Rules in Practice, part 4
“System Does Matter,”
The Forge and the Story Games Revolution
(2000s-2010)
Read more of the Rules in Practice series
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As was discussed in Part 3, by the late 1990s, the tabletop RPG community was buzzing with debates about how games should be played and designed. The internet had enabled far-flung discussions on forums like RPG.net and, soon after, a dedicated site called The Forge (active 2001–2012). Even at its height The Forge’s user base was relatively small (in the low thousands), but it wielded an outsized influence on RPG design discourse. It became a focal point for a broader indie RPG resurgence that had developed in the shadow of mainstream titles like Dungeons & Dragons and the early-2000s d20 boom.
While D&D’s 3rd Edition and its Open Game License (OGL) spawned a glut of third-party products, often dubbed “indie” in the economic sense, the Forge’s indie movement meant something quite different: authors pursuing personal design visions with full creative control, rather than piggybacking on a universal system.
This philosophical schism in what it meant to be independent would define much of the era’s discourse and set the stage for a revolution in game design. At the heart of the Forge debates was a sense of dissatisfaction with traditional RPGs. Many designers and players felt that big mainstream games (especially D&D at the time) were trying to be “jack of all trades, master of none.”
The contention was that a game like AD&D or Vampire: The Masquerade came with extensive rules and lore, but how people actually played could vary wildly—and often the mechanics didn’t necessarily support the kind of stories a given group wanted to tell.
In other words, the rules and the desired experience sometimes only tenuously overlapped. Why, many asked, should a group have to bend or ignore rules in order to have a satisfying night of storytelling? Amid this discourse emerged a rallying cry: “System Does Matter.”
Coined in a 1999 essay by Ron Edwards (one of The Forge’s founders), this phrase encapsulated the idea that a game’s rules have a direct, significant impact on the fiction and fun that result at the table, and thus rules should be deliberately designed to support a particular kind of play. Edwards was pushing back against the then-common wisdom that “any system will do if you have a good GM.”
Instead, he posited that certain RPG systems are objectively better for certain genres or themes—so if you want a game to feel like a Shakespearean tragedy, you need mechanics that create tragic dilemmas, not just generic rules that might produce tragedy by accident, or as a result of ad hoc roleplaying that isn’t driven by an underlying system. In short, system matters because mechanics guide decisions as well as outcomes: the rules shape the story that emerges, sometimes in subtle but powerful ways.
Good game design, in this view, means baking the desired experience into the mechanics so that the game naturally produces the kind of moments the players came for, without the group having to fight the system or heavily house-rule it. It has been my experience that there is much to recommend this view, although in many cases systems that try to take too much control can very quickly feel like the thing you have to fight against to get where you want to go.
This tension is perhaps one of the central paradoxes of roleplaying games, and at the same time, what can make them so—for lack of a better term—magical.
GNS Theory: Gamist, Narrativist, Simulationist
Alongside the slogan “system does matter,” The Forge crowd introduced (or refined) several theoretical frameworks to analyze how system and play style interact. The most famous (and controversial) was GNS Theory, which categorized play styles—or “Creative Agendas”—into three broad modes: Gamist, Narrativist, or Simulationist.
In simplified terms:
A Gamist approach focuses first on challenge and achievement, treating the RPG like a game that can be played well or poorly, emphasizing player skill and tactical goals within the context of RAW.
A Narrativist approach focuses first on creating a thematic story, treating the game like a collaborative storytelling engine, with the fiction put first.
A Simulationist approach focuses first on modeling an internally consistent world or experience, treating the system like a world simulation, either for the sake of narrative cohesion / verisimilitude or to explore for its own sake.
These terms built on earlier 1990s discussions of the “Threefold Model” (Drama, Game, Simulation) but discourse on The Forge gave them sharper definition and a somewhat prescriptive twist.
As I’ve written previously in this series, I believe models like this are well and good when considered a general description of what might otherwise go undescribed, but when considered a prescriptive model of what is happening and the range of what can happen, it can be misleading, or even (somewhat ironically) internally incoherent.
This sort of extreme framing was arguably never part of the initial intent in the model, but it has certainly become part of the conversation in the time since. These approaches are better understood as not mutually exclusive, and in many cases present a question of order or priority rather than either/or. For example, does the dice roll outcome lead the narrative, or is it a means of resolving what happens as the outcome of an already determined narrative? In other cases, it may be the difference between what’s foreground or backgrounded. (This was discussed more in Part 3 of this series.)
