"Worlds Funsome and Free: Understanding
Open Role-Play Adventure"
You've heard of #FKR? Its like extreme #OSR, but I prefer to call it #ORPA. So many acronyms! Here's a few pages explaining all that, both as various PDFs on my itch.io page and as a good old-fashioned blog post.
https://ethric-t-s.itch.io/worlds-funsome-and-free-understanding-open-role-play-adventure
https://trollbones.blogspot.com/2025/06/worlds-funsome-and-free-understanding.html
#OARP is dead! Long Live #ORPA
They're the same thing, just rearranging the title. In my thoughts, I always sounded the name out as "Oh Aye Are Pea." But after presenting a test session at Forge Midwest last weekend, people who'd read my essay and wanted to talk about it pronounced it as a single word -- "oorp," like a burp-belch, which sounds so goofy. Yeah, I concede it's ridiculous I didn't catch that earlier, but what are playtests for if not discovering the obvious.
EDIT: There is now a new version of this file, https://ethric-t-s.itch.io/worlds-funsome-and-free-understanding-open-role-play-adventure
On my way soon to Madison, WI to run some games. #ForgeMidwest is a small gathering, mostly for folks to playtest games designed towards a story-game style. I'll be offering some #ORPA sessions (what most of you call #FKR ) and am both excited and nervous. When I pitched the idea there was some confusion, so on request wrote up a How To explaining the style: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oSmMoO8ZCERAXuCg6O3FZ9PZZ91rSDFl/view?usp=sharing
2/2 The three core #ORPA precepts , as I see them:
- De-gamifying: playing the world, not a rules set (this is where most of the "isn't" comes from; really amazing how wide and deep expectations of gamification have become, and not just in games).
- Decommodifying: approaching the experience as something you create, not consume.
- Independent Imagination: bit of a follow-on from above, legitmacy/authenticity of the world as created by the table's efforts, not an outside authority.
E.T.Smith
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