Der PigDog's PigBlog

Prepare a scenario for play, using whatever tools are standard Frame scenes, including describing locations and marking the passage of time Tell other players whatever their characters would know Play their characters, on and off screen Adjudicate task resolution Make models And that’s it, literally nothing else. “Game” here doesn’t just mean published rules text, though it does also mean that. Mostly though it means whatever set of techniques, distributions of authority, constraints on authority, and resolution procedures your play group in fact uses. Following are some possible parts of a game that might not be in any rules text. They’re in the game if the play group does them. Write a little two-sentence bio. Make two characters at once, because one will likely die soon. Since your character died, do you want to play that guard until the end of session? Feel free to add details about [this place], your character is from there. Nat 20, nice! Tell me how you do it. We’re playing...

Since the Forge has lost some currency in popular RPG discourse, we don’t much talk about its theoretical fruits. In the following blog post, I’ll recover the Forgie notion of "reward cycle", with copious examples, mostly from actual play, disambiguating it from other concepts and showing how it sometimes works in play or goes astray. In the Forgie concept of games, a game is an instrument that a skilled play group uses to focus its play. We play games, not the other way around. I've written this blog post  to show how a skilled play group relates to a good game. I'm not writing for designers, though I do offer some tips for design, but for anybody interested in the phenomenology of play. Collective affective response and skilled play Group RPGs are social games. When I play well, I get a collective affective response. When things are going well, creatively, I can literally see it on the face of everyone playing. We’re all leaning in. (Note that “things going well, cr...