With that caveat, I’ll try to describe what the predominant understanding of this model was.
According to GNS theory, many traditional games were a muddled mix of all three agendas, which could lead to tension or “incoherence” when a group’s members had different expectations. For example, D&D might attract both Gamist players who enjoy tactical combat and Narrativist players who want epic character drama.
The “rules as written” of D&D arguably support the former more than the latter, so a given session can become a tug-of-war—perhaps the game incentivizes careful combat and loot (a more Gamist/Simulationist bent) while one player ignores the dungeon to pursue their character’s personal arc (a Narrativist bent).
Some groups can manage that sort of mismatch, but it often results in frustration or the need for heavy GM fudging to keep things fun. Many Forge theorists argued that a “coherent” game design should primarily target one mode and reinforce it with matching mechanics, rather than trying to please everyone at once.
In Forge terminology, “coherence” meant everyone at the table working toward the same creative agenda, producing a smoother play experience. “Incoherence,” by contrast, was the result of incompatible agendas built into the game or the group, leading to friction or reliance on a GM to bend the rules. Edwards in particular warned that RPGs which tried to mix all three goals (“do everything” systems common in the 90s) usually produced inferior experiences: such a game often relies on the group to ignore or modify half the rules to get the experience they want, essentially forcing players to do extra design work on the fly.
Whether or not GNS was an entirely accurate model of all role-playing, its influence was huge in encouraging designers to think critically about what experience their rules were fostering. The core message was that you should design your game deliberately around the kind of fun you’re aiming to create. This line of thinking led to a wave of RPGs that unabashedly took sides in the style debate, planting a flag in one corner of GNS.
Not every designer agreed with the stricter interpretations of GNS categories—even some Forge contributors later evolved the theory into the more nuanced “Big Model,” acknowledging interplay of social contract, in-game exploration, etc.—but the mantra of “system matters, design for what you want” resonated widely.
It directly rebutted the old-school mentality that system was secondary and a good GM could force any system to produce any kind of story. The Forge crowd flipped that around: good design should make it easy to match play-style preferences with systems that serve those preferences, rather than you fighting the system to make it happen.
The Story Games Movement: Narrative-First Mechanics
The early-to-mid 2000s saw an explosion of indie RPGs born from these ideas, a creative wave often called the Story Games movement. These games were typically small-press or self-published titles that focused on innovative mechanics tied directly to narrative outcomes and player choices.
The Story Games philosophy prioritized collaborative storytelling, “fiction-first” mechanics, and often a more distributed narrative authority at the table. Unlike traditional games where the GM is the primary storyteller and arbiter of the world, many Story Games experimented with giving players direct power to influence the story’s direction, sometimes even letting players frame scenes or introduce plot twists normally reserved for GMs.
The result was a different balance of power and creativity: these designs trusted players and GMs together to create fiction, guided by the prompts and constraints of the rules, rather than relying on a top-down, pre-scripted plot. A hallmark concept from this design movement was “play to find out”—the idea that no one, not even the GM, should script a pre-defined linear narrative beforehand.
Instead, the story emerges through play, with mechanics ensuring it heads in a thematically satisfying direction. This ethos took the emergent, unexpected fun of old-school dungeon crawling (where a session’s story comes from whatever happens in play) and applied it to dramatic narratives. In an old D&D dungeon crawl, you might end up with an unplanned tale of how the party survived against all odds, if it coheres into anything resembling a story. However, traditionally, the story was not the point of play.
In a Story Game, you might discover an unexpected story about, say, whether a hero’s love for his brother outweighs his duty. The key is that the outcome isn’t pre-authored, it’s discovered at the table. Apocalypse World (2010) by D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker, one of the era’s most influential Story Games, formalized this principle in the GM’s Agenda: “play to find out what happens.”
Many have taken this to mean the GM should never pre-plan outcomes or force a storyline, however D. Vincent Baker recently explained in a Reddit AMA (as part of the promotion for the upcoming Apocalypse World 3rd edition):
One common mistake is the idea that players shouldn’t name their own moves. They should.
Another is that “play to find out what happens” means that you shouldn’t prep, and that the GM shouldn't create elements of the world and its history without the players’ input. Not true, at least in Apocalypse World.
