Adept Play
A conversation with Jonathan Tweet! I hope I do not bore anyone by repeating myself about the influence of Over the Edge upon me in role-playing, both in helping me return to enthusiastic play from a doldrums period and in providing me with a fresh view toward design. The DNA of Sorcerer lies back in…
… Has This Been Goin’ On? Alternative equally music-meming title: My Only Friend, the End. Or, wait, how about, Stop! In the Name of What? This is about how long we play, in real time. It can refer to the length of a session, how many sessions relative to a given fictional situation, how long…
Apologies for the buzzword … The idea here was to examine our respective region when we encountered role-playing, and to think about how role-playing got there, and in what form. It’s only four people, representing two slightly different parts of Califoria divided as well by about six years (mid-70s vs. early 80s), the Netherlands at…
The comparison has been around for a long time; I first encountered it in an early edition of RuneQuest. It may even have entered that status of “everyone knows that,” but I haven’t run into much reflection on its content. Grégory Meurant opened a conversation with me about it. He’s posted here before about playing…
Here’s the final session of Cosmic Zap, playtest epic #1! I’d intended to append it to the previous post in the comments, but then again, it’d be good to see a complete retrospective on the whole thing here. The good news: it worked, and cognitively, procedurally speaking, there’s an actual game here. Further playtesting is…
Here’s the last session but one of the epic Cosmic Zap playtest, which sorta actually worked, and shows why successful playtesting has nothing to do with wowing people with your genius. Far from it. For this one, I plead guilty to egregious abuse of Extended Contests, the finer-grained subset of resolution. The modern HeroQuest rules…
It’s our fifth session of Monsterhearts! With only two more to finish editing to get current. This game took a hit between playtesting and summer family obligations, so the last session we played was about two months ago. I’d like to get back to it soon, so if you want to help with that, comment…
Mid-design playtesting is perhaps the most intensive intellectual stage, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like gutting out a highly fatiguing task whose benefit, upon completion, is looking mighty obscure. This is our sixth session for Cosmic Zap, and in a lot of ways, it might have been the last. You can see,…
When Champions was first published, most people involved in role-playing accepted, or even expected, to put in extensive effort before play. Today, plug-and-play is widely recognized as a virtue, whether justified by playing in convention situations or by citing friends who reasonably do not commit to complex nonsense before doing the thing they want to…