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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8657410" data-attributes="member: 85555">I suppose what we mean by linear adventure is important here. My brain immediately leaps to the structure that emerged in 3E, where there is often an A to B but a series of encounters planned out (and that is a very reductive description as in many adventures, once you got to A it might be a pretty open and fleshed out town with a nearby dungeon that could be explored in a variety of ways). But my sense of what Pemerton was talking about was maps being used for such adventures (most linear adventures map A to B on physical geography). I think one of the main reasons is even linear adventures aren't automatically railroads, so all it takes is one PC saying, I go off the road and approach the distant hills, for the map to become very relevant. But I do think Pemertons point is you don't need a physical geography map for this kind of adventure structure. To an extent, this is what happened towards the end of 3E if I recall. Many of the later books emphasized structuring adventures around a series of encounters based on their EL. So often you would literally just chart out something like: EL 2, EL 2, EL 1, EL 3, EL 4. Then take that and build encounters to the Els (picking appropriate CR monsters and foes so it gets to the right number). Then you would lay it on an adventure map of some kind (obviously this could be done in the other direction too). If you ran 3E this way, it worked very well mechanically in terms of presenting the right level of challenge, giving a sense of building towards a final bad guy....but the point where they started emphasizing this a lot is where I found myself losing interest (and I think that is because the EL system was the real underlying structure and as a GM I found that made sense of place less important). This was most clear to me in the 3E Ravenloft GM guide. The core setting book wasn't like this. But the GM book got deep into encounter structures. Mechanically it was very interesting because a lot of thought went into how to make encounters build fear and horror using the EL system (and in 3E the GM really can't ignore that system if they want encounters to achieve what they want them to achieve). But it made clear to me that once the setting wasn't as significant as that underlying challenge level structure, I just didn't feel as enthusiastic to run it (and I didn't like that EL structures tended to lead to pretty linear adventures by their nature). But that is all towards Pemerton's point that you a map it out that way. You don't necessarily need a geographic map to fit that on top of. I think my argument would be that may be the case, but because, even in the most structured path adventure built around encounters, the players always have the ability to go in an unexpected direction, that the geographic map is going to be helpful for most GMs (it is also really hard I think for GMs to think about those series of encounters divorced from a map of a place). I could be misunderstanding Pemerton's point though about the maps. With D&D especially, I found very few campaigns survive any particular 'way' of running the game. I run a lot of sandboxes. And I've run lots of D&D sandboxes. But how much of a sandbox I can run is very player dependent. If I have players who expect certain kinds of adventures and engage the world that way, then I have to bend to that to a degree. So I think it is the same with linear adventure paths. Those may be the idealized structure but for those who run them, since i don't really run them anymore, how often do players take things in a totally different direction where a map suddenly goes from being helpful to essential?</blockquote>

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