Quote from: TristramEvans;723325Im at the point now where I think just ignoring anyone who uses that phrase is the best bet. The Denners who periodically stop by here spouting that one inevitably turn out to be trolls.. Arduin, Rooster, Mister GC, etc

Yup.

The moment you start describing the actual roleplaying using dismissive pejorative, I pretty much stop caring about what you have to say because what you're talking about isn't my hobby anymore.

Quote from: S'mon;723279he's probably reading this thread now - I PM'd him

And thanks for the heads up. I thought I'd make a post, seeing as the thread is at least in part about me.

Quote from: Mistwell;721243In this thread, Pemerton is a Forgist and trying to argue that The Forge was a success and a cultural movement and "the preeminent influence on contemporary RPG design."

For those who haven't actually read the ENworld thread, and who care, here is the summary version:

   Another poster made a post saying that it's bad for RPGs to cater to gamist preferences, clearly using "gamist" in The Forge sense of the word.

I posted in disagreement, saying that gamism is a pretty big part of RPGing, and where D&D began. (I also said some stuff about 4e and gamism that's tangential to Mistwell's concerns.)

There was some confusion from other posters over terminology, which led to some explanations from various posters over its origins at The Forge.

Accompanying this explanation were some posts stating that The Forge was a bad thing for RPGs and RPGing. I posted my disagreement, and explained why I like The Forge as a critical analysis of my hobby. That seems to have made Mistwell very upset.

I think it's slightly ironic that the only two posters in the original thread who were really defending the legitimacy of gamist RPGing as part of the hobby are being tarred with the brush of Forgist elitism!

Quote from: Justin Alexander;721465At least two of those three things are true. All three might be true depending on how you're defining "success" and/or "preeminent".

I'm not sure that we've ever agreed before, but I'm very happy to. And this thread is surreal enough that apparently anything can happen!

Quote from: Iosue;722449I've always been able to have a decent discussion with the guy, and even if he finds B/X D&D outside of his tastes, he's able to appreciate some of its good points, and amicably contribute to threads I've started about it.

Thanks! And I'm still waiting for you to finish your Moldvay thread - it didn't really get up to his GMing chapter, which is one of my favourite parts of the book.

If I have time I might try and start a thread on that myself, but I'm probably too slack.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;721273pemerton is one of the few FoR (Friends of Ron) with whom I actually enjoyed conversing, when I was still active on EN World.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;722604In this particular instance, pemerton is quite clear about his fondness for Ron Edwards and the Forge; way back when, I jokingly referred to him as a 'F(riend)O(f)R(on)-player,' and he agreed.

My memory is that it was FORE (Friend of Ron Edwards). I also remember an exchange about bear psychology, and your "coincidence generation" tables for Flashing Blades: and it's nice to cross paths again, even if in a slightly unexpected way.

Quote from: S'mon;721520Pemerton is a good guy.

Quote from: S'mon;723017Pemerton is a real gentleman and a genuine nice guy

Thanks - the feeling is mutual!

Quote from: S'mon;722621I do wonder whether pemerton would have been disabused of his fondness if he had ever tried posting on The Forge.

Although by acronym I am a FORE, I've never met or interacted with Edwards, nor posted on The Forge. Nor am I a particularly adventurous or avant-garde RPGer - the only thing that ever makes me feel even remotely out of the mainstream is some of the responses I see to my posts about how I run 4e D&D, and the similar reponses to others who seem to run the game in the same sort of way that I do.

As I posted on the ENworld thread that Mistwell linked to, my interest in The Forge (both essays and forums) is as a source of critical analysis. Different people probably have different ways of judging which critics, and which analyses, they like - in my case an important part is that it interpret my activity back to me in a way that (i) makes sense but (ii) sheds new light. The Forge, and Edwards's essays, do that for me.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;722984I believe I knew Pemerton about twenty years ago. A good Rolemaster GM. I was a dickhead then (or even more so) so the friendship ended on a sour note, but he's a good guy.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;723301When I knew him, he loved to play (mostly GM) and thought about things very deeply. Taught me a lot about GMing and many other things.

Kyle, by my reckoning it is 23 years (almost to the day?) and it's very kind of you to say such nice things after so long.

To update you a little bit, that Rolemaster campaign continued on through 1997, though by then nearly all the roster (both players and PCs) had changed (although one of the Matts would make a guest appearance from time to time when he came back from the States). A new player took up Imeji, but she died tragically at 10th level after being caught in a fight with half-a-dozen guards whom she couldn't beat. She was laid to rest in a tomb in Greyhawk next to the body of her deceased lover, the montebank Derf (who had been played for a while by someone else you might remember from around that time, and had also come to a sad end.)

Another RM campaign ran from 1998 through 2008, reaching a very satisfying conclusion at around 27th level. I'm now GMing a 4e D&D campaign (commenced Jan 2009). We don't play as often as used to be possible (work, family, etc) - every two to three weeks for sessions of around 4 hours. The game is currently at 24th level and remains plenty of fun.

From your sig it looks like you've been doing some publishing - good stuff! My efforts there have been confined to a few amateur pieces for HARP in The Guild Companion webzine.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;723301If you become an academic, then you tend to like to break the world down into categories, that's how you analyse things. He's made it his profession to think about stuff in more detail than anyone else does. Many of us will view our hobbies through the filter of the worldview we've got from our careers.

I think this is all plausible and fair. I said something similar on the ENworld thread, pointing also to this Robin Laws blog that someone else had linked to.

(Kyle, if I've got your identity wrong I apologise, but I'm pretty sure I know who you are.)

Quote from: pemerton;723348Thanks - the feeling is mutual!

Thanks P, but I assure you, I'm not as nice as you.

