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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Theory! Huh! What is it good for?
Plenty of impromptu things happened at Gothcon. One was an off-the-cuff interview with Peter Malmberg, one-half the team of Rollspelsfika. The first couple of sentences are in Swedish, or my attempt thereat, but afterwards it’s in English. I’m pretty happy with the argument I make here in response to Peter’s challenge, which he put more…
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The Pool and the Snowball: Forward to the Past
I’ve been running a sequence of four game sessions working with James V. West’s The Pool. The mechanics of The Pool are lean and streamlined: Players start by creating a 50-word story introducing their characters. Traits and attributes are derived from those stories, and a players can assign points to those traits according to…
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Design Curriculum 5: Reflections and Practice
At this point, we needed to do three things at once. First, to make sure we filled in any missing points or caught up with anything Justin wanted to revisit; second, to lay down some important points about design as a process, as I thought we’d maybe strayed into play-theory at the expense of the…
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Champion’s Now Beta v0.5 Playtest, Seattle
We’ve played two sessions of the Beta playtest rules. I currently have three players. Only one has any extensive experience with Hero System. I’ve GMed Champions and Hero System, so I have a lot of math chops for the power design. We’ve had an initial character development by email, a face to face session of…
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Emergent Narrative, Pacing, and Lines
Weighting Rooms is a character and story building game for 3-6 players that I am currently designing with a group of students, along with some consulting advice from Ron. The basic premise of the game is that the players take on the roles of characters who have died and gone to limbo. They all suffer…
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The Darkness is winning
This has been a great consulting experience. Watch the way Dustin considers what I say about using the overall game/realm conflict as the rating for the power for replacement characters, internalizes it, but then completely makes it his own (and much better) by using the adversary’s current “win” score instead. I say “this is a…
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Design Curriculum 4: I’ll get you a Satanic Mechanic
I’m not making any claims about the logic or organization by this point in our talks, rather, I’m hoping Justin isn’t thinking that I’m totally making it up as I go. It’s certainly been helpful to me to recognize what pieces I need to pull into their own how we play discussion so they can…
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Design Curriculum 3: Talk/Roll
Justin Nichol and I continue our discussion, or training, regarding game design. This session (in 5 videos) delves into the way we talk / the way we roll. The topic shifts quite logically from whether & when describing things colorfully works, to gaudy and painful consequences of moment-by-moment decision-making. I have never thought the fiction-first/mechanics-first…
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Designers on the road
Hey! Alex cleverly informed Paul and me that he wanted to do an interview after we were trapped in the back seat on the way to Lucca from our apartment (in Viareggio? one of those coastal towns). I can now boast that I was able to unburden my soul to a geisha! Because cosplayers count.…