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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On hitting a sweet spot with Sorcerer
I feel another Adept Play post simmering, I just don’t know quite how to say it. We are six sessions into our Sorcerer & Sword game now, and every session feels like the best role-playing I’ve had the good fortune to be part of in years. With our recent Freebooters game which spanned 58 sessions,…
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The Paris Lift
This is an excerpt of one session from a multi-session mission. Attachments include more detail on previous sessions and more information on situation, NPCs, and game states, if you are interested. I’ve also attached two handouts I made for the game. I post this as an attempt to show how we played this game…
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I playtested a comedy pirate game
So, a few weeks ago I was playing Cairn as a player character, and we were exploring the house of a witch that had misteriously disappeared. We would poke around and interact with the empty house, and this reminded me very much of playing old LucasArts point-and-click adventure videogames. After a conversation with a friend, I was inspired…
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Rolemaster Reminiscing
For anyone interested, I recorded a video chat I had with Sean about his experiences with Rolemaster (and mine, such as they were). This came about because he had talked about Rolemaster in the recent probability seminar, and I took note — my play of the game in college was fairly unmemorable, but the game…
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Monday Lab: Probable Cause
Here’s a blessed event insofar as I can finally talk about role-playing content and procedures that are ordinarily kicked down the road. For me, Adept Play is a rousing success insofar as ideas can be introduced and resolved enough so that “next ideas” can actually be addressed, and I don’t have to spray down the…
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My experiences in tabletop role-playing some ideas i had
Some years ago, when I played a lot of heavy boards games, I attempted to design two games up to a playtesting stage. I also wrote down this as the type of rpg that I wanted to play sci-fi in space one where one player is the hero and the other players the evil world…
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Champions Now: Tune-Up
Our Champions Now game continues; you can read about the start of it here, and then I continued the discussion here. As Ron suggested in the comments in the latter thread, my GMing needed a little bit of a tune-up at that point, and making a few simply corrections to go back to doing what…
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Presentation: Balance, power, spotlight, agency, talking
I initially composed this as yet another reflection upon the game of Undiscovered that I’m playing with Sam, Helma, and Lorenzo, but decided it was more generally relevant to bring into Seminar as its own thing. As a prelude, I’d like to repeat something I recently mentioned at the Patreon. It’s the marked contrast I’ve…
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Burning the Midnight Oil
As I burn my midnight oil and avoid the elephant in the room in the United States, an idea for the game/setting/whatever I'm putting together came to my mind. A (sort of) custom character sheet. This sheet is born out of wanting to sort of smash together Circle of Hands with D&D 5th edition for this…