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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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…
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Cross-Gender Trouble and Play
There is a question that people tend to avoid asking in roleplaying game discussion, in my experience, even as they spend a fair amount of time articulating answers and implicitly presenting them. This question is along the lines of “How much am I allowed to deviate from my social positionality and my lived experiences in…
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December Q&A
This set of questions spans a wide range: some Forge and Story Games history, using traits or rules involving “Destiny” without railroading toward a specific thing, and plenty of resolution-type topics regarding how characters fight. Here’s the file summarizing our discussion at the Patreon. As always, I’m hoping for continuance and more development here.
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Persona, Problem, and Procurement – Contradiction in Character Creation
Character Creation is both creative, collaborative, tactical, and a signal for one’s expectations from play. Can a definite procedure help people to approach the game in the right way? Recently started a new campaign for Living Alchemy. Living Alchemy uses modules- characters are introduced into a setting with a few elements. You can read about…
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Here comes trouble
Over at the Patreon, I’ve been musing about and sharing iterations of my personal hack-and-whack job on Legendary Lives. It took a big jump after the discussion here at Monday Lab: Probable cause, and turned a corner at the dubious moment that I decided all the Imperial characters would have mustaches, yes, all of them.…