Adept Play
This is a very broad category, often confounded with the medium of comics, often perceived as tropes which are much narrower than the historical reality. These posts concern its expression and range within role-playing.
Talked through our Session 0 (world build character build) in previous post. Had our first game. Storn took great notes throughout. Long post summarizing game play and notes on rules questions, some analysis at the end. Timeline of Champs Now, M-Hero, The Victors. (Notes by Storn during play, edits from Neil afterwards) We…
We have a playgroup that are long time Champs/Hero players. Myself, Storn, Eric, Rick and Joe. (Their personalities and play styles are important to these play-test notes.) I’ve been playing since ’81 first edition, and Storn Cook (who you might know from art he has done for the game) and I have been playing together…
Whew – and here we launch into game design, for me an uncharacteristically scary moment, because this isn’t just anything, this is Champions – and playing what is undeniably either my elevation or profanation thereof. I have a bunch of Beta playtests beginning, and this one got going first, with Frank and Alan. I sent…
My Champions Now alpha play is concluded, and I’m moving into Beta. You’ll see a lot of things in the Defiants game which I decided needed to be revised heavily: Mind Scan, Desolid, assisting, and plenty of others which in the past I accepted as “well, that’s just Champions,” all hit the butcher shop for…
It took about four sessions to arrive at a title, but we did, and Rod provided this fine logo. It’s been seven sessions, and I am afraid it’s slogged quite a bit, paying off a bit later than I'd hoped. There’s no one reason, but a perfect storm of details which conspired to turn play…
Here’s the final session of Cosmic Zap, playtest epic #1! I’d intended to append it to the previous post in the comments, but then again, it’d be good to see a complete retrospective on the whole thing here. The good news: it worked, and cognitively, procedurally speaking, there’s an actual game here. Further playtesting is…
Here’s the last session but one of the epic Cosmic Zap playtest, which sorta actually worked, and shows why successful playtesting has nothing to do with wowing people with your genius. Far from it. For this one, I plead guilty to egregious abuse of Extended Contests, the finer-grained subset of resolution. The modern HeroQuest rules…
Mid-design playtesting is perhaps the most intensive intellectual stage, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like gutting out a highly fatiguing task whose benefit, upon completion, is looking mighty obscure. This is our sixth session for Cosmic Zap, and in a lot of ways, it might have been the last. You can see,…
When Champions was first published, most people involved in role-playing accepted, or even expected, to put in extensive effort before play. Today, plug-and-play is widely recognized as a virtue, whether justified by playing in convention situations or by citing friends who reasonably do not commit to complex nonsense before doing the thing they want to…