Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Psychedelica
This topic concerns hallucinatory, visionary, or artistic content of this type which features significantly in the fiction of play.
-
Sten, meet Jane
This is always the toughest time for playtesters, because it’s no longer about “cool, an idea,” but about “oh crap, saying/teaching it this way is pure miscommunication.” The poor players are like my hands which are trying to read Braille but are unfortunately picking up the waffle iron instead. The better one of my games…
-
Staying underground, dungeon or no dungeon
In his series of G+ posts based on reading/reflecting on games, Jason D’Angelo mentioned he’d be going through Dungeons & Dragons (1977), by J. Eric Holmes. Unable to resist, I asked him to chat me with about that, and so here we are. Some of the points in there bear further deep-dives. If you agree,…
-
The ontological concept of happiness, among other things
Second session of the current Cosmic Zap game, displaying one of the game features that it’s robust relative to player attendance. Rod mentions at one point that it’s the most self-indulgent role-playing he’s done, either lately or maybe ever. That’s why this time the lead image for this post is a link. I call attention…
-
Happiness = to love and to work
You play a game set in L.A., I tell you what, you’re going to be driving hither & yon a hell of a lot. This session brought us downtown, then to Corona, Venice Beach, the northeast burbs, and eventually to Antelope Valley, in the wilds of Palmdale. There was even a mention of La Fontana…
-
Chaos against criminality, as Law struggles to know itself
Here’s the first of three games I led at Gauntlet Con 2018! A Cosmic Zap playtest. When I initially signed on for playing it months ago, I was unsure about how well-developed the game would be, or even how playable/failed at all. But it turned out to be a decisive validator of the project. I…
-
Zap II, in-house testing
Here’s the next round of seeing how Cosmic Zap is shaping up. It’s an important phase because Ian is the project developer for Chaosium, and Rod and Juan are both artists who are very familiar with the source material. Juan screen-shared during most of the session, allowing us to enjoy his emerging character sheet. I’ve…
-
Outer Inner Space
Here’s the final session of Cosmic Zap, playtest epic #1! I’d intended to append it to the previous post in the comments, but then again, it’d be good to see a complete retrospective on the whole thing here. The good news: it worked, and cognitively, procedurally speaking, there’s an actual game here. Further playtesting is…
-
Science fiction freaks out about reproductive rights (again)
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…
-
Playing into design, designing out from play
Mid-design playtesting is perhaps the most intensive intellectual stage, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like gutting out a highly fatiguing task whose benefit, upon completion, is looking mighty obscure. This is our sixth session for Cosmic Zap, and in a lot of ways, it might have been the last. You can see,…