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.
-
Monday Lab: How Long …
… Has This Been Goin’ On? Alternative equally music-meming title: My Only Friend, the End. Or, wait, how about, Stop! In the Name of What? This is about how long we play, in real time. It can refer to the length of a session, how many sessions relative to a given fictional situation, how long […]
-
Conversation: 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 […]
-
![Monday Lab: [AA]IIEE[EE]!](https://adeptplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/beating-heart.jpg)
Monday Lab: [AA]IIEE[EE]!
Intent, Initiation, Execution, Effect – fictional things, probably the single most direct fictional content to be interfaced with real-people speaking and using rules, in the hobby. In a recent dialogue with Zac Porcu, he called it “the beating heart of role-playing.” Briefly: design zone 1 is to establish a linear order and then to carry […]
-
Two Premise Statements
From the Champions Now! Question Outpost: Joel Davis – Ron, if I understand the playtest document (plus everything you've said in your videos), the campaign is built around two premise statements: A defining trait of superheroes, supervillains, or powers in the campaign Campaign themes in a campaign location To wrap my head around this, I thought […]
-
Monday Lab: GM Half Full
Looking at the topic of distributing GM-tasks all sorts of different ways, which we all know well, but maybe its widespread use doesn’t reflect enough of its potential. Anyway, although Champions Now is more visible, I’m also working on Cosmic Zap for Chaosium, and the GM-task technique is reeeeeally its own thing for that one. […]
-
Monday Lab: The Other Kind of Map
“Everyone knows” what a relationship map is, but they’re definitely not all the same thing, especially with these variables exposed: Whether the player-characters are in it Group preparation vs. single-person construction Criteria for links/connectors I also had prepared more thoughts on the Sorcerer’s Soul method, with the depicted Forbidden Tome map as the example, which […]
-
Conversation: 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 […]
-
Monday Lab: Nutz R Us
It is crazy how common and how widely-developed craziness is, in role-playing. As much as world-building, as much as combat options, as much as magic systems, this is a definite feature of the hobby with its own schools and aims. It is clearly a primary path toward characterization, character development, player agency (through its managed […]
-
Champions Now Playtest Doc questions
1. What are the costs and effects of Life Support? 2. The Ranged advantage seems to be missing. +1/2? Allen