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What Does An Adventure With Vanilla Elements Need To Sell?
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<blockquote data-quote="LostSoul" data-source="post: 5958047" data-attributes="member: 386"><p>I don't know what sells, but here are my ideas on what makes a good adventure:</p><p></p><p>Player agency + challenge + setting exploration + moral meaning.</p><p></p><p>You need the first one. It's the most important. If you can provide the players with meaningful choices to make - not <em>too</em> complex; you don't want players to get overwhelmed - then they will be engaged in the game.</p><p></p><p>Which of the other elements you focus on depend heavily on the group who's going to play. The best way would be to provide ways for different groups to prioritize different aspects.</p><p></p><p>Challenge: Give players a challenge that they must overcome. It needs to be difficult enough to require player agency. It's better if the challenge interfaces with information the players gather from the setting: learn the secrets, reduce the challenge; and moral meaning: this choice could make the challenge much easier, but do we really want to go there?</p><p></p><p>Setting Exploration: Give players a way to interact with the setting. Secrets, details, etc. This is covered in a lot of places. The difficult thing is to integrate it into challenge and moral meaning. The setting needs to highlight moral meaning and contain challenges. Through exploration you gain an understanding of the moral issues and the challenges they present.</p><p></p><p>Moral Meaning: Give players choices to make on a moral or ethical level. This is simply achieved by treating all NPCs as rational actors, though some monsters may epitomize a moral or ethical stance.</p><p></p><p>"So we've learned that the snake-people murdering, sacrificing, <em>devouring</em> the towns-people are only doing so because the sages have been collecting the skins of snakes. The skin can be read as books, and the sages know this. (Thanks, Vornheim.) The snakes view this as abomination; a fate worse than death. Like having every detail of your life picked over and over and over again with nothing you can do about it. The information the sages have gleaned have brought their people out of grinding poverty, especially deaths from childbirth. Both the sages and the snake-people are very powerful and we would be hard-pressed to defeat one or the other. Through interpretation of the runes on the Black Ziggurat, we think that the snake people want an obscure "book" badly; we could steal that more easily (though still difficult) and hopefully bring an end to the conflict. But do we want to?"</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="LostSoul, post: 5958047, member: 386"] I don't know what sells, but here are my ideas on what makes a good adventure: Player agency + challenge + setting exploration + moral meaning. You need the first one. It's the most important. If you can provide the players with meaningful choices to make - not [i]too[/i] complex; you don't want players to get overwhelmed - then they will be engaged in the game. Which of the other elements you focus on depend heavily on the group who's going to play. The best way would be to provide ways for different groups to prioritize different aspects. Challenge: Give players a challenge that they must overcome. It needs to be difficult enough to require player agency. It's better if the challenge interfaces with information the players gather from the setting: learn the secrets, reduce the challenge; and moral meaning: this choice could make the challenge much easier, but do we really want to go there? Setting Exploration: Give players a way to interact with the setting. Secrets, details, etc. This is covered in a lot of places. The difficult thing is to integrate it into challenge and moral meaning. The setting needs to highlight moral meaning and contain challenges. Through exploration you gain an understanding of the moral issues and the challenges they present. Moral Meaning: Give players choices to make on a moral or ethical level. This is simply achieved by treating all NPCs as rational actors, though some monsters may epitomize a moral or ethical stance. "So we've learned that the snake-people murdering, sacrificing, [i]devouring[/i] the towns-people are only doing so because the sages have been collecting the skins of snakes. The skin can be read as books, and the sages know this. (Thanks, Vornheim.) The snakes view this as abomination; a fate worse than death. Like having every detail of your life picked over and over and over again with nothing you can do about it. The information the sages have gleaned have brought their people out of grinding poverty, especially deaths from childbirth. Both the sages and the snake-people are very powerful and we would be hard-pressed to defeat one or the other. Through interpretation of the runes on the Black Ziggurat, we think that the snake people want an obscure "book" badly; we could steal that more easily (though still difficult) and hopefully bring an end to the conflict. But do we want to?" [/QUOTE]
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