I’ve been working on the skeletal structure of an adventure and a campaign setting. I think the setting itself needs a lot of work still, but it is at least a start. The structure of the adventure is coming along a little better. I think that my best DMing days were without a doubt the game I ran in the early 1990s for my wife and some friends. I wouldn’t say I’m a fantastic DM/GM, but I think I got a lot better during that campaign. I spent a lot more time working on various levels of plot, from the big picture to the character level.
I am also seeing why I haven’t gamed in a while, or at least DMed/GMed. I am not satisfied to just slap an adventure together. I really like the process of creating a solid game with some good rationale and motivations. Over the last few years I’ve been writing a lot in general – nothing I have published on blogs – and have come to appreciate the value of being a very harsh self-editor. After writing anything but a blog post , I give it a day or two and really go back and edit with great fervor. Even in the writing up the outline of this first adventure, I can see the effects of these years of writing on adventure creation. If I do DM a game, it may not be the greatest thing ever, but it will be a lot better than anything I’ve done before.
In particular, I think the enhanced editing skills and planning will help the non-dungeon parts of an adventure. In my experience, that is where a lot of DMs kind of lose it. It’s easier to keep a party on-track when they are confined to a dungeon or similar environment. They can still do unexpected things, but it’s unlikely they’ll do something terribly off the path you envisioned. I’ll write more about this soon, but in my last game I started making what I called “contingency trees”, to try to envision what the characters might do at critical points in the adventures (for instance, finding a clue or something), and thus give myself a clearer route to getting them back on path without them ever realizing they were off it.
This helped me a lot, as I’m not super good at coming up with stuff on the fly.
That’s all for today.