Adept Play
These posts examine the variety of procedures and the variety of meaning or story-operations for violent confrontations.
As part of the discussion on Discord about looking at “OSR” games, I visited an old friend. Back in the early 80s, I GMed perhaps 100 sessions of DragonQuest 2nd edition. I’ve just been combing through those old rules and I’ve found some interesting elements. DragonQuest was first published SPI games in 1980. SPI published…
Part of hobby mythology concerns role-playing’s origins as bringing tighter focus into table-top wargaming, such that within this or that battalion, or aboard this or that vehicle, the group can look closer and see Sergeant Bob or whoever running around, being a character, having opinions, and doing things. If that’s so, then one would think…
We just started a Legendary Lives game. I’m GMing for Nick and George (we all just finished a fairly long-running Sorcerer game), and we have also been joined by our friend Mark (who played Trollbabe and The Shadow of Yesterday with me and Nick many several years ago, but hasn’t played with us recently). We…
I love this quote from The Mountain Witch: “All conflict is a form of combat.” For Justin Nichols’ Kinfolk, the issue is that he’s got a big whole-game arc of whether the invading industrials can be successfully repelled or otherwise stopped by the fey folk … and sure, you can make a chapter structure, and…
So this is about the best game I’ve played. It happened in 2009. It had two players, Me and LukeA, we played over the course of ten sessions and each session was between six to eight hours. In terms of discussion I think there are two notable things about it, solving choreography problems and the…
I’ve just had a session of Champions Now where a villain was knocked to 0 knockout. The players, being in control of the field for the moment, just blasted him a second time to ensure he did not wake up. Is that kosher by the rules? How is the rules about recovering the first time…
I want to talk a bit about a play test session for a game I am designing. The game is called Citadel of Time and it goes something like this: Trapped in the Citadel, you pursue missions to retrieve graels for the Castellan’s Great Project. Moving to different points in time, your success or failure…
Pre-Post Hello folks, I'm very glad to hear that you're enjoying these write-ups! It occurred to me that I ought to have included some player aliases so that way you all could keep a bit of track of who is who in all this. It also occurs to me as I'm writing this, I have…
Zac has not retreated from his call that IIEE (intent, initiation, execution, effect) is the “beating heart of the activity,” and Manu – the very soul who prompted this discussion at the Forge fifteen years ago – is still on task. Armed with these stalwarts, we embark upon another Monday Lab to investigate best practices.…