In the thread Perceptions of Civility at the Forge, the discussion turned to the bland-ness of "recent" rpg design, especially here at the Forge.

Hunter Logan wrote:
If considering the rpg design as a work of art, I'd say, "fortune-in-the-middle" is a safe, obvious solution worthy of a yawn. Tell the truth: Greg Stafford broke the mold when he did it, but everybody else is a copycat. Even then, fortune-in-the-middle is still fortune, inevitably a tired and unoriginal means of resolution. So, you can use it. No one will blame you for using it, but you'll never break the mold by going that route.

So, let me ask this: Why should we ever feel comfortable assuming that f-i-m, or any fortune for that matter, is necessarily the best or only way of solving a given design problem? Jonathan's approach shows his intent. He wants to break the mold. If that's his primary purpose in design, I say more power to him. And I ask you, who says breaking the mold can't or shouldn't be the primary purpose of design? Do we really need more tired, unoriginal game designs? I think not.

Of course, as Jack points out,

Bleeding edge is so transitory. What is bleeding edge today is old hat tomorrow, pathetic the next day, but nostalgically retro-cool the following week.

He's right, but that really doesn't diminish the value of the effort.

Ralph said (paraphrasing) in the last thread that you shouldn't look for innovative mechanics, you should look for the "best" mechanic. Unfortuntely, I feel like "best" doesn't mean anything unless you explain it further. The best for what, exactly? I'd argue that there are many "best" solutions for any problem, based on what exactly your qualifications are. Often times, your solutions won't seem clearly better than each other, just different. In which case, I'd chose the more interesting and original one every time.

Honestly, I also don't think Bleeding Edge design is that connected with "System Does Matter." I think it's all about creating play experiences, which can be System re-enforced, but could also re-enforced in other ways, such as play descriptions, color text, or trying to get everyone in the same headspace. After all, freeform design is pretty Bleeding Edge, especially here on the Forge.

I also think you can't expect play on the Bleeding Edge to be regularly successful. That's not the point really. I mean, it's cool when you can get it to work, but the point would more likely be to challenge yourselves and explore new concepts together, instead of creating really satisfying play experiences (at least, in a traditional sense). Once you get used to it, though, the Bleeding Edge stops being so Bleeding, and the weird becomes comfortable. Then you can either stay on the Not-Bleeding-Anymore Edge, or move on to find another Bleeding Edge.

Is that a descision between enjoying new techiques themselves, or enjoying the fruits themselves of older techniques (which last session may have been new ones)?

If you create a game that's so innovative and so exotic and so surprising that 2 people in the world declare it the most brilliant thing they've ever seen and no body else will even play it? Is that successful? More relevant -- is that part of the mission of the Forge?

The Forge features prominently an actual play forum. We are all about promoting actual play. There is a value to creating an experimental design in order to test bed some concepts, but that should always be with the eye towards how to then apply those concepts in a design that people will actually want to play. Similiar to how the auto industry will create concept cars and then incorporate some of those features into the next line of production models.

So its fine to challenge the threshold, I'm not saying its not. But its not fine to challenge the threshold just for the sake of doing something that hasn't been done before. The end result needs to be something that people will want to play...because that's part of the mission of the Forge.


The Forge is also about publishing. While publishing doesn't have to include sales for money, that is certainly a desireable end result even though not every game is expected to get there. Its ok to dance with the bleeding edge from time to time, but quite frankly the bleeding edge doesn't sell. Since part of the Forge's mission is to encourage publication we can't as a group be dedicated to nothing but the bleeding edge. Like the concept car we have to take the elements that work and incorporate them into games that customers will actually want to buy and play.


Exotic is an element in design. It cannot be the goal of design.

Valamir wrote: ...but quite frankly the bleeding edge doesn't sell.

Asrogoth wrote,

But my contention about The Bleeding Edge would be that it relies as much on approach as on mechanics. What makes games like Sorceror still near that cutting edge is not the mechanics -- it is the unique application of mechanics within a system to present a desired type of play and experience for the Players.

So...

In order to find the Bleeding Edge, we probably need to focus on "System Does Matter" as a blanket concept whereby all things in the system must gel in order to create that sweet game that gets everybody pumped up and wanting more.

Its ok to dance with the bleeding edge from time to time, but quite frankly the bleeding edge doesn't sell. Since part of the Forge's mission is to encourage publication we can't as a group be dedicated to nothing but the bleeding edge. Like the concept car we have to take the elements that work and incorporate them into games that customers will actually want to buy and play.

