{"id":4400,"date":"2003-09-09T20:21:49","date_gmt":"2003-09-10T03:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/?p=4400"},"modified":"2003-09-09T20:21:49","modified_gmt":"2003-09-10T03:21:49","slug":"adult_games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/09\/09\/adult_games.html","title":{"rendered":"Adult Games"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, not <i>that <\/i>sort of thing. We&#8217;re taling about <a title=\"random encounters: Game Design Archives\" href=\"http:\/\/random.bears-cave.com\/archive\/cat_game_design.html#3405\">gaming as adults<\/a>, and the perils and pitfalls therein.<\/p>\n<p>Doyce quotes quite a bit of a fine 2000 article from <i>Pyramid <\/i>magazine.  Check out the link above for the bits he&#8217;s quoted.  I&#8217;ll wait &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; okay.<\/p>\n<p>I agree with most of what it has to say, in principle at least, to wit:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Adult gamers do not have the copious free time that college and high school aged gamers do\/did.  Live with it.  Don&#8217;t set the bar so high that you can&#8217;t meet it.  That being said, adult gamers do have time to do some level of gaming.\n<li>Keep the group small.  The article recommends four.  That&#8217;s how many I have, though I&#8217;ve tendered an offer to a fifth (before I read the article), and I think that will be manageable.  But I will not go higher than that.  Believe me.<\/p>\n<li>Cut to the chase.  You don&#8217;t need to detail every encounter with everyone and everything between point A and B.  Think of a TV show.  Go from scene to scene, and not the stuff in-between.  I only partially agree with this &#8212; it&#8217;s certainly easy to get too bogged down in details for the time available (though we manage longer games than the writer suggests), and figuring out what&#8217;s not actually contibuting either entertainment or plot is a useful GM skill.  By the same token, it&#8217;s possible to entertain, for a while, without the plot advancing significantly, and that&#8217;s part of why people play, too.<\/p>\n<li>&#8220;Don&#8217;t cancel unless it&#8217;s an absolute emergency.&#8221;  Yes.  Habit is 80% of scheduling.  Cancellation can too easily become a habit, too, and cancelling for less than critical reasons will backfire on you when you have to cancel the next session because of truly critical reasons &#8212; at which point you&#8217;ve lost two meetings of momentum.  Trust me &#8212; I&#8217;ve <i>done <\/i>this, and it sucks, big time.<\/p>\n<li>Use the rules of TV to keep the game interesting.  Have an A-plot (basic conflict) and a B-plot (character-driven stuff), and short arcs of 2-3 meetings, with appropriate climaxes.  Keep things to a crisp time-table.  I think you can go overboard with this, but it&#8217;s a good starting point.<\/p>\n<li>Before you make everything go higglety-pigglety for the characters, establish the &#8220;normal&#8221; pattern, first.  That&#8217;s Basic Storytelling 101, but it&#8217;s a lesson I keep having to relearn.  Cutting to the &#8220;exciting stuff&#8221; too soon is a huge temptation that must be fought.<\/ul>\n<p>Good stuff, altogether.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, not that sort of thing. We&#8217;re taling about gaming as adults, and the perils and pitfalls therein. Doyce quotes quite a bit of a fine 2000 article from Pyramid&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4792,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/01\/05\/it_isnt_just_fo.html","url_meta":{"origin":4400,"position":0},"title":"It isn&#8217;t just for geeky losers any more!","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 5-Jan-04 10:55am","format":false,"excerpt":"A nice article here on how not only has D&D (etc.) evolved into something that grown-ups play, but successful adults play, too. Who'd'a thunk it? Role-playing games aren't just for...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Gaming&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3314,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/12\/23\/series_wish.html","url_meta":{"origin":4400,"position":1},"title":"Series WISH","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 23-Dec-02 12:15pm","format":false,"excerpt":"This week's WISH is a fine one -- and something that might inspire some last-second holiday shopping: What three fantasy books\/series would you recommend to other gamers? Why? What particularly...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Gaming&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4905,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/12\/09\/to_know_recursi.html","url_meta":{"origin":4400,"position":2},"title":"To know recursion, you must first know recursion","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 9-Dec-03 8:41am","format":false,"excerpt":"Okay, this is going to sound geeky-beyond-geeky, but ... Scott Kurtz, who draws the webcomic PvP, came up with the idea for a Role Playing Game about ... Role Playing...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Gaming&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":24431,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/10\/its-a-darned-crime.html","url_meta":{"origin":4400,"position":3},"title":"It&#39;s a darned crime","author":"***Dave","date":"Sat 10-Dec-11 5:08pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Hrm. 1. The headline is misleading; it's more like 600M gamers could be playing war criminals.2. I think it's an interesting idea to look at how actions in some of the major war-based video games might be violations of international war crimes statutes. The question of how that might be\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;~PlusPosts&quot;","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":366,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/04\/28\/faded_photograp.html","url_meta":{"origin":4400,"position":4},"title":"Faded photographs","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 28-Apr-03 7:38am","format":false,"excerpt":"Doyce is a silly, sentimental fool. But he's my kind of silly sentimental fool. It's hard to believe it's been five years (it's one of those \"[only] that long?\" kind...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Gaming&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9132,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/02\/13\/video_games_are.html","url_meta":{"origin":4400,"position":5},"title":"Video games are good for you","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 13-Feb-06 10:57am","format":false,"excerpt":"The advantages in eye-hand coordination for folks who play video games have been known for quite some time. But video games also seem to improve mental skills at multi-tasking and...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Gaming&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}