Posts Tagged by planning
| March 19, 2013 | Posted by John Arcadian |
My room-mate and I often take a night or two a week to watch through episodes of some series together. This is the closest either of us get to watching “TV” in the traditional sense. Our latest effort, House Of Cards, is a series on Netflix that deals with Francis Underwood, the current Majority Whip getting passed up for Secretary of State and using his influence and power to destroy his Washington enemies with politics and backstabbing. It’s a great series and got us talking about how…
| March 29, 2012 | Posted by Scott Martin |
I’ve read a number of interesting posts this week about Mass Effect 3, how very right it got its gameplay–and how its ending just didn’t match. Shamus Young, who used to write DM of the Rings, wrote a few posts analyzing issues from the game’s ending. If you’re playing the game, the next linked post leads to posts with massive spoilers. Click carefully. In Mass Effect 3 Ending Controversy, he suggests that there are three things that people expect from endings–not all three from every…
| February 13, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article comes from reader BryanB, who tackles one approach to running non-linear adventures in a comprehensive, usability-focused way. Thanks, Bryan! I used to use a fairly linear approach to adventure design, much like the writers of a typical module utilize. I’d often do a painstaking amount of detailed game prep. As many of my players tended to go off path during an adventure, I grew tired of seeing more than half of my preparation effort never see any use at the table. A…
| January 13, 2011 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
A few weeks back I wrote about how to quickly hammer out a series of timelines for NPC factions for your game. In the course of using the timelines I’d made I found myself asking the question: “How do I know when to pull the trigger on the next stage of the timeline?” The easy answers are “Whenever is dramatically appropriate”, “Whenever you feel like it.” or even “When the stars are right”. For me though, that wasn’t quite a good enough answer. I like…
| December 7, 2010 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Along with DNAphil, I’ve recently switched to using a template for my session prep. Phil uses a template he created; I’m using the one from the Decipher Star Trek RPG Narrator’s Guide. The Trek RPG template is really two templates: an outline for the episode (adventure) as a whole, which follows the three-act model common to Star Trek and many, many other TV shows (and movies, and books, and plays, and…), as well as a template for each individual scene. With five sessions of this…
| July 7, 2010 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
When you’re running a longer campaign, there’s always a danger that the story arcs you had in mind at the outset won’t be the best option as you progress through the arc of the campaign itself. This is often a good thing: Static, predetermined stories can be awesome, but they can also feel static and predetermined to your players — not so good. Planning things out in broad strokes (or even in fairly specific strokes) early on is a great approach. It keeps you focused…
