So hot. I should go for a run, my body is complaining because of all the inactivity, but it’s nearly 30°C outside.
I was listening to an episode of the Zock Bock Radio podcast and they mentioned a thing that I need more time to think about. If you’re the referee of a campaign and you have a great scene in mind, like I sometimes do, then you have two problems: for one, you’re inclined to railroad your players towards that scene, and two, you are probably back at square one after the scene has played out.
I never felt that problem number one was a big one for me. I usually say: use every idea as soon as possible, there’ll be more good ideas in the future, and I find that’s generally true.
I am more concerned with problem number two. Perhaps that’s the reason that I sometimes tire after a long campaign? Sea of Five Winds ended after 120 sessions of 2–3h each; Greyheim ended after 67 sessions of 1h 45min; Razor Coast ended after 60 sessions of 1h 45min. Player characters rarely get up to level nine in the course of these campaigns.
Perhaps this is part of referee burnout: since you’re always back to square one after a great scene, you’re in constant search of more great scenes to put in your games, and if your scenes are not great, you feel like there’s no game to be had.
The remedy, it would seem, is something I know well – I just didn’t appreciate it as a solution to a specific problem. The remedy is tools: maps that answer questions about neighbouring areas; tables that answer questions about encounters, traps, rumours, events; factions that answer questions about intrigues and shifting powers; set pieces of space stations, castles, villages, and so on. I knew it was cool to have these, and I often use these myself. I like to have maps at my disposal; I use encounter tables liberally. But I don’t have a folder of castle maps, of dungeon maps, of villages.
Perhaps this is what fascinates me about Hex Describe. In a way, it’s my set of tables that I can keep going back to. Hidden within the user interface is direct access to some of the tables. For example, the Magic User Boss table is used for I don’t know what, but on it’s own, it’s also great! Or simple lairs, like Wood Elves with forest name, pets, leader, portrait, treasure, spells, and so on. Without a map to back it up, the missions generated don’t actually work, but that’s beside the point. Text Mapper on its own is also great, for dungeons. The maps are generated based on tiles of 5-room or 7-room configurations and I think the 7-room configurations are more interesting, and thus a dense structure that isn’t a megadungeon would be the 4 × 7 = 28 room dungeon.
Anyway, all of that is great, but the important part to me is that adventure prep needs to get away from the idea of great scenes and towards adventure-supporting tools. This is how you can run a game every week. I used to think that all I needed to be able to run a game every week was one of those Paizo Adventure Paths, but the problem with those is that where as they might contain many great scenes they also consist of many pages that you have to read and digest, and that’s not something I enjoy. I don’t enjoy reading adventures for entertainment. It ended up being a chore, and if I skipped it, I felt bad. I never quite knew why. Back then I thought, the solution would be to run my own stuff because then, having written it, and having enjoyed the process more than reading, underlining, and highlighting bought material, it’d be easy. But running a game once a week or more often while you have a job is not easy, not if you’re trying to think of great scenes to put into your games all the time.
I think I’m going to focus more on writing tools for my games, and to do it explicitly to fend of referee burnout. I’m already pretty happy running Stonehell, and I was pretty happy running the Castle of the Mad Archmage in years past. I just need more faith that preparing simple tools will still lead to great games. The great scenes will still happen, but they won’t be “designed” to happen. They’ll happen on their own, simply because there’s so much gaming that happens and because I’ll be ready to push those buttons if the opportunity presents itself. All I need to do is keep my eyes open and pay attention. They’ll be incidental to the adventure machine producing an environment that has a geography (maps), people with unpredictable reactions (reaction tables), monster variety (random encounters, monster manuals), goals (based on neighbours and locations on the map), and so on.
#RPG
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My games use your simple tools and procedures and have great moments! Drinking turned into a curse turned to a dungeon into Timat!!
Thank you for everything you do!
– Oliver 2022-06-27 02:33 UTC
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Hrm, the campaign stats you mention are god-tier, most of us never experience such constancy, I’d wager!
– starmonkey 2022-06-27 05:41 UTC
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I don’t know. I guess there’s always somebody who has been running a longer campaign. Except for the people that started their game in the seventies and never stopped. 😅
Perhaps the reason the “awesome scene problem” spoke to me was my RPG burnout that started around the beginning of the pandemic when I ended the Razor Coast game. It all came back to me with the development and play testing of Helmbarten.
– Alex 2022-06-27 06:04 UTC