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.
I’d given some thought to this playtesting group, including how it had inadvertently stress-tested the lower limit of player number. Difficult as that was, because I do not like stress-testing, it wasn’t the main thing on my mind. I was worried that the actual editor of the game and its interiors artist were still not…
This is always the toughest time for playtesters, because it’s no longer about “cool, an idea,” but about “oh crap, saying/teaching it this way is pure miscommunication.” The poor players are like my hands which are trying to read Braille but are unfortunately picking up the waffle iron instead. The better one of my games…
In our fiction, that is. (Traducción apurada al castellano más abajo, después de la próxima foto.) Ale, Edson and I met at home, and later we caught up with Ceci and her two dogs. So we created the characters in my kitchen, the streets, and the beautiful forests of La Plata, in a lovely spring…
Second session of the current Cosmic Zap game, displaying one of the game features that it’s robust relative to player attendance. Rod mentions at one point that it’s the most self-indulgent role-playing he’s done, either lately or maybe ever. That’s why this time the lead image for this post is a link. I call attention…
You play a game set in L.A., I tell you what, you’re going to be driving hither & yon a hell of a lot. This session brought us downtown, then to Corona, Venice Beach, the northeast burbs, and eventually to Antelope Valley, in the wilds of Palmdale. There was even a mention of La Fontana…
My other Gauntlet game! Unlike the Cosmic Zap session, running Champions of any stripe in a convention setting is no picnic for prep. But the hardest part is not the character construction … it’s the fact that the players will not have the necessary buy-in and sense of “let’s do this” per interesting item or…
Here’s the first of three games I led at Gauntlet Con 2018! A Cosmic Zap playtest. When I initially signed on for playing it months ago, I was unsure about how well-developed the game would be, or even how playable/failed at all. But it turned out to be a decisive validator of the project. I…
I guess it won’t surprise anyone that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been tapped again for a Hunted. This time there’s no supervillain component, it’s just (“just”) the agency, so in looking for villains to create, and seeing the Crusader on the Curator’s sheet, I focused on the “trapped between two worlds” feature that both…
I’ve been resisting the obvious suggestion about defining the superhero group, “set everything ahead of time,” for very good reasons. Most of the trouble that’s cropped up in playtest so far is not due to failing to do that, but directly traceable to introducing a new hero, whose definitions and problems tend to bulk up…