Hunter Logan wrote:
Of course, as Jack points out,

Bleeding edge is so transitory. What is bleeding edge today is old hat tomorrow, pathetic the next day, but nostalgically retro-cool the following week.

He's right, but that really doesn't diminish the value of the effort.

Jack, I feel like all of your quotes apply much better to centuries-old mediums like writing and painting, rather than roleplaying, which has barely even begun to accept itself as a medium for expression. I mean, right now, I have only the vaguest idea of what the form of roleplaying is capable of. I don't think we've even begun to scratch the surface. So to say that we should master the form, when the boundaries of the form aren't even clear... I don't know, it just seems problematic to me. Am I supposed to put off doing "out there" things until I've written 3-4 Heartbreakers, published some One Trick Pony indie games, and proven that I've mastered the medium?

Am I supposed to put off doing "out there" things until I've written 3-4 Heartbreakers, published some One Trick Pony indie games, and proven that I've mastered the medium?

Hunter Logan wrote: but in our world of photography, digital imagery, and cgi, the sort of craft you're talking about is losing ground.

Now, I hate to jam Ralph with his own game like this. He's always come across as a good guy, but Universalis completely deflates his own point. Universalis is a cutting edge game, a game designer's version of the concept car if ever there was one, and Universalis sells quite well, doesn't it? Was number 5 on RPGNow, lots of happy players, etc. Doesn't Universalis kind of prove that innovation can sell? Obviously, not every bleeding-edge design is going to do that, but why do we hear so much resistance from an innovative, conceptual designer about the idea of openly discussing, if not excessively promoting innovative, conceptual design? No one says, "Do this to the exclusion of all else," but seems to me, the Forge, more than probably any other site on the web, should be open to and interested in these sorts of topics.

Hi Ralph,

I understand what you're saying, and I agree to a point. But the Forge already has a mission: To support the publication of creator-owned games and to promote actual play of rpgs, not necessarily in that order.

Seems to me, the Forge is certainly big enough and diverse enough to support anyone with a genuine interest in publishing creator-owned games, and I don't understand why anyone needs or wants to discriminate based on creative goals. You want to make commercial games? Cool! Someone else wants to do something else? That's cool, too.

It's not like the Game Police will came around to say, "Mr. Mazza? You're game is too conventional. Come with us please." Or "Mr. Walton? You are not designing within the official constraints of commercial appeal. Can we see your game designer's license?"

So, what is the real issue here?

Funny. I was going to make the same point Logan did...if the mission of the Forge has changed, someone should tell Ron. Natch.

Point is, I want to feel comfortable producing anything here, as long as I own it, write it, and produce it. If I want to write and publish my own d20 supplement, I should feel comfortable discussing its design and difficulties here (well, other than fearing Dav sending some inhuman midget thugs to my door!), because that's well within the Forge's mission statement.

By comfortable, I mean that I (should) feel I would recieve the same level of help and interest regarding that project as I would recieve with some wild, bleeding edge design. If anyone here is saying I wouldn't, for whatever reason, I'd suggest that's a warning sign about failiure of the Forge's mission by it's participants. Take a step back and consider: what is the Forge about?

It isn't hard to answer. "Supporting creator ownership."
If we start making distinctions about what we're going to help out with, because a product isn't "original" enough, I think we fuck ourselves, and not in the good way.

Now, I'm not saying we are doing this, or that the Forge is guilty of this secondary, unstated exclusion, I'm putting it up there as a question each person is going to have to ask of themselves, and ask of their reason for participating at the Forge. Now, that's between you and yourself, I'm not looking for answers, defenses, or anything else.

To quote myself from the beginning of this thread:

Asrogoth wrote:
I suggest that The Forge, while not ignoring "new" ideas, must pursue quality within our RPG theory and design in order to affect the RPG community and present it with the "next big thing".

Jonathan Walton wrote: Honestly, I also don't think Bleeding Edge design is that connected with "System Does Matter." I think it's all about creating play experiences, which can be System re-enforced, but could also re-enforced in other ways, such as play descriptions, color text, or trying to get everyone in the same headspace. After all, freeform design is pretty Bleeding Edge, especially here on the Forge.

My guru-in-my-pocket, Keith Johnstone, has something to say about this, but he called it the avant-garde instead of the bleeding edge. Same thing though.

He reckoned that the folks identified as the avant garde were all very much concerend with getting works created that looked like what everyone thought the avant garde should look like... in the case of theatre in the 70's, lying around in naked heaps, or reciting haiku while trying to stare the audience down.

Meanwhile, the real development and "cutting edge" was the folks trying to make relevant theatre that folks wanted to pay to see.

