Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="rounser" data-source="post: 194993" data-attributes="member: 1106">Yes, something like that - status quo areas and non-linearity is something with the DMG talks about, but rarely do you see the resources for carrying it out published, without requiring either significantly more fleshing out or freeform DMing.&nbsp; This is why I hold the recently published, detail-heavy city books in esteem - they save a lot of work in making a city which is more than just a skeleton of sparse detail.Such a product could even be just a &quot;DM's playground&quot;, with no story arc, but an area the size of, say, a village or two and environs, including dungeons, wilderness lairs, NPCs and urban areas detailed down to encounter level (i.e. traps, monsters, treasure, NPCs with personalities, individual buildings and what the shops sell), plus mini-adventures with hooks that can be sprung in the area at DM discretion and involve those NPCs and locations.At least a small area of the campaign could come to life for PCs to explore without the DM needing to wink and nudge that he hasn't populated that dungeon yet, so please don't go there just yet, or having to make it up on the fly.&nbsp; Presumably you could overlay whatever adventures with plots or story arcs over those foundations, which is where DMs seem to enjoy spending their time the most (besides worldbuilding or making maps, it seems).Perhaps I'm just jaded with seeing published campaigns which are almost exclusively based around episodic railroading or megadungeons.&nbsp; Occasionally you see glimpses of another way in products like In Search of Adventure (which featured adventure redundancy depending on which path the PCs took), the Night Below (which had above-ground environs which were almost detailed enough to let the PCs roam where they chose and find interesting things to do) or Ruins of Adventure (which was based on a semi-non-linear CRPG, and therefore allowed for a lot more player choice of what to do next than your average P&amp;P module), but I don't think these angles have been pursued more than at a token level.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="rounser, post: 194993, member: 1106"] Yes, something like that - status quo areas and non-linearity is something with the DMG talks about, but rarely do you see the resources for carrying it out published, without requiring either significantly more fleshing out or freeform DMing. This is why I hold the recently published, detail-heavy city books in esteem - they save a lot of work in making a city which is more than just a skeleton of sparse detail. Such a product could even be just a "DM's playground", with no story arc, but an area the size of, say, a village or two and environs, including dungeons, wilderness lairs, NPCs and urban areas detailed down to encounter level (i.e. traps, monsters, treasure, NPCs with personalities, individual buildings and what the shops sell), plus mini-adventures with hooks that can be sprung in the area at DM discretion and involve those NPCs and locations. At least a small area of the campaign could come to life for PCs to explore without the DM needing to wink and nudge that he hasn't populated that dungeon yet, so please don't go there just yet, or having to make it up on the fly. Presumably you could overlay whatever adventures with plots or story arcs over those foundations, which is where DMs seem to enjoy spending their time the most (besides worldbuilding or making maps, it seems). Perhaps I'm just jaded with seeing published campaigns which are almost exclusively based around episodic railroading or megadungeons. Occasionally you see glimpses of another way in products like In Search of Adventure (which featured adventure redundancy depending on which path the PCs took), the Night Below (which had above-ground environs which were almost detailed enough to let the PCs roam where they chose and find interesting things to do) or Ruins of Adventure (which was based on a semi-non-linear CRPG, and therefore allowed for a lot more player choice of what to do next than your average P&P module), but I don't think these angles have been pursued more than at a token level. [/QUOTE]

Verification