Adept Play
Adept Play
Author: Ron Edwards
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The coalition must hold (trust us!)
Francesco Zani is busy with lots of game designs, as you’ll see in the videos of my consulting sessions at Lucca. Dictat is a joint effort among him, Davide Cavadni, and Francesco Rugerford Sedda, whom (the latter) I met at Modena Play early last year. Dictat’s a card game that relies on LARP-like subroutines, “oh…
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Workshop: The Plot Thickens
Here’s one of the two workshops I presented at Lucca. It was prompted by two short videos I posted here in the past few months: The role of the roll and Emergent plot techniques, which have led me to a generally larger argument. The main point is that, there are two primary ways to play…
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Gay Power
Stefano first talked with me about this game about a year and a half ago, at Modena Play. At the time, he was anxious about how it might be received, about whether or how one might be designated unsuited or ineligible for authoring such a thing, and about representation in general. Dozens of playtests later,…
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Staying underground, dungeon or no dungeon
In his series of G+ posts based on reading/reflecting on games, Jason D’Angelo mentioned he’d be going through Dungeons & Dragons (1977), by J. Eric Holmes. Unable to resist, I asked him to chat me with about that, and so here we are. Some of the points in there bear further deep-dives. If you agree,…
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Who’s a good dog
I’d provide the two character-sheet diagrams I examined while preparing for play, but they are both the same: about 80% of the items on each one was now slammed into the center, including new ones that had been acquired from each other’s sheet. In other words, both sorcerers (Ahmet and Ingmar), their demons (Solomon and…
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The ontological concept of happiness, among other things
Second session of the current Cosmic Zap game, displaying one of the game features that it’s robust relative to player attendance. Rod mentions at one point that it’s the most self-indulgent role-playing he’s done, either lately or maybe ever. That’s why this time the lead image for this post is a link. I call attention…
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Happiness = to love and to work
You play a game set in L.A., I tell you what, you’re going to be driving hither & yon a hell of a lot. This session brought us downtown, then to Corona, Venice Beach, the northeast burbs, and eventually to Antelope Valley, in the wilds of Palmdale. There was even a mention of La Fontana…
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Values and families, not necessarily family values
My other Gauntlet game! Unlike the Cosmic Zap session, running Champions of any stripe in a convention setting is no picnic for prep. But the hardest part is not the character construction … it’s the fact that the players will not have the necessary buy-in and sense of “let’s do this” per interesting item or…
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Chaos against criminality, as Law struggles to know itself
Here’s the first of three games I led at Gauntlet Con 2018! A Cosmic Zap playtest. When I initially signed on for playing it months ago, I was unsure about how well-developed the game would be, or even how playable/failed at all. But it turned out to be a decisive validator of the project. I…