Welcome to the board Pemerton

Quote from: TristramEvans;723369Welcome to the board Pemerton

Thanks.

Welcome aboard Pemerton.

Glad you made it over Pemerton. I think you'll like this board.

Welcome indeed!

Welcome, you seem like a pretty reasonable guy!

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;721316I've met all kinds of gamers, but I've never met a Forgy in real life.

I did. Last year when I was in north america I went incognito into Warp 1 games in Edmonton, which was never a very good gaming store: they shrinkwrap most of their product, charge extra above canadian cover price (which is already a ripoff), and really only stay in business because they're on a big street and its where people go who either don't shop on the internet or do an impulse-buy.  

Well apparently, since the last time I was there, it turns out that the new RPG-section staff are a pair of hardcore storygamers.  I was very amused to see a number of Forge titles actually on the racks, including really obscure stuff.  This is particularly funny when you know the Edmonton gaming scene, which is very meat and potatoes.  The other stuff they had there was lots of D&D (4e and reprints), tons of Pathfinder, superhero RPGs, and lots and lots of Palladium books; all of which sell like hotcakes in Alberta.

Some of the forge books had clearly been there for a very long time (some were literally gathering dust), a few others were obviously more recent as I knew they were more recent books.

So I couldn't help but start up a little chat with these guys; I asked them if they had Dungeon Crawl Classics; the guy responded "No, we sold out". I noted that there was practically no OSR stuff at all there; he responded, sneering "no, the OSR isn't really important, its just a few guys talking on the internet".  So I asked him about the forge games he had, and he started telling me about how awesome they are. I pointed out all his palladium books and he admitted they sell like crazy, and (he sounded so frustrated) he couldn't understand why when they were so awful.  I casually asked him how the AD&D reprints did and he admitted they sold well too.

So finally I asked him if he was going to reorder DCC; he said he could special-order it, and I said that I was just passing through, but if he was sold out of all the DCC books he brought in, and hadn't actually sold the forge books he brought in, wouldn't it in fact make the OSR stuff more relevant to his market where people like AD&D reprints and buy Palladium books and they sell out of DCC books but no one seems to buy the forge books they bring in?  He spouted off a non-answer about how "being commercial wasn't the point".

Which again, is hilarious, because I know Warp 1's owner, and "being commercial" is and always has been his ONLY point (not that there's anything wrong with that, its why his business still exists after more than two decades while I saw comic & game stores come and go like mayflies in that city over the last 20 years).  If it weren't that I don't particularly care for Warp's owner, I would have been very tempted to give him a heads-up about what his employees were up to.

Anyways, those were some real-life storygamers. And not having had a pipe in my mouth, they never even knew how dangerously close they stood to the Pundit himself.

RPGPundit

Quote from: S'mon;721520Pemerton is a good guy.

I'd say the Forge was one of the factors in the end of the '90s Railroading Era, aka the Dark Age of RPGs. .

It wasn't.  The major factor in the end of the White-Wolf's era was the release of 3e D&D, which was an instant smash success.  If you look at the 3e DMG, they literally repudiate the WW 'storytelling' railroad-style of play, advocating instead a "Kick in the Door" style of old-school gaming.

Which in a way shows you how far things have come since then; at the time, 3e felt like an unbelievable breath of fresh air and a return to old-school roots.  Which sounds really strange to anyone who played late-era 3.5 and rejected that in favor of the OSR.

RPGPundit

Quote from: One Horse Town;721542In the olden days circa 2004, when the missionaries where thick on the ground i just used to refuse to use their jargon as the framing point of the discussion. For some reason, that really pissed them off.

It pissed them off because that was their one and only rhetorical tactic; borrowed from critical-theory/deconstructionist academia: control the terminology, the semantics.  If you get to define what terms are used and how they are used, you front-load a bunch of assumptions into the conversation and you win the argument before it starts.
Refuse to accept their jargon, and they haven't got a leg to stand on.

RPGPundit

Quote from: pemerton;723348My memory is that it was FORE (Friend of Ron Edwards). I also remember an exchange about bear psychology, and your "coincidence generation" tables for Flashing Blades: and it's nice to cross paths again, even if in a slightly unexpected way.

Welcome to the adult swim.

Quote from: RPGPundit;723495It pissed them off because that was their one and only rhetorical tactic; borrowed from critical-theory/deconstructionist academia: control the terminology, the semantics.  If you get to define what terms are used and how they are used, you front-load a bunch of assumptions into the conversation and you win the argument before it starts.
Refuse to accept their jargon, and they haven't got a leg to stand on.

RPGPundit

"Know Your Values And Frame the Debate" was one of* the most useful books I've ever read. By a leftist, it clearly lays out leftist Framing tactics, in order to teach them to others. Presumably the author didn't realise that some non-leftists can also read.

*The other was The Gift of Fear, about how not to die.

Quote from: Arminius;721873Actually it all flows from the latter; the idea was if you preferred one CA, you were an -ist. If a game tended to facilitate a CA, it was an -ist design. The most influential part of GNS theory, and the most controversial, was that if a design facilitated more than one CA (was "incoherent") it would inevitably lead to power struggle and misery. Therefore games should not encourage fun outside the main CA.

Precisely.  The problem with GNS is not that it suggested different gamers like different things from their games, that's more or less true. The problem was that it suggested that each gamer liked only ONE thing from their games and that therefore the "perfect" game was one that only appealed to one type of 'creative agenda'.  

THAT was the actual theory, the rest was the postulates that lead up to the theory.  And as such, the entire theory is invalid.  Subsequent evidence has proven that games created with only one "creative agenda" are miserable commercial failures compared to games that have multiple utility.  Of course, the theory was utterly absurd right from the start, since it suggested that D&D, the most popular RPG in history, was a "bad" game.

RPGPundit