thanks for the good play, Forge

Because the Forge is going quiet in a bit, I wanted to express my thanks to Ron, Vincent, Clinton, and everyone else involved in running the Forge, and also in contributing to it. Although I've never designed a game, the Forge impacted my "actual play" enormously, and I feel has been instrumental in improving my skills as a player and GM. You guys made a huge difference to me. Thank you.

I found out about the Forge sometime in the Spring of 2004 through an RPG.Net thread about Donjon, which I absolutely loved.

Around that time, I was running a long Alternity campaign which had become somewhat railroady and frustrating. Several of the Forge discussions back then were focused on stakes-setting techniques, and these ended up saving the campaign for me.

In early '05 I got a chance to play the old, non-Fudge version of Shadow of Yesterday, which became my go-to game for much of 2005.

Via a game of Primetime Adventures I got involved with NerdNYC, which has become a big source of friends and good times over the last seven years.

After struggling a bit with Sorcerer in Summer '06, we went back and did it again in Summer '07 and it was a great experience as I learned to completely let go of managing "an adventure." This was a seminal moment in my gaming career, I think. Without this lesson, I wouldn't have been as receptive or as capable of doing sandbox style play with the New York Red Box, my current gang.

Along the way I've had lots of fun playing With Great Power, Dogs in the Vineyard, My Life with Master, Trollbabe, Burning Wheel, Paladin, Capes, The Pool, and Breaking the Ice. Through the discussions and articles, I've learned about Puppetland, Prince Valiant, King Arthur Pendragon, and Dying Earth, games that I probably never would have heard of, let alone played and fell in love with. Somewhere in early 2008, one of the Ben's posted a thread about playing early-edition D&D again, which was one of the catalysts behind forming New York's largest OSR gang.

Thanks to those experiences - particularly with learning to loosen up the Alternity game, and figuring out the "create a tense situation; let the players disturb it; play out the consequences" style of GM'ing in Sorcerer - I've come to view gaming as a kind of dialogue, a collaboration. (I won't use Ron's jam band metaphor because it's over used, but it's exactly on point.) Or, rather - I had been told all along, in all these countless GM books, that running a game was a collaboration with the players, but they didn't teach me how to collaborate. These Forge games and discussion threads, at that particular time, for this particular gamer, taught me these things.

These games were fun to play, but the act of playing them improved the play of a lot of other games too. People put a lot of hard work into this site, and that hard work led to me and my friends having an enormous amount of fun. I can't thank y'all enough.