Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="arwink" data-source="post: 2000514" data-attributes="member: 2292">Start small.  Minor shocks, dead bodies, evil cutlits.  If you're going to be running a game with an eye on the long term, starting with the big bads is generally not the way to go.  As a good rule of thumb, don't hit the players with anything too weird in the first three to four sessions.  Keep them sure that *something* is going wrong, but don't let them nail down the fact that it's decidedly supernatural.  Suspiciouns are good, confirmation is bad.Once you've got them embroiled in the plot, start bringing out the real weirdness.  By now the players should know three things: 1) The alien and unknowable actually exists and is up to very bad things, 2) No-one else is going to believe them if they tell them about it and 3) If they don't stop it, no-one will and the earth is doomed.  Essentially, you lure people into an overarching plot and mire them to the point that if they do the sensible thing and walk away things are only going to get much, much worse.On the scale of designing individual adventures, pay really close attention to the second step mentioned in the rulebook: Motivation to continue.  If the players don't feel like they should be investigating the goings on, they wont.  In a recent game I played in, the group went to an occult auction that was interupted by a murder and a theft.  We made a half-hearted attempt to investigate, but our research had picked up nothing about the stolen item, the owner of the auction house was opposed to our investigation and asked us to leave it to the police, and we knew there were bigger things afoot due to the over-arching campaign plot.  After a fruitless hour where we were essentially told "No-one wants you involved in this" we all shrugged and left.  (Not that there's anything wrong with having NPC's telling your players that no-one wants them involved, but when you're told that repetitively by people who aren't all that suspicous or worried about their stolen property...)Once I've worked out the initial scenes and how the players get into the adventure, I find it easier to work in three stages.  List everything the players need to know.  List all the cool locations, NPC's and events I think are integral to the plot.  Create a general flowchart that links them all together with appropriate skill checks or investigation.By pushing the focus on the things the players really need to know, I can quickly adapt the information to ensure it matches the PC's plans, and I can use the investigative elements they come up with to direct them towards the scenes I think are necessary.  The Flowchart means I can give them guidance if they need it, but I'm ready to improvise if they want to talk to someone else.After all, it doesn't really matter if they find Mad Kieth's diary beneath the floorboards of his asylum cell or a file contianing a rough transcript of his ravings on the psychiatrists computer, as long as the information eventually gets them to the delapidated old house he inhabited with his mother and fall through the floorboards into the pool of zombie kittens below.  Just remember to take notes <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>

Verification