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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6309444" data-attributes="member: 82106">I certainly don't disagree. This is why I largely write my own adventures. The commercial adventure writer is faced with a number of problems that basically result in MOST adventures being pretty linear. Even games like CoC don't REALLY have severely non-linear adventures (think of 'Masks of Nyarlathotep' a very classic CoC adventure). This is because skipping a lot of material reduces the value to the purchaser, they want to USE what they got, and the lowest-common-denominator of GMs is "I can run one combat/encounter after another in a row". There are exceptions of course, and the classic Dungeon Crawl was BASICALLY a response to this. It was non-linear (in a trivial sort of way where anything you do leads to more rooms and corridors, with maybe a choice of monster de jeur), but the players would almost always go through ALL of it.I don't think they NEED to be set up this way, I think they ARE usually set up this way. Again, most GMs are just not that skilled at writing really good adventures, and they haven't been exposed to many either. However, I think its quite POSSIBLE to do with D&D.The PCs could use several approaches here. They could use an all-out assault, they could infiltrate, or they could research various types of specific countermeasures. This could lead in various directions. They might even ally with an unsavory force (maybe some orcs for instance) who also feel threatened by the cultists, etc. This CAN go in a variety of directions. Its even possible it could be a plot-twist where the supposed 'evil cultists' are really just suffering from a curse, actually the good guys, etc. That's under 2 minutes of thinking about it, and ALL of those ideas are quite possible in a D&D game.Well, again, there can be plot twists, allies, betrayals, various tactics employed (maybe the PCs simply take one part and bunker down, KNOWING the bad guys will have to try to take it from them for example, vs the expected "get all the parts first" strategy). This already seems quite non-linear to me, with even a slight bit of work.Obviously they can follow various paths, research, find people that know the dungeon, etc, or just plow through. There are a few approaches at least. The actual 'crawl' is going to be a crawl, but at least there are choices of direction to take, presumably.Again, this seems to me to be a very non-linear adventure repleat with possibilities for different plot twists and tactics. Its hard to imagine it being reduced to a linear adventure.I'm sure they can and have been written that way. I observe however that ALL of them can definitely be written as more 'action adventure' or 'plot and intrigue' and that 4e could handle any of them in these various modes. Several possible endings suggest themselves for ANY of these adventures and they need not end with combat per-se. I think its nice to allow various possibilities for the players to choose. Maybe they WANT combat, or maybe they're happy to have a riddle contest with the dragon or whatever.Well, I think you might be making it too tough to sneak by or something. I think in 4e the idea was an SC would be invoked that could be approximately the same difficulty as the combat (IE you WILL win 99% of the time but you may use a lot of resources if you screw up badly along the way). What 4e does EXCELLENTLY well is the 'shoot the rapids' or 'escape from the erupting volcano' or 'cross the rickety bridge', etc type scenarios. They can be really thrilling and cool. Its the first D&D that can do 'Indiana Jones' basically at all. You could ALMOST do it in 3e, but the skills were too hard to get right and low level PCs were still too easy to get killed by one bad die roll. 4e is both challenging and forgiving at the same time and that's a fun combination for mixing up the types of adventure elements.I understand what you mean about combat, its an easy and relatively stock sort of element to throw into an adventure, and it features often in mine as well as those of other people. I just don't think it is the only thing you can do in 4e. It isn't even the BEST thing 4e does.</blockquote>

Verification