Keep things short. Don’t overexplain. That background you wrote? It should be shorter. That NPC personality? Do you need that much detail? Try dot points. If you take over a page for an encounter, it’s too long. If it’s over a column, can you shorten it? Adventures are read twice, if you’re lucky. Once to prepare, and once during the running. When a DM runs … Continue reading On Brevity, Clarity and Adventure Writing
Imagine a game of Dungeons & Dragons where everyone was a fighter, there were no short or long rests, and the only way you could regain hit points was by returning home and resting for a week or more. In many ways, that’s how the original game was. Clerics didn’t get healing magic until second level, and then it could only restore 1d6 hit points … Continue reading Healing, Spells and Resources: The Pacing of Dungeons & Dragons
There are times in your life when you want to use a monster one of your friends has written. Well, perhaps it’s never happened to you, but it’s happened to me. So, here’s the result: Buried Temple of the Death God. Which demonstrates that I wanted to use as clichéd a title for the adventure as possible. As the monster was released as OGL (that … Continue reading Buried Temple of the Death God – Fight or Flight?
In my last post, I described the initial concept of an adventure. The next stage of this adventure is to get into a little more detail as to what the PCs will face. Let’s start with the tomb encounter. This is where the players meet the “recovery specialists” who are trying to loot the tomb before the PCs. I’m building this encounter for 5 PCs … Continue reading Designing an Adventure: Choosing the Monsters
I’ve decided I need to design a new adventure. The “announcement” that the next adventure season of D&D will be in Undermountain has fired my imagination. I’d very much like to design a series of short dungeon adventures detailing undiscovered corners of the megadungeon. So, why not? Okay, the “announcement” didn’t actually say “it’s Undermountain”. It just hinted, very heavily, that Undermountain is next. It’s … Continue reading Designing an Adventure: First Steps
One thing that greatly irritates me about Pathfinder is the plethora of conditional modifiers. There are usually very good game-world reasons for those modifiers, but the more of them there are, the harder it gets to keep track of everything. I just noticed one of them in the latest blog entry on PF2, Secrets of Alchemy. Now, thematically this is a fantastic item. It’s very … Continue reading Pathfinder II – Modifier Madness
The Paizo team put out a blog entry recently about how they’re handling spells for Pathfinder II. I though I’d say a few words on what their approach means for the game. Caveat: I’m not a fan of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. This will come out in this article. I think that if you enjoy Pathfinder, you’re an excellent person who should keep playing games … Continue reading Thoughts on Pathfinder Playtest Spells
I’ve run Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat three times each, Curse of Strahd twice, Out of the Abyss and Princes of the Apocalypse once each, and I am currently running Storm King’s Thunder and Tomb of Annihilation. By now, I’ve had a lot of experience running the campaign adventures of Wizards of the Coast. Many people evaluate adventures based on how … Continue reading The Structure of Campaign Adventures
In Out of the Feywild (see review in the last post), there’s an encounter with an invisible pixie. The encounter says it trails the PCs invisibly unless they seem friendly. What then makes the pixie interact with the PCs? It’s a problem I’ve seen many times in adventures. The designer needs to set up a situation where the PCs have something to react to. The … Continue reading Adventure Design: A Word on Encounter Triggers
Over the years, Dungeons & Dragons adventures have tried many different techniques of presenting monster stats in the adventure. The first adventures – Steading of the Hill Giant Chief – listed the hit points of the monsters and then expected you to look them up in the Monster Manual. Later AD&D products provided “full” stat-blocks, although they’d typically leave out special ability descriptions. However, as … Continue reading Presenting Monster Stat-Blocks in Published Adventures
