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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ben Robbins" data-source="post: 3645882" data-attributes="member: 38705">This is a topic near and dear to my heart. You're absolutely right that adventure design hasn't made fantastic progress. If you open a module from 1980, it doesn't look that different than an adventure now. Where are the leaps forward, where are the flying cars?When I started writing adventures for publication a few years ago it totally changed how I looked at adventures. It's not good enough to have a good adventure idea that _you_ could run great, you have to encapsulate and communicate that idea in a way that will make some GM in some other part of the world be able to run a good game. It's particularly odd because what you are writing will be read by the GM, but the final audience is really the players who will never read your text. The adventure is not a novel, <a href="http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/16/writing-game-material-the-audience-of-my-audience/" target="_blank">it's an instruction manual</a>.I've been tackling the problem more through the structure of the text rather than the formatting (formatting is part of the equation and definitely needs a revolution, I just haven't come up with anything on that front that I think can be translated to all formats). The "<a href="http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/48/anatomy-of-an-action-scene/" target="_blank">Anatomy of an Action Scene</a>" that I've been using breaks up scenario info into clear logical sections that follow a chronological progression and give the GM a clear sense of what is happening and why. That's not terribly interesting in itself, but it has punched out critical things like extracting essential plot information as <a href="http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/41/revelations/" target="_blank">Revelations</a> -- instead of burying it in the flow of the action and linking that info to particular encounters, it sits on top as a scenario-wide outline which let's you adapt to changes as they come (you know the heroes need to learn the Duke is left-handed to move the plot, so even if they miss it in the scene you intended them to find out, since you are tracking your Revelations you know that needs to come out some other time).Definitely. My editors keep giving me a hard time for writing in paragraph fragments, but really it's to make sure it's easy to find info. An ideal game should really be an outline of bullet points the GM can refer to easily, like the Game at a Glance section in <a href="http://www.lamemage.com/releases/0020-drnull-bridge/LAM0020-drnull-bridge.pdf" target="_blank">Dr Null: Battle on the Bay Bridge</a> (free download) or the Revelations I mentioned above. No GM wants to read through a whole column of a text in the middle of a game to find something. Playtesting feedback has shown me that if you bury info, the GM will not even see it.There should be a law against not playtesting. Or a big disclaimer sticker "Warning: this adventure has not been playtested! You are on your own!" No matter how smart of a GM you are, or how good your sense of what works and what doesn't, putting the scenario in the hands of _other_ GMs and seeing what happens is critical beyond belief.I've got a huge rant stored up about the difference between describing a situation (there are orcs in them thar' hills, the high priest is corrupt, the prince is a doppelganger) and telling a GM how to deliver that idea as an adventure.You've got to start somewhere. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  Seriously, there's a lot of ground to cover, so I salute all attempts to move the ball. Some ideas may turn out to be crap (trust me, I know) but the only dumb questions are unasked ones and all that. In the end better adventure design will make it easier for new GMs to run games, which means more games, which is good for the hobby, and so on.</blockquote>

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