Adept Play
One on one or small-group discussions, without the formal context of an interview or seminar.
Megan Bennett-Burks and I toss some topics back and forth mainly because we both grapple with them. You’ll probably recognize my beefs with crowdfunding, or rather, how it happened to turn out in practice, despite my support for the basic idea; also, my ongoing effort to distinguish between text as teaching vs. reference vs. user…
It is pure pleasure both to play with and to converse with Simon Pettersson, with the added benefit of his help & guidance during my first visit to Lincon last month. Patrons already got to read about my adventures with sleeping quarters there, so if you want anecdotes and details, that’s the way. When I…
The mystic world heard my cry, evidently, and has delivered a glowy burst of conversations about what dice do, especially when rolled in profusion. This time I have the pleasure of talking with Ben Milton, in an almost completely unconstructed, non-interview-like chat just because we like these dice things. Part 1 examines what big dice…
Evidently my Reflections by request video from Febuary 14 wasn’t too badly done, as I’ve received a lot of inquiries about continuing the discussion, especially the topics raised at the end. John Stephens contributed a lot of thoughts and attention to the development of role-playing, during what some think of as the strongest period of…
In his series of G+ posts based on reading/reflecting on games, Jason D’Angelo mentioned he’d be going through Dungeons & Dragons (1977), by J. Eric Holmes. Unable to resist, I asked him to chat me with about that, and so here we are. Some of the points in there bear further deep-dives. If you agree,…
In the recent Globalism seminar comments, Alan Barclay talked about encountering ditto copies of Dungeons & Dragons probably bootlegged from the GenCon release in 1974. I do recall the game just transported me — I didn’t care much about mechanics, just the experience of ineracting with the imaginary world created lagely in my own head.…
A conversation with Jonathan Tweet! I hope I do not bore anyone by repeating myself about the influence of Over the Edge upon me in role-playing, both in helping me return to enthusiastic play from a doldrums period and in providing me with a fresh view toward design. The DNA of Sorcerer lies back in…
The comparison has been around for a long time; I first encountered it in an early edition of RuneQuest. It may even have entered that status of “everyone knows that,” but I haven’t run into much reflection on its content. Grégory Meurant opened a conversation with me about it. He’s posted here before about playing…
When Champions was first published, most people involved in role-playing accepted, or even expected, to put in extensive effort before play. Today, plug-and-play is widely recognized as a virtue, whether justified by playing in convention situations or by citing friends who reasonably do not commit to complex nonsense before doing the thing they want to…