Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Combat rules
These posts examine the variety of procedures and the variety of meaning or story-operations for violent confrontations.
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Big Stompy Robots
Rod, Robbie, and I sat down on Discord to talk about giant robots, the influences and the games we have (or have not) played. It was a good discussion, and I will just hit a few of the highlights to open up the discussion here. Apologies for not recording it, none of us felt strongly…
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Initiative and the one-minute round
I’m using simultaneous initiative (with an action declaration phase) and one-minute combat rounds for In the Realm of the Nibelungs, both a first for me and my group. Combat mostly runs via Swords & Wizardry Continual Light, a D&D ‘retroclone’, albeit with some changes (such as simultaneous initiative). One question which has come up is…
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A Session of Tunnels and Trolls
So I GMed my first game session of Tunnels and Trolls today (5th edition). I found it very interesting, it was fun, but a number of rules questions came up. Anyway, here’s what happened. So the setting of the game is my own; some of you may recognize where my inspiration for this comes. The…
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July Q and A
These are some very think-y questions! Including a lot about beasts and monsters. I want to clarify some things about my response to Sean. First, here are the three “roots” of critical hits in text. They’re not intended to be in order, as I think they were simultaneous at this scale of history: Here’s the…
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A small post about a great combat scene
We had our first moment of “everyone looks quite confused at the rules” playing RQ/Mythras. It was a situation involving 3 actors each using a weapon with a different Reach, everyone making liberal use of the Change Range action to outmaneuver the opponents, with one guy not having to roll due to a Combat Style…
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An Intense Action Game of the Pool
So you can consider this a follow-up to my earlier post describing nuances in and action gaming with the Pool. I had the chance to try out my ideas with a couple of excellent players. The backdrop to the game was a “Demon Hunter” idea, set in contemporary times in my home city of Seattle. I…
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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…
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Nuances in and Action Gaming with the Pool
So I had the chance to play the Pool with a couple of excellent roleplayers this past weekend, and it helped spark some thoughts for me. Let me describe a particular moment from the game, and then how I applied a lesson from it to a wider context. At one point, an NPC was trying…
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Timing, movement, and maps
I think we have created a solid mini-curriculum about some critical features of play. The first part is Movement and maps, the second is Horses on squares, and here’s my next part. I definitely include the comments to the prior posts as part of it. If you find any other posts or sets of comments…