That’s a terrible post title. Someone should have stopped me.
Anyway, we are in fact seven years exactly into Adept Play, dated from its initial registration as a Swedish business. A tiny one to be sure, but at least as viable as a lemonade stand. What good has it done? What has been accomplished? What works? What needs sandblasting or even amputation? What might be initiated?
My own reflections
- The website as such, well, by definition it’s a headache, but the bones are good, and I do have a good want-list.
- Generally, it’s a difficult concept to convey: there’s no monitoring of participation, therefore no advertising, no click-counting, no metrics factoring into monetizing. I don’t think most people even dream that a person can “have a website” without some platform toward those ends.
- It doesn’t need an overhaul, but rather, an additional layer now that I have the bedrock working pretty well. That layer would be a little modern, a little click-y, a bit “hello citizen, how may I kiss your ass today,” but also positive in shaping a user’s experience to their taste and continuing through use. I’m working on it.
- Play as experience and discussion, as shared and received: by and large it’s successful. The body of work is, at it stands, impressive.
- I’m OK with turnover in site participation, and also OK with varying success per person. I also accept that for some, getting what they needed and moving on simply to enjoy play and not tap keys at a website is the right life-decision.
- What matters (as an educational priority) is, held steady for however many people are involved, for more of them to learn and enjoy more about role-playing, independent of prior experience or preferences within play.
- Recordings and presentation: make no mistake, this is fucking work. Crude as they seem, each video is edited as carefully as possible to showcase the event as real play, including rules glitches, incidental conversations, and social context. Playing three sessions a week at Spelens Hus and keeping current with the recordings is easily half-time employment and sometimes more.
- There’s an inherent cost involved: that people, me included, are not inclined actually to watch long videos of play. We just aren’t. I’ve found that I can’t do it by default, but I will do it with pleasure and attention when something has been stated which matters to me. I’m hoping this point applies to my own recordings and that I can find a way to state such things as plainly as possible in the posts.
- There’s a serious benefit to me from making them: straightforwardly, it makes me a better player. I saw it when my recording fell off for a while, that my own play actually deteriorated, or at least, I could immediately see that my ongoing sense of development wasn’t present.
- “Orange,” based on a graphic I use a lot, by which I mean, anyone inclined to role-play as a form of expression. The corollary being simply to abandon and ignore all hobby standards, practices, expectations, asssumptions, and identities.
- The big triumph here is not merely in my own play (I’ve always been an origin point for play, since I was 15) – it’s visible here now as common practice among many of us, with special reference to the fact that new players, or those new to expression in practice, are not fumbling, stumbling newbies, but astonishing powerhouses, and we have much more to learn from them than vice versa.
- The hard part to explain is that this goal is impossible, entirely antithetical to any mode or purpose of marketing. It cannot be promoted or sold. It is simply and only done.
- Online educational stuff shall continue,
- Monday Labs and the Q&A served a reasonable purpose but bluntly, the former didn’t land hard enough to help anyone get better at play, and the latter never generated further useful work at the site.
- Coursework and the current workshops are vastly more effective – I can quickly determine who is and isn’t actually understanding things and the quality of posting and thought jumped up a quantum. There’s a bigger discussion to be had about money and about making them an outgroup attractor rather than an ingroup boutique.
- My own fun needs to more forward in all of this. I’ve discovered no real benefit to choosing games to play at Spelens Hus, for example, based on “what I think they’ll like,” and no downside to choosing them based on what I’m enthused about.
- It’s hit hardest in terms of design. Dreams of Fire has lagged, and sometimes gone off in wrong directions, because I’m not playing it constantly; and that’s because I don’t perceive my role at Spelens Hus as compatible with playing something half-formed toward my own publishing benefit. I’m playing it online now in order to get past that.
- Integration of local play and educational work is my biggest problem, entirely and overwhelmingly so. I identified it years ago and haven’t cracked it yet.
