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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Rule this
I’ve run into a few conversational speedbumps lately, nothing adversarial, which nevertheless put me in an adversarial frame of mind. That’s due to history: having been mis-characterized as a “rules as written” advocate, for example; having taken the high road regarding such terms as “old school” as if it were a thing, and seeing my…
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Space / Light / Oxygen
A group of us have been discussing underground environments over at the Adept Play Discord server, and some interesting insights and questions have been raised. We arrived at a critical mass of comments where it seemed prudent to move the discussion over to this site for the sake of deepening (pun intended) the discussion, widening…
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Should a guitar play itself?
Recently I’ve been playing some more Dungeon World, this time as a player, kind of coaching an unexperienced GM through the game (it unfortunately requires this, due to the numerous unclarified rules). We’re at our fifth session and we’ve started to really hit it off a couple of sessions ago. Me and the GM often…
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Monday Lab: In the phenomenological thickets
I posted the Phenomenology presentation in January 2018, as my first Adept Play contribution to thinking about this activity of ours. What you’re seeing there is actually my second version; I’d posted the first to the Patreon back then, and re-shot it following their comments. I’m doing the same again, with an eye toward a…
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Compartmentalized/Defecting Luddite
I’ve always been one of those role players who hates any laptops/smartphones at the table when we game. I see them as distracting & therefore damaging to the immersion we seek. Gaming online right now (which we finally decided to try since returning to gaming & 2 of my gaming friends are not in my…
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Design Curriculum 1: Re-inspiration
I’ve been working up a Design curriculum for role-playing for a long while, so when Justin Nichols approached me for a game design discussion that leaned toward mentoring, I accepted without reservation. At the beginning of this episode, we considered our options for the initial approach, and Justin preferred the “lab” version in which we…
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Role / Jazz Playing
The comparison has been around for a long time; I first encountered it in an early edition of RuneQuest. It may even have entered that status of “everyone knows that,” but I haven’t run into much reflection on its content. Grégory Meurant opened a conversation with me about it. He’s posted here before about playing…
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Another pair of eyes
There is little, possibly no hope left in me that discussing role-playing as phenomenology has been time well-spent. “Sporadic cynicism” indeed. But every so often something happens to disperse it. In this case, it’s Dustin DePenning, author of Synthicide, whom you may have watched in play with me over in Actual Play. He contacted me…
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Discuss: Phenomenology
This five-piece video series is my raw material for the ongoing project, to generate a real text for what on earth this role-playing ‘thing’ might actually be. It’s the abstract part, coming at it with both extensive experience but also completely without the familiar in-hobby vocabulary or investments. It’s really abstract! I know that, it’s…