Adept Play
These posts include recordings of play.
Here is a recording from Session 1 of my Sorcerer campaign (“Demons are Social Media Junkies”). The first hour was spent (not recorded) was spent cleaning up the character creation from Session Zero, and I talked through some rules, especially those pertaining to demon abilities and sorcerous rituals. We were able to nail down the…
Catching up on my Sorcerer posting! Laura, Grégory, and I get into weird spaces in this one, partly because of the location in our fiction, the mutable or at least shiftable interior of a demonic church, but also because I played demons with remarkably awful/abstract outlooks. To review, the phrases for this game are Shadows…
One of my first major video play projects for this site was an extravagant foray into Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, using a focused playset I’d built in face-to-face play a couple of years before that. I called it “Barbaric Psychedelic Cosmic Cataclysmic Fore Ee,” and you can see the sheet I made for it…
We’ve been playing Sorcerer for two months! Five meetings and four sessions of play so far, and ongoing. This is with Laura and Grégory, both located in France, and thus set in Marseille. I was nonplussed to discover that neither had ever set a game they’d played in their own country. I went a little…
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,…
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,…
I’d given some thought to this playtesting group, including how it had inadvertently stress-tested the lower limit of player number. Difficult as that was, because I do not like stress-testing, it wasn’t the main thing on my mind. I was worried that the actual editor of the game and its interiors artist were still not…
After setting up my little consulting table at the Palace Hotel during Lucca, I found myself tired of discourse and yearning for play. When a friend I hadn’t seen for a while passed by, with a copy of Trollbabe (in Italian, published by Narrattiva) in hand, that seemed like the perfect plan. There’s a little…
This is always the toughest time for playtesters, because it’s no longer about “cool, an idea,” but about “oh crap, saying/teaching it this way is pure miscommunication.” The poor players are like my hands which are trying to read Braille but are unfortunately picking up the waffle iron instead. The better one of my games…