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.
Weighting Rooms is a character and story building game for 3-6 players that I am currently designing with a group of students, along with some consulting advice from Ron. The basic premise of the game is that the players take on the roles of characters who have died and gone to limbo. They all suffer…
This has been a great consulting experience. Watch the way Dustin considers what I say about using the overall game/realm conflict as the rating for the power for replacement characters, internalizes it, but then completely makes it his own (and much better) by using the adversary’s current “win” score instead. I say “this is a…
I’m not making any claims about the logic or organization by this point in our talks, rather, I’m hoping Justin isn’t thinking that I’m totally making it up as I go. It’s certainly been helpful to me to recognize what pieces I need to pull into their own how we play discussion so they can…
Justin Nichol and I continue our discussion, or training, regarding game design. This session (in 5 videos) delves into the way we talk / the way we roll. The topic shifts quite logically from whether & when describing things colorfully works, to gaudy and painful consequences of moment-by-moment decision-making. I have never thought the fiction-first/mechanics-first…
Hey! Alex cleverly informed Paul and me that he wanted to do an interview after we were trapped in the back seat on the way to Lucca from our apartment (in Viareggio? one of those coastal towns). I can now boast that I was able to unburden my soul to a geisha! Because cosplayers count.…
Here’s one of the two workshops I presented at Lucca. It was prompted by two short videos I posted here in the past few months: The role of the roll and Emergent plot techniques, which have led me to a generally larger argument. The main point is that, there are two primary ways to play…
In the recent Globalism seminar comments, Alan Barclay talked about encountering ditto copies of Dungeons & Dragons probably bootlegged from the GenCon release in 1974. I do recall the game just transported me — I didn’t care much about mechanics, just the experience of ineracting with the imaginary world created lagely in my own head.…
… Has This Been Goin’ On? Alternative equally music-meming title: My Only Friend, the End. Or, wait, how about, Stop! In the Name of What? This is about how long we play, in real time. It can refer to the length of a session, how many sessions relative to a given fictional situation, how long…