Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Situations
The term refers to the available, actionable scope of play during the course of a roleplaying experience. It may be composed of different locations or times, or concepts, and it is always composed of scenes (where someone is, what is happening) as subunits.
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Playing without prep – an anecdote
This is a follow-up to this post : https://adeptplay.com/2025/07/11/playing-prepared/ I started playing Fantasy For Real with Julie & Logan, with who I played Apocalypse World three years ago (Already !), here https://adeptplay.com/2022/08/26/return-apocalypse-world/ Due to my recent improvement in play, also a period of only playing as a player-character (not as a GM) the last 6 months,…
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Playing prepared
I think I have internalized ways of playing prepared enough to be able to describe what I do when I play. This is the simplest description of what I learned about how to play situationally. This text assumes by default a traditional role of a GM who have NPC and backstory authorities. This partly describes…
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GMing For Iago
I’ve been running a game using Story Engine for a couple of months now. We’ve had some scheduling bumps, so it has only really been three or four sessions. The setup involves an idea I’ve had for years that I casually describe as “Frank Miller’s Three Musketeers”. Essentially, a kind of neo-noir underworld game set…
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Gothcon 2025
I always enjoy Gothcon, and this time I received some much-needed exercise as the play-area was located a few blocks away from the main convention buildings. I may even have managed to navigate the larger layout of the city via the trams without embarrassing reversals, for the first time in my travels here. As usual…
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The gods must be evil
We’ve continued with our Harnmaster game throughout the past two months, originally discussed through session 7 at One bad harvest. As of last week, we played the twelfth and final session, so I have a lot of catching up to do. My concepts and preparation for this game do have a fundamental flaw. I never…
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Three Plus Two Musketeers
David, Greg, Rod, Sam and I recently played our eighth session of Lace & Steel, a game we’ve been playing for approximately five months. I want to write about the game, for myself, with an eye toward jump-starting my own critical reflection on roleplaying, which has suffered quite a bit in 2025. Rod, who’s GMing,…
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First Circle of Hands session in a new group
About a year ago I was introduced to Circle of Hands at Lincon, and I wanted to explore this game more. I tried running it at Arcon in Oslo last June, I set up the same con-scenario for some colleagues and during the autumn my regular group switched from Stonetop to Circle of Hands. My…
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Laser Duel on Dreni
“Mustering Out Blues” is what I call Traveller using the Pool, slightly hacked so that how many you credits you want to spend and how many you can get as payout is part of the action. I’ve been running it with three players in two-hour-long sessions online via Roll20 about once a week since the…
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Irresponsibility and integrity
I’d like to celebrate the virtues of my game Fantasy for Real, especially the phrase I hit upon at some point in its latter-day development, “irresponsible adventure,” and what that means. I’ve been playing the hell out of it during April through various events I’ve attended. The brief history is that I worked on two…