Adept Play
Catching up on my Sorcerer posting! Laura, Grégory, and I get into weird spaces in this one, partly because of the location in our fiction, the mutable or at least shiftable interior of a demonic church, but also because I played demons with remarkably awful/abstract outlooks. To review, the phrases for this game are Shadows…
One of my first major video play projects for this site was an extravagant foray into Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, using a focused playset I’d built in face-to-face play a couple of years before that. I called it “Barbaric Psychedelic Cosmic Cataclysmic Fore Ee,” and you can see the sheet I made for it…
I rarely get the chance to dig right into one of my most favored and preferred role-playing mechanics, the dice pool. Notwithstanding that I have yet to discover a reasonable description of what any such thing is, meaning, in a defining sense, applicable to various versions. I wouldn’t mind seeing plenty of “hey, what about…
We’ve been playing Sorcerer for two months! Five meetings and four sessions of play so far, and ongoing. This is with Laura and Grégory, both located in France, and thus set in Marseille. I was nonplussed to discover that neither had ever set a game they’d played in their own country. I went a little…
Justin and I shifted over to one of his other designs in progress, Origin, which has a nice values-based resolution idea and lends itself to “but that wouldn’t be right” play among superheroes. Part 1 (embedded below) goes right into my critique of one of his values-axes, i.e. a polarized spectrum, to address the perceived…
You can go all the way back to 1998 to see me saying, “I want to talk about point-builds and dice, so let’s get past some easy points about goals of play and get to the good practical stuff.” Twenty-one years later and people are still blubbering about “but but simulation.” I’ve repeated this plea…
Our topic this time is the length of play as it relates to game rules. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not as simple as seeing what the rules say and obeying them; people play long or short in defiance of those rules (when present) all the time. The question is when or how the rules…
You’ll see a mention in the video as well as in the comments to one of Robbie’s playtesting posts that I am staying a little hands-off with the Weighting Rooms consulting, which may seem like a “but isn’t getting hands-on the point” question. Well, I’ll repeat what I said here: that when someone is trapped…
Justin gave me a list of questions or topics for this session, and I realized they made most sense in nested form. So I grouped IIEE and relationship mechanics into the larger category of Bounce and system diagrams (specifically their feedback or activity loops), then put the whole into the biggest category of design processes…