Adept 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.
This is a post of pure enthusiasm for our most recent Circle of Hands session, which had one of the most epic and just plain metal conclusions I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s Venture two, the players are my wife and two of our sons (18 and 16) and they’re already very much Into…
A bit unfairly, this is the last game played during the two-pal pow visit, after Jared had left for home and Simon and I had a bit more time. We’d been talking about French games, as he’d just visited there to investigate the crazy-indie design scene, and he had a bag full of weirdness. One…
Whew! Convention pile-up has me sucking wind on getting posts finished. This one’s about playing Svart av Kval, Vit av Lust, by Simon Pettersson. He’s a one-man Forge here in Sweden, and now that I think of it, reminds me of my good pal Jared Sorensen. When I visited Indierummet at Gothcon, I noticed several…
When I finally got to the Indie Palace area at Lucca, in the Palace Hotel, Beatrice Da Vela and Filippo Zolesi, the latter a.k.a. our very own Pippo Jedi at the Patreon, came to see me with their game Quella Volta Che. It’s not funny or cute, but head-on, headlong into the thick of sexual…
It is crazy how common and how widely-developed craziness is, in role-playing. As much as world-building, as much as combat options, as much as magic systems, this is a definite feature of the hobby with its own schools and aims. It is clearly a primary path toward characterization, character development, player agency (through its managed…
Oh golly, let’s see a bunch of guys over-share about how much their characters have been having sex!! … for those few of you remaining in the room, you’ll see us talk well beyond the boilerplate. Sex has been freed-up in role-playing over the last decade and a half. This seems to have freed us…
Fiction Synopsis: Our heroes must break into a stronghold of apostate halfling paladins to take back blueprints for trap designs. Plans go awry when the same solar eclipse that allowed our heroes to sneak into the stronghold allows something more sinister to return as well. The social sphere: This particular group’s first D&D campaign had…
When I was a 10 year old child, I tried to gamemaster a few Toon games with my classmates during recess, but I could never get it to work. Barring that, the following is an account of my first time roleplaying, and certainly the first time that I participated as a player. I was 18…