Adept 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.
Back in 2011 I submitted a game to the Ronnies based off the keywords: murder and whisper. I’ve played and revised the game quite a bit since then. I mention this in the spirit of full disclosure that the game I’m about to discuss is a game of my own making. However, I want to…
This is the single most brutal post I have presented or perhaps ever will present at Adept Play. So I’ll start with all the good things. The fictional adventure as atmosphere and topic was delightful. I offered a starting point which instantly became, from and for everyone, absolutely our own mostly-anthropomorphic frog fantasy. Lorenzo rightly…
So last night’s Burning Wheel game was a rough, instructive and ultimately rewarding one for me. To explain why (to myself as much as you), I’m going to have to go into some detail about what has happened so far. You can skip to the “Reflections” below if you just want the takeaways. Setting We’re…
This is a joint post for the fourth and upcoming fifth sessions of both Väsen and Godsend Agenda. The first is being played very much rules-as-written with a published scenario, and the second is very much the GM’s personal version of the game, somewhat different from Jerry’s (the author; the game is in development). The…
See here for the first post in this series. We’ve played two more sessions of Worlds Without Number. After the first session, one of the players had to drop out—the player who had recognized my prep at the end of the first session and had me scrambling to prepare something else. I decided, since I…
Character Creation is both creative, collaborative, tactical, and a signal for one’s expectations from play. Can a definite procedure help people to approach the game in the right way? Recently started a new campaign for Living Alchemy. Living Alchemy uses modules- characters are introduced into a setting with a few elements. You can read about…
We had our first player character death in Tunnels & Trolls last night. This was the fourth session of playing T&T, though the campaign began using the minimalist Tunnel Goons rules. We switched over to T&T after 7 sessions due to my feeling that TG required too much additional design work to make it “go”…
A month or two ago I got interested in playing Dogs in the Vineyard because of some of the discussion here about it. I played with the same people that I played my very successful game of The Pool with after taking a couple weeks break from playing when that game ended. So, we made…
Eric and I played Mars Colony. We hadn’t ever played anything together; we set the game up on the Adept Play discord. I played the Savior Kelly Perkins, and Eric played the Governor role. I’ve played Mars Colony once before, about a decade ago, at a convention. My memory of that game is dim, but…