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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Workshop: The Plot Thickens
Here’s one of the two workshops I presented at Lucca. It was prompted by two short videos I posted here in the past few months: The role of the roll and Emergent plot techniques, which have led me to a generally larger argument. The main point is that, there are two primary ways to play…
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Crack the ‘Magine Dragon
In the recent Globalism seminar comments, Alan Barclay talked about encountering ditto copies of Dungeons & Dragons probably bootlegged from the GenCon release in 1974. I do recall the game just transported me — I didn’t care much about mechanics, just the experience of ineracting with the imaginary world created lagely in my own head.…
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Monday Lab: How Long …
… Has This Been Goin’ On? Alternative equally music-meming title: My Only Friend, the End. Or, wait, how about, Stop! In the Name of What? This is about how long we play, in real time. It can refer to the length of a session, how many sessions relative to a given fictional situation, how long…
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![Monday Lab: [AA]IIEE[EE]!](https://adeptplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/beating-heart.jpg)
Monday Lab: [AA]IIEE[EE]!
Intent, Initiation, Execution, Effect – fictional things, probably the single most direct fictional content to be interfaced with real-people speaking and using rules, in the hobby. In a recent dialogue with Zac Porcu, he called it “the beating heart of role-playing.” Briefly: design zone 1 is to establish a linear order and then to carry…
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Another pair of eyes
There is little, possibly no hope left in me that discussing role-playing as phenomenology has been time well-spent. “Sporadic cynicism” indeed. But every so often something happens to disperse it. In this case, it’s Dustin DePenning, author of Synthicide, whom you may have watched in play with me over in Actual Play. He contacted me…
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Monday Lab: Nutz R Us
It is crazy how common and how widely-developed craziness is, in role-playing. As much as world-building, as much as combat options, as much as magic systems, this is a definite feature of the hobby with its own schools and aims. It is clearly a primary path toward characterization, character development, player agency (through its managed…
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Champions Now Playtest Doc questions
1. What are the costs and effects of Life Support? 2. The Ranged advantage seems to be missing. +1/2? Allen
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Monday Lab: In a Word
Earthsea was clearly on everyone’s mind in early role-playing. Due to rambling, I didn’t include some of the time we spent realizing how many systems and settings dipped into its terms and the organization of magic. It’s also – at first glance – genuinely perfect for fantasy role-playing, as attractive a package as any. You’ve…
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Grains are the answer
The question being, what is the anchoring procedure for playing Tales of Entropy? When it is so easy to go awash and awry when one’s character twists into what you didn’t anticipate, or when one is now cast as Narrator with no idea of where to go. Something has to make sense, to begin, to…