Issues #1-7

Sam and I sat down last week to record a conversation about a 7-issue run on Villains & Vigilantes we did along with our longtime creative collaborator Robin.

Personally, I value how unprogrammed this particular dialog was. We excavated lessons from our play of Villains & Vigilantes that weโ€™re excited to apply to our current game of Vigil.

If you’re unfamiliar with comics or superhero roleplaying, I’d recommend diving into the “Titles and Topics” and seeing where it takes you. Adept Play has a treasury of AP reports, recordings, and discussions that turned me into a passionate comics reader and role-player.

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3 responses to “Issues #1-7”

  1. I am thrilled by Sam’s summary of inspirational or inspired content prior to play, and whatever may or may not come of it, as opposed to content one may be determined to enact in play or to see produced by play. That is fundamental to what we do.

  2. Wow. Looking back on this I can really see my physical pain manifesting with all my fiddling around and squirming. But besides that, I think the discussion is pretty great. I came back to this because I’m about to play another game of Villains & Vigilantes. I’ll try to post an update on that. This comment is mostly to say: more people should watch this video and I would love to see some comments here. When have you felt like you’re really playing well, and how much does it feel related to “owning” or “using” the rules of the game? What do you feel when you’re “in the zone”?

    • As it happens, one of my current posts in draft concerns the game of Villains & Vigilantes we started playing earlier this year. It’s a re-organized version of the one I posted about in June, with a change in participants and no continuity. I haven’t been able to finish editing or even to arrive at a good way to post at all, as these are the last recordings of Helma playing.

      So I’ll extract a bit from what I intended to include, which is that finally, I think I was able to benefit from the text at many levels. For example, we applied the rules for Force Field correctly, which are deep subroutine of their own and require a lot of player agility, even more so than, for example, Illusions. Using Force Field correctly ties into another detail which is easy to miss, that a player may actively dial down a damage roll’s impact, prior to rolling, for fear of hurting one’s opponent too much … and this combination of rules ties directly into the moral judgment at the heart of play and the development of Charisma.

      These interacting rules present an excellent example of very small-scale”technicalities,” “details,” which in fact increase the range of player options and judgments … what I refer to personal presence at the table, in that you are in fact playing and not someone else, who might do something quite different presented with exactly the same circumstances. It’s excellent design. The decisions matter in the moment but also in sequence with all the moments of play and in comparison with everyone else’s. It aligns absolutely contrary to the stereotype that fiddly little rules details and micro-decisions are boring and, worse, reduce the player’s presence.

      I also used the NPC creation and scenario rules extensively, and I think, greatly to the advantage of play. From my GMing point of view, the latter involved playing my villainous characters responsively: e.g., a technological accident was just as ruinous to their plans as it was a potential social and medical disaster from the heroes’ point of view.

      When and if I succeed in posting about this, with or without recordings, I’ll try to be as explicit as possible about how this worked, including how creating the NPCs fed straight into play in what seemed an involuntary process. In response to your question, my thinking is that it looks and feels as if I embraced and even succumbed to highly-directive, even programmatic text for characters and situations … but I submit that, exactly as we have all observed for playing heroes with this game, the rather legalistic text always stops short of telling you precisely what to do. That is left to the humans as a play experience, for which preparation is notably facilitative rather than directive.

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