Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Authorities
“Authorities” is my term for how people say things which are honored by others in play. Using an authority often means including some constraining factor such as a dice roll. Authorities are organized very differently system by system, and often group by group.
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Improving as “just players”
At Sam’s suggestion, he and I recorded a conversation about improving as “just players,” not GMs. We have 2+ years of conversation, shared play, and mutual influence between us, and we were able to ground the topic firmly in our experiences of play. The conversation largely speaks for itself. However, I want to highlight a…
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Ierendi
For our second arc of Champions Now, we’ve added a new writer-artist, Sam, and moved the action to the island city-state of Ierendi. As with Karameikos, I’ll leave explanation of the backdrop and lore to Rod, but suffice to say that Singapore has been a strong inspiration, and gaudy phantasmagoria abounds. You can find our…
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Stop Setting DCs?
This discussion started with Sorcho (Ed Heil) on the Discord channel brought a video to the attention of the larger group. The video comes from the channel of Cetx Etc and can be found here. Feel free to have a listen, it is less than 11m in duration. In the video, the author expresses the…
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The Masked RPG
I ran Masks of the Mummy Kings by Nathan D. Paoletta on the weekend; it was my first time playing or running this RPG which was published in 2015. It worked perfectly as a zero-prep one-shot, but I am unsure about the distribution of authorities. MotMK is a fun, light, storytelling game. Players play nameless…
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Last Breath
I ran this 3-session game of The Pool with some friends while taking the Adept Play course Playing with The Pool. It was everybody’s first time with this system. I’m going to talk about our experiences with The Pool, particularly the perceived death spiral, and how players used Monologues of Victory (MOVs). My start file…
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In/Over
“Authority.” Ever since I first articulated the concept in 2004, people have broken on the word. No surprise, really – anyone even calling themselves “the authorities” are openly, non-ironically declaring themselves to be assholes wielding arbitrary force. Everyone has grown up wth the hip slogans “question authority,” “fuck authority,” and memes of “respect my authori-tay.”…
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Return to Apocalypse World
Very long time couple of non roleplayers friends wanted to play a rpg, and got into vampire with one of their friends, last year. I asked them a few month ago how it went. Julie, my long time friend, told me that she didn’t like all the thespian show she had to do, to precise…
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What’s My Motivation?
Recently, I was invited by a friend to playtest a game he is working on. The game is about assassins that possess people close to their targets in order to gain access to them. The game is a work-in-progress, so I don’t want to get too deep into how it works. Instead I want to…
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Q and A at the Patreon
During December, I asked patrons if they wanted to throw me some questions, especially pretty specific to games that I’ve published or perhaps know well enough to say anything about. The idea was to collect a few and make a little video response, to be posted and discussed at the Patreon. A quick point: if…