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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 5684086" data-attributes="member: 8835">too many good points...On BSG and Umbran's #2:BSG did not have a planned story arc.  the writers made stuff up season to season, story arc to story arc.  This explains some of the What'sUpWithStarbuck moments...I write my adventures 1 session at a time, generally as a complete "story" or cliffhanger.  As a result, if I have a crappy hook that you still agreed to bite into, at the end of the session, I guage player desire/intent and that's what I base the next session on.An AP planning to go from L1 to L20 is too risky to me.  Too much assumption on what the players really want to do, as well as lock in on what its about.  Writing each session from scratch, I can sense what themes would fit by my players and put it in there.  This is also why they tend to bite my plot hooks, because I wrote them KNOWING my players and PCs immediate concerns.Back to themes a bit.  I suspect that concept is just a bit too abstract for me.  I wouldn't want to run 20 levels of "why slavery is wrong" as a theme, and I can't envision a theme I could do that with.In my Circle of Magic example (the legally required Mage's guild), all I did was present the card-carrying, goose-stepping member PC with a sympathetic NPC with a different viewpoint.  The player could have gone either way in turning them in or helping them.  That was a cool moment, and total surprise to me.  But I wouldn't want to run an entire campaign on that theme.Which brings me to another trick I employ.  The way I learned about Star Trek's plot model (back in creative writing class) was they used a 2 plot system.  There was the threat/problem for the ship, and the threat/problem for a character.  Sometimes they had parallels.Forex, the Enterprise is trying to convince some colonists they need to evacuate, and Worf is related to one of the colonists and must deal with some personal issue with that person.It was so formulaic that for LUG's ST:TNG RPG, I even made tables for generating adventures.In D&D, this concept translates to: general problem/opportunity for the party (go explore the Dungeon of Disastrous Doom), and personal problems/opportunities (if you get enough money, you can pay the ransom to free your father).</blockquote>

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