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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Skill Challenges: Changes Over Time
In the Adept Play discord chat, I said, I have been buying some D&D 4th edition books, because it’s a game I’m keen to run. Finally yesterday I had enough of a spread to look at Skill Challenges throughout the edition. I had heard the math was “bad” the first time they printed the rules…
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Stop Setting DCs?
This discussion started with Sorcho (Ed Heil) on the Discord channel brought a video to the attention of the larger group. The video comes from the channel of Cetx Etc and can be found here. Feel free to have a listen, it is less than 11m in duration. In the video, the author expresses the…
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Lincon 2023
Where I played Darkurthe Legends and Spione (slated for upcoming Actual Play posts), and encountered lots of contact among people I knew and others that I didn’t. My schedule for the rest of the year is looking pretty full! I also presented a workshop, perhaps playfully titled “Our role-playing, ourselves.” Although it borrows from a…
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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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Calling Rolls and “Unresolving” statements
So, while getting feedback for my “Poolpendium”, I have recently discovered that a specific way I play “The Pool” is not that common among other people as I had originally thought. When I’m GMing, I’ll sometimes give bad or undesirable outcomes to see if the player is willing to roll for it, sometimes reminding them…
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We Both Fail
This weekend I started a one-on-one Dirty World game with Robbie. Dirty World is a noir mystery/crime thriller game using an unusual variation of the One Roll Engine (ORE) created by Greg Stolze. I happen to like ORE quite a bit having played both Wild Talents and The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor previously. The…
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No easy task
Both Knave and Tunnels and trolls share a couple of properties: crawl games, fairly cartoony encumbrance (though in different ways) and a dicing system with a fairly difficult baseline difficulty. I want to talk about the task resolution. (Practically every game resolves tasks and conflicts in some way; these ones resolve tasks explicitly and conflicts…
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The bouncing function of Sorcerer’s diagram
Ron’s Numeracy course puts an important focus on the fact that: RPG is about bounce, which means that the collective reincorporation of fictional elements provided by each person of the table creates fictional content that no single one of those people anticipated. Bounce starts with the intersection of the four authorities. Stochastic procedures only reinforce…
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A People’s History, or at least a person’s
A lot of interviews showed up recently. For this one, I was contacted by Nune, who is studying entrepeneurship in Rotterdam. (rhymes with “rune,” one syllable) His questions included what does it mean to be a role-playing publisher, what do you have to contend with, what should you consider, and especially, the term he used,…