Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 54372" data-attributes="member: 259">So I decided to be done with the snipefest in the 1E vs. 3E thread, and I read an interesting article referenced in that thread (and linked to <a href="http://people.ne.mediaone.net/danielrcollins/grtdnd/grtdnd1.html" target="_blank">here</a>).  And I got to thinking about my ideal adventure structure.SPOILERS FOR SPEAKER IN DREAMS AHEAD (scroll down past the second set of colons to avoid the spoilers):::::::As a DM, I dislike location-based adventures: most of the ones I've looked at just don't seem plausible to me, or else require so much work on my part to achieve plausibility that I'd have been better off starting from scratch.  And frankly, if I'm buying an adventure, it's because I don't want to do all the work myself.I purchased Speaker in Dreams because it's a plot-based adventure:  it contains a flowchart showing the events in the order it happens.  Here's an adventure likely to be plausible, I thought, and likely to have a strong story!Naive Daniel.  Poor naive Daniel.Beyond the tremendous plausibility problems (the city of 4,000 people is nearly 1% evil monsters and cultists, but nobody notices; the town guard finds a body drained of blood and covered in bite marks in a book store, and the people there are suspicious, and the town guard doesn't investigate further; the bad guy can telepathically communicate with PCs in their dreams, but rather than using it to suggest that they kill one another or something equally useful, he puts himself at great personal risk to give them a little thrill chill), it either assumes a mass series of coincidences or else it assumes that deadly events are completely rampant in the streets.Most of the encounters are waiting for the PCs to show up.  Grimlocks attack a theater right as the PCs arrive.  The bad guys hang out in the temple until the PCs arrive.  The ubervillain remains in the mansion, useless, until the PCs arrive.So I've spent many, many hours puzzling over the adventure until I could figure out how to make it make sense to me.  Figuring out what the supergenius villain should be doing.  Figuring out how the bad guys will launch effective (and cinematic) attacks against the PCs.  This is work that I thought I was paying someone else to do for me; other than figuring out the stats for the villains, and drawing a few maps, I feel like I paid $10 for just about nothing.:::::::END SPOILERSSo, site-based adventures leave me cold, and my experience with a semi-plot based adventure didn't do much for me.  What's left?I'm thinking of a default-failure adventure structure.Such an adventure would detail a bad guy and a plan.  It would give a timeline for the plan, like so:Day 1:  Bad guy ambushes guard captains's messenger and kills him and steals message.Day 2:  Bad guy approaches guard captain, tells captain he knows about the affair the captain is having with the baroness, and blackmails him:  unless the captain arranges for the city gates to be open at midnight, the bad guy will tell the baron.Midnight:  bad guy leads his band of monstrous assassins into the cityDay 3:  bad guy kills captain, monstrous assassins settle inDay 4:  Monstrous assassins begin assassinating local clericsThe plan would then have some obvious contingencies, such as:-The bad guy leaves a spy watching the captain's office, to report any suspicious activities.  If the party unsubtly approaches the captain, the spy will report their visit to the bad guy, and the bad guy will investigate.-If the bad guy finds out about the party's reputation, or if the bad guy finds out that the party is planning an assault, he'll scry on them immediately.-If the bad guy feels threatened by the party, and if he knows where they are, he'll direct these three monsters to assault the party, using their abilities in this unusual and clever fashion.The DM would need to figure out less obvious contingencies.Essentially, the idea is that the adventure would tell what the bad guy is planning on doing, what will happen without the PCs' interference, and how the bad guy is likely to respond to some of the more likely PC actions.I know I'd find this structure much more useful to me:  it's how I design adventures myself.  It would be plot-based, but it wouldn't shove events onto the PCs:  rather, it would rely on the PCs exhibiting the kind of suicidal curiosity so common amongst adventurers.Would a structure like this work for other folks?  Are adventures with this structure common?  I dimly recall seeing some adventure like this awhile ago in Dungeon Magazine, something about drow, but I didn't read it closely, since it was for a power level much higher than what I was running.Any comments or ideas?Daniel</blockquote>

Verification