D&D General An adventure for 5e, and a comment on dialectical exemplification

[clearstream]

I've recently finished writing an adventure for 5e exploring the questions: what makes something fictionally true? and how do I externalise fiction in a way that allows me to explore it? It might have been easier and in some ways more appropriate to design this particular adventure for PbtA, FitD, or similar, but it felt most worthwhile to me addressed to D&D players. That resulted in some mystified participants in my playtests, but it also drew a few folk into a style of play that was fresh to them and which as it turned out they greatly appreciated.

It's titled Garden of Blight and is free on Itch.

Shortly after finishing I bought Mythic Bastionland on DrivethruRPG which has some points of similarity to Garden of Blight (whilst also very significant differences ofc.) Something that stood out to me are the thirty-ish pages of examples of play at the back: McDowall's Oddpocrypha. His examples are presented as "the records of a single scribe" and take the form of a sort of dialectic; pairing narratives of actual play with the thoughts of an unnamed commentator (from the language probably a game designer, and I think probably McDowall.)

I've suggested in the past that examples of play are one way we convey our "form of life" from which our rules take their meaning. (Following Wittgenstein's PI.) In Garden of Blight I follow a common pattern of placing examples from play (actual play, as much as possible) next to rules that I felt needed to be exemplified (not as extensively as I think I should have!)

Seeing that approach from McDowall makes me want to go back and pull all those examples and rewrite them as his sort of actual-play|designer-thoughts dialectic. That's such an effective way to convey form of life... i.e. how to draw the intended meanings from the rules.

I also love McDowall's terse, to the point, rules presentation... but that is simply doing (at a high level of excellence) what designers ordinarily do; the extent of his dialectical exemplification felt fresh and effective to me. I can think of one other example, which is the Dungeon World Guide by Fontes-May and Dunstan, which has eight pages of similar dialectical exemplification (even similarly formatted.)

 

[TheSword]

I downloaded it, had a skim read. Feels like a framework for improvising adventures on the fly.

 

[clearstream]

I downloaded it, had a skim read. Feels like a framework for improvising adventures on the fly.

It could be generalised to do that. As designed, the special feat, dichotomous 'plot arcs' (label for the mechanic, not prewritten plot), settlement events, and the chosen milestones (for XP), normally lean the adventuring into the overarching theme of blight. That is, it's a framework for improvising an adventure with certain themes. As importantly, it is not only DM who is doing that improvising.

 

[GMMichael]

I've suggested in the past that examples of play are one way we convey our "form of life" from which our rules take their meaning. (Following Wittgenstein's PI.) In Garden of Blight I follow a common pattern of placing examples from play (actual play, as much as possible) next to rules that I felt needed to be exemplified . . .

Do you mind providing an example?

That's such an effective way to convey form of life... i.e. how to draw the intended meanings from the rules.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but it sounds like some rules are coming with an unspoken context behind them. Potentially many of these. Is the form of life an illustration of the rule-interactions: the mechanisms? How many intended meanings are we talking about here?

 

[clearstream]

Do you mind providing an example?

Certainly. There is a rule that

The only fixed truths in relation to a mystery are those that have been shared with players. Up until GM’s ideas about a mystery are shared with players they can be overridden by what happens in play. For example, connecting clues to a mystery or plot arc can force GM to revise their ideas.​

​

The example in the text (from actual play) is

as the party search the catacombs beneath Dimfell, GM describes carvings surrounding a crevice wherein nestles an enchanted seed. One of the players, Alston, connects the graven diagrams to those found in a journal stolen earlier by Wendell from the library of Lord Arlow. Alston advances the carvings as one clue and the book as another. GM accepts the book (no roll) but calls for an Intelligence (Investigation) check to interpret the carvings.​

​

Succeeding on their check and now holding several clues, Alston decides that they have enough to advance a theory spun out of a mystery GM had introduced earlier… “Lord Arlow’s nefarious scheme”. Alston muses that Lord Arlow’s devices—inspired by ancient science—are the source of blight, and that destroying them will reverse it.​

​

K___’s successful d20 roll forces their GM to discard a notion they had in mind that blight surges would turn out to be a supernatural response to unchecked felling and extraction. It turns out that Lord Arlow’s nefarious scheme is far more pivotal than GM had previously contemplated.​

If I do another revision, examples are something I will pay far more attention to. In hindsight, the added word count seems best justified where a rule is doing something out of the ordinary.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but it sounds like some rules are coming with an unspoken context behind them. Potentially many of these. Is the form of life an illustration of the rule-interactions: the mechanisms? How many intended meanings are we talking about here?