I've committed, in my only putative design submitted to the design forum, a game that's probably unplayable, but pretty damn cutting edge. Didn't develop it further, because other games did what that system wanted to do, but better.

Same problem faces games designers as theatre practitioners: invention is all great and good, but unless it makes a game better, WTF is it doing in the game, apart from giving the designer an ego-stroking?

As long as, as designers (which the gods know I'm not) we're commited to producing the best games we can, they will be by their very nature new and exciting and different, because I hope we're honest enough with ourselves to answer the question "Why would any potential player choose your game over brand X?" If Brand X is doing it better, I'd hope we can say so.

I admit it. I'm concerned about the tenor of this thread. Stop me if I'm wrong, because I really want to be wrong here. I see Ralph, Ken (Asrogoth), and Pete making a case that the Forge should somehow mostly advocate roleplaying games with commercial appeal, that games developed on the Forge should contain some predetermined level of quality, and that designing games different from the norm is somehow less worthy than designing games that build on what has already been done. I'm disgusted by what I've read.

As I've already stated, the Forge has a mission. That's the mission Ron gave it within parameters he already defined. Frankly, I think Ron knew what he was doing when he wrote a definition of publication that includes free download from a website. I sincerely doubt commercial appeal was ever a primary consideration for his mission statement. Ron's a big fan of indie comics and underground entertainment. A lot of that is about expression of ideas that don't/can't/won't necessarily have a big commercial appeal. I'm not trying to speak for him, but it seems to me he wants to promote growth and expansion of roleplaying. He admits, he originally released Sorcerer with a hope that at least one person would have an interest. So, until he writes a new mission statement for the Forge, or comes here to tell me I'm full of shit and you folks have it right, all this talk about what the Forge should or should not advocate is specious at best. At worst, it's an unwarranted attempt to bully designers with different goals into conforming to a tired, mannered, and unoriginal norm.

I must ask, what is this quality? How do you determine which games have it and which games don't? Whatever it is, don;t we invariably support it with our posted opinions, advice, and comments? What is it that makes a game better? And better than what? And what makes you so sure a so-called bleeding edge design will lack quality? If you haven't even seen the game yet, isn't it a little early to pass judgment?

Pete, you're going to be sore at me now, because I looked at your game. Here's the thread. Looks to me like you were off to a good start. I think Mike Holmes can be trusted as a pretty good judge of system ideas, and he said,

Wow, that's very rigorous. I like it a lot.

Hiya,

Unsurprisingly, I agree with you, Hunter, about the actual issue - there is no "what the Forge should support," only the support itself if the game is creator-owned.

On the other hand, I suppose there's no particular harm in airing one another's personal ideologies, as long as it's clear that it's a "Gonna speak my mind" thread rather than a "Set policy and resolve a confusion" thread.

The usual call applies for mutual understanding and working out an issue in a discourse-y fashion.

Best,
Ron

No Hunter, somewhere along the line the context for my comments has gotten lost.

My initial remark back in earlier threads was in response to a comment of Jonathan's where he was chiding the Forge designers for not knocking his socks off with innovation. He was remarking that the Forge was no longer far enough out on the cutting edge.

My response to that was that it is not the Forge's goal to be cutting edge. Our goal is to publish indie-rpgs that are as good as we can make them. Whether those rpgs are cutting edge or not is completely incidental and completely up to the individual designer.

My remarks were directed solely at the idea that somehow if our designs are not cutting edge enough (i.e. we spent too much effort mucking around with old boring Fortune in the Middle) that we were not fulfilling our potential.

How in the world this gets mutated into "designing games different from the norm is somehow less worthy than designing games that build on what has already been done" is quite beyond me.


Honestly, I have absolutely no idea how you arrived at your last post from anything that has been said.

Ralph, I think we got here from someone implying that "we should write games that lots of people want to play." It's a question of how to measure quality, really. Surely you can have great games that appeal to tons of people partially because they're so good. But you can also have games that are targetted at very small audiences that are equally good. The audience for such games is just much smaller.

Wow...

Hunter, what a response! I was quite surprised that somehow this thread has really gone off in a direction I had no intention of it going. Talk about wonky.

First of all, I had no intention of stating Forge policy as to what games are supportable and what aren't. All games presented here that qualify as indie should invariably be supported. *** No brainer ***

I was attempting to take the idea of The Bleeding Edge mentioned in other posts and focus on how The Forge is NOT responsible to be on it, but that instead, it attempts to create "quality" within the games presented here -- and if anything that quality would in fact produce "Bleeding Edge" games.

