Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 9174384" data-attributes="member: 6750908">I think there are a number of reasons why we can't compare Baldur's Gate 3 directly with a published Adventure Path. Most of them (that I can recognize) have been brought up on this thread already, but I think there might be some value in gathering them together:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The Origin Characters, and the other Companions, aren't really Player Characters or Non-Player Characters; they are both and neither and... something in-between, something that doesn't really have a place at the gaming table.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">For a major NPC, Larian programmed maybe 4-5 "routes" you can take with them, in addition to (possibly) ignoring and/or murdering them. Most minor NPCs still have 2-3 options, and this is evidence of Larian's breathtaking level of attention to detail.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Even taking the previous two restrictions into consideration, Baldur's Gate 3 is literally the equivalent of thousands and thousands of pages of written material, the equivalent of dozens of published Adventure Paths.</li> </ol>Now... I try to keep track of the State of the Art in our industry, but I don't follow Adventure Path design too closely, because you could say that I'm ideologically or aesthetically indisposed to them, either as an umpire or as an amateur/aspiring game designer. My understanding is that most (the vast majority) of Adventure Paths are written with a single (or 2-3 at best) predetermined ending with maybe a few column inches per adventure or maybe a couple of pages per series of umpire advice if players take the adventure in a different direction.Correcting this would involve... like Larian has done, to their credit, multiplying the page counts of every module/path by ten or twelve or a hundred for content, like so much of the content of Baldur's Gate 3, the vast majority of consumers (umpires or players) will never experience.I believe that designing commercial content with that Baldur's Gate 3 kind of depth is possible, but I don't know if it's commercially viable; it would require a radical restructuring of what an Adventure Path is, as a product, and I don't know if that kind of product would appeal to the same people that buy and run Adventure Paths now. Now... to lay my own bias on the table, what I'm describing here would be a more codified and organized version of my own prep process, and I am exploring the matter of refining that process for commercial development. I don't bring predetermined plots to my table, for my players, and I want to encourage other umpires to take my approach: I encourage my players to design characters that have very strong feelings about the world they live in, and I present them with opportunities to change that world, and then play out the world's attempts to push back. Ideally, by the time I've exhausted all of my predetermined content, my vision, the players are invested enough in their world and their vision that nearly 100% of the game from that point onward is me reacting to them.What I do, what I want to see other umpires do and what I want to sell them the tools to do, is create models-- psychological, political, economic, ecological-- for how all of my game pieces will behave on their own accord, and how they'll respond to the different threats and incentives that the players might present to them. I set a lot of plots in motion at the start of every campaign, and I set up a lot of contingency plans, and I dangle them in front of the players... but all of the actual plot of my campaigns is provided by the players' responses to their initial situation.That, I think, is the closest that I think a predetermined and pre-packaged "adventure path" can get to the flexibility-- and responsiveness-- of a masterwork Western RPG like Baldur's Gate 3 or any of the others we'd care to hold up as an example here.</blockquote>

Verification