Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Character creation
This section concerns character creation as it relates to playing a game, not in isolation. General topics are welcome as well as specific instances.
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The Hero Calculator
It’s been a while since my last Champions Now post. I plan to resume sharing about the 1930s New York game that I introduced in my previous post, “The Gift,” with posts about the characters that my players created and the sessions we’ve run, but these future posts will include character sheets, build sheets, and…
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Yonder out yonder
This is Traveller, in one of its early-early publications: 1981, Game Design Workshop, which as far as I can tell is about the same as the original 1977 publication. A quick point: this isn’t anything like Traveller as stamped iconically into gaming culture. There is no setting, no Imperium, no canonical starmaps, no campaign-planning, nothing…
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Dialing down the fantasy
I’m a polyfantasist: any degree of fantastic content and any degree of naturalism are both fun. For the moment, I’m focusing on one historical cluster of play-and-design: variously called hedge fantasy, mud-and-shit fantasy, “iron” fantasy, sometimes overlapping with historical fantasy, with games that sought it through the lens of deep culture and realism. It’s played…
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The Gift
This post is a follow-up to the one I made in March titled “On My Way to Champions Now,” where I shared the two statements I’m using to set up a Champions Now game set in 1930s NYC. Those statements are: Following the game’s rules, I turned the statements over to my players along with a 3-Corners…
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Situated characters
[This post is adapted from a Patreon post a couple of months ago. It’s relevant to the March Q&A so I’ve made it public here.] I’ve been thinking about a practical aspect of preparation which feeds into qualities of play. It boils down to a simple question: does whoever’s making up important aspects of the…
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Let’s put up another TV show
After having played Primetime Adventures (the 2nd edition, the one with the blue cover) a while ago … looking up when that was … wait now, that’s two and a half years ago? Anyway, here is the link to the old stuff if you want it … okay, let’s restart this:Ever since I’ve been a…
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Mustering Out Blues
At the end of February, I ran a game for Games on Demand Online I call Mustering Out Blues. It’s a Traveller hack that came from a couple-three different places: (1) the classic Traveller campaign I started at the height of the pandemic that evolved into Galactic Adventures, the game I described in a previous…
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Finding a game in there
One trend in role-playing game publications, from the beginning, is to stuff too much into the pages: design discovered and utilized in play, speculated design, padding, features or content provided by other people, consolidated content for IP purposes, content perceived as “needed” or “people want it,” and more. I find many game texts to be…
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Devil Ex Machina
This is an actual play of a Sorcerer campaign called Devil Ex Machina. It is set in San Francisco in 2023 and I wanted the demons to have the vibes of malevolent, conscious artificial intelligence. Sorcery in our game is characterized by an obsession with programming, extensive use of IT, and getting lost in the…