@GusL dispenses wisdom, peppered with his usual style.
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I half expected something more incendiary from the title. Instead, I finished agreeing with almost all of it. There are too many adventures without a central idea or theme, even though having one makes writing the adventure immeasurably easier.
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fairly solid advice, but also just a useful birds eye guide to the process. if I am going to add something (and jeez, this might just be a list of MY OWN PROBLEMS). here are some things I don’t do, that I wish I do:
- be less subtle than you think about mysteries, clues, references, puzzles.
- pick just 2-3 motifs and HAMMER AT THEM.
- minimize novelty: familiar structures make things easier for GM and players. if you are going to be clever and do novel things, surround it with familiar things so it goes down easier.
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I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few days and I think this might be the push I needed to finally just make a dungeon. Or maybe a zungeon? There’s that jam going on… I just really appreciate having a step-by-step process to iterate through.
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it would be interesting if you could split the universe in two: in one universe you just WING IT. in the other you follow these step by step instructions. compare and contrast.
my favorite thing to do is WING IT… and THEN read how to do it. I feel experience helps solidify the learning. also I like having individualistic habits already rutting the road.
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“Did I decide I couldn’t draw maps, so why bother?”
Yikes, I feel called out rn
This part was a really helpful articulation of a problem:
When I am preparing an adventure for my home game, the end product is very different then when I am writing an adventure for publication. Running your own adventure is easy, a lot can be left out because all you need are the notes and reminders of the adventure you’ve already imagined. When you run a location from your notes it’s already familiar. The writer knows the adventure location intimately and doesn’t need to be told how it fits together, how it looks, or what its themes are. All of this just comes naturally because the writer already imagined it once while designing the thing. The notes themselves don’t need to be long either, hyper-minimalism works well enough because each note triggers your memory of the space as its creator.
The opposite is true of a published adventure - everything is new to the referee running it. Worse, especially if the published adventure includes things from rulebooks or other common sources, the referee reading it might think they understand how the adventure plays because they recognize elements, but have an entirely different idea of how these elements look and act in play than the author. That isn’t always bad, and doesn’t necessarily lead to a poor experience for the players or referee … but it can, especially if the adventure is written to depend on certain expectations and ideas that aren’t communicated, or worse are communicated late.
I often have this issue with one page dungeons, where it seems like an author has a specific idea in mind but that isn’t elaborated upon (due to space constraints).
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another subtle thing:
different GMs have vastly different play styles. some adventures are just a puzzle simply because the people writing them play so differently from the people reading them. you see that most distinctly reading old modules.
and when I write adventures – and I am surely not alone in this — sometimes, I kinda want to pull other GMs towards my individual play style, so i’ll write them in a way that is not quite normal intentionally. (in addition to the usual miscommunications).
in summary: adventure writing is hard.
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