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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8657074" data-attributes="member: 29398">I got nothin' when it comes to making up terms. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />But, to add even more to the fun, there's two levels of these dependencies; the presence of one of which will make an adventure linear while the other will not.The first type, the one that to some degree forces linearity, is when something Must Happen in an earlier scene in order that a later one can be accessed and-or played.  A bland-and-boring example might be the trope where the PCs must find a key in one area in order to get through an otherwise-unopenable door in another; or when a scene with the butler must take place or else there is no possible way the PCs can safely access the mistress of the house with whom they need to speak.  Kinda railroad-y, yes, but also quite common.  These are the type of dependencies many of us either don't like at all or tolerate if used sparingly.The second one, that doesn't force linearity, is when while all scenes are more or less equally accessible the play of some will be (in some cases greatly) affected by whether or not other scenes have already been played.  An example here might be where the PCs are trying to rescue a prisoner, did they find a stealthy way of avoiding all the guards (i.e. bypassing a variable number of scenes) en route to the prisoner, or did they throw stealth to the wind and just blow away the guards on their way in.*  Put another way, the scene where they reach and rescue the prisoner is in theory going to happen at some point if the PCs are to succeed in their mission, but that scene will play very differently if it is among the first to be played during the adventure rather than among the last.  Note too that this scene sequencing is almost entirely dependent on how the players/PCs choose to approach the mission.This second type of dependency is IMO just fine, and sometimes almost falls under simple consequences: if you do A first it'll make doing B either easier or harder than if A had not been done (and might even make doing B either impossible or unnecessary).* - georgraphy factors in here as well.  If the prison is physically laid out in such a way that the PCs have no choice but to plow through lots of guards en route to the prisoner then it's going to be a linear adventure no matter what, with a pre-known number of scenes in it.  But if the prison is laid out in such as way as to allow different approaches (or the PCs can bring resources to bear to allow different approaches e.g. Passwall spell, flight, etc.) then the adventure need not be linear at all and - using number of scenes as the measure - the adventure's length cannot be predicted ahead of time.  Maybe they do wade in and encounter every possible scene and-or location and have 6 combat scenes then the actual rescue scene then another combat followed by a chase; or maybe there's only three scenes to the whole thing - stealthing in, rescuing the prisoner, and stealthing out again.</blockquote>

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