Creating Community: Three Years with the Forge

Posted by JonathanWalton on December 3, 2005 at 02:47 PM

Last week, Jim Henley and I began an email conversation, and at some point I admitted:

I have another huge 20x20 post in me that I'm trying to figure out how to write. I think it's going to be called "Defining a Community" and it's basically my reflection on the interactions that define the borders of who is and who isn't "The Forge Community" (it would also apply to other communities, of course). I think I innocently jumped on the forums in 2002 and automatically assumed I was as much a part of "The Forge" as Ron & Clinton, despite my total ignorance of the body of thought that had been previously developed. It seems like a lot of people (including sympathetic folks like Bruce Baugh, but also numerous Forge-haters) could never bring themselves to do that.

In an interesting bit of timing, Ron & Clinton decided, in the past couple of days, to close the Forge's RPG Theory and GNS forums to further posting, hoping to shift the focus to other things they feel are more productive. I have mixed feelings about this choice, but I hope that it will serve us well in the long run. While those forums were never consistently productive, they did have their moments and I worry, like Chris Lehrich, that people who are sincerely interested in theory (often the targets of a world of shit and hate, even among the indie crowd) will, for a while at least, have no place to go. However, I have personally been involved in a slow, equitable divorce from the Forge over the past year-or-so and see this new development as part of that process, as well as part of Ron & Clinton's eventual goal of shutting down or completely transforming the Forge. I am a big fan of the central Forge giving way to the Forge disapora, but, as a way of moving on and saying farewell, I'd like to talk about what the Forge did for me, which will hopefully surprise some of you.

For context, the first threads I started on the Forge were:

-- in RPG Theory: Designing for a Play-By-Email Format, 23 Sept 2002
-- in Publishing: Indie RPG Anthology?: “Death to D20”, 24 Sept 2002
-- in Indie Game Design: We Regret to Inform You (The GM is Dead), 1 Oct 2002

Just from the titles, you can tell that I was coming from and heading towards a rather different place than the majority of the Forge's most frequent posters. I was 20 years old. I had been running the In Nomine wing of a freeform PBeM community called World Weavers for the last couple of years. I was all excited about the possibilities of GM-less play. My favorite roleplaying games were Rebecca Borgstrom's Nobilis, Adams/Fooden/Manui's Continuum, and Steffan O'Sullivan's Fudge, all of which had rocked my socks off less than a year before. These were all indie games, interestingly enough, developed and published by their authors independent of the whole industry machine. I was trying to purge myself of all preconceptions of what roleplaying could be. I was beginning to think big and different. I was ready to turn the whole world upside-down. And, when I arrived, I remember being disappointed that most of the published Forge games seemed so traditional. Sorcerer didn't interest me at all. Neither did Donjon. I bought a PDF of Paladin, which was alright, but didn't blow my socks off (though, a lot of Paladin later became Dogs in the Vineyard). In the beginning, what I really dug was Universalis. Here, I said, was a new kind of game. Here's where the future lies.

Strangely enough, people were very supportive of my "out there" ideas. The first person who replied to Designing for PBeM was Ron Edwards, and he said:

Hi Jonathan, Welcome to the Forge! And thanks for starting with such a fascinating issue. ...Of course, I am personally pig-ignorant about the whole thing so can only stand here and go, "Hmmm, uh-uh, really," and stuff like that. Lots of people here have lots more experience, though...

So from the beginning, I think, it was clear to me that the Forge was all too willing to support alternative discourse. Ron was very much aware that he wasn't an expert on everything and that there were some topics or kinds of play that just didn't excite him all that much, but he was happy for people to talk about them, even if he didn't join in. For all the awkward discussions I would end up having with Ron in the Theory and GNS forums (trying to understand what the heck he was talking about in those essays), I don't think this feeling of openness ever completely faded. However, it was clear that folks like Ron, Clinton, Mike Holmes, Ralph Mazza, Luke Crane, Jake Norwood, and the like (the first and second generation Forge denizens, with major games under their belts) were not really my peers and partners on this journey. They had both "been there, done that" and also had already decided to answer certain questions in certain ways, where I was more interested in profoundly different answers. So, I began to study what they had done and why they had done it, but was still looking for people to walk this new road with.

