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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 7060026" data-attributes="member: 57112">Do many folks still run their players through literal mazes? I always imagined they became passe in much the same fashion as they did in computer games and interactive fiction ("twisty little passages" indeed).Where I do see the value in this is exactly as [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] demonstrated, through adventure/scenario design. Though there's danger there too in constricting yourself to the branches you've created, since you can never really account for the range of possible player actions. It's something that needs something supplemental, a list of quickly improvisable scenes and encounters if the PCs get off track. This "extras" can be designed to provide additional clues to steer the party back in the direction you want them to go, or they can perhaps help you follow whatever tangent the PCs are on about and have that loop back around to the original adventure.There's a great story I remember reading recently (I wish I could find it, my google fu is failing me) about a DM who was running a murder mystery, and that the way they had written it their "Miss Scarlet" analogue was the killer. However, the players ended up creating an elaborate reason for all of the clues they had found to instead pointed to "Colonel Mustard". The thing is, their reasoning made a ton of sense to the DM, who had never even considered the players' theory but was actually rather intrigued both by their theory and by the implications of the players actually being right. He ended up deciding to change the plot mid-session so that the players were actually correct; he decided that was the solution that provided the best possible play experience for everyone involved. I'm sure there are some DMs who would balk at such a suggestion, but it sounded like it worked great for that group.I'm pretty far off-topic, I realize. But I do like the idea of using these branches to help design more open-ended adventure scenarios (what I think the Alexandrian would term Node-based scenario design).</blockquote>

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