What's changed for me since the Forge.

[J. Tuomas Harviainen]

I've learned to appreciate the spectrum inside singular small games, especially one-story narratives. The "Campbellian" stuff, i.e. the game's concept extending to only repeating one thing over and over. Not usually my thing, but knowing how far it can be taken by clever and stylish design has been very illuminating.

The other thing is that through here, I've gained a lot of contacts, fellow theorists, friends. For someone as obsessed as I am with actually understanding role-play as a phenomenon in itself, that's a very, very valuable thing.

-Jiituomas

[Darren Hill]

Among some of the sentiments expressed above, discovering the Forge has made me mourn those I've known who drifted away from gaming because they 'outgrew' it - at least the ones I can clearly now see with hindsight were frustrated narrativists. I've entice one old friend back into a one-on-one session of one of those weird little games he's heard another of my other friends disparage, and I have my sights set on another old friend...

[Thunder_God]

Now I talk about gaming with my fiancee, and I give her the whole spiel about stories having a theme and premise, and everybody at the table having an equal creative stake, and she smiles and goes, "Well, duh, how else would it work?" But it took me a year and a full campaign to finally shed the old habits.

This is invaluable. We talk here about the need to analyze games and delve into their meat and heart, but then again, we're also in need of deconditioning.

Some of the things that result in an "Oh!" moment for us are totally natural for those who don't Role Play or think outside the RP mindset(it's a shame when we put blindfolds on), which makes me curious what the result would be if you'd have jargon-free discussions about what we talk here with non gamers.

Very curious.