And, eventually, I stumbled across Shreyas Sampat, Eero Tuovinen, and Ben Lehman. There were others I felt I really clicked with -- Emily Care, Rich Forest, Piers Brown, and Chris Lehrich among them -- but our online relationships were more irregular, whereas, for a while at least, Shreyas, Eero, Ben, and I would leap upon each other's posts as soon as they appeared. I've never really talked to them about it, but Shreyas, Eero, and Ben (along with some others) became the Forge for me. I imagined myself as part of a small, informal community within the larger Forge body, one with few expectations of its participants, but one with very different goals and priorities than the rest of the Forge at large. If I had to describe what those priorities were, I might use the word "aesthetic." Above all, the four of us were interested in creating things of beauty and we were pretty well convinced that we were artists (or, at least) artisans, aspiring to works of power and grace. Some of my peeps might object to the wording I just used, but I think the general idea applies. How did this micro-community of similarly interested people form? Slowly and without any of us planning it.

I met Shreyas through his first post about Torchbearer (15 Oct 2002), a transformative, flourish-filled fantasy about power, love, and tragedy. He was posting under the name "four willows weeping" back then and I thought he was a girl for the first couple of weeks, just from his writing style. I began our relationship by being an annoying know-it-all and correcting his Chinese. Yet, I was totally his fanboy by the end of that first thread, writing examples of play based on a game I was just getting to know, just because Shreyas' aesthetic sense was so strong that it was easy to latch onto ("My Sword is Sharp as Winter," being the classic example). Since then, our relationship has tended to be that way, with me being ridiculously excited about everything Shreyas does, which I hope doesn't annoy him too terribly much. But we began a kind of mutual admiration society, out of the realization that we were writing games that appealed to each other, at least in their ideals and goals if not in the actual execution. Also, we were unsatisfied by most of the published Forge games, in ways similar to how we were unsatisfied with mainstream roleplaying. Certainly, these new indie games were doing something different, but it was not the kind of different that we really got excited about. My "working relationships" with Eero and Ben developed in very similar ways.

What, you may well ask, did any of this have to do with GNS, the Big Model, the Infamous Five, the Lumpley Principle, Stances, IIEE, the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast, Vanilla, Pervy, and all the other bits of jargon and theory that have become the wider world's view of the Forge? Um, well, nothing.

I participated in some of those conversations, mostly trying to understand what people were saying, but largely stayed out of it. The first forum I read every morning was Indie Game Design, which, after 6 months or so, was largely abandoned by the old-timers, leaving it to us newbie kids. It took me a long time to get around to reading Ron's essays. I can remember a frustrating discussion with Ron in which I tried to suggest that his model was missing an important "Stance." Now I think that I was trying to arbitrarily divide things up into categories that made sense to me, since Ron's arbitrarily divided categories were based on things that made sense to him. I was unwittingly using techniques from "Feminist epistimology"; instead of saying "it is A, so B" I was trying to say, "well, if it was A, then B." I was proposing new ideas which I hoped would lead, in turn, to even more interesting ideas, instead of looking for a real truth that I doubted was there. Ron wanted evidence that the model I was proposing was better, which I didn't have. For me, what was important was creating a model which was different, preferrably, as different as possible, because different models would lead to different kinds of games. I tried, off and on, to create a model which would support me in creating the kinds of games that I was interested in designing, but it often seemed like I was struggling against the grain, so I eventually gave it up.

What the Forge remained, in spite of my frustration with making an impact in Theory, was a virtual space in which I could congregate with players and designers who might possibly be interested in some of the wacky ideas I was proposing and who would propose equally wacky and fascinating ideas. We're beginning seeing the fruits of some of those interactions (the Forge Third Wave?). Ben's Polaris, Emily's Breaking the Ice, Shreyas's Mridangam, and, once we finish them, Shreyas's Torchbearer and my first major game, Vesperteen. None of these games needs a GM. All of them offer a play experience that bears little resemblance to those offered by traditional roleplaying or the earlier generation of Forge games. They're what Kenneth Hite has dubbed "almost roleplaying games, but not quite." And because these wacky ideas were tolerated (and even supported) at the Forge, we're seeing them flourish. Which is why I'm a Forge-hater-hater. When people talk about the Cult of Ron, I go "huh?" When people talk about the Forge only accepting certain kinds of ideas, I go "what?" That's just not my experience at all. The Forge was what we decided to make of it. We weren't expected to like all the games or get along with everyone (in fact, Ron and Shreyas are like fire and ice, nowadays, but Ron still recommended Raven Swallows the Sun), but you could certainly find people interested in the same kinds of things that you were.

So, while most of the people involved in that "Third Wave" have moved on, and now it looks like the Forge is moving on as well, I will continue to miss the closeness, daily encounters, and shared committment I felt over the past 2-3 years with a bunch of amazing individuals. So I say, "Godspeed, Forge. May angels sing thee sweetly to thy rest." And then, turning to the dawn, onward and upward.