Adept Play
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.
Yes, the title is clickbait. It’s merely a pun on the game we’re talking about … or does this topic turn out to address the loaded role-playing hobby term after all? You decide. Jon and I took some time to share experiences about playing The Pool, based on the games you can read about or…
Due to some weird circumstances, I ran a 1-shot last night for a group I am an actual player in (as opposed to mostly GMing). It was for three of the players as the others could no make it (hence the 1-shot). The barrier was partially a social one: I do not know one of…
See here for the first post in this series. We’ve played two more sessions of Worlds Without Number. After the first session, one of the players had to drop out—the player who had recognized my prep at the end of the first session and had me scrambling to prepare something else. I decided, since I…
I think we have created a solid mini-curriculum about some critical features of play. The first part is Movement and maps, the second is Horses on squares, and here’s my next part. I definitely include the comments to the prior posts as part of it. If you find any other posts or sets of comments…
It seems to be my month for consulting on projects which have hunkered down in people’s notebooks for fifteen or twenty years, refusing either to get past a design hump or to yield gracefully into “not gonna do this game” status. The full name for this one is Variations on a Private and Lonely Hell,…
For a while now, I’ve joined in a Tunnels and Trolls game run by Jon Hastings, mostly with members of his longstanding friend group. One of them, George, wanted to have a conversation with Jon about how to follow up on what interested him in his RPG experiences. I nosily asked if they would be…
I have been using HW to run a fantastical & high-powered Glorantha game. I have been ruminating about how to treat failures. I tried to start a discussion about Simple Contests for HW/HQ but ended up doing a lot of reflection on a play episode and set out some best practices for myself. Hopefully others…
I’m currently 72 sessions into a D&D5e campaign I started in March of 2019. It is day 189 for the adventurers. The players are just beginning to reach level 10ish. I have a roadmap for the game out to level 20. Who knows how far we’ll make it or how long this will go on?…
I’ve been in interview madness for a couple of weeks. The first was with The Thirteenth Floor podcast, which hasn’t been posted yet. Then I was contacted by Pawel from the role-playing play, design, and discourse community in Poland, who have had the dubious luck to dig into my essays at the Forge and have…