ACTUAL PLAY
This is where we do what we do! We talk about playing table-top role-playing games. This is not a play-at or streaming site - it's for discussion of what you're already doing.
You can discuss decades of play or thirty seconds of play, or anything in between. Any table-top role-playing game is welcome: old, new, in print, out of print, published by you, published by whoever. You could have played it at any time, from back in the early 1970s to a second before you hit "post."
From there, I trust you to work out how you want to talk about your games. If you'd like, check out my best-practices manual for suggestions, but it's really flexible.
If you already do a podcast or other actual-play series, live or not, please consider yourself invited to discuss it here by embedding a link as a topic.
For games in design, i.e., playtesting - yes, go right ahead, that's welcome too. For consulting sessions with me, which is different, see the Consulting page.
I'm currently designing Champions Now, for Hero Games, in active alpha playtest. The dedicated page for that is here.
It's our fifth session of Monsterhearts! With only two more to finish editing to get current. This game took a hit between playtesting and summer family obligations, so the last session we played was about two months ago. I'd like to get back to it soon, so if you want to help with that, comment here so the other players feel hot / cold / dark / volatile (circle one).
Mid-design playtesting is perhaps the most intensive intellectual stage, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like gutting out a highly fatiguing task whose benefit, upon completion, is looking mighty obscure. This is our sixth session for Cosmic Zap, and in a lot of ways, it might have been the last. You can see, I hope, how the content we gained from it yielded real gold, but it’s mainly evident in the final two sessions, not here.
When Champions was first published, most people involved in role-playing accepted, or even expected, to put in extensive effort before play. Today, plug-and-play is widely recognized as a virtue, whether justified by playing in convention situations or by citing friends who reasonably do not commit to complex nonsense before doing the thing they want to do.
I suppose that could be a promo tagline? "Psilocybin role-playing ..." no, probably not a good idea. But it's true that this session of Cosmic Zap was well-supplied with my little rules handout that finally made some sense, even if I have continued to change it up since, and the players were more versed in what the dice and numbers really did.
I’ve played a ton of Vigil in the past year, but not posted about it much. For those arriving recently, check out my Comics Madness post Is your hate pure? for what it’s all about. More generally, it’s one of my three simultaneous superhero game projects, along with Champions Now and Cosmic Zap.
Introducing Silverbeak! Because adding Monsanto to a welter of corporate and government ownership that already includes ICE, Blackwater/Xe, and the U.S. Army isn't too much, no, not at all.
Specialized viewing only: three D&D players working up the details for their 4E characters, because the DM wants to do a level jump, from 3rd to 7th. Even though each has looked through the books, this is a significant accounting/build task, so - only if you're interested.
It's a dark dark game, so I guess that it's ... artistic? for me to have borked the video and arrived an an all-black-void recording.
I hope it can be fun listening anyway, but I really regret losing the explicit attention we were paying throughout this session. The player-characters did not interact at all, so it will sound like three soloists trading off, but the reality of play was far more social, attentive, group-ish, and generally engaged with one another.
How about that other superhero game I'm working on? And no, not Vigil, but the other other one, which I'm calling Cosmic Zap.
Quick review: this is work for The Chaosium, using HeroQuest as the chassis, specifically the HeroQuest SRD, itself a bit of a work in progress.
(First time posting here, at Ron's suggestion.)