Adept Play
On to third level! This time I’ve expanded the scope of play to where I’d originally conceived it should be, with a number of different characters and unstable situations which interconnect. The point is for the players to decide whom they want to help or kill, and for them to assess the potential dangers of…
Here, hop into this handbasket with me. We’re goin’ for a ride! It’s part of “Finding D&D,” focusing this time on fundamentalist belief and practice, including but not limited to the OSR. I thought about waiting until part 4 was done, as these two parts only make full sense relative to one another. But whatever;…
I ran across Synthicide and happened to meet Dustin at GenCon 2017. He intrigued me by commenting that it wasn’t “my kind” of game, whereas my quick skim had shown me it probably was, and I suggested we follow up on that thought after I’d had a chance to look at it more carefully. By…
Thinking about what-next per session is pretty hard for this sort of naturalistic play, especially when circumstances don’t lend themselves to substantial cuts. I’d have to think for a while to understand why that’s not a problem in playing Sorcerer, for example. (It doesn’t have explicit scene-type mechanics either.) In this case, I put some…
It’s not a metaphor. I’m talking about D&D as religion, not merely “religious” as a colorful synonym for “passionate.” This is Finding D&D, Part 2, addressing TSR as orthodoxy and the resulting construction of culture and values. It’s still just a draft, intended for review & critique and so on. I’ve already spotted a couple…
I’m spacing out the discussion of Tor’s project post by post, because it’s in such an early stage that each chat we have turns into a big block, or stage, of the process. If I’m not mistaken, this one is pretty much the turning point from “playing D&D 5th edition on purpose” to “his own…
With great thanks to Petteri, Santiago, and Paul, we enjoyed diving pretty deep into the game, with more to go. Given four briefly-described choices from Petteri for our starting short-story piece, we used From the World of Old, which concerns a dragon who wakes into the developing civilized world (not really historical, but symbolic thereof)…
I first encountered Be-Movie during Modena, a gaming convention in the city of that name, just about one year ago when I was running little consults at the Narrattiva tables. I confess I was suspicious about it. For one thing, the term “B movie” in hobby culture is almost always parodic, in the sense that…
Who could have asked for a better inadvertent experiment in comparative design? Four consulting clients, one specific historical ideal of role-playing experience, similar influences and familiarities with games and ideas, resulting in four non-converging, distinctive games. Directions Storyplay, Tales of Entropy, Be-Movie, and this one, Jeff Slater’s House of Spiders. Here’s a summary of some…