I’m not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn’t a popularity contest, it’s not the moral Olympics, and it’s not church. But it’s writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else.
Wash the car, maybe.

Stephen King (From “On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft)

Hi Folks, it’s me, Paganini, from a long, long time ago in a Forge far, far away. I have some things on my mind.

I was a part of the Forge, and I miss it. In particular, I miss talking with people who think that RPGs are worth thinking about seriously, but who don’t (at least up to a point) take themselves all that seriously. I guess there were some self-important people at the Forge, but what I mean is that, nowadays if you check in with places like RPG.net, Reddit, Stack Exchange, etc., it seems like not only is there not much good thinking going on, everyone is also out to get each other!

At the Forge, round about 2001 or so, we used to see a recurring thread that was something like “O WOE! WE HAVE ALL THESE GREAT IDEAS BUT NO ONE PLAYS OUR GAMES!” This was somewhat tedious in that it was not – contrary to Forge custom – a practical discussion of “Hey, how can we, as independent game designers be more effective at getting the word out?” but was, rather, a kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I and some other members thought that it was no one’s responsibility but our own to play our games, and if there were a bunch of people who wanted to play but weren’t getting to, well, there was a whole internet right there that we could use to do that. We started up a group called Indie Net-gaming. The first few games we played via the e-mail list (this was an e-Group I think, or maybe a OneList, which eventually became a YahooGroup when Yahoo bought out all the list-servers.) We pretty swiftly moved the actual gaming to IRC, where we did the majority of our playing for the next five years.

In 2008 I became less active in the community, due to intrusions from the professional and personal world. Indie Net-gaming carried on, however, eventually moving to a Discord server, where there are still a handful of us left from that original crowd, but not much actual play any more. By the time of COVID I had more or less stopped playing games altogether. 2024 was a particularly bad year for me, personally, and I was in kind of a low spot when earlier this year (2025) Mike Holmes invited me to join a Forged in the Dark game he was running. To be honest, I don’t much like Blades in the Dark, but I welcomed the opportunity to socialize with an old friend and meet some new people.

That got me thinking about RPGs again, and (what always happens when I think about RPGs) thinking about writing again. I’ve been aware of this community (AdeptPlay) for a while, but I had a misunderstanding about what it actually was (I was under the impression that it was a kind of paywall for Ron’s teaching gig). A while ago Jesse set me straight about that, and here I am, writing this intro post.

So, what is on my mind?

First, playing in Mike’s game has made me realize that I miss my kind of games, the ones that I played and ran a lot of back in the early 2000s, and that I still think of as Narrativism. Please don’t think that this is an indictment of Mike’s game; I’m having a good time, and I knew up front exactly what sort of game it would be. But playing in it has reminded me that there’s another way to play that I used to like a lot and used to be good at. I’d like to do that again.

Second, there’s that word Narrativism. I know it’s deprecated and widely misappropriated (Don’t search Reddit for “Narrativism.” Seriously, it will crush your soul.) but that’s the word I use to myself, because that’s what this was called when I learned how to do it. It eventually became “Story Now,” but I don’t know if people still use that expression either. So, there’s a language issue of getting up-to-date with current terms, or rehabilitating and dusting off some old ones. I’m going to keep saying “Narrativism,” if no one objects, because I like its action-oriented connotation. Narrativism is something I do, not something I have, or want, or feel.

Three, I am not much of a Platonic thinker these days. Twenty years ago I was all wound up trying to pin down just what was that abstract essence, that “Narrativismness,” the “that without which not,” the “Narrativism-nature”. I just don’t care about that at all any more. I’ve read Wittgenstein since then. All of this stuff is bundles and spectra. There is no essential nature ideal form blah blah blah. I want to talk about how really to do it – what we used to call “Techniques.”

Four, I’m also not that interested in game design any more. I’ve always felt that In order to deeply understand how something works I need to be able to make that thing. There will probably always be more to discover about how RPGs work: RPGs really quickly get right up against very deep human mysteries, like how language works, how our perceptions interact with our mental models of things, and all kinds of ethical and social and psychological problems. But I feel like I have a good enough handle on how RPGs work that I don’t need to make new tools any more; I have the ones I need to get what I want.

Five is Unity of Action, which is an expression from Aristotle’s Poetics. What it means is that a whole play (Aristotle is talking about Greek Tragedy) is about one thing, and just that one thing. This is contrasted with other genres – such as History, where events are portrayed because they happen in a particular place or at a particular time, but are otherwise unrelated to each other. We never used this term at the Forge. I certainly hadn’t read any Aristotle in 2001! But I think we spent a lot of time looking for it, and trying to figure out how to get it. It’s almost right out in the open in Trollbabe. Looking back, I think that some of our games flopped because they lacked Unity of Action. Yes, our characters were “thematic” in the sense that they were encountering moral dilemmas, but those ethical choices were not linked strongly, or even at all. Random moral encounters aren’t much less tedious than random monster encounters are.

I have more things on my mind, but I think those five built up the momentum I needed to write this post. They’re what have been distracting me while mowing the yard and loading the dishwasher. Thanks for reading!