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*Pathfinder & Starfinder
It needs to be more of a sandbox than a railroad?
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6396272" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I like your points. I think they make nearly any published adventure hard to run <em>as published</em>. Almost all published adventures either set out an area and its inhabitants, or set out a series of events/locations for the PCs to progress through.</p><p></p><p>With the former, it is very hard for "what happens next to make sense in the context of PCs, NPCs and setting" unless the GM injects most of that content. Or unless you count as "makes sense" nothing more elaborate than the orcs from room 2 rush in when they hear combat between the PCs and the orcs in room 1. That is a very narrow form of "meaningful choice" which is well-suited for a certain sort of classic D&D game but I think is different from what many contemporary players are after.</p><p></p><p>With the latter - event/travel-to-locations type adventures - the basic issue is that the story of the PCs is prescripted. Which is mostly at odds with "reactions/outcomes to previous activities demonstrating an effect and change on the setting".</p><p></p><p>I can think of a couple of published adventures that come pretty close to satisfying your desiderata without needing major revision. One is the Penumbra module Three Days to Kill. Provided the players buy the initial hook, the play will be driven by their choices, which can definitely make a difference. But I have seen criticism of this module (on rpg.net) for having too little material - the way it satisfies your desiderata is by presenting a single situation for the PCs to resolve. This takes about half-a-dozen pages. The other 20-odd pages are backstory and framing advice.</p><p></p><p>Another module that comes reasonably close is OA3 Ochimo - the Spirit Warrior. (I'm sure there are other modules, from the latter part of the 80s through to the d20 era, that are similar in structure, but I don't know them off the top of my head.) At it's core this is similar to Three Days to Kill - it presents the PCs with a single situation to resolve - but it pads it out a lot more, to generate more content for play at the cost of diluting the in-play frequency of meaningful choices. It does this in two ways: to get from the foreshadowing to the location of the crunch you have to hack through a wilderness, which has some interesting foreshadowing of its own but perhaps not enough to warrant the amount of material; and then the crunch location is a fairly traditional dungeon-esque adventure which again involves elements of padding/dilution of meaningful choice.</p><p></p><p>I enjoyed Ochimo when I ran it (adapted to Rolemaster) 15-odd years ago (though even then I compressed some of the exploration aspects). But these days I think I prefer the pith of something like Three Days to Kill. When I use longer published modules I pick out the key situations/crunch points and use them in the same sort of style as Three Days to Kill. I just ignore all the filler, or repurpose it as crunch points for some future episode of play.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6396272, member: 42582"] I like your points. I think they make nearly any published adventure hard to run [I]as published[/I]. Almost all published adventures either set out an area and its inhabitants, or set out a series of events/locations for the PCs to progress through. With the former, it is very hard for "what happens next to make sense in the context of PCs, NPCs and setting" unless the GM injects most of that content. Or unless you count as "makes sense" nothing more elaborate than the orcs from room 2 rush in when they hear combat between the PCs and the orcs in room 1. That is a very narrow form of "meaningful choice" which is well-suited for a certain sort of classic D&D game but I think is different from what many contemporary players are after. With the latter - event/travel-to-locations type adventures - the basic issue is that the story of the PCs is prescripted. Which is mostly at odds with "reactions/outcomes to previous activities demonstrating an effect and change on the setting". I can think of a couple of published adventures that come pretty close to satisfying your desiderata without needing major revision. One is the Penumbra module Three Days to Kill. Provided the players buy the initial hook, the play will be driven by their choices, which can definitely make a difference. But I have seen criticism of this module (on rpg.net) for having too little material - the way it satisfies your desiderata is by presenting a single situation for the PCs to resolve. This takes about half-a-dozen pages. The other 20-odd pages are backstory and framing advice. Another module that comes reasonably close is OA3 Ochimo - the Spirit Warrior. (I'm sure there are other modules, from the latter part of the 80s through to the d20 era, that are similar in structure, but I don't know them off the top of my head.) At it's core this is similar to Three Days to Kill - it presents the PCs with a single situation to resolve - but it pads it out a lot more, to generate more content for play at the cost of diluting the in-play frequency of meaningful choices. It does this in two ways: to get from the foreshadowing to the location of the crunch you have to hack through a wilderness, which has some interesting foreshadowing of its own but perhaps not enough to warrant the amount of material; and then the crunch location is a fairly traditional dungeon-esque adventure which again involves elements of padding/dilution of meaningful choice. I enjoyed Ochimo when I ran it (adapted to Rolemaster) 15-odd years ago (though even then I compressed some of the exploration aspects). But these days I think I prefer the pith of something like Three Days to Kill. When I use longer published modules I pick out the key situations/crunch points and use them in the same sort of style as Three Days to Kill. I just ignore all the filler, or repurpose it as crunch points for some future episode of play. [/QUOTE]
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It needs to be more of a sandbox than a railroad?
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