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Vince has dropped Forge Theory anyway.On PbtA being an RPG, it's worth considering what Vincent Baker was doing when he created Apocalypse World. He was exploring RPG structures and procedures and trying express all the theorizing about RPGs he was doing in a game. How many people's reaction to PbtA comes out of it's origins in The Forge vs. any idea at all of what an RPG should look like and do? I think the innovation in Apocalypse World is not any of the specific mechanics or presentations but purely the fact that it was built intentionally from Baker's thoughts on RPG theory. Of course that means that many of the PbtA games are no more revolutionary than the numerous "fantasy heart breakers" that followed D&D (of any edition - lots of D20 heart breakers...) since the authors are just copying concepts without basing their efforts in any understanding of theory.
The Big Model was nifty when it was current. It was fun and useful to me, and I owe it my games from Dogs in the Vineyard to Apocalypse World, but rpg design has left it behind.
Among many others, but most particularly, I don't think that the idea of Creative Agendas stands up after all, let alone G, N, and S as its representatives.
We used to think that RPGs were one game. In, like, the 90s or whenever. We would say things like "what is the object of a RPG?" as though all RPGs would have the same one.
GNS was a real step forward: "RPGs aren't one game, they're THREE!"
But, of course, RPGs aren't three games either. Every RPG, like every other kind of game, is its own. You can taxonomize them if you want, but then you're constructing artificial categories and cramming games into them, not learning or finding out something true about the games themselves.
From https://web.archive.org/web/2019111...com/forums/discussion/20273/the-big-model-rip
So while the theory was an influence on PbtA it was (in Vince's words at least) a theory based on false premises. So I'm not sure that not following the theory is the issue here; if anything following it is more likely to be an issue with bad PbtA games.
More importantly, I'm not convinced that "an interest in RPG theory" and "great design" go hand in hand in the first place. There's certainly great designers with an interest in the area; Greg Costikyan has been into ludology before it was called that. But then you have someone like Greg Stafford who, from what I can tell, was never really involved in the theory debate side of things.
But perhaps the biggest counterexample is Ron Edwards himself. If an obsession with theory leads to good design, I don't see it in his frankly not very good rpg output. Does anyone seriously want to make an argument that Sorceror is better or even more innovative than Pendragon or Ghostbusters?
At the end of the day, the whole theory hothouse that was The Forge seems to have produced roughly the same percentage of brilliant, average and bad games as everyone else.