Adept Play
Adept Play
Tag: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition
A fantasy game composed of the Monster Manual (1977), Player’s Handbook (1978), and Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979), It was written/compiled by Gary Gygax and published by TSR (TSR Hobbies).
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Finding a game in there
One trend in role-playing game publications, from the beginning, is to stuff too much into the pages: design discovered and utilized in play, speculated design, padding, features or content provided by other people, consolidated content for IP purposes, content perceived as “needed” or “people want it,” and more. I find many game texts to be…
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Homemade AD&D module from 1981
Around 1981, a book called Down in the Dungeon was published. It featured the theme of a dungeon and pages and pages of paintings of scenes inspired by fantasy roleplaying game play. The book included a view of several levels of the actual maze of the dungeon, and images of the denizens. Inspired by this,…
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July Q and A
These are some very think-y questions! Including a lot about beasts and monsters. I want to clarify some things about my response to Sean. First, here are the three “roots” of critical hits in text. They’re not intended to be in order, as I think they were simultaneous at this scale of history: List of…
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Timing, movement, and maps
I think we have created a solid mini-curriculum about some critical features of play. The first part is Movement and maps, the second is Horses on squares, and here’s my next part. I definitely include the comments to the prior posts as part of it. If you find any other posts or sets of comments…
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Monday Lab: Halfbreed
The recent discussion in Actual Play has prompted me to what may be quite a lot of pointed looks at racism in role-playing content. I’ve made a little video to set local boundaries & standards for all of them, beginning right here. You’ll be seeing that link again. To repeat one of the points from…
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Levels or layers of character identity
I’m looking now at the whole of fictional character identity. Classically, it’s composed of attributes, race, class, and a range of options concerning gear and spells. Many games have simplified or complicated this framework, and some have approached the idea from different angles, but it’s a simple idea that applies to any story-ish fiction and…
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Monday Lab: Veil Power
Oh golly, let’s see a bunch of guys over-share about how much their characters have been having sex!! … for those few of you remaining in the room, you’ll see us talk well beyond the boilerplate. Sex has been freed-up in role-playing over the last decade and a half. This seems to have freed us…
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Conversation: Reflections and dissections
Here’s a conversation with Ivan, following up on his comments (and video) in the Finding D&D series. I split the last bit off to join the SFTV RPG seminar too, so this was sort of an all-over-Adept-Play discussion. It’s divided roughly into some “how we met D&D” talk, thoughts on fantasy in role-playing and fantasy…
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Monday Lab 2: Kittybox
“Everyone knows” what sandbox means. Except that it was a term ‘ported into table-top role-playing from another medium and adopted as fashion rather than substance, so no, I don’t. Talk is cheap, whiskey costs money, and let’s see if this is a thing, and if so, how many things, and if so in a given…