Greg Christopher asks What do you wish that modules could do, but which you haven't seen done before?
What do you wish that modules could do, but which you haven't seen done before
I’ve mentioned before what I don’t like: I want less detail, less pages, less words. I also don’t like riddles too much.
But what is it that I want instead? In a way I could just copy and paste the list of things I like in a One Page Dungeon. I’m not going to repeat them here. If the adventure has more than one page, here’s how I’d like to see them used:
things I like in a One Page Dungeon
1. choices and multiple avenues – Vault of Larin Karr provided a little mini-campaign where the various problems could be tackled in a different order
2. cool scenery and atmosphere and matching evocative artwork – things outside the vanilla medieval, fantastic landscapes, rooms, artwork, buildings, people; I know my players always pay attention if I show them a picture – and that means I don’t need fancy maps and art that I cannot show to my players
3. a useful map that reduces the time I have to spend leafing through the book itself – if there is space on the map, use it
4. credible one-sentence motivations for the various factions – these should be very simple and they should enable me to improvise people’s reactions and their plans
5. in order to make things easy to find, you don’t need a table of contents and an index; if you think you’d benefit, consider shortening the text instead
6. add bold keywords and headings to make the text easy to *skim*; write the adventure as if you were writing for the attention span challenged audience on the web: Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines (advice from 1998)
Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines
One of these days I should eat my own dog food and actually write an adventure that follows my own suggestions. 😄
#RPG #Keep It Short
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
Thanks for the cool answers Alex.
This project I am working on will be a sandbox campaign, so it should satisfy most of these demands. 😄
– Greg Christopher 2011-04-15 21:42 UTC
---
As for using a map, I can point to my own Water Temple. The adventure itself and the dungeon aren’t too cool, but the way text and map are interwoven are an example of what I like.
– Alex Schroeder 2011-04-16 16:32 UTC