Adept Play
Adept Play
Author: Hans
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Skill Challenges: Changes Over Time
In the Adept Play discord chat, I said, I have been buying some D&D 4th edition books, because it’s a game I’m keen to run. Finally yesterday I had enough of a spread to look at Skill Challenges throughout the edition. I had heard the math was “bad” the first time they printed the rules…
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The Experience of Protagonism
I have been experiencing something pretty great in play lately, across two games. I want to talk about it. The Play I’m playing in a one-on-one Burning Wheel game. I’m not GMing. The GM was inspired by the Morrowind video game (which I’m unfamiliar with), and we have a political-religious war going on where the…
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Normal People
On the discord, Sam said: “I am yearning for a game where it would be out of the ordinary to see a fist fight, let alone someone die. I think I want to play a game about ordinary people doing things no one could possibly call an adventure. What games have you played that do…
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Through the lens of prep
A Viricorne Guide is a game where adventurers or other travelers arrive in Viricorne, the Reborn City, and are guided around it. It is a city of judgment, and people come there to be judged (and do other things). The text, as inspiration, has a dreamy, smooth quality to it, like a digital painting with…
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I’m just a teenage gunmage, baby
I did three solo-play sessions of Ironsworn. The audio is here, but be warned that no editing has been done; thinking silences are preserved as well as physical and mental coughing and hitching. I didn’t use Ironsworn’s sketchy Norse frontier setting, but rather used the Iron Kingdoms, a magitech-meets-WWI kinda thing. I played a seventeen-year-old…
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I flinched.
So we played Worlds Without Number for about 13 months, twice monthly with some small breaks and one or two large ones; probably 15-20 sessions in all. The game ended on a logical stopping point: after spending a few sessions somewhat aimlessly (i.e. with no strong goals) wandering around the Maze of the Blue Medusa,…
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The whole is exactly the sum of its parts
Previously on: post 1 / post 2 We’ve continued our Worlds Without Number game, sometimes with 3 players (including me, the GM), most of the time with 2. The characters are now level 5, which is halfway up the ladder. Since the last post, they have traveled around local and semi-local areas a bit and…
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From Confusion to the Concrete
See here for the first post in this series. We’ve played two more sessions of Worlds Without Number. After the first session, one of the players had to drop out—the player who had recognized my prep at the end of the first session and had me scrambling to prepare something else. I decided, since I…
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Worlds Without Number – Beginnings of a Bricolage
We started a Worlds Without Number (WWN) game, playing in-person. WWN is built on the chassis of various editions, rememberings, and reconfigurations of the pre-3rd edition non-Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It turns the dial up on Vancianisms, mostly through spell names and spell powers (spells are more versatile and powerful than spells in, say, Moldvay…