Rather I would say that all rules come with unspoken context behind them, and many unspoken contexts are brought to interpretation. One great example from 2014 PHB is this rule

If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity--at least 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity--the characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it.​

​

Some took that to imply that it would take an hour of fighting to interrupt a rest, whilst others interpreted it as an hour of walking or any amount of fighting. Official 2014 "Sage Advice" agreed with the former whilst the 2024 text has followed the latter. Suppose the 2014 text had included the following example

Jared (as DM): Last session, you holed up in a cell with just one way in... but it's far from totally safe. The tramping of ogres patrolling or searching is often heard passing nearby. And sure enough, four hours into your rest one sticks its head through the door.​

​

Amy: Aura's on watch. I'll kick Shreeve awake as I lunge for the ogre hoping to surprise it.​

​

Jared: Roll initiative, which means we're in combat. You can count the benefit of a short rest, but your long rests are interrupted.​

​

Through seeing what it looks like to follow the rule, it seems clearer that any combat would interrupt a rest. So why do different people interpret rules differently, and when confronted with alternative interpretations what leads them to feel that one is right? I'm saying that one way examples encourage shared understandings of what counts as following the rule is by sharing the form that life takes when the rule is given its intended effect.

 

[Clint_L]

I'm wondering how this works with the player sense of having genuinely solved a puzzle or mystery.

Your example reminded me of my experiments with using generative AI as a DM, mostly as a means of exploring the limitations of generative AI. And what I found most unsatisfying in that play was that the generative AI had no fixed parameters for the story, so was adjusting it on the fly to fit my speculations. I found that this wound up producing narratives that felt very same-y...because they were coming from me. There was no surprise, no sense of having worked something out.

This sounds quite a bit like your example of the DM replacing their old theory in favour of a player theory supported by a role. But is that fun for the player? It really is taking the game out of the equation almost entirely, and making it a pure shared storytelling experience. Improv, basically, with some random elements.

If that's the kind of RP experience you want, D&D seems like a very complicated way of getting there. Fiasco is built to produce exactly that sort of gameplay, and is great fun, but only works as a one shot adventure; you can't really do a campaign.

 

[zakael19]

Certainly. There is a rule that

The only fixed truths in relation to a mystery are those that have been shared with players. Up until GM’s ideas about a mystery are shared with players they can be overridden by what happens in play. For example, connecting clues to a mystery or plot arc can force GM to revise their ideas.​

​

The example in the text (from actual play) is

as the party search the catacombs beneath Dimfell, GM describes carvings surrounding a crevice wherein nestles an enchanted seed. One of the players, Alston, connects the graven diagrams to those found in a journal stolen earlier by Wendell from the library of Lord Arlow. Alston advances the carvings as one clue and the book as another. GM accepts the book (no roll) but calls for an Intelligence (Investigation) check to interpret the carvings.​

​

Succeeding on their check and now holding several clues, Alston decides that they have enough to advance a theory spun out of a mystery GM had introduced earlier… “Lord Arlow’s nefarious scheme”. Alston muses that Lord Arlow’s devices—inspired by ancient science—are the source of blight, and that destroying them will reverse it.​

​

K___’s successful d20 roll forces their GM to discard a notion they had in mind that blight surges would turn out to be a supernatural response to unchecked felling and extraction. It turns out that Lord Arlow’s nefarious scheme is far more pivotal than GM had previously contemplated.​

If I do another revision, examples are something I will pay far more attention to. In hindsight, the added word count seems best justified where a rule is doing something out of the ordinary.


