Adept Play
Adept Play
Author: Ron Edwards
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Our rules, ourselves
“Let’s try it out” became a genuine hydra of extended play, especially for a game conceived as a swiftly-coiling drive into final conflict. We ended up with five sessions, some pretty long, and here are the last two. My judgment calls, consulting thoughts, analysis, whatever you want to call it, are reserved for conversation with…
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Well as long as it’s not absolute power …
… then maybe the corruption isn’t so bad! Because there’s no other way to fight; in this game, Aslan isn’t coming, there’s no cool tattooed bunch of rebels to locate, there’s no haven to escape to. You have to join the evil. Rise in it. Grow powerful. And not give in. It’s those Hijos del…
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Crack the ‘Magine Dragon
In the recent Globalism seminar comments, Alan Barclay talked about encountering ditto copies of Dungeons & Dragons probably bootlegged from the GenCon release in 1974. I do recall the game just transported me — I didn’t care much about mechanics, just the experience of ineracting with the imaginary world created lagely in my own head.…
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Humanity and morality in design
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…
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Monday Lab: How Long …
… 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…
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Monday Lab: Distribution and globalism
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…
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Role / Jazz Playing
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…
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Outer Inner Space
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…
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Science fiction freaks out about reproductive rights (again)
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…