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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The Experience of Protagonism
I have been experiencing something pretty great in play lately, across two games. I want to talk about it. The Play I’m playing in a one-on-one Burning Wheel game. I’m not GMing. The GM was inspired by the Morrowind video game (which I’m unfamiliar with), and we have a political-religious war going on where the…
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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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Insight from Play
James Nostack asked some questions on the Discord about Mouse Guard. I ran a fairly lengthy campaign about 5 years back, I figured I would share my insights. The questions are copied from the discord, and reformatted for ease of reading. James_Nostack: Mouse Guard is loosely based on Burning Wheel. In that game, there’s a…
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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…