Hello, Blogsphere! I'd like to kick off my inaugural post with some description of my purpose in writing. I've loved fantasy for as long as I can remember. There wasn't any real table-top game community or niche for one in my highschool, so most of my experience up until recently has been through video games. My actual experience with Dungeons and Dragons started with BioWare's Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights titles. While this did give me an introduction to the mechanics of AD&D, D&D 3.0 and 3.5, it wasn't until college that I played my first actual game. I've always enjoyed fiction writing, and so I've taken it upon myself to learn the art of dungeoncraft. This blog is a place where I'm going to lay out my rough thoughts and impressions, with the vague hope that they'll eventually spell out words of power.
The most basic challenge I've faced so far is most definitely The First Rule. The First Rule was coined by Ray Winninger, author of the Dungeoncraft column in Dragon magazine back in the days of AD&D. The rule is extremely simple: "Never force yourself to create more than you must."
It makes sense writers spend months if not years building a setting; you've got weeks or days to plan characters, setting, and plot (which is a unique challenge that deserves it's own paragraph or two). That said, it's an extremely attractive exercise; if you're going to create a world for your players to interact with, why shouldn't it be a full and vibrant one? I actually have to disagree with Ray Winneger's argument that over-prep results in wasted time; I've done most of my "big-picture" prep in what I'd consider free time as a kind of free-writing exercise, so it hasn't cost me anything in prep. This lured me into a very false sense of security when designing my first serious campaign; I'm actually very proud of the setting I've created, and was eager to give it life. It wasn't until I actually ran my setting- and plot-heavy sessions that I figured out just how much of a problem I'd caused myself.
The campaign in question is a homebrew adventure I'm running for one of my friends using a revised version of D&D 3.5 called Trailblazer. I'm not trying anything revolutionary in terms of monsters or mechanics; the two combat encounters have been relatively successful. Yup, you heard me. two encounters in as many sessions. The Dungeon Master's Guide recommends that characters can handle four encounters before having to break off from combat and regroup; one a session is just plain slow. I blame the lack of pace on my failure to obey The First Rule.
The first session in the campaign established the background: the party was hired by Thearch Hadrian, a local Church official to clear out an abandoned stronghold. They traveled to the site, gathered local lore, and fought off the surprise undead attack. All that took about four hours to play out. Why? Because I included a large amount of background on just about everything; the church, the local politics, and general monster forecasts for the local area. That's not to say the session didn't go well. The role-playing aspects of the session went better than I thought they would; adding a bit of extra life to the non-player characters and locations made for some interesting interactions between the characters and their surroundings. That said, it took a huge amount of time and memory to impart all the information I wanted my player to have. Extra information is harmful not because it makes you 'waste' a weekend creating something that is useless; thinking about fluff can result in applicable ideas. Its damage comes when you force your player to work through it; extra description forms dead space in a campaign. Prep what you want your players to take away, and let the flavor text attend to itself.
This doesn't just apply to words and information, as I found out my second session. Having learned something after my description marathon the time before, I wasn't going to make the mistake of presenting a lot of useless fluff. The characters were going to enter the citadel, encounter kobolds and... encounter them. Yup. These little beggars could be talked to, fought, or snuck past, and I had plans for all of them. Biiiig mistake. I wound up having to prep not only the information I wanted the characters to get out of the kobolds, but also the little guys' combat and anti-stealth strategies. I wound up using about a tenth of all that. The characters chose to talk their way into the fortress, where they managed to befriend the kobolds in a far more logical way than the complex conversation mechanic I'd designed.
That was a bit of a wakeup call for me. I'm used to BioWare games, where conversation is in and of itself a puzzle of choosing a response and then seeing what the character's reaction is. The burden of roleplaying is very much on the game designer in the land of video games. Instead of playing the conversation game, my characters showed me what I consider true roleplaying; they made a suggestion, I figured out what the reaction would be, and then gave them a result they could use to figure out what to do next. In this case, I believe my player's line was roughly "everyone likes a cleric, right?" A few seconds later the dwarven cleric was exorcising possessed kobold who would later provide them with most of their information. A happy ending for all involved, except that I now had nothing between the characters and the treasure except for grateful, smiling kobolds. But that's a story for another post.
What did I get out of this? I didn't realize how far so little information could go. Instead of big elaborate stories and backstories, bare facts are all that you need to go in with. Instead of attempting to make the combat itself memorable, give a memorable reason for why there was combat in the first place. It actually embarrasses me to admit I'd forgotten this. In high school, I was a devout follower of the great dramatist Anton Chekhov. "If a gun is on the table in act one, it must be fired by the end of the play." This is especially true of dungeoncraft. It's easy to fill the mechanics with fluff at run-time, but only make yourself emphasize through planning what you want your characters to take note of.
I think I've covered less than the minimum observable fraction of this topic, but I know I'm going to have more encounters with it in the future. May they all be of manageable CR.
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