Sure. I have the exact same problem, the people I want to play with are people who most easily have free time to play on Shabbos afternoon. So when I ran the game at Worldcon, even though we were playing on Sunday and most of the players were goyim, I asked if they were okay with playing as if it were on Shabbos, to try out my ideas. I also talked to Benjamin Rosenbaum at Worldcon and he said that he and Avery are working on an official Shabbos-friendly playkit.
The basic problem of playing A Dream Apart on Shabbos vs. D&D is that when I run D&D on Shabbos, I can do a lot more planning ahead of time. I can make maps, item cards, NPC stats, secret notes for players, etc... ahead of time, so the only challenge is stat tracking, and that's a relatively solved problem. Whereas A Dream Apart has a mapping phase that is communally done at the table, after character creation... I needed to figure out a strategy for doing that when you can't do writing, everything else is basically straightforward.
So I created a bunch of magnetic tokens with the various shtetl features from the Shtetl playkit page on them, as well as a number of additional locations of my own. When we got to the shtetl mapping phase, we spread out the tokens and discussed how we wanted to place them on the map. It worked really well, everyone got involved in moving pieces around... actually I think it probably worked more collaboratively than a mapping exercise would have if just one person were holding the pencil. We were also able to easily move things around a couple of scenes in when we realized that a different geography would help the story more. I can PM you my token sheet later.
The other thing that involves writing is marking your character sheets and setting element sheets. We didn't do any marking, we just declared our choices out loud. That mostly worked out, but Ben says they're talking about creating a new version of the sheets with all the choices on the edge of the page so you can mark them with paperclips or something.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2019-08-23 06:49 pm (UTC)The basic problem of playing A Dream Apart on Shabbos vs. D&D is that when I run D&D on Shabbos, I can do a lot more planning ahead of time. I can make maps, item cards, NPC stats, secret notes for players, etc... ahead of time, so the only challenge is stat tracking, and that's a relatively solved problem. Whereas A Dream Apart has a mapping phase that is communally done at the table, after character creation... I needed to figure out a strategy for doing that when you can't do writing, everything else is basically straightforward.
So I created a bunch of magnetic tokens with the various shtetl features from the Shtetl playkit page on them, as well as a number of additional locations of my own. When we got to the shtetl mapping phase, we spread out the tokens and discussed how we wanted to place them on the map. It worked really well, everyone got involved in moving pieces around... actually I think it probably worked more collaboratively than a mapping exercise would have if just one person were holding the pencil. We were also able to easily move things around a couple of scenes in when we realized that a different geography would help the story more. I can PM you my token sheet later.
The other thing that involves writing is marking your character sheets and setting element sheets. We didn't do any marking, we just declared our choices out loud. That mostly worked out, but Ben says they're talking about creating a new version of the sheets with all the choices on the edge of the page so you can mark them with paperclips or something.