Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5125534" data-attributes="member: 80487">The original Wilderlands of High Fantasy packet is a lot less detailed than the Necromancer Games boxed set. The latter not only compiles material from a pile of later modules but adds much new material (very little of it 3e-specific). The difference is 32 pages -> about 450 pages (plus maps).Darned right. The relationships that players develop in play are the main focus.That's a difference from the assumption that there is THE plot, provided by the GM!The prevailing mode in scenario design is basically to answer the question of what is going to happen to the players. Turning that around, one gets a design that asks the question of what the players will do.Any scripted sequence of events -- such as a program of 'encounters' in the WotC sense -- must depend at multiple points on the PCs doing certain things and not doing others. Anticipating the more likely things that might happen can be useful, certainly. However, laying down not a script but an environment that operates on general principles facilitates a lot of agility in response to the players' initiatives.That might sometimes be the current state, in broad strokes. I mean that as a caution against taking too literally the upper bound of "a dozen possibilities" (or assuming it to be at a certain level of resolution/ precision).I think it important, not as some "ideal" but as what I have found to be good practical advice, to distinguish "plot" in a very loose sense ("stories" as hypothetical courses of events, and as narratives told after the fact) from buying a ticket on a pre-existing roller-coaster.If one really cannot break a habit of thinking of an 'adventure' as necessarily "this or that series of encounters the GM has planned", then I am afraid one is likely to shoulder a very heavy burden of work in trying to run an otherwise free-wheeling campaign.Even without that, one may sometimes find it prudent to tell players wishing to explore the Lost Continent of Emu that it is really not so much misplaced as still mostly a blank even on the referee's map -- so their expedition can be scheduled no earlier than next week, if it is going to be up to snuff.</blockquote>

Verification