Adept Play
Lines refer to content which a person, or group, does not want to include in the current fiction of play. Veils refer to content which is acceptable but which a person, or group, does not to be described explicitly.
Contrary to a lot of play culture right now, I’m not too invested in single-session, highly staged play. I don’t mind the technique itself and have myself written some games along those lines, especially It Was a Mutual Decision, but there are so many of these at present, I find myself attracted mainly to “hey,…
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…
Stefano first talked with me about this game about a year and a half ago, at Modena Play. At the time, he was anxious about how it might be received, about whether or how one might be designated unsuited or ineligible for authoring such a thing, and about representation in general. Dozens of playtests later,…
The Games and Education podcast series by Keenan Kibrick is no small thing! I am very happy to be invited for a conversation there, and even more so about morality, explicit content, real-world emotions, and boundaries. That’s what my 2003 publication Sex & Sorcery was all about. You see, I think the developments from there…
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…
This is an excerpt from my conversation with Ken Oswald, who contacted me regarding a bunch of role-playing topics. He was especially interested in the references he’d run across about Sean Demory’s 2002 game le mon mouri, so here is the bit where we went through its system diagram and talked about its content. This…
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…