A Dark And Quiet Room

I posted this to an RPG forum, but I thought that I’d put it here for further discussion, if warranted. Plus, if I write something, I like to post it as widely as possible. It’s good for my ego.

Thanks, Joce. I appreciate the kind words.

Just thought that I’d add a note about Forge theory.

But, best of all, this is a game you can just pick up and play, without requiring any knowledge of Forge RPG theory. This was a flaw in the two indie games I have read in the past (Dogs in the Vineyard and My Life With Master). If you didn’t know RPG theory, you missed out on some stuff, or some of the rules ended up being hard to grasp. That annoyed me to no end in both cases. It’s not the case with Dirty Secrets. Although I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been designed in a vacuum, it’s written in a vacuum - everything is explained plainly in the book, without the need for you to have read anything else, be it another RPG or Forge ideology.

I really appreciate Forge theory. I’ve been on the Forge since its inception in 2001, and I’m grateful for the body of thought that has come from that site, including the games that have resulted from the theoretical work done on the site. Dirty Secrets is well within that stream of thought, and I acknowledge my primary design inspirations, which include Ron Edwards’ Spione, Ralph Mazza’s Universalis, and Ben Lehman’s Polaris.

But….

I really don’t like it when design theory jargon (or my preferred title, which is “terms of art”) work their way into a game manuscript.

I firmly believe in the importance of design theory to inform your design, and, if anyone here really cared, I could break open the various aspects of Dirty Secrets and explain their theoretical underpinnings, using the proper terms of art. But the game text is not the place for a theory discussion; it’s the place to teach how to play the game. So, for example, unless your game is Sorcerer, you shouldn’t be talking about Bangs in your game text. The concept, absolutely. The word, no.

By analogy, imagine a computer game. There’s a lot of technical work that goes into making a computer game work. But the computer game documentation shouldn’t discuss (say) how to interface with DirectX or how to construct the neural net that runs the AI opponent. Those are terms of art, used to discuss the design of the game. Rather, the game documentation should teach you how to play the game in the clearest manner possible.

And that’s what I tried to do with Dirty Secrets.

Brian Peters had ordered a copy of Dirty Secrets around the time when Indie Press Revolution was out of stock. So I offered him a copy of the PDF to tide him over until his printed copy came. Here’s what Brian had to say about the Dirty Secrets PDF edition.

“One of the best looking PDF RPG books I’ve ever seen!”

“If more [RPGs in PDF format] had linking and cross referencing and the nifty bookmarks and such like yours does, I’d be much more interested in purchasing games in pdf format.”

Thanks, Brian!

I sent Jocelyn Robitaille a copy of Dirty Secrets to review for RPG.net. He makes some initial comments here:

This game is tight, y’all - I am very impressed with how focussed and streamlined the bits and pieces all are.

But, best of all, this is a game you can just pick up and play, without requiring any knowledge of Forge RPG theory….Although I’m pretty sure [Dirty Secrets] hasn’t been designed in a vacuum, it’s written in a vacuum - everything is explained plainly in the book, without the need for you to have read anything else, be it another RPG or Forge ideology.

Thanks, Jocelyn!