Adept Play
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.
Last October 31st, I went to the first conference of the Italian role-playing games authors, which has been held during the Lucca Comics & Games 2018 fair, and to which I partook with a small speech with the same title of this post, and with the following abstract: Six years apart from the closure of…
In his series of G+ posts based on reading/reflecting on games, Jason D’Angelo mentioned he’d be going through Dungeons & Dragons (1977), by J. Eric Holmes. Unable to resist, I asked him to chat me with about that, and so here we are. Some of the points in there bear further deep-dives. If you agree,…
In the recent Globalism seminar comments, Alan Barclay talked about encountering ditto copies of Dungeons & Dragons probably bootlegged from the GenCon release in 1974. I do recall the game just transported me — I didn’t care much about mechanics, just the experience of ineracting with the imaginary world created lagely in my own head.…
Apologies for the buzzword … The idea here was to examine our respective region when we encountered role-playing, and to think about how role-playing got there, and in what form. It’s only four people, representing two slightly different parts of Califoria divided as well by about six years (mid-70s vs. early 80s), the Netherlands at…
Ken Oswald is a game and comics retailer in Alabama, who’ll be giving an ambitious introduction to role-playing later this summer, He contacted me for sort of a brainstorm, let’s compare notes session. The question is, how might a non-role-playing, or sorta-semi, heard-about-it audience be best oriented? Without manipulating toward specific products, and without falling…
The one thing I regret is not making up twenty characters across seven game titles and launching into fervent play right away. This was so much fun. There was a Renaissance, and no one noticed. Or only in scattered experience, in the insistence upon the recognition of this or that title (for me, The Fantasy…
Here’s a conversation with Ivan, following up on his comments (and video) in the Finding D&D series. I split the last bit off to join the SFTV RPG seminar too, so this was sort of an all-over-Adept-Play discussion. It’s divided roughly into some “how we met D&D” talk, thoughts on fantasy in role-playing and fantasy…
Part 5, final video out of five. Presenting a couple of definitions, asking a few pointed questions, copping to what I think. Let the rumpus start. I’ve mentioned it here and there, but will repeat that these are drafts, my first attempt. Some of the mistakes might be fixed easily with re-edit, others less so…
Finding D&D, part 4! This one is scaring me. Remember how I warned that the one about fundamentalism and the OSR wouldn’t be insulting? I fear this one can’t say the same, and even if it doesn’t go too far, I know it’s going to gore a lot of oxen. One point I develop in…