Adept Play
I’ve shifted our focus more fully into the concrete experience of designing a game. I’m also finding it useful to consider the practitioner’s general outlook of “this is how I did it,” vs. the observer’s or analyst’s outlook of “but how does a person do it,” without falling into the trap of tossing it back…
The recent discussion in Actual Play has prompted me to what may be quite a lot of pointed looks at racism in role-playing content. I’ve made a little video to set local boundaries & standards for all of them, beginning right here. You’ll be seeing that link again. To repeat one of the points from…
The slow burn topic on my mind lately is randomization, for any and all ways it’s been employed in role-playing. As Justin and I discussed in the Design Curriculum series, solo games provide a useful comparison in terms of randomizing mechanics. In Aleksandra Sontowska’s The Beast, play is run simply through answering questions on cards,…
I’m looking now at the whole of fictional character identity. Classically, it’s composed of attributes, race, class, and a range of options concerning gear and spells. Many games have simplified or complicated this framework, and some have approached the idea from different angles, but it’s a simple idea that applies to any story-ish fiction and…
Solo or solitaire play appeared very early in RPG history, and yet I often considered it marginal or beta play. I certainly saw it that way until about 2010, especially the second round of Ronnies and the contest/event 01/01/11 organized by Em and Eppy. By then, I’d wholly revised my similar thinking about twosie play,…
This has been a great consulting experience. Watch the way Dustin considers what I say about using the overall game/realm conflict as the rating for the power for replacement characters, internalizes it, but then completely makes it his own (and much better) by using the adversary’s current “win” score instead. I say “this is a…
I’m not making any claims about the logic or organization by this point in our talks, rather, I’m hoping Justin isn’t thinking that I’m totally making it up as I go. It’s certainly been helpful to me to recognize what pieces I need to pull into their own how we play discussion so they can…