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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Corone" data-source="post: 8816976" data-attributes="member: 6806393">We previously recommended some writing tips on adventures. Rather than talk about how to create a scenario or how to plot an adventure, I thought I’d focus on common pitfalls in the nuts and bolts of writing and presentation. You may find these useful for any adventure or community content project as much as anything offered to a publisher.[ATTACH=full]265552[/ATTACH] <a href="https://pixabay.com/illustrations/secrets-book-content-window-a-book-2022109/" target="_blank">Picture courtesy of Pixabay.</a><h2>Break it into Scenes</h2>When writing an adventure, break each encounter or scene down with a title. It helps the GM keep their place and find individual encounters more easily. If your section ‘Into the Dark Forest’ has five encounters, make each encounter a new scene within that section.As a side note, try to avoid ‘double headering’. This is when you have a section title immediately followed by a new heading. It can look a bit odd on the page and can sometimes make a mess of the layout. Usually if the scene is large enough a small intro will suffice.So, instead of this:Do this:As a side note, try not to give away spoilers in your headings, such as ‘Entering the Villain’s secret airship’ or ‘Chasing Bob the murdering butler’. While they shouldn’t, players can sometimes flick through adventures and will catch most headings. So don’t give too much away in them just in case.<h2>The Player Characters Will…</h2>Never assume anything of a player character group. If you are using the words ‘the player characters will then…’ you may well find they won’t. You can say ‘if they locate the key the player characters will probably want to try it in the door’. Remind the GM of the reason the PCs have to go in any particular direction. This will help them figure out if they have given the right clues to lead them in the right direction. But if you assume there is only one path to the next scene and the players will automatically take it, you could be leaving the GM high and dry when they don’t.Your adventure must be able to cope with the PCs going in a different direction rather than following the set path. Now, quite often, the set path is the only sensible way to go. But the best adventures predict some other possibilities and help the GM figure out how to bring the PCs back on track. This might be “they might decide the leaf design of the notebook is the real clue and set off to the forest. But after an hour of searching they will come across nothing but a few rabbits. Old Ned, who lives in the forest (see scene 2) might be able to help them by pointing out the clue they missed in the notebook.”While there is no way you can accommodate every possible direction the PCs might try, you can cover some of the most obvious ones. Essentially, help the GM where you can in herding the player characters. Just offer a few options to help manage any journeys off the beaten path.<h2>Empty rolls</h2>This is my personal bugbear and happens more often than you’d think. Make sure every roll is there for a reason and that a failure doesn’t bring the adventure to a halt. The way to avoid this is to make sure there is detail for what happens for both a pass and a fail at the roll. If there is only an option for what happens on a success, you may be looking at an empty roll.Let’s say there is a secret door in the room. If it just has treasure behind it, or a short cut, you can just call for a perception test to see it. If the PCs pass the test, huzzah, they find treasure. But if they miss the roll they just have to go the long way around or don’t get rich. But if the secret door is the only way to the villain’s lair, failing the test brings the adventure to a stop. It leaves the GM fudging the test so they succeed, or offering the test again (in which case why make the test at all) or leaves the PCs standing around with nowhere to go. So, for every test, make sure you have details for the consequences of both success and failure.So make sure you analyse which aspects of the test need to succeed for the adventure to continue, and if necessary, add other consequences for failure. So, if the PCs need to see the secret door to continue, make seeing the door itself a result on both the success and failure. But place an extra consequence for failure. So, on a pass they see the secret door, and also the trap on it. On a failure they see the secret door, but fail to see the trap and get hurt. You must make sure they can always move forward, but that doesn’t always mean without consequences. After all, the plan here is to make running the adventure easier for the GM, not a walk in the park for the players.</blockquote>

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