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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You had one job!
It begins at another post, Finding a game in there, which muses upon “fire-axing” Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, first version, published 1977-1979. Briefly: using the rules as best as possible or practical, but for a subset of the content, disallowing various classes or concepts from the start. I’ve already registered a session at Lincon, in…
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Champions Now Debrief: “Fear Death . . . Fear a Frog!”
Here’s a video debrief I did with Alan and Jon about our year-long Champions Now game, featuring middle-aged heroes in Burlington, Vermont (and a few road trips to New York along the way). Tons to discuss about situations, who can Presence attack whom, crazy mystical powers, and the simple joys of jumping around and kicking…
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D&D and its derivates – two games in one
No matter how hard I try, I keep coming back to Pathfinder 2e. Before I discovered the virtues of that game, the first edition had my interests captured for years and years. To some degree, it is unsurprising – I played D&D 3.5 before I really knew of any other systems. However, poring over feats,…
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Night Streets 2
Back in July, I played a “movie” of Extreme Vengeance with Denica and Nathan, in three sessions. This game is from 1997, with a discussable publishing history, and I later met and talked with its author, Tony Lee. As with a couple of similar games from around this time, the concept is that you play…
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Sewer madness
Not with me, but rather it’s me interviewing Kristoffer about his alleged one-session, now multi-session game of Electric Bastionland. The context begins with a bit of prior play with me GMing, using only the free version, then the subject of this interview, which is his GMing from scratch with another group, using the entire text.…
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The Sentinels of Justice: Hero Sheets
Hi all! This is the third installment in my series of posts on the Champions Now game that has come to be named The Sentinels of Justice. The first post (Greetings: On My Way to Champions Now) presented the two statements I used to kick off the game, along with some musings. The second post…
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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…