In Apocalypse World, it’s okay to ask for the players’ input when you want it, but the players are only responsible for their characters, and the GM is fully responsible for creating the world, the backstory of the environment, all the NPCs and their plans and intentions and everything.
You play to find out what happens when they meet.
Quite a critical distinction.
To see how system and style were fused in Story Games, it’s helpful to look at a few concrete examples. The decade from 2001 to 2010 saw the release of numerous indie RPGs that served as proof-of-concept for the Forge’s design theories. These games unabashedly put narrative first and showed how inventive mechanics could yield new kinds of stories at the table.
A pivotal early example was Ron Edwards’ own Sorcerer (2001), essentially the archetype of “Story Now” design. Sorcerer is about modern-day individuals who bind demons, exploring the theme of “what would you pay for power?”
It made the character’s moral dilemma into a game mechanic: the core stat Humanity measures one’s connection to humanity vs. darkness, and summoning or controlling demons forces you to spend or risk that Humanity. In other words, the cost of power becomes a quantifiable, player-facing choice.
This was a stark departure from games that treated morality purely as story fluff. Sorcerer’s system enforces its premise by making every use of demonic power a potential step toward your character’s doom. Even the resolution mechanics were crafted to reward narratively setting up your actions. All of this made Sorcerer a quintessential “story first” game by design: its rules engineered to confront players with tough thematic choices, exemplifying the Narrativist agenda in practice.
The Burning Wheel Gold Edition: Can you wrap your head around it? ⚙️ RPG Review & Mechanics
Around the same time, Luke Crane’s The Burning Wheel (2002) showed how one could marry gamist proceduralism with narrative character focus. Burning Wheel is a crunchy, detailed fantasy system, but it introduced the influential idea of Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits (BITs) as the heart of character and story, and which are embedded within the other systems of the game.
The move of embedding character within the system was particularly novel. Players in Burning Wheel write explicit Beliefs for their characters—actionable convictions like “I will reclaim my family’s ancestral sword from the usurper, Lord Valerius.”
Similarly, it systemetizes another popular element of RPGs that is very often merely a type of “flavor text”: that of their Backstory. This is done through Lifepaths, so that Skills, Talents and so on are all a product of the life that character has lived up to the point that play begins, and their starting age is a function of these past chunks of their “story so far.”
The GM is then systemically obliged to challenge those Beliefs during play, and players are rewarded (with a meta-currency called Artha) when they pursue their Beliefs in ways that complicate their lives. This creates a powerful feedback loop where the characters’ personal goals drive the narrative direction.
Another seminal title often cited as pure Forge-style design is D. Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard (2004). Dogs casts the players as youthful religious lawmen in a mythical Wild West, handing them ultimate moral authority in the communities they visit.
Its revolutionary conflict resolution system turns every skirmish into a high-stakes moral drama. Conflicts are played out as a kind of raising and seeing duel with dice, but the crucial innovation is escalation: a conflict might start with harsh words, but a player can choose to escalate—to go from talking, to shoving, to drawing a gun—each step opening up new dice to roll.
The catch is that escalating violence increases the potential consequences (fallout) for your character. That isn’t just lost Hit Points; it can scar your character or change them, but it’s also how you advance. In effect, the game rewards you for getting in trouble and suffering the consequences.
The brilliance of Dogs in the Vineyard is that its mechanics force players to continually decide what principles their characters will stand by or compromise on: do you shoot a sinner to uphold the law, even if it means innocent collateral damage? Every conflict becomes a test of faith and judgment.
In Forge terms, the system is the story in Dogs. There’s no pre-written plot—the GM’s role is simply to present an evocative situation (“this town is torn apart by sin and dissent, what do you do?”) and then follow the game’s procedures. The dice and escalation rules ensure that play will produce a story where the characters’ beliefs are tested and consequences spiral outward, addressing the game’s central themes of justice, faith, and violence.
It’s a prime example of Forge design principles: mechanics and theme inextricably linked. Fast-forward a few years to a very different style of indie game: Fiasco (2009) by Jason Morningstar. Fiasco emerged from what you might call the “Forge diaspora”—designers influenced by the story-game ethos even if they weren’t publishing on The Forge forums by that point.
Listen to our interview with Jason Morningstar about his recent Kickstarter for Zhenya’s Wonder Tales.
This game pushes the envelope by eliminating the GM entirely and using carefully structured randomness to generate a fully formed story arc. The premise of Fiasco is to emulate a Coen Brothers style caper-gone-wrong: characters with big ambitions and poor impulse control making a mess of things.
