NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6963104" data-attributes="member: 6787650">"Casual design" isn't supposed to mean "absence of design." What you're talking about sounds like running the first 1% of the plot of an AP. I'm talking about something which is designed to be a standalone, episodic game, with accompanying game structures.Actually, D&D should be a whole family of games, all using the same physical resolution mechanics but designed using the idioms and structures of a specific game genre. "D&D: Betrayal" can be a dungeon crawl where one person has a secret objective and will betray you halfway through (think of the opening scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark); whichever side completes their objective gives a bunch of XP. "D&D: Dungeon Crawl" is the basic "kill the monsters, take their treasure" dungeon crawl (probably what you're referring to when you mention Adventurer's League). "D&D: Mystery" is a scene-oriented mystery (murder or theft) with a possible fight at the climax; you get XP if you solve the mystery and/or right the wrong. "D&D: Mad Mad World" is a team-oriented, time-sensitive dungeon crawl where two teams are racing for the same objective through a dungeon, and the first one to get the treasure and get out gets the XP--play will proceed by turns through a randomly-constructed dungeon. "D&D: Freeform Exploration" is just a sandbox. Characters which survive one game of D&D are eligible for use in any other game of D&D. Enough related games and you have something which you can start to call a campaign.All of these can use the same physical resolution mechanics of D&D (attack rolls, skill checks, etc.) but the game structures are different. E.g. in "D&D: Mystery" you explicitly identify affordances and potential scene transitions for the players to activate, and the players accept that there will be a higher degree of linearity ("railroading") to keep the game short and fun; in "D&D: Mad Mad World" you have the teams take ten-minute turns, which means that long actions such as "we take a short rest" occupy multiple turns and are disincentivized (by player boredom among other things). You might find that you need other things too like multiple DMs in order to run turns in parallel; or in some cases (like in D&D: Betrayal) it might make more sense to have no DM, only a designated "monster advocate" for each scene who runs the monsters in accordance with the guidance in the game. ("The spider chases you; on any turn when it doesn't catch up to you, roll a d6; on a 5-6, it gives up chasing you.")What I'm trying to say is that if you want a game that is accessible to casual players, it's weird to use campaigns and APs as a base for reaching out to them. It makes more sense to think up an actual game which ties into D&D but still has its own rules, beginning, and end, and takes place entirely in a single night. Then a campaign is the continuity between associated games, not a game itself.</blockquote>

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