Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Medium of play
Table-top role-playing occurs in a distinctive state of listening among the participants. In terms of fictional construction, the effect is reincorporation, and within the fiction, the effect to produce uncertainty. These ideas are presented in the course People & Play, the foundation of all the other courses.
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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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Two Nicotine Girls’ dashed dreams
I ran Nicotine Girls for the first time yesterday. Despite some confusion, especially in the middle, we had an intense experience that we can’t quite believe ourselves. Hank and Olivia are a couple and part of my regular group as well as its splinter group which Olivia and I created to play smaller games. Everyone…
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Playing prepared
I think I have internalized ways of playing prepared enough to be able to describe what I do when I play. This is the simplest description of what I learned about how to play situationally. This text assumes by default a traditional role of a GM who have NPC and backstory authorities. This partly describes…
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Play-Play-Play
Play: What we did for a single session with Masks of the Leviathan, a design of Dithmer’s that he facilitated for Felix and me, which I believe is in a late-stage, fine-tuning phase. It’s fantasy. We had: Characters (rather, “figures, which can be a single character or multiple, or a concept or something inanimate embodied…
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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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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…
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“Collaborative mode”
What is this? Our group has been playing together for a bit. Some for 100+ games, some for 10+ games. We love Call of Cthulhu, “play to find out what happens” games (Apocalypse World derivatives) and GM-less games (Microscope, Fiasco, Desperation). We don’t love scenario-based adventures only, and we tend to play with the GM…
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Blackbrain Tea
I’m not completely certain, but I think this is in the realm of our activity. Whether it is or is not is a valid topic of discussion for this post. Some way or another, a year or two ago I became aware of the existence of a book called Top 10 Games You Can Play…
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Vampire The Heresy
This is a report of an experience of Vampire The Masquerade played between 2003 and 2006. This was a play by forum game, on a French website (who is now offline), with more or less 30 players and 3 GM. The site functioned as a series of forums, each one used as a “scene”, generally…