Adept Play
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.
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…
Weighting Rooms is a character and story building game for 3-6 players that I am currently designing with a group of students, along with some consulting advice from Ron. The basic premise of the game is that the players take on the roles of characters who have died and gone to limbo. They all suffer…
This has been a great consulting experience. Watch the way Dustin considers what I say about using the overall game/realm conflict as the rating for the power for replacement characters, internalizes it, but then completely makes it his own (and much better) by using the adversary’s current “win” score instead. I say “this is a…
Dustin was intrigued by my statements in our first consulting session about character improvement, as well as being suspicious that I would start maundering about relationships as reward enough. I was able to surprise him a little, and the discussion was able to expand quite sensibly into his more general design regarding character death. A…
Dustin isn’t a naive game designer, having produced Synthicide and generally navigated modern publishing. He asked me how to promote a game which did not fit neatly into “trad or indie,” “OSR or story game,” or any other dichotomy which people presented to him. Which is a perfect opportunity for me to stomp upon those…
This was my first scheduled consult session at Lucca. As usual, I had no expectations, but if I did, they would have been challenged by the degree that people came prepared. Francesco brought a deck of cards that looked ready to print. The title in English is “The Trench,” so my first question, as I’m…
Contrary to a lot of play culture right now, I’m not too invested in single-session, highly staged play. I don’t mind the technique itself and have myself written some games along those lines, especially It Was a Mutual Decision, but there are so many of these at present, I find myself attracted mainly to “hey,…