At the start of play, the group of players picks a Playset (a scenario pack) that establishes an initial web of relationships and motives. They then use a pool of dice to collaboratively define details: relationships between characters, important needs or objects, and so on, which sets up the situation. Play proceeds in scenes that the players take turns setting up.
Here’s the twist: if you establish the scene, other players get to decide whether it’s going to end well or badly for your character by giving you a positive or negative outcome die, whereas if you resolve the scene, you leave the setup to the group but you get to narrate how it turns out.
Halfway through the session, Fiasco introduces a randomly generated Tilt—an unexpected chaotic event that ensures things go off the rails—and at the end, an Aftermath phase determines each character’s fate (also via the dice outcomes the players accumulated). All of this is explicitly geared to produce the kind of rising-action-to-disastrous-conclusion arc you’d see in a darkly comic crime film.
Fiasco is essentially a story-generation machine: its rules exist solely to enforce the beats of its chosen genre and distribute narrative authority across the whole group. It shows that if you design the right constraints, you don’t even need a GM; the mechanics themselves can make sure that a satisfying (and chaotic) story emerges by the end of play.
Finally, closing out the decade, we circle back to D. Vincent Baker with Apocalypse World.
Apocalypse World would become famous as the genesis of the “Powered by the Apocalypse” (PbtA) engine, spawning countless hack games moving forward into the 2010s, but it’s also a capstone of the 2000s indie design revolution. The game distilled many Forge-era lessons into a sleek framework, and a progenitor of what came next.
In AW, characters have specific Moves listed on their playbooks, each described in plain language of the fiction—e.g. “When you go aggro on someone (i.e. threaten violence to get your way), roll +Hard.” This is a pure fiction-first approach: you don’t say “I use my Intimidation skill,” you say “I grab the warlord by the collar and slam him against the wall,” and that narrative trigger tells you which move to roll.
Every move has only a few possible outcomes, usually on a 2d6 roll: a full success (10+), a partial success (7–9) with a twist, or a miss (6 or less) which means the GM gets to make a troublemaking move in response.
The GM in AW never rolls dice; instead, the GM is guided by an agenda and principles (e.g. “make the world seem real,” “make the characters’ lives not boring,” and of course “look through crosshairs” and “play to find out what happens”). Following these principles means the GM should respond to whatever the players do, rather than pre-planning outcomes.
Although that is not to say the GM shouldn’t pre-plan anything at all, as outcomes and setting are not one and the same. It is instead effectively angling towards distinguishing between setting and plot. In short, setting is within the GMs purview, but the intent is for the system itself to create the story arcs, with GM and players alike discovering the narrative through play.
This design was a direct answer to the perceived problems of traditional “Trad” style play: there’s no need for a benevolent GM to fudge dice for drama or force a predetermined plot, because Apocalypse World’s mechanics will generate drama and surprises on their own. It’s the culmination of the Forge ideal that a well-crafted system can reliably produce a satisfying story in play.
Little wonder that AW’s approach caught on like wildfire in the years that followed. However, it’s important to note that the Story Games approach didn’t replace older styles of play—far from it. Throughout the 2000s, plenty of groups stuck with D&D, GURPS, Shadowrun or other traditional games and enjoyed them as-is.
Others might have borrowed a trick or two from the indie scene, for example, running a Session Zero to set expectations, or lifting the idea of Fate-style Aspects into a D&D game to encourage roleplay. And of course, some gamers and designers outright rejected the Story Games philosophy, preferring the older models.
In fact, as the Forge-influenced narrative games were rising, another movement was brewing as a counterpoint—the Old-School Renaissance (OSR), which looked back to the 1970s style of play for inspiration instead of forging ahead into new design territory. The OSR’s rallying cry of “Rulings, Not Rules”—emphasizing ruling by GM judgment and player skill over codified mechanics—can be seen as almost a direct rebuttal to the Forge’s “System Does Matter” ethos, or at least a vigorous debate with it.
The takeaway here is that the 2000s RPG scene was diverse and at times ideologically heated—a decade of experiments and arguments about what RPGs should be and could be.
Note: The OSR movement is an important story in its own right, introduced in Part 2 of this series. I’ll be getting back to it in detail in the next installment.
