Adept Play
This is a series of recorded discussions between Ron Edwards and Justin Nichols regarding roleplaying game design, conducted from late 2018 through early 2019.
You can go all the way back to 1998 to see me saying, “I want to talk about point-builds and dice, so let’s get past some easy points about goals of play and get to the good practical stuff.” Twenty-one years later and people are still blubbering about “but but simulation.” I’ve repeated this plea…
Our topic this time is the length of play as it relates to game rules. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not as simple as seeing what the rules say and obeying them; people play long or short in defiance of those rules (when present) all the time. The question is when or how the rules…
Justin gave me a list of questions or topics for this session, and I realized they made most sense in nested form. So I grouped IIEE and relationship mechanics into the larger category of Bounce and system diagrams (specifically their feedback or activity loops), then put the whole into the biggest category of design processes…
I’ve shifted our focus more fully into the concrete experience of designing a game. I’m also finding it useful to consider the practitioner’s general outlook of “this is how I did it,” vs. the observer’s or analyst’s outlook of “but how does a person do it,” without falling into the trap of tossing it back…
I’m not making any claims about the logic or organization by this point in our talks, rather, I’m hoping Justin isn’t thinking that I’m totally making it up as I go. It’s certainly been helpful to me to recognize what pieces I need to pull into their own how we play discussion so they can…
Justin Nichol and I continue our discussion, or training, regarding game design. This session (in 5 videos) delves into the way we talk / the way we roll. The topic shifts quite logically from whether & when describing things colorfully works, to gaudy and painful consequences of moment-by-moment decision-making. I have never thought the fiction-first/mechanics-first…
I’ve been working up a Design curriculum for role-playing for a long while, so when Justin Nichols approached me for a game design discussion that leaned toward mentoring, I accepted without reservation. At the beginning of this episode, we considered our options for the initial approach, and Justin preferred the “lab” version in which we…