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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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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Yonder out yonder
This is Traveller, in one of its early-early publications: 1981, Game Design Workshop, which as far as I can tell is about the same as the original 1977 publication. A quick point: this isn’t anything like Traveller as stamped iconically into gaming culture. There is no setting, no Imperium, no canonical starmaps, no campaign-planning, nothing…
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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…
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Situated characters
[This post is adapted from a Patreon post a couple of months ago. It’s relevant to the March Q&A so I’ve made it public here.] I’ve been thinking about a practical aspect of preparation which feeds into qualities of play. It boils down to a simple question: does whoever’s making up important aspects of the…
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Reincorporation and deep situation
Last week, I played my 28th session of a game in development called Crescendo with the game designer (Nathan Hicks). The title of the post is taken from a discussion the day after our session. I suggested writing a post about it called “reincorporation is a helluva drug” and Nathan responded by saying: “You just…
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Take chances, make mistakes, get messy
This is about a game we played last fall for six or seven sessions, maybe more, using my ongoing modification of Legendary Lives that I’m calling Whimsical Ways. Play concerned the misadventures of these characters: To repeat slightly from the video, I found myself doing way too much canoodling and placing things during play so…
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Games & Systems: My Thoughts
I worked my way through both the post by (on) Liber Ludorum and the original post by Linda Codega, both of which I have linked. Codega’s post is on Gizmodo and by definition is more focused / influenced / to be read in as commentary on more commercial ventures. Whereas LL’s post moves further afield…
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Reincorporation and situations in The Clay That Woke
This is a self-reflective post is about referring reincorporation and situation in play, and two mechanics of the game: the nameless conversation, getting a name and how all of those variables intersect together. For that reason, I’ll avoid any talk about prep in the article. What I want to celebrate, is what I see as…
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Mustering Out Blues
At the end of February, I ran a game for Games on Demand Online I call Mustering Out Blues. It’s a Traveller hack that came from a couple-three different places: (1) the classic Traveller campaign I started at the height of the pandemic that evolved into Galactic Adventures, the game I described in a previous…