Parallel Movements: the d20 Boom and Nordic LARP
While The Forge was spearheading the story-games revolution, it did not exist in a vacuum. Its development and design principles were shaped in relation to other major forces in the RPG hobby, including the commercial mainstream and international avant-garde scenes. One of those forces was the aforementioned d20 boom triggered by D&D’s 3rd Edition OGL.
The years after 2000 saw an unprecedented flood of third-party D&D-compatible products. This in turn gave rise to two parallel meanings of “indie RPG.” For the d20 publishers, “indie” meant economic independence — small press creators could suddenly tap into a huge market by publishing for an open system, without needing Wizards of the Coast’s blessing.
It was about market access. For The Forge community, however, “indie” meant creative independence, owning your work outright and designing a unique system tailored to a specific artistic vision. It was about breaking away from D&D’s shadow, not capitalizing on it.
This fundamental schism explains a lot of the online tribalism of that era. Forge designers often disparaged the typical OGL d20 offerings as derivative, or as “fantasy heartbreakers,” which buried nuggets of brilliant, innovative design inside clunky, outdated systems that merely mimicked AD&D. In turn, fans of d20 products sometimes saw the Forge folks as pretentious or out-of-touch with what most gamers actually wanted.
The two “indie” scenes had very different goals: one was extending and expanding the life of the D&D monoculture, the other was rebelling against it.
Also, even as The Forge was focusing on tabletop theory, an experimental live-action roleplaying movement was flourishing in Scandinavia – centered around the annual Knutepunkt conference and a network of designers pushing RPGs as an art form.
There was significant overlap between The Forge crowd and the Nordic larp/freeform scene, especially at conventions and in small-press circles. Designers like Emily Care Boss, Epidiah Ravachol, Jason Morningstar, and others moved back and forth between those spaces, importing ideas about immersion, calibration tools, and emotional intensity into Forge-adjacent indie design and vice versa. Emily’s later “American freeform” work is a good example of that bridge: tabletop procedures married to Nordic-style scenario design and larp techniques.
From a Forge perspective, the apparent “lack of mechanics” in Nordic-style play was itself a kind of system. The Lumpley Principle defines system as the whole set of procedures by which a group agrees on what happens in the fiction. Seen through that lens, Nordic games were highly structured: casting, workshops, strict situational framing, written character briefs, calibrations, and post-game debriefs all acted as mechanics, even when there were no numeric stats. Instead of a resolution engine on a character sheet, the “rules” lived in constraints on space, social position, and scene framing.
This was a deliberate reaction against more traditional larp formats such as Mind’s Eye Theatre, where layered powers, advancement, and reward systems often produced grindy or gamist incentives that undercut the kind of emotional or narrative experience many players actually wanted. Nordic designers pursued 360° illusion, strong scenography, and targeted meta-techniques as levers to shape play: building a concrete situation, embedding conflicts and relationships into the setup, and then letting committed performers run with it.
Story games coming out of the Forge orbit took a parallel path on the tabletop side. Instead of piling on modifiers, they systematized language: flags like Beliefs, Aspects, Keys, Kickers, Bangs, and relationship maps became the primary mechanics that drove scene framing and consequence. Games like Fiasco and various freeform or larp adaptations show that same logic applied to live play: procedures, prompts, and situation-building do the work that hit points and spell lists used to do.
Both movements treated structure as the engine of play. The difference was where they chose to locate that structure: in written rules and explicit resolution procedures on one side, and in scenario design, physical environment, and social constraints on the other.
Influence and Legacy
Love it or hate it, the Forge/Story Games revolution left a permanent mark on RPG design and on how gamers talk about design. By the 2010s, many concepts pioneered in the indie scene had filtered into the mainstream.
Even designers at big companies took notice that mechanics could be used in novel ways to shape narrative experience, not just resolve tasks. It became far more common for games to declare a specific creative agenda or to use mechanics that drive story.
The idea of having a dedicated Session Zero became a widely recommended practice became ubiquitous, directly echoing indie RPG onboarding techniques, but also games across the spectrum began to include narrative meta-currency—think of the Bennies in Savage Worlds or the Inspiration points in D&D 5th Edition (2014, 2024)—which clearly owe a debt to indie mechanics like Fate Points that reward players for roleplaying their characters or driving the story.
The very fact that D&D 5E includes Bonds, Ideals, and Flaws for characters (with perhaps underdeveloped mechanical rewards for invoking them) shows the influence of games like Burning Wheel and Fate on the industry. Genre-emulating “powered by” frameworks became popular as well—most directly the Powered by the Apocalypse phenomenon, where Apocalypse World’s framework was adapted to everything from high fantasy to superhero comics.
