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.
The Four R’s (Ross, Ron, Rod, and I) played through eighteen sessions of Legendary Lives, completing our run at the start of December. For background, this heroic fantasy rpg is one of the so-called Fantasy Heartbreakers that came out in the 1990s. There are still plenty corners of the game that I would love to explore,…
Watching the discussion "Dice: the love, the hate, the fear, the need" ( http://adeptplay.com/consulting/dice-love-hate-fear-need ) led me to consider the role of Hero Points in several role-playing games I'm familiar with. By Hero Points I mean a fund of points that a player can spend to influence the outcome of a resolution system that calls…
This photo shows the character Laura Wolf, as played by Ava Layevska, in the Mexican TV series Yankee. I was a couple episodes in when she just seemed so familiar to me, and then a bit later, I said, “Ah ha, not because of some other TV or movie character, but because that is Shining…
This is the very kind interview with Lucas Falk, including Peter Malmberg as fellow guest. Late in the evening during Lincon, Lucas found a corridor which seemed quiet, pulled some interesting high-backed, well-padded chairs into a curiously intimate small circle, and commenced to interview there. We did not expect that most of Linköping would then…
It’s ridiculous how many games I cart around with me, matched only by how obscure or short-lived or forgotten many of them are. I feel like flashing a little sign or card that says “Yes, you never heard of it,” just to get past the litany of announcements to that effect when I produce one…
Plenty of impromptu things happened at Gothcon. One was an off-the-cuff interview with Peter Malmberg, one-half the team of Rollspelsfika. The first couple of sentences are in Swedish, or my attempt thereat, but afterwards it’s in English. I’m pretty happy with the argument I make here in response to Peter’s challenge, which he put more…
I’ve been running a sequence of four game sessions working with James V. West’s The Pool. The mechanics of The Pool are lean and streamlined: Players start by creating a 50-word story introducing their characters. Traits and attributes are derived from those stories, and a players can assign points to those traits according to…
We’ve played two sessions of the Beta playtest rules. I currently have three players. Only one has any extensive experience with Hero System. I’ve GMed Champions and Hero System, so I have a lot of math chops for the power design. We’ve had an initial character development by email, a face to face session of…