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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Swapping all the Places
Recently, my partner and I finished out the ongoing game-that’s-hard-to-describe we’ve been playing, which they call “Harmony Campaign”, set in Glorantha. It lasted about two and a half years, with a long gap near the end where active play was rare. In that time, a number of changes in both our lives occurred, directly correlated…
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Dungeons & Dragons 5e-ish
1 DM, 5 players. Online (Discord, YouTube). This group consists of audiobook narrators. It was originally an outreach for our new professional organization, PANA (the Professional Audiobook Narrators’ Association) so character voices are very much in style for this game. The premise is that fantasy characters have been magically transported into a particular genre of…
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The Yellow King Role-playing Game
3 players and 1 GM. In this game, we are playing three different sets of characters in four different timelines. Originally, we were only going to play this game during COVID, but it’s just so darned interesting we’ve been continuing to do mystery after mystery…probably until all the groups of characters die or go mad. …
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Improving as “just players”
At Sam’s suggestion, he and I recorded a conversation about improving as “just players,” not GMs. We have 2+ years of conversation, shared play, and mutual influence between us, and we were able to ground the topic firmly in our experiences of play. The conversation largely speaks for itself. However, I want to highlight a…
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Bluntly
Here are my reflections about Ten Candles insofar as I understand it. I don’t think it’s any good, and that to enjoy playing necessarily entails doing something other than what’s written there. Like it or not, here’s why.
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If it ain’t baroque….
The Game About 7 months ago, a group of us (4 players plus myself as GM) started playing a relatively new game called Fallen (Perplexing Ruins). The game is presented as a “baroque and grim” fantasy rpg which takes place in a time period analogous to the 17th century. My attraction to the game was…
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Reincorporation and deep situation
Last week, I played my 28th session of a game in development called Crescendo with the game designer (Nathan Hicks). The title of the post is taken from a discussion the day after our session. I suggested writing a post about it called “reincorporation is a helluva drug” and Nathan responded by saying: “You just…
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Inclusive Design
Here’s an interview with me and Thomas Munier, who has been developing materials and ideas in the Francophone-Anglophone overlap. The title term is his, and its meaning is quite broad. He prepared the ground as follows: I would say that there are three parts to deal with which show an approach to inclusive design which…
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The didactic potential of Ten Candles
I recently took Ron’s People & Play course and feel like, more than anything else, it gave me language and context to talk about things I have experienced but lacked proper terminology for. One of the interesting concepts was that of zilchplay, and the idea that, oftentimes, play doesn’t even happen, which is something that,…