Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Consulting
Here’s where you can see my role-playing design consulting, with clients’ permission. Please comment at any post that interests you.
I am available for consulting! I do not insert my own design, writing, or editing into others’ games. I engage with your goals and your aesthetic priorities to help you see your way through the questions or struggles you may have, to provide new information or perspectives, to play a little bit, to listen, and to ask the tough questions.
Check out any of the posts and videos to see how it goes, and use the Contact link above. If we agree it’s a good fit, then the fee is 1200 SEK + VAT (300 SEK) for three sessions.
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Three maybe-maybe-not heroes, and that is the point
I’ve moved into playtesting for Levied Souls, with the help of friends at Spelens Hus. It’s a long-term project with plans for multiple sessions, and so this first session was for character creation. By player request, it’s also audio only, athough I have set it up as a video for helpful captioning and occasional textual…
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Designing the introductory teaching game
Patrons will recognize Zac Porcu as the instigator and interlocutor in the huge discourse on role-playing that made available to them a few years ago, and viewers here may recall the Sorcerer Musik game that he and Jann played in. He and Jann are now working on a role-plyaing game composed of easily-used cards transported…
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Existential sword and sorcery
Here’s one of my favorite things: consulting with someone I didn’t know about a project I didn’t know about. Jeff McNeil has been working on his game Levied Souls for some time, and it’s beaten into pretty much manuscript phase, just shy of actual layout. I’ve learned that this is not my favorite phase to…
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Scathings
One of the sessions I played at IndieCON was for Edoardo Cremaschi’s Marks on the Skin (you may remember him from Little Katy’s Tea Party in Consulting). I am wondering whether it is really good for a person to play several Cremaschi and Pettersson games in a short span of time, as each designer quite…
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Dead protagonists, fleeting memories
Psychopomp is another of the many initial/proto game designs that Justin is musing over and playtesting, and he wanted to make sure it got into the scorching too. I had to think pretty hard about how to go into it, because it fits so strongly into a particular aesthetic and an existing set of variables,…
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Dice pool design is a ball pit to play in
I rarely get the chance to dig right into one of my most favored and preferred role-playing mechanics, the dice pool. Notwithstanding that I have yet to discover a reasonable description of what any such thing is, meaning, in a defining sense, applicable to various versions. I wouldn’t mind seeing plenty of “hey, what about…
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Superhero values confrontations
Justin and I shifted over to one of his other designs in progress, Origin, which has a nice values-based resolution idea and lends itself to “but that wouldn’t be right” play among superheroes. Part 1 (embedded below) goes right into my critique of one of his values-axes, i.e. a polarized spectrum, to address the perceived…
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Discovering what not to do
You’ll see a mention in the video as well as in the comments to one of Robbie’s playtesting posts that I am staying a little hands-off with the Weighting Rooms consulting, which may seem like a “but isn’t getting hands-on the point” question. Well, I’ll repeat what I said here: that when someone is trapped…
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Weighting Rooms redux
Three of us gathered to play the newest revision of Weighting Rooms on January 21. The players included me (a middle aged English teacher), my daughter Lara (an 18-year-old senior), and Joe (an 18-year-old senior). Our session lasted about 2.5 hours and we had to shut off the game a bit prematurely (due to…