Now, quality is a nebulous term in many cases -- beauty is in the eye of the beholder (or is that eye tyrant? ha).

So, in an effort to clarify what I mean by quality here is how I would define it -- the way I meant it for this post.

Taken from this link at Dictionary.com, I find I am attempting to use the definition found under Quality is under 3b "Degree or grade of excellence".

On the Forge, I see quality as radiating from the lucid discourses found on our forums through design (Indie Design), the various theories/approaches proposed (General RPG Theory Forum, Articles, GNS Theory Forum) and the practical usage of games (Actual Play).

I would hope that no one that tries to publish any game would WANT to publish anything that they deem of "low quality".

Now I don't expect everyone to have the same understanding of degrees of quality, but I assume that anyone wanting to actually make their works known to others would spend some time attempting to make their rpgs with some "degree of excellence."

Maybe I'm reading too much into the people at the Forge and the games these people have produced, but it appears that even when just presenting games intended to show certain mechanics, these designers desire to present them with some form of polish.

To end... I just noticed Valamir's (Ralph's???) cross-post which also deals with this idea.

The Forge is not responsible to determine the quality of anyone's games -- the Forge is a community. But I think it is in keeping with that communal spirit that any games presented here be encouraged to seek some form of quality as their authors see fit. And by no means should any games be favored over others because they are or are not "innovative".

And to further confuse you and attempt to re-establish my original idea... innovation isn't necessarily found in presenting something "new" but in presenting old ideas in a new way, usually noticed as "innovative" because of its somewhat higher degree of excellence.

I hope I've clarified myself.

See there are two different issues that are being confounded here.

One is what a designer could do, and the other is what is the mission of the Forge.

As a designer you can do anything you want. Be as bleeding edge as you want. Design the most exotic, non traditional, "gamers" wouldn't recognize it as even being an RPG game that you want.

I not only accept that, I endorse it, and eagerly look forward to seeing what comes out of these efforts.


But you implied, no...pretty much stated, that the Forge isn't doing enough to encourage more of that. My point is that it isn't the mission of the Forge to focus exclusively on bleeding edge, exotic, non-traditional games. It isn't necessary for the Forge to encourage more of that. That isn't what we're here for.

It grates me a little that somehow that point is being construed as being anti innovation.

Asrogoth wrote:
I suggest that The Forge, while not ignoring "new" ideas, must pursue quality within our RPG theory and design in order to affect the RPG community and present it with the "next big thing".

Hi all,

Yes, these responses make sense. Thank you. If I've misread intended meanings, I'll accept responsibility for that. I think we're on the same page now. I don't think I stated the Forge should focus exclusively on anything. If I did, that's certainly not what I intended.

For the record, I'm here to share whatever developments I make in roleplaying design, to share thoughts about roleplaying, and to help expand roleplaying beyond traditional, dice-based games that rely on systems primarily designed to "simulate the objectivity of a real world," as Jonathan Dobson puts it in his article, "Pursuing the Element." I think there is a profound disconnect between what some (maybe many) players really want out of roleplaying and what dice-based (really, fortune- and fortune/karma-based) rpgs can provide. Certainly, that disconnect applies to me. I don't think that makes me particularly cutting-edge, but that's where I'm coming from. Hope that helps.

Edit to add the following: Thanks to Ron for his statement. I think that really helps to frame the discussion and put things in perspective.

You know, I did phrase myself badly... okay, to quote the Blodhound gang, like scrotum, here it is in a nutsack:

I dislike novelty in games design for the sake of novelty, but not as much as I dislike convention for the sake of convention. I believe that pursuing either as a goal of design (ANY design) is the way to shitty design.

And, since you asked, I thought PtA did what I was trying to do, but with a wider range of application. Looking back, that system could be resurrected as a more focused game...

I wasn't talking about popularity when I said "compare to brand x", but lack of that comparison leads to, amongst other thing, ye olde fantasy heartbreaker. Brand X can be any other game you care to name, not even commercially succesful ones: it's questioning whether your game would be played by anyone in preference to any other game, given the choice. It's actually not that hard a test to pass, given the value of "anyone" in the equation, it just asks you to justify the existence of the game, and the effort of making it. It's not a commercial question at all, though I'd see where you'd get that impression from my previous post.

Anyway, that's turned into a "what I meant..." post without much substance, and we're all looking like we're saying "The Forge should promote the design of good games," as if we'd want to do anything else...

Hello,

Pete's nailed it. In the interest of everyone hugging and being done, let's call this one closed.

Best,
Ron