Outside of rules themselves, the Forge’s influence is visible in the language and analysis we use for RPGs today: terms like “narrative control,” “player agency,” or “creative agenda” are now common parlance, and the idea of explicitly discussing what kind of fun your group wants is far less unusual than it was in the 90s. The indie movement proved that deliberate design could deliver experiences very different from the traditional dungeon crawl, and that there was a hungry audience for those new experiences.
The legacy of the 2000s indie RPG renaissance is also evident in the business and community side of gaming. The Forge helped normalize the concept of the creator-owned RPG – the idea that a designer could publish a game outside the traditional publisher system and find their audience. The DIY ethos championed by The Forge (right down to forum threads on how to cheaply print books or handle shipping) paved the way for today’s crowd-funded and digital self-publishing boom. In the early 2000s it was a revelation that a lone creator’s quirky game (My Life with Master, Polaris, etc.) could gain acclaim and make a modest profit.
Now, thanks to platforms like Kickstarter and Itch.io, that model is utterly mainstream.
There’s a clear indie-to-mainstream pipeline that emerged: designers who cut their teeth on Forge-era games went on to work on major titles (for instance, D&D 5E had indie veterans on its design team), and many concepts forged in the indie crucible have been adopted by big-name RPGs. It’s not at all strange today to see a new D&D adventure encouraging collaborative world-building, or a Star Wars RPG to include narrative “twist” results on dice—ideas that trace back to the indie revolution of the 2000s.
None of this is to say The Forge’s influence was without controversy. The movement had a polarizing side, especially in its heyday. Some in the wider RPG community found the Forge’s jargon and quasi-academic theorizing off-putting, or felt that the Forge crowd were dismissive of traditional play.
At the peak of the debates, there were flame wars on forums and snarky editorials. A few extreme remarks from Forge figures provided ample fuel for critics—the infamous “brain damage” comment, for example, the suggestion that certain RPG play styles might stunt players’ creative thinking, was widely criticized as pretentious nonsense (and later walked back). Detractors sometimes used the term “storygame” derisively, to imply these indie games weren’t “real” RPGs at all but some artsy storytelling exercise.
On the other hand, many indie designers felt misunderstood – they weren’t out to kill the traditional RPG, just to expand the hobby’s possibilities. Over time, the initial heat of those arguments cooled.
The Forge itself closed down by 2012, its mission more or less accomplished, in Edwards’ view, and the community moving on. Many of its members migrated to other forums like Story-Games.com, founded in 2006 as a successor that aimed to continue indie RPG discussions in a less doctrinaire atmosphere.
By the late 2010s, most gamers came to recognize that different games serve different tastes, and the hobby is broad enough for both traditional and story-game approaches. As one retrospective noted, instead of writing off a game as “broken” just because it doesn’t fit a preconceived mold, we can ask what experience the design is aiming to create and evaluate it on that basis. The Forge’s big lesson—that knowing your design goal and aligning rules to it leads to better games—has been absorbed into the broader wisdom of the hobby.
In the end, the Forge and Story Games revolution of the 2000s decisively proved that system does matter, even if it isn’t all-determinitive or ever truly set in stone—that if you craft mechanics to reinforce a desired style of play, you can achieve remarkably coherent and compelling play experiences. This era produced games that were laser-focused on delivering certain types of stories, and in doing so it expanded our idea of what RPGs can be.
At the same time, the conversation between system and style continues. Later movements like the OSR, the emergence of “hybrid” designs that blend narrative and crunch, and ongoing debates in design communities all show that the pendulum never stops swinging. But wherever your tastes lie on that spectrum, the Forge’s emphasis on thinking critically about the relationship between rules and play remains a valuable perspective for designers and players alike.
Additional Reading & Resources:
Ron Edwards – “System Does Matter” (1999). The original essay that became the Forge’s manifesto, arguing that RPG mechanics must align with a game’s intended experience.
Ron Edwards – “GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory” (2001). A foundational essay defining Gamist, Narrativist, Simulationist agendas in detail, and discussing game design “coherence.”
RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, Game Study Study-Buddies podcast
Shannon Appelcline – Designers & Dragons: The 2000s (2014). A history book chronicling RPG industry trends in the 2000s, including the indie RPG boom and key figures of The Forge.
