Techniques for spicing up aventures! By: Everyone?!

[Silver Moon]

The Shopping List
Have a local Arch-Mage stop by and give the adventuring party a shopping list - basically a listing of magical components that he needs for various things he/she would like to make. Eye of this, blood of that, etc. Emphasize that the mage is in no rush for any of these, just pick them up if you happen across them. And make it a long list, including some rather obscure things they may never ever come across. This creates for extra subplot and sometimes motivates players to investigate and fight things they might otherwise just avoid. It's also fun for the DM when you are using adventures from Dungeon Magazine or other pre-printed sources that happen to include creatures that are on the shopping list but that you might not otherwise plan use in a module you think up yourself.

 

[awayfarer]

Combat is a good way to get PC's together early on. My MERP group recently started a game this way. It sort of went in a domino effect.

1: My character is a 9'6 Beorning and fugitive after he committed murder. Stomps into the tavern to get a drink before leaving town.

2: The GM's made a character who is distantly related, knows my character, and is rather unhappy to see him. We agree to step outside. (We round-robin DM, so everyone makes a character)

3: Stupid, drunk, town guard gets in our way. We find something to agree on, we both punch the bugger and knocking him clean out. Someone else calls the guards. Now we're BOTH in trouble with the law.

4: We move outside. Town guards get a little overzealous and starts shooting. Three other characters, a ranger, a paladin and a thief, come out and get drawn into the fight. The ranger hacks off a guards arm, killing him. So of course, ranger is wanted for murder now and his best friend the paladin is an accomplice.

5: Thief decides it's time to high tail it. He steals a horse. It belongs to the sorceress PC. She was the last out of the tavern and is not too happy that some guy is stealing her horse. Ends up getting dragged along when he will not relinquish control.

Looking back, it was probably the best first session of any game I've been in.

 

[justinsluder]

Two words: evil gnomes

Build them malicious and go to town.

 

[Black_Swan]

Go outside of the mechanics. For example, have some barbarian orcs do a death-from-above (jump attack downward) in a 3D fight location.

That's a really cool idea! A narrow pass..where the pc's expect the same old boulder/arrow attack turns into a really cool scene.

The World of Darkness Message Board has a great thread like this. It's comprised of one or two sentence hooks that you can turn into an adventure.

 

[Psion]

Tables & Lists. As in, random and non-random lists of elements. Try them out. There are some good ones in DMGII and Green Ronin's Advanced GM's Guide things like fight scenes, npc agendas, and so forth. AEG's Toolkit (not available in PDF) is all about these. Browse through them for things you haven't done in recent adventures. If an adventure goes off the tracks or ends early, roll on them to come up with some quick ideas.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

How do I spice up adventures? Well, I start by taking off my shirt.....


Just kidding.

I use a lot of skill tests and action zones from Iron Heroes.

 

[diaglo]

let the players have input. alot. let them add stuff to the campaign early and often.

ways to get this from reluctant players:

ask for a background, a favorite weapon, names of things they like, unique mentors or influences, a secondary trait or skill

add bits and pieces and drop hints. but don't force it. they came up with the stuff but they may not know what they want. but if you keep hinting they can add more to spice it up too

 

[Psion]

More:

WWBBEGD?
(Active, thinking NPCs/Villains)

The players often can catch you off guard, bypass things that were supposed to be challenging. You can also find yourself falling into a rut when it comes to adventure design.

To address this, I prefer to approach my adventures from the standpoint that the villains are not mere room occupants. Consider things such as what the NPCs would do when confronted by the evolving situation, or how would they plan for the PCs in the first place? This becomes a valuable resource for keeping things interesting and presenting the PCs with new challenges.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

Another idea I had was to run dungeons abstractly. Rather than describe each individual corridor and room (many of which wind up empty anyways), why not focus on the rooms that have content in them and leave the rest to extrapolation?

This is exactly what I do. We play via OpenRPG, which is still a lot slower than playing face to face, and it helps immensely.

I also encourage Taking 10 or even 20 when searching for traps.

 

[Lanefan]

A few stray thoughts on this...

Games can become dull on two levels.

One is short-term...when a particular session, or adventure, is dragging. Sometimes, it can be because it's just a bad adventure or not suited to the characters and-or players; other times, people just aren't feelin' it that night, whatever...the problem is it can sometimes be hard to tell these two apart. The options here are limited; a random combat can help sometimes, and there's been some excellent suggestions up-thread on how to spice those up (location, memorable opponents, etc.), but if the problem is adventure-based rather than random player boredom this could backfire by just making an unpleasant experience drag on longer. If it does turn out to be adventure-based dullness, all you can do is strip down the adventure by removing every non-essential encounter and just get it over with...or, and this might add some excitement, throw in some encounter and make it glaringly obvious the PCs have no choice but to flee. That way, they can come back sometime later and take care of whatever drove them away, and you're on to a new adventure in the meantime.

Ending a session in mid-combat is always a sure way of getting interest at the start of next session.

The other level is long-term...when a whole campaign is losing steam. Here, it *really* helps to be running two parties concurrently, as the easiest way to spice things up for a while is to have some characters (and their players) switch parties. But if you're running a typical one-party linear game, about all you can do is lob in some memorable NPCs (going *completely* overboard on an adventuring stereotype can help here...wizards and cavaliers are great for this). If your players have been running the same PCs for a long time, see if they're interested in cycling in some new blood while temporarily retiring their existing PCs...even if only some of the players do this, it changes things up.

Lanefan