Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Emotions in play
The real participants’ emotions factor into play at many levels and at many points, sometimes as cause toward the fiction and sometimes as effects from it. Terms like immersion and bleed apply to some visible forms, but the social component of play carries emotional weight as well.
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Until the shepherds arrive
I’ve been playing at Spelens Hus throughout the summer, but schedules have been so variable that no useful posting has been possible until we get some regular play in. The exception is three sessions of The Quiet Year, played by Emil, Denica, and me. We set up a play-location sparked by the word “archipelago,” but…
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Comedy and Whimsy
I’ve been playing again since taking a three months break from playing and thinking really hard about how I want to approach this activity and if I even want to continue doing it. One of the important improvements is retracting my investment in all “community” aspects of roleplaying and the related madness, and focusing on…
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Epics don’t grow themselves
We’ve been playing Trollbabe for a while at Spelens Hus, featuring these characters: Our character sheets are particularly wretched scraps of paper, which I confess I prefer these days; also, these are the current versions after five sessions, somewhat marked up. The adventures so far I cannot manage to express how much Rod’s map for…
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Three Plus Two Musketeers
David, Greg, Rod, Sam and I recently played our eighth session of Lace & Steel, a game we’ve been playing for approximately five months. I want to write about the game, for myself, with an eye toward jump-starting my own critical reflection on roleplaying, which has suffered quite a bit in 2025. Rod, who’s GMing,…
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When Did You First Hear ‘Yes’?
I was listening to some random Yes the other day and I recognized it as a song from their Pop era. And it got me thinking about how we react to others who may be fans of a band on either side of significant change. The band Genesis is another good example and Metallica is…
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A Small Act of Kindness in Hell
This weekend I played a session of my design-in-progress game “Variations on a Quiet and Lonely Hell”. It went quite well and there was an interesting bit of play phenomenon that provoked some thoughts I’d share. A brief structural overview for context: The player characters are all (separately) wandering around an abandoned town. When they…
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Trying free form and tabletop role play at Stockholm Scenario Festival 2024
This post is about my experiences at Stockholm Scenario Festival 2024, “A festival for free form role playing games, short larps, and other kinds of shorter participatory storytelling.” This past year I have been wondering how little of a rules system a game could have and still be fun to play for me. What is…
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A light in the past
As scheduled and promoted, I played Amerika at the Happening, with Claudio, David, Laura, and Hans. If you donated to help the event, then you have the brief manuscript we used to play, set in this region of northern California. It’s far north of my hometown, but I have considerable experience there in two pulses,…
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Excess and excitement
At the Happening, I played several games which share some features: characters at extreme risk and at least some are not expected to survive, circumstances which pit them against or with another as players decide, formal shifts in immediate content or theme, a lot of backstory content created during play, and a lot of inspiration…