Good post. I like your articulation of that third point. There has to be something unfinished or ready for reclamation by the table. Especially if you ever want a GM to re-run your adventure, which in my experience, is your adventure power user—the person who runs games at stores, conventions, or libraries.
yeah I think it’s a tricky balance, enough meat to run the story but enough room to breathe that players have the space to make it their own, and gives the GM enough room to flex it to their needs. I like to think of it as “white space” like in graphic design, its pleasing room to breathe.
Love the TRIAD. I agree wholeheartedly, without reservations. I hope I am already doing this, but I wouldn’t mind making a poster of the triad and sticking it up on the wall as a reminder next to “hang in there”.
quick thought:
kinda minor, but I also LOVE boxed text. I like designing with it, and I greatly prefer adventures that have it. Caveat being, if the boxed text is done well; but is a caveat necessary? “If done well” is true of everything adventure related. Stepping back, I like to think of pre-written adventures as a 3rd party to the table experience. An invisible hand that guides the world, and gives a sense of verisimilitude. I have run, and enjoy pure GM reveries; but for me, its an inferior experience (as both a player and GM). It just feels too arbitrary. Like, there is a constant nagging voice inside me, thinking about GM motivations that interferes with immersion.
Having that 3rd party GROUNDS THE EXPERIENCE. Its the map that GM and players share. It gives a sense of objectivity, that creates that sense of verisimilitude.
Boxed text enhances this effect in that it accentuates the voice of the adventure. It brings that 3rd party into the room, quite literally, speaking thru the GM. It materializes the ghost in the machine.
From a design/writing perspective, the emphasis should be on making sure the voice that you put in the boxed text is a voice that enhances the material. “Purple prose” being an obvious one here: for fantasy I love it. Its a way to bring people back to the OLDE THYME. It gives a literary footing to the adventure.
Of course, different voices also work. If you want things to sound more contemporary, more like an anime or whatever medium you are using as a touchstone for your adventure structure, you write in that voice. The players hear that voice, they know, oh this is anime-y; and their head focuses on the logic of that genre. When it all comes together… its a powerful tool. Consider the alternate case: HATED BULLET POINTS. As a GM, you can try to channel a voice that feels appropriate for the material, but maybe you don’t have the skills. Also it just generally adds to GM load. So usually, you default and use your own voice. Is that terrible? No… but I feel like it diminishes the 3rd party effect. Not my preferred flavor. For me, WORSE.
OH, one more point, that is related to my BOXED TEXT thoughts:
“1. These tools should focus on the fictional world’s reactions to the players’ actions rather than the pre-defined narrative in the DM’s head.”
Stepping back here a sec. Perhaps not everyone thinks this way, but the main way I think of TTRPG experience is that it is a game of playing in existing fiction. The basic desire that springs from reading a loved book, and wishing you could visit the book. Seeing a movie, and wishing you could walk onto the screen.
Historically, perhaps the hobby started as playing a wargame and thinking I wish these army figures were real people. But I do think the leap to what a TTRPG really became is that the rules jumped the play off the table space, and into the fiction space.
This is of course a style preference, but I do think there is something fundamental to this, heading back to the 3rd rule: the fiction should always be approached sideways (I am consciously avoiding orthogonal, I hate that word). You are jumping into the book. The book isn’t about you. You are not the main character going thru the plot. You are playing around in it. You can KILL the main character, and take over their role and see how it goes… but that path doesn’t take you to the same end.
So to emulate this, as a designer, you establish what OSR-y people call “situations” that have nothing to do with the PCs. You give guidance as to how the situation reacts IN GENERAL… that is all you need to do. The PCs have the freedom to approach the situation however they want: violence, diplomacy, trickery, avoidance. And as a designer, you provide enough guidance so the GM doesn’t have to think to hard as to how the situation changes.
Thanks for the obviously nuanced response.
