Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Hobby culture
Roleplaying emerged from a historical meeting-point among wargaming, literary enthusiasts, and counterculture in the 1970s, and it has interacted strangely with pop culture and commerce.
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The Overlooked Importance of Resonance
Here I am with some fresh reflections after another miserable experience. I’m playing Monsterhearts II with a group. It’s a game I know well and have played a lot. I don’t think it’s exceptionally strong on pure mechanics, but it has lots of elements that spark tense situations between characters with dynamics I find interesting.…
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Observations on play in Toowoomba
I’ve been playing a few times with the local D&D club. Local in this case is Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia. A reasonably large provincial city – where I started playing back in the 70s, when I was one of at most a handful of players in the whole town. Now, of course, there are hundreds of…
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If you’re not looking for it, you don’t see it
[This post is adapted from a Patreon topic from earlier this year. If you want to see how some of my ideas are developed before becoming public, please consider joining the Patreon.] I doubt anyone reading this would respond positively to an outright vile racist slur in a role-playing text, or tolerate it to the…
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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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Gaming, future, role-playing
I was invited to attend Conpulsion, a long-standing and proudly non-commercialized convention in Edinburgh. This year, the convention theme was “The Future of Gaming,” which led me to ask the organizers to reconsider whether I would be a good guest. I told them: I don’t think the activity celebrated by Adept Play, whatever you want…
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Fantasy Role-Playing in 1998 Germany
The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge) isn’t the oldest German RPG, but by far the commercially most successful and most widely played one that had dominated the market for decades. Covering the entire publication history and design development here would be far out of scope, but I still need to establish some context for those…
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Champions and Dinosaurs – Before D&D
As a change of pace, here’s some proto-roleplaying… Back in 1956, a guy called Tony Bath wrote a pair of articles in the Bulletin of the British Model Soldier Society. Titled “War Game of the Middle Ages and Ancient Times“, they contained the first published set of Ancient/Medieval wargames rules. Developed over time, these rules…
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Workshop: What Went Wrong
Here’s the beast: all the things I think we should collectively consider as the social and commercial platform for role-playing’s history … and content, and emotions. Distribution, political context, money matters, subcultural effects, and more: presented not as momentary justifications, but as a layered history with a deep structure of cause and effect. Many thanks…
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On not getting it out there
Erik Steiner is a PhD candidate at York University, studying the economics and marketing of role-playing. He’s apparently talked to a lot of people and eventually came around to me. Before you understandably anticipate a disaster, I’ll tell you the payoff: a great conversation and opportunity to articulate important ideas. Because, at his invitation, I…