Finishing up
greyorm:
It's been a ride. Thanks everyone!
Larry L.:
Thanks Clinton and Ron and Vincent for everything. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this cool thing. Thanks to everyone who figured out how to get their awesome game realized and into my grubby hands.
The Forge was not merely the thing which breathed new life into a hobby I was basically ready to abandon out of frustration. It was something really special on the entire Internet. Ron's moderation brought a unique combination of academic rigor, cutting through the bullshit which plagues 99.999% of online discourse, paired with a kind of straight-talking enthusiasm for a number of geeky pastimes, which given the topic at hand was necessary for any of this to be genuine or to matter. It brought together the shared expertise of hundreds of scattered subject matter experts who had probably never thought of themselves in those terms. It was a model for Internet discussion. It was what any hobby's community wishes it could achieve.
Everything is different and better.
charlesperez:
Yes, it has been quite a time, both lurking these years and making the occasional post.
Charles
Moreno R.:
I was hoping that someone would say what i wanted to write better that I would have. Thanks, Larry, I am adding my signature to your post, if you don't mind.
Quote from: Larry L. on May 31, 2012, 04:54:16 PM
Thanks Clinton and Ron and Vincent for everything. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this cool thing. Thanks to everyone who figured out how to get their awesome game realized and into my grubby hands.
The Forge was not merely the thing which breathed new life into a hobby I was basically ready to abandon out of frustration. It was something really special on the entire Internet. Ron's moderation brought a unique combination of academic rigor, cutting through the bullshit which plagues 99.999% of online discourse, paired with a kind of straight-talking enthusiasm for a number of geeky pastimes, which given the topic at hand was necessary for any of this to be genuine or to matter. It brought together the shared expertise of hundreds of scattered subject matter experts who had probably never thought of themselves in those terms. It was a model for Internet discussion. It was what any hobby's community wishes it could achieve.
Everything is different and better.
What the forge did, for me, was to show me that the hobby I was leaving behind, disgusted by what it had become, had worth after all. That it could be something better, with better instruments, better procedures and better practices. That it was not necessarily poisonous.
I did sign up in early 2006, so this mean that I was here for more than half of the forum history. There is more Forge with me than without me. It's strange to think about that, I am still seeing myself as the new guy who has to go read the old posts to understand what the others are saying. And reading the old posts I realized that I had it easy, coming here when all the difficult work was already done, the "forge theories" proved beyond any rational doubt by new games that surpassed everything that had come before, the big model already drawn and explained with years of experience explaining it. It had to be much more difficult believing in what the Forge stood for in 2001. But reading these first threads, I would have liked to be there at the beginning. instead of wasting more years with broken games and bad habits..
When I started to flame after that against these same old useless habits and broken games in Italian forums and conventions I was only venting my rage, but I found that really a lot of people shared that rage and were searching for something better. A lot of these people became my friends, and the Italian gentechegioca community has grown both in number and in sociality in a way I would not have considered possible only a few years ago. And nothing of that would exist without the Forge.
And finally, without the Forge I would not have known and I would not have met Ron, Vincent, Meguey, Paul, and Danielle, and that would have been really a pity.
I am not happy to see this place closing. I will miss it, even if was almost empty at the end. And about that... I consider it the biggest failure, not of the Forge, but of the community that was attracted by this forum in 2001-2005. The way a lot of people did read "talk about theory only in Actual Play terms" as "you can't talk about theory anymore" (or maybe it was honestly a "if I have to play to talk about theory, I am leaving this place"). I think that a certain point, in this community, commerce and/or status games took the place of actual play and reflection for a lot of people, with bad consequences both for the forum and the community.
The Forge would have been closed anyway, this is clear from at least 2005. The pity is not that it's closing (even if I will miss it a lot...), it's that it was not more used it the last years that it was open. Now it's too late.
Too late to post new threads, anyway. But luckily the forum will stay here, and there are still a lot of interesting threads I have still not read...
Christoph Boeckle:
Thank you Ron, Clinton and Vincent, thanks a million. Without the Forge I'd most probably have stopped playing RPGs. Now I'm moderating a small French-speaking forum very much inspired by the Forge, with some games having been started thanks to that forum now seeing the light of day as finished and utterly playable and satisfying games, some independently published, another in the end being taken up by a small press publisher. I hope I'll finish my first game soon too, as an independent endeavour. Thanks for bringing the ideas of independence and of thoughtful game design to such a wide audience, role-playing is a better hobby now than it used to be. I'm looking forward to supporting the spirit of the Forge into the future, in whatever appropriate forms we'll find.
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