox; or the entirety of wizards everywhere are fucking morons, which kind of ruins the whole feeling of the wizards being, you know, NOT morons). 
So the likely answers to this situation are: a) Realism sucks and b) Melvin's Player is a slimy little dipshit who's trying to argue about "realism" so that he can get away with a munchkin move that would unbalance the game and ruin everyone's fun in the long term.

"Internal consistency" does not actually have much to do with "realism". If you add something that is "realistic" but that doesn't actually match with what you see in the setting, where it doesn't make sense that it wasn't already a truth, then you fuck up Emulation for the sake of chasing the endless questing-beast of "realism".

If someone says it's "realistic" that Katanas are really superweapons compared to normal swords, and they are at all available, why isn't every single high-level fighter using one?
If someone says it's "realistic" that dragons need x amount of territory to use as hunting grounds, then why have dragons either not gone ahead and taken over the game world to satisfy their vast needs, or have become extinct by now from starvation?

Emulation and realism are not the same thing. Often, they're opposed.

RPGPundit


(Originally posted November 6, 2010)

I Got Interviewed!

A relatively novice blogger struck up a conversation with me on Twitter, and asked me for a few tips about how to expand his audience.  I was happy to oblige, and suggested one thing that has worked for me in the past is interviews.  So I went and got myself interviewed for this political gaming blog.


Check out The Injustice Gamer to find out what I had to say now about the OSR, D&D 5e, how much input I had as a 5e consultant, and what I think about the controversial people who have been hired to make expansions for Betrayal at House on the Hill.

RPGPundit

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