Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Seminar
What is this table-top role-playing thing? How does it work, what does it do, what kind of designs do which things? I’ve got some ideas, and so do you. This is where we talk about it! You’ll see conversations, presentations, interviews, and essays.
All the posts here present a concept, game title, or a historical hobby event for discussion, so please comment at any of them. Be sure to review the Site Etiquette & Best Practices available at the bottom of the page.
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Skill Challenges: Changes Over Time
In the Adept Play discord chat, I said, I have been buying some D&D 4th edition books, because it’s a game I’m keen to run. Finally yesterday I had enough of a spread to look at Skill Challenges throughout the edition. I had heard the math was “bad” the first time they printed the rules…
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Augustifesten 2023
This is a downtown festival held in Norrköping every year, mostly associated with food but which has accumulated all sorts of other activities through the years. Now it’s almost a local extra version of the Sweden-wide Kulturnatt in late September. It’s also an important anniversary for me, in two ways. First, Spelens Hus began participating…
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Närcon 2023
I’ve attended the third and last of the primary Swedish conventions for me this year, excluding the big one, Nordsken, which I might consider next year. Närcon is not specifically about games as such, being, simply, all about the fun, emphasizing cosplay and music. Spelens Hus Norrköping has an ongoing presence there, recently under review…
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Stop Setting DCs?
This discussion started with Sorcho (Ed Heil) on the Discord channel brought a video to the attention of the larger group. The video comes from the channel of Cetx Etc and can be found here. Feel free to have a listen, it is less than 11m in duration. In the video, the author expresses the…
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July 2023 Q&A
I see much underlying unity across these questions, and I hope you can too. The central concept is situation in play, which certainly needs more practical clarity among us as it relates first to texts, and also to straightforward behavior. Oddly, too, it matches with the final question concerning explicit role-playing references in music, as…
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June 2023 Q&A
Maybe I’m too much of a pattern-making story-making animal, but the questions this time really built a single coherent body of inquiry for me. I felt like I was addressing a single important topic from multiple angles of attack. I introduce the video with a warning, but I’ll say it briefly here as well: this…
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Once again with feeling
Lorenzo Bertini asked me for some discussion about Lines and Veils, specifically, and the general concept they’ve been folded into. (Context: Lorenzo is Claudio Freda’s partner-in-crime regarding their game in design Inquest; Claudio is present in the video as well for clarity and sometimes translation.) I’d asked Lorenzo first to check out Conversation: Safe spaces…
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Dialing down the fantasy
I’m a polyfantasist: any degree of fantastic content and any degree of naturalism are both fun. For the moment, I’m focusing on one historical cluster of play-and-design: variously called hedge fantasy, mud-and-shit fantasy, “iron” fantasy, sometimes overlapping with historical fantasy, with games that sought it through the lens of deep culture and realism. It’s played…
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May 2023 Q&A
The first video is long as I wanted to keep my reply to Mark in a single packet. His question was a comment in the previous Q&A post, regarding my recommendations for myth inquiries & ideas regarding popular culture. I’ve attached an outline which may make it easier to follow. I did not manage actually…