After a hiatus of 5 years, I'm back to running Satan's Game.
My little girl is bigger. Work is quite tolerable. I am lucky in love. And so I have a little more RAM to spare the imagination.
We bought ourselves Baldur's Gate III for our nearly coincident birthdays. So much of the history of vidya games is The Attempt to Automate Dungeons & Dragons. BGIII is exactly that. You can make the little people move around the terrain. You can make them kiss. You can't look Up though, which is a miserable shame in a game about exploration.
As cool as BGIII is, it soon got me jonesing to tabletop as god intended. Now I am lingering in early Act II, (btw the game is divided into Acts, following the general trend in Content-Era D&D which emphasizes "story" and "narrative" while offering formulaic solutions to achieve this, like I am about to offer below) Neglecting this Very Important Videogame because I am suddenly more interested in game and Dungeonmaster-craft.
It is notedly difficult to assemble a tabletop group in your 30-40s. We have busy lives. We go to bed early. Having addressed these hurdles, I have gathered a group of Players, all of whom are(were) brand new to the TTRPG experience. Seizing their availability, I set forth to quickly build and Adventure; something which I have not done in years, and never really had nailed down in the first place.
This is how I mentally structured the adventure. Insert disclaimers here.
Inspiration Purpose Scope/Structure Mechanics Specifics
Inspiration: The initial Idea that was so good, you simply have to run a game about it. It will dovetail or dictate the Purpose, Structure, or Mechanics of the creation. The inspirations will rarely be a Specific. Specific encounters may be more ore less inspired. But one juicy encounter, taken by itself will rarely provide the imaginative structure on which to build the rest.
My Inspiration was that I simply wanted to run an enjoyable game, and that my players would all be very New. For all I know, this is the only taste of TTRPG these folks will ever have. And I want to leave a good impression. For this, I want to furnish a "typical" D&D experience.
Purpose: This is where I define What this game is for. Why would anybody want to play it. Are we doing a serious, long drawn high-stakes campaign to get that LotR high? Are we having one shot to play with ideas which would break, or not fit into a more conventional game? In my case, I am curating an experience for New players to show them the game. I don't have a message or a grand vision this time. I want to use a spread of Monsters, NPCs, Treasures, Tricks and Traps that characterize both the Mechanics and the Milieu of Satan's Game.
Scope and Structure: With my goals in mind, I can pick a format which will serve the goals. Hex crawl, sandbox, dungeon crawl, one-shot, unfolding drama, 5 room dungeon, theater of the mind. These are some game-planning structures that are commonly talked about. Frankly, I want to keep it short. I'm not counting on scheduling regular games. And I really don't want to overcommit either. So the plan is to make a short one-shot adventure.
This is also about the same as defining what the adventure is About. What is the main thing the players will be dealing with? A dungeon? a landscape? a person? a case of right and wrong? This will set the bounds of the adventure. Beyond those bounds is a different adventure. The first adventure I presented is about a monster. The players are challenged to survive it and learn about it. I set this in a wilderness area, with only a handful of scenes. The points of interests are in a loose geographical arrangement, but not mapped. The player characters should follow from one to the other on their quest for security and certainty. Right? There is not a "story" written out. But I know the motivations of the monster and how it will operate and what it will do if the PC's don't interfere. That informs me to What Should Happen Next
Mechanics: I didn't tinker with this for the adventure. New players have enough to learn. But changing or adding mechanics can help convey the ideas or mood. The opponents or environment may have a challenging feature which adds a challenge to exploration or combat. One might invent new powers for the players to covet. A curse which grows over time might be used to ratchet tension. These are examples of mechanical tweaks.
Specifics: These are the encounters and points of interest which make the actual body of the game. Structure considerations tell us how to distribute them. For this adventure, I made sure that there was something for most every sort of character To Do. This is to teach a variety of mechanics. Encounters are also meant to convey information about the monster and increase tension in the situation. I will also scan through spells, tricks, monsters and so on to sift out appropriate ideas, then apply as prudent.
I found a monster in the AD&D MM. The Eblis, a sub-entry under Birds. This is a spooky intelligent stork with illusion powers. I like everything about that except it being a literal stork. Storks bring babies, not horror. By the time I was done reskinning it and modifying it to 5E, I had a new creature which no one but myself had any reference to. It might have been in better taste to stick to typical D&D monsters in the book, for the sake of teaching the milieu. But I was fascinated with the Eblis and Mystery Monster adventures are pretty simple to plan.
What happened? As a result of all this, the party succeeded their way off course almost immediately. They got some blood on their hands and got while it was good. They left with many questions.
We have another adventure going on now. This one is also meant to convey the gist of D&D to new players. This one is about a dungeon rather than a monster. More of a dungeon for dungeons' sake.
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