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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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I’m a recovering rewriter
I had a friend visit my home recently, someone that wasn’t a “gamer” and had never played a roleplaying game before, to the point I had to teach him how to recognize the polyhedral dice. He saw my Mausritter box and was attracted to it, and asked to play—I obliged. This is not about how…
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Autopsy of a situation
This post is really a follow up of this one about situations and reincorporation. I wanted it to be a comment in that post, but it became too long. It’s about “playing the situation” vs “preparing it”. So please check it and see it’s more about general skills of play than about The Clay That…
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A sad bit of FATE
I recently ran a mini-campaign of Eis & Dampf, a German steampunk setting for FATE. I had offered the game as a break from two recent campaigns: a heavily railroaded bit of Call of Cthulhu by a friend and my dungeoncrawling game In the Realm of the Nibelungs. I had deliberately offered Fate as a…
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Bearing the Torch for Everyone Else
After finding the book in my local game store, and having the game recommended by an acquaintance, I got inspired, recently decided to set up a Torchbearer campaign with IRL friends. I got quite hyped (part of the problem, maybe) about the game and put quite a bit of effort into preparing it, going to…
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Long Live the New York Red Box!
Worth Remembering In 2013 I was getting divorced. I’d hurt someone I loved very much, and it blew up a lot of ideas I had about myself. One night in the middle of that emotional car wreck, I called my friend Tavis for advice. He was the only divorced guy I knew well enough to talk to about…