During July there was a social media activity under the hashtag #RPGTheoryJuly with a month's worth of daily prompts designed to spur people to talk about RPG Theory, i.e. the field of study (whether amateur

The content below originally appeared on my now-defunct blog on June 28, 2013, I'm reposting it here because I wanted to reference it for a Twitter post for #RPGTheoryJuly. It's talking about a

A few years ago I wrote a big post on my now-defunct blog about the Forge Theory terms “Positioning” and “Currency”. There's an #RPGTheoryJuly activity happening on Twitter, and the day 9 topic is “Fictional

4. Describe your work. If you'd like an overview of some of my game design projects, I covered that in this post a few months ago, so I'll get a bit more abstract with this question. There are a couple

I've seen some rumblings around corners of tabletop RPG discussion areas of the Internet of some renewed discussion of Forge Theory, and even “Creative Agenda” or “GNS”. This was always the most controversial

One of the useful ideas that came out of tabletop roleplaying game discussions on The Forge discussion forums was the Lumpley Principle: System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as

In discussion of the philosophy of games and sometimes in tabletop RPG Theory there's a recurring notion that an end goal or “object of the game” is an essential element of games. For example, in The