Last night was the fourth installment of my ongoing drama "The Secret of the Curators" and it really showed me where I need to pay attention to my adventure design. I had long stretches where essentially nothing happened except discovering another more-or-less empty room.
Where I blew it there was that nothing in the rooms served any purpose, so they were just finding things and having to sit through descriptions of things that had no bearing on the adventure and- yikes! I just realized they didn't even come across any good loot. That "yikes" was not sarcasm, it was me just now realizing another way that I bunged my game up.
Perhaps I'm straying too far from the D&D model of "kill the monster, take its treasure" which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, I am also realizing it's kinda hard to just drop a "monster" into the game when things start slogging. This is something I will definitely have to prepare for in the future. XXVc is pretty explicit about not creating gennie monsters, which I'm down with as I really like the non-pulp sci-fi aspect of the game, but it also... I need to realign.
I'm going to go meditate on this and get back to you later. I'm leading myself down a dumb path and need to get off it, quick. Wish me luck.
Bah, it was plenty of fun, and the lack of gennie monsters ain't a problem.
ReplyDeleteAny chases? Bomb defusals? Crazy flight maneuvers? Decrypted strange files pointing to a .dos as the crazed killer? Strange signals from another star? Men trapped in a space station, regressing into a barbarian society? Satellites from centuries ago making trouble? A strange, probably manufactured disease? A journey in an artificially modified whale to a Delph city? :)
ReplyDeleteLOL No, it was intended to be an introductory scenario that would also allow me to ease back into GMing after being away from it for so long. So, it was more along the lines of B1 In Search of the Unknown, I guess.
ReplyDeleteNext adventure, I'll be sure to include all your suggestions. ;)
:)
ReplyDeleteI think - given all the delightful pieces of random Buck-ness you come up with - that it will be a blast. :)
Well, thank you, kind sir. :)
ReplyDeleteI just need to implement those ideas properly. Not a deal breaker, I just need to think more about how to do that.