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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9700750" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean I can tell you but it's so specific I don't think it will be helpful.I was running may adaptation of the very excellent <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/237544/the-gardens-of-ynn" target="_blank">The Gardens of Ynn</a> supplement, keeping most of the setting mechanics but adapting it to Dungeon World rules and the needs of my game (which is in the style of the Arabian Nights and the Golden Age of Islam). So I called it the Garden-City of Zerzura, and turned the "Idea of Thorns" (the memetic mind-virus that is the major big bad thing of Ynn) into the "Song of Thorns" (a memetic mind-virus spirit that was also a song, hence why it could infect the minds of anyone who heard it or anyone who sang it etc., originally a spirit of savagery and entropy which became superpowered for reasons the players still haven't quite figured out.)In the original Ynn rules, you roll to determine where each pathway leads, as you take that pathway. So I did that, because...it's what the structure as written was. The player in question told me that he felt that this ruined the tension of exploration--not the threats within each place, but the feeling of risk vs reward because it wasn't possible to make right or wrong decisions of any kind. He didn't mind at all that it had rogue-like qualities, he just didn't care for the fact that the place was generated as you explore it, rather than generated and then explored. If you left and came back, you'd just be bumbling around waiting for the places you wanted to go to (re)appear, that sort of thing.So I took that to heart and will be keeping that in mind anytime I ever do similar sorts of things. If I'm going to have randomly-generated locations, I should prepare at least some of the space in advance, so that it feels like there are right and wrong choices, so that it feels like it's a place being explored, not a place being produced, as it were.Like I said, really ultra-specific and not useful to most people, but well-thought-out sincere criticism that had nothing to do with saying I was doing things badly, and everything to do with "this didn't work well for me as a player". It'll shape any similar random or semi-random dungeon crawls we ever do, which might happen again, such as a visit to the same author's The Stygian Library.</blockquote>

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