Adept Play
These posts include any socio-political content, regardless of how fantastically or realistically presented, however direct or indirect, which factors directly into the events and experiences of play. Disclosure: I do not credit any claim to “non-political” content.
Francesco Zani is busy with lots of game designs, as you’ll see in the videos of my consulting sessions at Lucca. Dictat is a joint effort among him, Davide Cavadni, and Francesco Rugerford Sedda, whom (the latter) I met at Modena Play early last year. Dictat’s a card game that relies on LARP-like subroutines, “oh…
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,…
My other Gauntlet game! Unlike the Cosmic Zap session, running Champions of any stripe in a convention setting is no picnic for prep. But the hardest part is not the character construction … it’s the fact that the players will not have the necessary buy-in and sense of “let’s do this” per interesting item or…
I guess it won’t surprise anyone that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been tapped again for a Hunted. This time there’s no supervillain component, it’s just (“just”) the agency, so in looking for villains to create, and seeing the Crusader on the Curator’s sheet, I focused on the “trapped between two worlds” feature that both…
I’ve been resisting the obvious suggestion about defining the superhero group, “set everything ahead of time,” for very good reasons. Most of the trouble that’s cropped up in playtest so far is not due to failing to do that, but directly traceable to introducing a new hero, whose definitions and problems tend to bulk up…
Just what the inheritor of the century-old superheroic powers and the sixty-year-old superhero-veteran need: a barely-legal vlogging celebrity hound who claims to be the Bay Area’s’ own indispensable crime-fightin’ hero guy. Meet Komodo Dragon! (and thanks to Rod dropping by to be our entirely enjoyable guest player) I am also pleased to present not one…
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…
Here’s the last session but one of the epic Cosmic Zap playtest, which sorta actually worked, and shows why successful playtesting has nothing to do with wowing people with your genius. Far from it. For this one, I plead guilty to egregious abuse of Extended Contests, the finer-grained subset of resolution. The modern HeroQuest rules…
The conclusion to our 39 Dark game, in two videos: Lane Novack, good guy or bad guy? I’m interested in your opinion. Some things to talk about include: What’s going on when players bypass the imagined situation, announcing actions or making statements without any reference to location, characters’ presence, movements, or anything similar. Whether 39…