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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In the Shadow of the Shining Lords
Checking in to share some notes about an ongoing game of The Pool which I started with a few local friends (though we play it over Discord) after taking Ron’s “Playing the Pool” course. I started out by offering the players a few evocative images from the covers of the Planet Stories pulp magazine, and…
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50 sessions played wrong
So, one of my favourite stories about my play experience is how I ran “Burning Wheel” wrong for 50 sessions (counted, now I played something around 84 sessions of BW). From my and most players perspective it was quite normal and there wasn’t anything suspicious… and so it was until I ran it for Aleksandra…
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Alien parasites vs. prom night
I recently ran The Pool on short notice for three players, using a ‘start file’ I created as part of Ron’s course, Playing with The Pool. The players Carl and Kevin are old friends of mine and in their 50s like me; Russel is Carl’s 19-year old son, who joined our regular (much larger) roleplaying…
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Situational questions
Twelve sessions in, I’m comfortable with the concept I’ve outlined earlier: any permissible combination of fighter, thief, cleric, and assassin; half-elves, half-orcs, humans; the mega-Law and mega-Chaos churches and the implied shadowy-city fantasy. To review, check out You had one job!, Goodness, and Shady deeds in shadowy places. At this point, again between-levels and between-adventures,…
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Shady deeds in shadowy places
We have begun our third adventure for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, including one half-orc cleric-assassin for the Church of the Eternal and Fundamental Ordination, one half-elf fighter-assassin for the Church of the Ineffable Disruption of All Being, one half-elf fighter-thief who moonlights for the Disruption, and two half-orc fighter-clerics for the, well, it doesn’t really…
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Fleshing out encounters
This play report started as a comment on Issues 1–7 but ballooned into its own post. I ran an impromptu game of “generic OSR” (whatever that means — as I have seen playing these games, a lot of different things to different people) last week. We went spelunking in the module Caverns of Thracia by…
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Issues #1-7
Sam and I sat down last week to record a conversation about a 7-issue run on Villains & Vigilantes we did along with our longtime creative collaborator Robin. Personally, I value how unprogrammed this particular dialog was. We excavated lessons from our play of Villains & Vigilantes that we’re excited to apply to our current…
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Goodness
We’ve continued to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, first version, at Spelens Hus, for another whole adventure in three more sessions. It has included a big shift in focus due to adding two players, Yaroslav and Milo. [see the previous post You had one job!] Milo had been present in our initial preparatory session but…
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War no more
We’ve been playing 3:16 for a while at Spelens Hus, meaning, the group of young people who’ve previously played Tunnels & Trolls, Villains & Vigilantes, and Mörk Borg among others. The membership has shifted around a little throughout its 18-month history but has always been characterized by enthusiasm and intellectual connections. Those latter features led…