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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Fun and games in the Book of Job
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,…
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What Do I Like and Where Do I Get More of It?
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…
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Best Practices for Resolving Hero Wars/quest Contests
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…
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Dungeon Calculus: A Mathematical Approach to Adventure Design
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?…
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Interview: Meeting a community
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…
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Hantverks play
Simon has been busy! Since last autumn, he has organized Hantverksklubben (roughly, “handicrafts” or “hands-on” club) here in Sweden, through the Rollspel.nu forum and conducted at the Hem-Con Discord server. All of this is in Swedish, but I’ll say more about that in a moment. As of the discussion presented in the video, they’ve played…
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Rule this
I’ve run into a few conversational speedbumps lately, nothing adversarial, which nevertheless put me in an adversarial frame of mind. That’s due to history: having been mis-characterized as a “rules as written” advocate, for example; having taken the high road regarding such terms as “old school” as if it were a thing, and seeing my…
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Characteristics vs Skills
I wanted to post up some probabilities for Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. After I asked on Discord, Tommi generously crunched the numbers for me. You can view the spreadsheet he built (and lots of other game-related stuff) at his blog. As background, there are two methods of opposed rolls in RQG. The first is to…
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The Shadow of Yesterday: NPC rolls
So, we had ended last session of our Shadow of Yesterday campaign on a cliffhanger: the villain, tied and captured, spells a Zu sentence (a powerful form of magic), but when we played next time and I detailed the scene (the Zu sentence itself), I rolled on the villain’s behalf, only to find that he…