The reason I put that line in about box about the boxed text under the guise of “done well,” is because I have in the past almost felt shame about adding it to my adventures. You hear people in the OSR space talking about “how bad it is” and it starts to become a b&w rule in your mind. But its a tool, and can obviously be used well or not. It was also extremely refreshing to see someone I look up to, Joseph R. Lewis, who has written some of my personal favorite adventures talk about it and reinforce my personal feelings. I sort of selfishly included that point to share his killer interview on the Ship of the Dead Podcast, which if you didn’t get around to listening to I would really suggest it. There is a ton of insight to be gained, and I continue to be in awe of his creativity and how he balances it with the technical and usability.
Great point about the “sideways” situations as well, I wasn’t thinking about that when I rationalized my feelings, but I wholeheartedly agree. Its a tool I have been using almost intuitively with the same goal in mind.
Thanks again for the read and the insightful response!
my distaste for bullet point descriptions started early. the first OSE adventure i ran was Hole in the Oak. which works well with the house format and runs fine with bullet points BECAUSE ITS SO VANILLA. like its … a dungeon … a good one! but both the players and GM know what is going on broadly. they just need to know the tiny little changes that make it unique.
then i purchased a lot of OSE adventures, and holy shit. my opinion changed, and just like how in the old thread, someone pointed out just how BAD that format is for holy mountain shakers, it was that exact module that did it for me. it feels like the format is choking the ideas into submission. that format is only good for a subset of adventures, and that subset isn’t even my favorite style.
the thingy i am working on, i do my usual purple prose boxed text, and to add to the feel, sometimes i put in a lil verse. the adventure is in the “alice in wonderland” and “wizard of oz” family, so verse fits it both in style AND in how the PCs react to the world.
for example:
*a pond
*toad sits on a plinth in the middle with a friendly look
vs.
Upon a plinth, amidst a stagnant pond,
A toad sits perched, with gaze both deep and fond.
which one will imply to players that the toad can talk? as soon as you rhyme, suddenly, players just… KNOW that the toad might talk. its a genre thing. and genre is an important indicator as to how to face the fiction.
also, the verse is going to be, in play, more compact. weaving sentences around bullet points usually takes a lot of words. well, or you slip into CAVEMAN SPEAK. then its more compact. but bad.
so point is: boxed text is nice because with a carefully crafted voice, more information can be shared about both the imagined world in how it looks, but also how it acts. so players will be able to “play” better in that space.
obviously, with bullet points, a GM can do this well on the fly, but that’s hard to do and easy to screw up! and I find, when I run these, I have to resort to just SAYING things instead of SHOWING things. like, after I notice the players don’t get that the frog talks, i’ll just be like, “it looks like it wants to talk”. all in all LESS GOOD RESULT.
I like the approach you have in your style of writing adventures and, overall, I love the idea not to have standards… in the last years I read too many comments reviews about meeting or not meeting OSR requirements or so.
My 2 cents: every author does his better when he is free to express as he likes. No constraints or ‘golden rules’ of any type. The only ‘constraints’ should be your 3 points, so that the GM is eased in his job. Full stop.
From my side, I don’t consider myself an author, however I wrote some adventures last year (and I will likely do this year as well): I made them trying to fulfill these 3 rules… and, let me add, I aimed also to have a decent reading for the GM’s pleasure of reading a good story. Somewhere in the past I read a post where an educated fellow wrote that an adventure nowadays is also a reading (iirc it was on ENworld).
The outcome is a text where the story of the adventure is written in a way that the GM should not need to have the text of the adventure with him, he should follow the unfold of the story focusing on how the PCs interact with it. In that sense, except for the room/dungeon descriptions, the overall story should be known by the GM and applied according to the actions/reactions of the PCs. That is extremely difficult to explain, I find it easier (by far) run it as a GM… my apologies!
I’ve spent a career as a creative, and so much of being able to push yourself to be better is setting small goals. I find that just the practice of holding yourself to a standard, makes your work infinitely better. It doesn’t really matter if anyone else understands, because you do.