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.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
Ecstasy and mortality
The above graphic shows the games I played during the Happening, whether organized by me or by someone else. The total games played by everyone there approximately doubled that number of titles. This post is about the two I’ve circled, which are part of my Cantos set of four games. They are weird, arty, intimate…
-
In memoriam: Helma Lindow
My best friend died Saturday, September 28. She was halfway between her 59th and 60th birthdays. She discovered role-playing in 2019 and swiftly became the center of many people’s experiences, for play itself and for learning what it actually is. She was the finest practitioner of this art, as an art, that I have ever…
-
A little me time goes a long way
My job affords me a lot of downtime lately. With this sudden excess of time, I’ve started doing many creative things I love.
-
Into the bliss
Hi all! I’m more of a discord person but to please Ron I decided to post it here (it will be my first post on AP). For last two months I run 8 sessions (plus session zero) of Ben Lehman’s “Bliss Stage” from 2007. We played online using discord plus roll20 as our UI. I…
-
Finding that purpose
I wanted to follow up on my previous post regarding my reflections on Inquest to go more in depth into the Inquest session that I played on the first of the year. It was a planned session with three other friends (Alessio, Benedetta, and Daniele) over a New Year’s gathering. I was playing as the…