Adept Play
Adept Play
Category: Trouble during play
Role-playing is not intrinsically difficult or delicate. However, its ease and availability have not been well-served through its history. These posts concern those moments when it does seem difficult or delicate, toward the goal of identifying how we make it harder than it is.
-
The Overlooked Importance of Resonance
Here I am with some fresh reflections after another miserable experience. I’m playing Monsterhearts II with a group. It’s a game I know well and have played a lot. I don’t think it’s exceptionally strong on pure mechanics, but it has lots of elements that spark tense situations between characters with dynamics I find interesting.…
-
Playing without prep – an anecdote
This is a follow-up to this post : https://adeptplay.com/2025/07/11/playing-prepared/ I started playing Fantasy For Real with Julie & Logan, with who I played Apocalypse World three years ago (Already !), here https://adeptplay.com/2022/08/26/return-apocalypse-world/ Due to my recent improvement in play, also a period of only playing as a player-character (not as a GM) the last 6 months,…
-
A frustrating second venture
This was the second session and venture in my Circle of Hands group, I posted about the first one here. I was frustrated after the opening scenes of this session, and at times afraid that the game was falling apart. I’ll try to write what happened and how I felt and then end with some…
-
Eaten Taboos
We played a game of Zombie Cinema. It was at home, 4 players including me, my wife, a very old friend with whom I played RPG for 20 years, and another good friend “roleplayer” veteran, whatever it means. I found that it is an excellent game and that I want to play more. It reads…
-
Designing for Misunderstandings?
I’m following up on a recent Discord conversation at Adept Play on the topic of designing RPGs in terms of experiences that the designer wants the players to have. I also want to make my concerns about this clear, as I think I haven’t articulated myself very well about this topic over the years. The…
-
Workshop: What Went Wrong
Here’s the beast: all the things I think we should collectively consider as the social and commercial platform for role-playing’s history … and content, and emotions. Distribution, political context, money matters, subcultural effects, and more: presented not as momentary justifications, but as a layered history with a deep structure of cause and effect. Many thanks…
-
Dawnford
This has been a tough season for sustained play. For this EABA game, we have managed eight sessions in six months, and it kills me to see my claim in the prior post that we’d managed to recover regular play, which obviously we did not. (Previous posts: Apoc western, Radioactive grit) I categorized this post…
-
Workshop: No, Not Blackleaf!
Workshop #2 is now available here. If you’re a patron, be sure to check the recent Patreon post first, to get your discount code. Many thanks to the wonderful participants and all the points you raised: This space is for participants and, I hope, for people who get the recording, to continue discussing the topic.…
-
Hot passions, hot place
Sorry, not those sorts of passions, or at least not much, as we’ve been playing. We’re continuing with my more-or-less faithful extraction of the AD&D 2nd edition Dark Sun, plus a bit of 4E, using The Pool, as described in Dark + Sun + Pool and It always goes to the arena. The six sessions…