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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bert1000" data-source="post: 5110989" data-attributes="member: 29013">1. Pacing. This is the big one. As someone else said, there needs to be some kind of story between every 1-2 combat encounters (and even skill challenges). See my next post for my thoughts on Eyes of the Lich Queen, which I thought did this pretty well. 2. Exploration “encounters”. This is the micro version of pacing. Areas need more interesting non-encounter details. See this thread: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/244799-old-school-modules-space.html" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/244799-old-school-modules-space.html</a> In summary, I agree that a completely empty dungeon room is boring, but a non-combat / non-skill challenge area does not need to be. Cult of the Reptile God is an awesome old school module and the final cavern complex has a bunch of “non encounter” rooms that are really cool: 1) a store room with provisions that lets PCs know there are humans around and their approximate number (information conveyed!), 2) an otherwise empty muddy floor cavern that looks similar to another cavern with monsters in the mud (tension!), 3) a cavern with non threatening skeletons acting as a bilge pump to keep the area from flooding! (awesome fantasy detail, sense of wonder!!!). 3. Variety. Many, smaller interesting locations are much more entertaining, allow a wider variety of plausible creatures to interact with, and create the sense of moving forward. Alternatively, a reason not to clear every room of a large location also works (luke didn’t clear every room of the death star but instead had several meaningful encounters toward his goal). Lich Queen did variety well. 4. Choices and consequences. Give the players meaningful choices and consequences and incorporate the results into the story. This is my beef with a lot of as written skill challenges right now. Failing a skill challenge results in some kind of trivial consequence (e.g., fight an extra level +1 battle). I think skill challenge results should always include a real story element. The skill challenge example in Galaxy of Intrigue had failure result in the loss of fellow prisoners at each failure. This is great, and even better if they had several interactions with some of these NPCs before hand. Not only will the PCs feel that they failed (even though they still escape and move the story along), but one of the lost NPCs might come back and hunt them down because they “abandoned them in the mines to save your own skin”. Incorporate more elements like this. More if the PCs choose to do this, then… Lich Queen did not really do this well. 5. Antagonist motivations revealed to PCs. First, the villains need better fleshed out motivations and background. But equally as important, some of this motivation and evil plotting needs to be conveyed to the characters in-game (and please don’t overuse the note, journal entry please). Otherwise all that background and motivation is just fun DM reading. The players are motivated to participate because they want to play an rpg, but great adventures are when the characters are also logically motivated to participate. So the larger point is create reasons for why the characters might care. Lich Queen was too heavy handed with this (basically characters get magically cursed and have to lift the curse).</blockquote>

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