Kieron Gillen (author of the comic DIE as well as the related RPG) writes about the essential elements in an adventure.
I have no question of the veracity of this abstraction, but I am struggling to figure out how it would be useful for writing… or reading… an adventure.
I guess its a good lens to go over all the adventure bits and bobs and make sure they are balanced. I know I tend to enjoy SMOKE MACHINES to the point of making things unbalanced. “feels like wandering around a pretty diorama without any real direction” (actual feedback i’ve gotten).
and on the other hand, I just finished playing The Bureau which I think has a sort of opposite problem. its so focused on gates, chests, and keys, that the environment slowly melts away, and all I started seeing was the mechanical skeleton. like, we would meet an NPC, and no matter how interesting they were, we were so focused on getting the key to the next gate, by the end of the adventure, I went from mentally imagining myself in a creepy office building to mentally imagining a checklist that needed attention. (in a way, it slowly turned exploration into a boring office job-- almost meta!).