Rather I would say that all rules come with unspoken context behind them, and many unspoken contexts are brought to interpretation. One great example from 2014 PHB is this rule

If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity--at least 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity--the characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it.​

​

Some took that to imply that it would take an hour of fighting to interrupt a rest, whilst others interpreted it as an hour of walking or any amount of fighting. Official 2014 "Sage Advice" agreed with the former whilst the 2024 text has followed the latter. Suppose the 2014 text had included the following example

Jared (as DM): Last session, you holed up in a cell with just one way in... but it's far from totally safe. The tramping of ogres patrolling or searching is often heard passing nearby. And sure enough, four hours into your rest one sticks its head through the door.​

​

Amy: Aura's on watch. I'll kick Shreeve awake as I lunge for the ogre hoping to surprise it.​

​

Jared: Roll initiative, which means we're in combat. You can count the benefit of a short rest, but your long rests are interrupted.​

​

Through seeing what it looks like to follow the rule, it seems clearer that any combat would interrupt a rest. So why do different people interpret rules differently, and when confronted with alternative interpretations what leads them to feel that one is right? I'm saying that one way examples encourage shared understandings of what counts as following the rule is by sharing the form that life takes when the rule is given its intended effect.

A lot of this feels like trying to established the process of the Carved from Brindlewood style of games in a 5e setting. Are you familiar with those? I sprung a version of their rules upon my Daggerheart play group which came over from the 5e culture almost entirely, and they've explicitly been so satisfied with how we establish clues and meaning together. The last session we explored some leads (which they had created via Action Rolls + conversation + the threads they pulled) and gained some clues (again, via what they decided to investigate and open to interpretation once they land upon how they play into answering the opened ended larger questions at hand).

During the End of Session praises & wishes, one of the players literally highlighted how much the work of creating context together felt so much better and as a table created the environment of fictional mystery solving far more then the 5e game they'd played briefly that was supposed to be mystery focused before "it fell apart."

I'm wondering how this works with the player sense of having genuinely solved a puzzle or mystery.

Puzzles and mysteries are two different things imo. Puzzles are generally a single scene, you have a puzzle, you solve it or doing (and if the game assumed you would, things can get awfully complex).

A mystery asks you a question. One way to answer it can be to find out roughly what the author/GM/etc expect (there's a lot of advice out there on being a little flexible, or like "three clue ruling" it so that no matter what they "get the answer" etc). Another way can be to figure out what the mystery is together. IMO in this framing the actual flow of play and way in which the players seem, in my experience, to be freer to come up with theories and then test them using mechanics seems to reflect the mystery-solving fiction I read far more then my personal experience with pre-written mystery-style games.

If you/your players exclusively obtain satisfaction via finding out the "correct" answer as if it's a puzzle, this style of play will not hit. If you instead enjoy the feeling of your theorizing within the outlines of the themes of play having a chance to answer it (or fail!), I think many find it quite satisfying. Not the least in which because like most situational based play you dont ram into a wall and have to flail around as a table to get back on track.

 

[clearstream]

A lot of this feels like trying to established the process of the Carved from Brindlewood style of games in a 5e setting. Are you familiar with those?

Yes, definitely in the same vein; although I was also working from the earlier Apocalypse by Moonlight by Oli Jeffrey. I suspect CfB was inspired by that, too.

I sprung a version of their rules upon my Daggerheart play group which came over from the 5e culture almost entirely, and they've explicitly been so satisfied with how we establish clues and meaning together. The last session we explored some leads (which they had created via Action Rolls + conversation + the threads they pulled) and gained some clues (again, via what they decided to investigate and open to interpretation once they land upon how they play into answering the opened ended larger questions at hand).

During the End of Session praises & wishes, one of the players literally highlighted how much the work of creating context together felt so much better and as a table created the environment of fictional mystery solving far more then the 5e game they'd played briefly that was supposed to be mystery focused before "it fell apart."

That chimes with my experiences. Multiple players spoke glowingly after sessions about how we established clues and meaning together. And that played out differently over different campaigns. In one, our threads spun out of one player's backstory: their family grew increasingly central to affairs. In another, we roamed across three different plot lines, eventually focusing on the bureaucratic undead inhabiting a desert pyramid.

A mystery asks you a question. One way to answer it can be to find out roughly what the author/GM/etc expect (there's a lot of advice out there on being a little flexible, or like "three clue ruling" it so that no matter what they "get the answer" etc). Another way can be to figure out what the mystery is together. IMO in this framing the actual flow of play and way in which the players seem, in my experience, to be freer to come up with theories and then test them using mechanics seems to reflect the mystery-solving fiction I read far more then my personal experience with pre-written mystery-style games.

That's a good way of putting it: a mystery asks you a question. (Yet another note for if I ever do another revision.)

