Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: System Matters
System refers to any and all interactions which result in play, as a dynamic and changing form of fiction. These posts address its features at any scale or purpose of play.
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Oasis of the Blue Magus
For Common Hour D&D yesterday, I ran an hour’s worth of a game called Wolves at the Lake, in a scenario I called “The Oasis of the Blue Magus.” I had fun with it! The system is sparse but elegantly so, and the players (three students, two professors, all male) dove right in. We’d agreed…
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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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Two Nicotine Girls’ dashed dreams
I ran Nicotine Girls for the first time yesterday. Despite some confusion, especially in the middle, we had an intense experience that we can’t quite believe ourselves. Hank and Olivia are a couple and part of my regular group as well as its splinter group which Olivia and I created to play smaller games. Everyone…
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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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Time to Take a Stand
I had a great time running Mustering Out Blues last weekend, a two-hour session with four players, three “regulars” and one guest: Adept Play poster “Johann” took me up on my offer to get a little Traveller experience via the Pool, and created a character who would fit right in: ex-Fleet pilot Rory Cunningham, with…
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Arenas of the Old City
Last year sometime, I took the “Ronnies” course, which involved reading game texts, watching play, and thinking about the connections between them. There was even homework! The capstone of the course was designing a game around a theme (“Red Meat”) in 24 hours and getting it to play. The idea that came to me was…
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Running Fallout at a Con
So I ran some demo games for a company at a recent convention, the Fallout RPG and Star Trek Adventures, and I’ve been thinking over the experience. The challenge I had was the games were supposed to be only one-hour-long introductions, and the sample adventures provided were all uniformly railroads. My problem with having a…
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Designing for Misunderstandings?
I’m following up on a recent Discord conversation at Adept Play on the topic of designing RPGs in terms of experiences that the designer wants the players to have. I also want to make my concerns about this clear, as I think I haven’t articulated myself very well about this topic over the years. The…
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Emergency Room C
After some preparations discussed at the Discord (quoted below), I’ve finally run InSpectres. It was a mixed success, but I’m dying and preparing to immediately play it again — not least due to prior discussions: The course “Playing with the Pool” (which includes a section and activities regarding InSpectres) and several discussions and Actual Play…