NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3275368" data-attributes="member: 2067">I think this piece from Malcom Gladwell's recent piece in the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070108fa_fact?page=1" target="_blank">New Yorker</a> is kind of relevant for the game, so I'll exerpt it here:While it goes into some politics issues, my main concern here is how this relates to adventure design.Are your adventures mostly puzzles, where information will slowly reveal the true answer and the PC's must acquire such information to find the Real Culprit (tm)? Divinations seem to be the shortcut for puzzle design: "Who knows the answer?" or "What is the key?" become questions that can shortcut a lot of game time. They help you find The Solution to the Conflict.Or are they mostly mysteries, with several possible likely outcomes, that require the characters to use their own (and the player's) judgement to determine which clues are the important ones? Where amount of information doesn't matter nearly as much as quality of information and analysis? Divinations would seem to be less helpful, here: you can find out who performed Action X, but that wouldn't solve the problems presented by that action. You can ask a deity's advice on your descisions, but deities have their own agendas and worldviews coloring their response. Is your party solving puzzles, arriving at conclusive endings? Or are they investigating mysteries, taking one possible path to one possible solution that has its own reprocussions?I find my own design tends to favor mysteries. I'd rather have my players asking "what if" questions, speculating and then acting on that speculation. I find it really helps the playing of a role -- what would my character consider the cause for this event? And because I tend to free-wheel a lot as a DM, it can help fuel my own game design. If a character decides Option A is the important option to puruse, I can hinge the next adventures on Option A (even if Option P is the real solution). It helps the PC's have an instrumental role in the outcome of the adventures, too. Whatever they end up accomplishing is important to the character, rather than a static wall of facts, so they have change the campaign world with their own desires. Now, yes, all campaigns have a bit of everything, but I'm asking what yours tends to be: does X happen and the PC's must find out U, V, and W before X becomes clear? Or does X happen, and the PC's must react to X happening, even if it's not entirely clear how or why X happened?Tell me about your experiences, I'd like to see what you think. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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