- Spelens Hus play is a real time and people-managing headache, and I have not found a solution despite a year of trying
- Being on the Spelens Hus board has been important for a lot of things, and I’ve tried to do a good job. It is, however, a lot of work and I’m not sure I can justify it for another year after this one.
- Wider outreach
- 2023 was my best year for this, including the Erasmus Project in Rome and a week spent at a school in Malmรถ. But it’s fallen off since, and I’m not sure whether I should be pushing harder or let this pass and focus on libraries instead.
- Money, honey: elective
- Patreon … it’s never been a great fit for me, but it does work. As usual, I should be thinking about making the cheapest tier the best, and very attractive to do. Maybe an overhaul toward that end is a good idea.
- Game purchases are steady and appropriately minor, in terms of income. I love my pamphlet format.
- Workshop purchases are surprisingly high, but they have a serious problem: no long tail. Once the month is past, the sales fall off and disappear. This has to get fixed; I want these actually to be the most experienced, used, and informally promoted things that I do.
- Consulting has completely disappeared. No one’s approached me for consulting for over a year, and of those, no one from outside Adept Play. So I’m placing it into a mental “early phase Adept Play” category and no longer promoting it as a feature.
- Libraries: despite funding having been cut horribly last year, this still might be my current best shot at the kind of income I want. I have a paid gig there during the upcoming school break, and they are encouraging a weekly event as well.
The Happening

I do want to do another one this year, and I need to plan for it. Some thoughts on how it went last year …
- Its own merits as conducted and experienced were straightforward:
- The big shortcoming from my expectations is obvious: not enough Swedes. Ideally I’d like it to be viable based on Swedish participation alone, and I’d like to see the rather rigid local segregation into identity-groups break down a little. I’d like to see more people there whom I don’t know.
- Finances (in terms of me): remarkably, it was totally affordable. Still, I’d like to work out some alleviations for participants, especially discounts at a hotel or two; and I’d like tidy budget devoted to promotion and recording.
- I really liked presenting Amerika as the mascot, more or less, and I will work up another installment or version based on a different region and issue. I’m thinking about Chicago and police murder/brutality.
New concepts and features … well, I do want to showcase Norrkรถping more actively, so some kind of event or activity could be included, role-playing oriented or not. I liked the idea of a buddy system with locals, so visitors have someone to help them get around and maybe shop or do whatever they want, i.e., they have to know what might be done.
You, you, and you
I have no idea. I have no “above and beyond” expectations or demands, and it seems wrong to consider any, especially for something whose basic benefits are supposed to be free and whose payment model is entirely elective (and lacks the usual bag of monetizing tricks). And especially for something which does in fact demand a non-internet standard for engagement and quality of thought.
My only thinking concerns “one ripple outwards” processes – so that someone you know, who has no idea who I am or anything related, might find themselves inclined to interact here. Since growing the numbers as such isn’t my concern, my purpose in saying this is to generate a better, more various body of voices, and to get us out of this rut of about ten altogether too-similar people particpating at any given time. (More $1 patrons wouldn’t hurt either, as a secondary effect.)
Your thoughts on any of my reflections are welcome although be warned that this is very close to me and I am not sure how I’ll react. I do need input, so I will try to be decent.
3 responses to “Seven Year itch and scratch”
As an experiment and experience, Adept Play feels like a success. At least from the outsider view. Its kinder than other spots on the web by a long shot, which in itself cannot be underestimated. Through the site I have met quality people I enjoy sharing PLAY with. And that play has created thoughtful discourse. I do miss that old Patron? chats where 9 or 12 people would Brady Bunch it for an hour or so on Mondays. But I realize that something like Adept Play is better when its in motion as opposed to being stagnate. Which is to say, under constant if slow evolution.
If there was a workshop you would like us to send people to as a good “Start Here” place, which workshop would that be?
For accessibility, almost certainly “No, Not Blackleaf!”
I think maybe some of the more accessible Actual Play recordings would be good too. The Spelens Hus RuneQuest game seems very effective for this purpose, and maybe the Khaotic game from GenCon last year.