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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8812851" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 125: November 1996part 2/5Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Ed's tour through the Border Kingdoms becomes increasingly glacial in pace, as we start a multi-parter on High Emmerock. High enough to naturally be meadows rather than forests, it's still a fertile place that makes excellent grazing ground, which means it's filled with cattle, sheep, horses, deer and other ungulates. Once owned by giants, it took many years of hard war for humanity to become dominant there, and even once they did, it's not as if they're going to stop fighting amongst themselves for control and status. Recent history includes patricide, fratricide, exiles and mysterious disappearances. It only stabilised when a group of 7 adventurers decided none of them needed to be king and assumed collective control as Lords, which removed the obvious point of weakness at the top as each of them supported the others in governing the place. To take over you'd have to be a similarly cohesive high level party with a decent army underneath you and a plan. So there's plenty of interesting storytelling going on here, but it's relatively low on present day plot hooks for PC's to engage with. It may well turn out to be more a place to stay between adventures than have them. I guess we'll have to wait until next time to find out for sure. Being PC: So their Living events have a roleplaying problem. Too many people barely get in character at all, or treat the roleplaying scenes as completely silo'd from the combat, puzzle-solving and exploration parts of the adventure. That's not the way to do it! You can express your character's personality at any point in the game, and it can come through in both the actions you choose and the way you describe them. Even if you're playing a pregen with only a short writeup, there's often additional clues in the spell and equipment choices on how you should be roleplaying them so read between the lines and get into character. As with the GM'ing advice, this is really basic stuff, so it's irritating that they even have to say it, but I guess they do. Constantly putting people together in groups with other people they've never met before means it's more likely you'll have to deal with troublemakers, or just people with wildly different playstyles to your own. You'll get a better idea of just what level the average gamer is at, which can be pretty disappointing. Even in a relatively exclusive club like the RPGA, these struggles are never-ending.Tournament Adventures - How To Write 'Em: Another year has gone by, time once again to do an issue full of basic advice on how to write for the newszine in an attempt to boost engagement. If writing a non-Living tournament adventure, coming up with good pregens that are the right power level for the adventure and have plot hooks embedded into their descriptions that encourage interesting roleplaying with other PC's & reactions to events is half the job. Remember that they have to finish everything within 3+1/2 hours, so getting through about half a dozen encounters is the right number, (although you can write more if it's a nonlinear one where they probably won't be seeing everything) approximately half of which should be combat ones. Careful with the puzzles, as a bad one that doesn't engage with the rules of the game can break immersion. Careful balancing of treasure is irrelevant in one-shots, but very important in Living adventures. Don't write too many bits of railroading boxed text that the PC's can't react too until it's over, or that presumes their actions entirely and breaks the adventure if they interrupt it. But all these bits of good advice are secondary to just sitting down and writing until it's finished. Don't get hung up on producing perfection first time, get a first draft out, then playtest it & revise it until it works as intended. All fairly familiar stuff, but at least they're aware of the current big criticisms of their output and encouraging people to try and put more nonlinearity & roleplaying into new adventures. Will it have any effect though? Pushing against years of inertia is a struggle. Creating the Nightmare: Straight after the generic advice on adventure writing, we have the same thing only for horror games. Have a clear idea of what you're doing, get it down, then get other people to test it and catch any obvious things you might have missed. Make sure the pregens fit the scenario, and have details that encourage them to interact with each other in interesting ways. Don't overdo the boxed text without giving PC's a chance to react to the bad guy's monologues. All pretty similar, only here there's even less emphasis on combat, with it being quite plausible that you'll only have one full length stand-up fight near the end and the rest all investigation, roleplaying & jump-scares. This does mean that you may have to break the rules of the game behind the scenes to keep smart players from short circuiting the whole thing, but even here, that should be done sparingly and never in the final encounter. (which they should win unless they're really dumb or the dice turn completely against them. ) I guess that even in this genre, they've really reduced the number of meatgrinders that are expected to wipe out whole groups. All pretty familiar really. Looks like this is going to be another repetitive issue.</blockquote>

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