Originally published at Musings of a Misfit Monkey. Please leave any comments there.
Whether you’re a gamer or not, if you’ve been over to the Harping Monkey recently, you know that there’s alot of roleplaying discussion going on, much of it centered around game design and setting design/worldbuilding, with a smidge of paradigm-shift confusion going on between folks who hew toward “traditional” style play and those who are working to think and play in innovative ways.
And the discussions, thankfully, are really really good. And so far, very cordial. And I suppose I probably ought to be writing this over there, but to be honest, I’m writing it here because my blog needs this kind of content, and I might also be able to draw folks from that discussion over here to discover that I have a blog.
I was going to add a link to the forums over at HHM just now, but I edited it out because I don’t want to start throwing a bunch of links at you yet. Stay here and read this. The links can come later.
That’s part of my point in this post, actually. I’m going to be telling you that if you’re interested in learning about the “new paradigm” – the innovative, progressive styles of independent, creator-owned game designs that are generally (but not necessarily accurately) thought of as “Forge games”, then you’ve got a whole ton of massive reading and thinking to do. It’s almost overwhelming. No, strike that. It IS overwhelming. There’s the Forge site itself, and the sites and blogs of many of the creators of these games, and the many good sites covering RPG theory and issues of play styles and a couple of great podcasts where these types of games are diligently covered, and … frankly, there’s just a frackin’ mess of stuff and no clear consensus on where to start. I certainly can’t tell you where to start, except maybe at the end of this post I’ll toss one idea at you anyway.
Of course that’s just research. Once you get neck-deep into all that, you’ve got to actually buy and play some of these new games. If you don’t, it’s all just jumbles of theory.
But first, I probably have to actually sell you on why you should even care. Why even bother to learn about these new and innovative roleplaying concepts if you’re already quite comfy and happy playing the way you play now?
Good Question. Actually, I’m not going to try to sell you. If you’re interested, stick with me. If not, that’s cool. But if you have no interest in indie games, further reading of this post will not appeal to you. Unless you’re my stalker. I guess then you’d read the post even if I said I was going to discuss belly-button lint.
And there’s my latest attempt at K.J. Johnson-style wit. sigh.
Okay, if you’re still here, I want to give you the only thing I really have to give. My perspective and experience. That’s what this blog is, right? A convoluted mish-mash misfit journal of my thoughts and perspectives. Captain Obvious strikes again.
Aaaagh! Sorry. Focus, Mick. Write coherently.
Okay.
As a beginning point, if you have not read the earlier post entitled “Fanning the Flames of Fun”, you probably should. It is a re-print of an essay I did for Misfit Brew back in March ‘06, when I was just beginning to dig into indie design concepts and Forge-style philosophies. That essay sums up how I felt near the beginning of my personal journey into this craziness. It was a gut-level first impression kind of rant. But time has passed. And I’ve grown a bit.
Now, I’ve got a little more experience and a little more perspective. I believe I am solidly in favor of the progressive concepts being championed by the communities of the Indie game-design revolution, at least as I understand them. And I gotta say, in the few demos I’ve done and in the reading of actual game books from some of these games, I LOVE some of the great ideas and concepts and there are some cool mechanics to be found. But in terms of becoming a full-on Forgie disciple, I’m still not quite there. I’m still not picking it up and grasping it all. I think that my play-style is still too constrained by traditional conditioning. That, and, well, some of the folks over ther, the ones who are the leading evangelists of this new paradigm in roleplaying, well, they often write very academically and can come off as somewhat elitist. The bottom line is, they don’t seem to want to make it easy to grasp what they’re getting at. I know this is not actually the case, but it’s like they don’t really care about welcoming new folks into their hallowed halls.
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