If you/your players exclusively obtain satisfaction via finding out the "correct" answer as if it's a puzzle, this style of play will not hit. If you instead enjoy the feeling of your theorizing within the outlines of the themes of play having a chance to answer it (or fail!), I think many find it quite satisfying. Not the least in which because like most situational based play you dont ram into a wall and have to flail around as a table to get back on track.

Agreed, and I observed that the D&D players I recruited tended to be acclimatised to the former. For some the adjustment appeared to come as a wrenching realisation at a particular moment, whilst for others it grew on them as they explored the authorial space available. A minority bounced off it -- the experience they were looking for was more DM-as-storyteller -- which has its own, different, satisfactions.

 

[clearstream]

I'm wondering how this works with the player sense of having genuinely solved a puzzle or mystery.

Your example reminded me of my experiments with using generative AI as a DM, mostly as a means of exploring the limitations of generative AI. And what I found most unsatisfying in that play was that the generative AI had no fixed parameters for the story, so was adjusting it on the fly to fit my speculations. I found that this wound up producing narratives that felt very same-y...because they were coming from me. There was no surprise, no sense of having worked something out.

One way I think about it is as a matter of when the plot is authored. A norm of D&D has the plot authored ahead of play. Player authorship then focuses on the details of how their character interacts with that plot... how they feel about it, finesse solutions to its problems, and so on. And you are right to flag these particular concerns: two questions that motivated Garden of Blight were -- how does something become fictionally true? and how might I externalize fiction in a way that allows me to explore it?

I want to cite four sources of possible answers.

• In a letter to Milton Waldman, JRR Tolkien wrote "always I had a sense of recording what was already 'there'. somewhere: not of 'inventing'." Echoing more extensive comments he makes in a letter to Auden.
• In Shawn Tomkin's Ironsworn "oracles" are used as seeds for divergent ideation.
• In Chris McDowall's Mythic Bastionland similar tables offer "sparks" while myths supply progressive themes.
• Oli Jeffrey outlined in Apocalypse by Moonlight a practical mechanic for managing progressive mysteries without preconceived solutions.

I think it is the human capability implied by Tolkien, prompted by mechanics such as oracles, sparks, myths, and theorizing, that can sustain the sense of discovery.

Garden of Blight supplies these resources in the form of 'hexploration tables' and 'dismal and poisoned events', and two thematic plot arcs in tension. It probably works best with at least two players to avoid the monotonic authorship you might have experienced. The dice skew invention so that it is easy to concede external life, which one may then enter.

I call Garden of Blight an adventure, rather than "a framework for improvising adventures on the fly" because there is a great deal of intentionality and a form of authorship in providing the theme-skeletons and sparks that drive authorship-in-play. It is like crafting mechanisms for telling not just any story, but stories of a chosen sort.

This sounds quite a bit like your example of the DM replacing their old theory in favour of a player theory supported by a role. But is that fun for the player?

From my experience, yes! It observably was fun for players. At the end of each campaign, multiple players testified to that.

If that's the kind of RP experience you want, D&D seems like a very complicated way of getting there. Fiasco is built to produce exactly that sort of gameplay, and is great fun, but only works as a one shot adventure; you can't really do a campaign.

This is a fair point. It would have been easier and in some ways more appropriate to design it for PbtA, FitD, or similar, but Garden of Blight felt to me most worthwhile addressed to D&D players. Whilst that resulted in some mystified participants in my playtests, it also drew folk into a style of play that was fresh to them and which as it turned out they appreciated.

 

[clearstream]

Something that may be of interest to designers: I understand Garden of Blight to live in the same space as designs like Ironsworn and Mythic Bastionland. Their abstracted mechanical schema is like this

theme-skeletons + spark tables
​

So in Ironsworn the progress tracks coloured by vows are the theme-skeletons, and oracles are the spark tables.

In Mythic Bastionland the myths are the theme-skeletons and sparks are literally the spark tables.

In Garden of Blight the plot-arcs in tension are the theme-skeletons and hexploration tables and dismal and poisoned events tables are the sparks.

I think this arrangement 1) lets the dice skew invention so that it is easy to concede the fiction emerging in play an external life, which one may then enter, while 2) cohering all that around curated themes, so that it's not simply a framework for improvising adventures on the fly, but a framework for improvising ludonarrative of a chosen sort on the fly.