RPG Talk

MattLoter wrote: Seems I'm an odd man out for not really playing mods all that often. The vast majority of my playing is all homebrew settings and adventures. Frankly I don't think I'd enjoy playing near as much if all I did was play prewritten stuff.

I used to pull modules apart and use their pieces in an otherwise homegrown storyline.

Good role playing needs situation, story-arc, and characters. The idea of a deep dungeon with 20 levels and 300 rooms that just lie there waiting for someone to loot them doesn't really work, and that's the stuff that takes up so much time and effort. You're better off having a lot of smaller encounters driven by a bigger storyline, and those are easier to pull together in a short period of time (e.g., a week between sessions).

Modules are great for pulling a room or two out of. Often that's enough for an evening of gaming. The big stuff happens once every three months when the characters reach significant milestones in the bigger storyline. Those you have more time to work on, and frankly they often aren't terribly difficult to write up either because the arc drives much of the drama. Setting is what remains.

S.

MattLoter wrote: The vast majority of my playing is all homebrew settings and adventures. Frankly I don't think I'd enjoy playing near as much if all I did was play prewritten stuff.

It seems the only difference is who wrote the adventure. Someone on staff or your GM. They could both suck or be great either way.

Only advantage to the local GM is he knows your characters. I've always gotten over that hump of a pre-written module by tweaking a few things here and there to include pc character backgrounds or interests. I never play a mod straight up. It's simply far easier for me to trick up a mod, then create something from scratch.

metalface13 wrote: I think the appeal of Tolkien's world, for me at least, is there isn't a lot of whiz-bang magic and magic items laying around. Yes there is magic and magical items in LOTR, but it's not magic missles and Sword of Flame +3 to hit.

That's why I was really interested in FFG's Midnight D20 setting.

Once I get the Effing PH, I'm totally running it. Love it, love it, love it. Hopelessness is AWESOME.

wdgrant wrote: My son has been pestering me to play some D&D, but I run into the same problems mentioned here. I don't have time to write adventures. Does anyone know of some good one-player adventures for D&D 3.x or of another RPG that has a good store of them? I would love to encourage his desire and spend some time doing something we both enjoy, but I just can't write adventures.

Well, if you look at Feng Shui, I've written craploads of stuff for it. Wouldn't take long to actually type up, as I'm a packrat with all my notes. The rules are incredibly simple (3 D6s and one 20 sider for a Shot Counter) and you're golden.

Jeff White wrote: It seems the only difference is who wrote the adventure. Someone on staff or your GM. They could both suck or be great either way.

I think the difference is "adventures" vs "campaigns". Adventures are little bits of minor quests and so forth, they may very well find a place in a campaign, but a real campaign is something huge in a pretty open world. I like the feeling of being able to do whatever I want and follow whatever plot threads seem the most compelling. Prewritten stuff pretty much forces you to go in whatever direction the author had planned overall. You might get to make a quick detour, but you're still pretty much on rails.

I get the appeal of playing mods, but I much prefer the sandbox vibe to being given clearly defined "quests" to complete.

MattLoter wrote: I get the appeal of playing mods, but I much prefer the sandbox vibe to being given clearly defined "quests" to complete.

For me there's kind of two general categories:

1. Prewritten stuff, modules or campaigns or whatever. If it's good, the railroady nature isn't too apparent and there's also flexibility written into the modules. Viz. Masks of Nyarlathotep; 8 sprawling chapters full of globetrotting pulp goodness, but the PCs can do them in any order they like. Each chapter has clues that lead to each other chapter, so they can follow their noses and it all hangs together and feels organic.

2. Improvised or barely-structured, light- or no-GM. This is what I really like, because to me it's the fullest realization of the improvised storytelling part of the hobby. I can make #1 fun, but it's not as personally satisfying because the PCs' choices don't matter as much. And it can very easily turn into primadonna GMs presenting their epic world/plot to PCs to the sound of much public fappery. I don't really care about their world because interesting worlds are a dime a dozen; if you want to tell me a story then you should write a novel and stop pretending my decisions really matter to the ultimate outcome.

Ultimately it comes down to the fact that, like many of us, I'm (a) busy and (b) lazy, and don't want to spend a bunch of out-of-game time prepping for a hobby. The big survey WOTC did before releasing D&D 3rd ed. found that (IIRC) on average, DMs spend 2 hours prepping for every 1 hour of play. 2:1!! That's what's killing the hobby. By following one of the above two, I keep my sanity and get to still enjoy playing. Win-win.

dysjunct wrote: The big survey WOTC did before releasing D&D 3rd ed. found that (IIRC) on average, DMs spend 2 hours prepping for every 1 hour of play. 2:1!!

That's because the average DM sucks at his job and wastes time on material that never gets used.

S.

Sagrilarus wrote:

dysjunct wrote: The big survey WOTC did before releasing D&D 3rd ed. found that (IIRC) on average, DMs spend 2 hours prepping for every 1 hour of play. 2:1!!

That's because the average DM sucks at his job and wastes time on material that never gets used.

S.

That is absolutely true. Unfortunately, I am a very average DM.Also, a very good DM is a rare and beautiful creature. I haven't played with one for years. I fear they may be extinct, at least in my neck of the woods.

wdgrant wrote: My son has been pestering me to play some D&D, but I run into the same problems mentioned here. I don't have time to write adventures. Does anyone know of some good one-player adventures for D&D 3.x or of another RPG that has a good store of them? I would love to encourage his desire and spend some time doing something we both enjoy, but I just can't write adventures.

www.rpgnow.com/index.php?cPath=225_4044

D&D 3.5, and relatively well written. There's at least a dozen of them.

dysjunct wrote:

Jeff White wrote: I figure we've moved beyond that D&D 4e thread.

Two things:

1) I hear that Goodman Games only plans on releasing _one_ DCC RPG sourcebook a year, but tons of adventures. Yes! This is what I always want companies to do. I'm not interested in world building and I don't want to buy a book about some made up country. Just give me the adventures. It does sound like they are going to release DCC to the OGL so that 3rd parties can make sourcebooks for those that want them.

I think that's one of the (many) reasons for the high regard held by Call of Cthulhu. Most of the output is campaigns or books of scenarios. Very little "here's some setting information, have fun."

There are two extreme ways to approach running an adventure. Tell a tightly-scripted story that forces the player characters along for the ride. Or just set up a big sandbox setting for them to play in, and let the players freely choose what they will get into. Neither extreme works well, I think. Most players will get rebellious if they only are only allowed choices during combat. And if you don't have a story and just a setting, player groups will tend to fall quickly into a rut and the game gets boring.

So I like an rpg product line that gives me both well-written adventures and more general campaign material. The campaign material is helpful when the characters jump off the rails of the scripted adventures, and the scripted adventures help keep the campaign from stagnating.

That said, my longest campaign was for Legend of the Five Rings, which had great campaign sourcebooks but very few adventures. I got a lot of mileage out of the City of Lies setting, for which there was just one pre-made adventure, and that didn't even come with the set. We played for 3.5 years, and we even had to split the group into two in the final year, because it's cumbersome running a regular game for 12 players.

That prep stat that you mentioned elsewhere surprised me. So the average DM was spending, say, 12 hours for a 6 hour session? I guess that I'm lazy, or else just really good, because I typically spend less than 2 hours prepping for a 6 hour game.