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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Conflict conflict, who’s got the conflict
That illustration is just about exactly perfect for my character, Zocchi Scurlato. (artist is Nicholas Kay) Petteri, Paul, Santiago, and I continue with our saga of the golden dragon-man in the city of commerce, whom Zocchi is more or less planning to murder, depending on whom he runs into next. This session is noted for…
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Manticores R us
My latest consult with Tor brings us his working title, “Belitsunnu’s Manticore,” and extensive discussion of winning/losing, procedures for player input into preparation, and improvised tactical play. Please add the collective intelligence to this one. We raised tons of questions and I tried not to drive toward answers – help me round out and deepen…
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Events, plot, story, and other conundrums
We met again to keep playing Tales of Entropy, and I think we’re getting a good look at how “story” happens, or perhaps, an exercise in whether fictional events are or are not a story. It won’t surprise anyone to know my position: that the more we anticipate and compose a story, the less we…
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The merchant’s wife
I’m spacing out the discussion of Tor’s project post by post, because it’s in such an early stage that each chat we have turns into a big block, or stage, of the process. If I’m not mistaken, this one is pretty much the turning point from “playing D&D 5th edition on purpose” to “his own…
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Gold, dragon, golden dragon
With great thanks to Petteri, Santiago, and Paul, we enjoyed diving pretty deep into the game, with more to go. Given four briefly-described choices from Petteri for our starting short-story piece, we used From the World of Old, which concerns a dragon who wakes into the developing civilized world (not really historical, but symbolic thereof)…
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B stands for Best
I first encountered Be-Movie during Modena, a gaming convention in the city of that name, just about one year ago when I was running little consults at the Narrattiva tables. I confess I was suspicious about it. For one thing, the term “B movie” in hobby culture is almost always parodic, in the sense that…
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Lies, patience, and creepy grit
Who could have asked for a better inadvertent experiment in comparative design? Four consulting clients, one specific historical ideal of role-playing experience, similar influences and familiarities with games and ideas, resulting in four non-converging, distinctive games. Directions Storyplay, Tales of Entropy, Be-Movie, and this one, Jeff Slater’s House of Spiders. Here’s a summary of some…
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To Crawl or not to Crawl
Tor and I continue our discussion of his embryonic, not-5th-anymore fantasy adventure design. We talk about inspiration/behavior mechanics, the large context for play I call the Crawl (with juicy game references), and the importance of making it your own, gloriously embarrassing fantasy. About this point, you may be asking, “What kind of game consulting is…
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Finding direction
Here’s the first consulting session with BPG, author of Directions Storyplaying System, of two sessions we’ve done which includes a pretty detailed amount of “let’s play” across two of them. I found working with this system simultaneously with Tales of Entropy to be a little challenging, as they share the rhetorical philosophy of design and…