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.
-
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…
-
Robber baron
Last week I went on a date with L, a person I met online. They asked me out after an online conversation about rpgs. We planned on both meeting up as a pair and creating a group to play Monsterhearts, but found a lot of logistical difficulties and eventually gave up. We were only able…
-
Issues #1-7
Sam and I sat down last week to record a conversation about a 7-issue run on Villains & Vigilantes we did along with our longtime creative collaborator Robin. Personally, I value how unprogrammed this particular dialog was. We excavated lessons from our play of Villains & Vigilantes that we’re excited to apply to our current…
-
Regression to Mercy
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of playing my game In the Realm of the Nibelungs for the first time because a friend has taken over GMing! Yesterday, another player’s character died — and the GM ignored the rules and said the PC might still be saved by cure light wounds…
-
Some boring combat
The following is a recollection of a fight from a session about a year ago, which I count as one of my worst gaming experiences. Not long after this I ended my tenure as referee in this ongoing game. It was particularly disappointing as I had had many of my best experiences in that same…