Just finished watching this thought-provoking video by Merlin Mann:

His final point bears repeating: on the web, the infrastructure is pretty much done. Want to create a website? You can have a slick site in an afternoon. And that’s not just one page of black text on a white background; that includes SEO and permissions and embedded videos.

Nor do you have to be a techie to do this. Google any question. The answers are there.

The question is: now that the tools are mature and the platforms are robust, are we putting equally mature content on them?

There are a lot of interesting theories out there about what a ”story” means within a role-playing game.

The simple view sees the GM as the controlling narrator, with the players reacting to the GM’s story. In this view, the players are fundamentally passive, struggling to overcome the GM’s challenges. The PCs are trying to survive or otherwise get past the current obstacle.

This is an outdated paradigm, though a lot of games default to it.

The other extreme sees the players as controllers, with the GM providing a world and antagonists for them. Systems like FATE and Amber feature this much more collaborative, player-driven game.

This is great in theory, but rare in practice. It requires skilled players who are committed to an uncommon level of attention.

So we seek the middle ground. I’ll call it the quasi-collaborative system, in which the GM and players collaborate on certain aspects of the game, while others are kept in the GM’s hand.

What should be kept only for the GM? The plot, the antagonists, and encounter design.  Again, players could collaborate on this, but in practice it doesn’t happen, and it’s hard to maintain tension when the players know every detail about their enemies.

Everything else–setting, system, etc.–can be agreed upon by group consensus, though anything left undecided will be the GM’s purview. Doubtless, there are many details that the players simply won’t care about; the GM is free to fill these in.

This still leaves plenty of options open for player collaboration. In a recent game, the players ended one session at the entrance to a necromancer’s lair, after being asked by the captain of the guard to return with proof of the necromancer’s activity.  I asked the players for suggestions of the kind of proof they could bring back. They gave me some ideas, which I incorporated into the lair.  The tension of the lair remained high, since the danger lay in getting to the proof, not the proof’s specific form.

Also, of course, player choice can dramatically change the plot. PCs may knock out an enemy instead of killing it. They can ask questions that you never thought of.

So, the story is driven primarily by the GM, with the players as important accessory drivers. In my experience, it works well.

My previous blog post got me thinking:

What is an adventure’s intended use?

A lot of adventure writers (myself included) design adventures with a ”commercial software” approach: the user will install the software and start using it immediately, probably without a manual, and it needs to work well up-front. It should guide the user in its use and require minimal fiddling to be useful.

What if one were to take an ”open source software” approach, in which the user is expected to customize the tool and manipulate it dramatically?

Compare something like HandBrake–insert DVD, select drive, select preset format, and click “Go”–to something like ffmpeg–you have to find the combination of command-line options that will convert your video into the appropriate format, but man there’s an option for everything.

Imagine an adventure that’s divided into several major sequences, and where each sequence is described more like a historical record than a blueprint. Stat blocks appear, sure, but the writer is trying to describe the mood and implications of the situation, not the scaffolding. Reading the description of a sequence should leave you a little breathless with the possibilities.

In other words, what if the writer focused on making the adventure vivid instead of detailed? Imagine an adventure that reads less like a technical manual and more like a Conan story. Give me a neat story to run, and I’ll find the monsters and maps.

There’s a great post over at RPG Musings about buying third-party products. I have a similar problem:

I rarely buy third-party RPG products. In my experience, those products are too-specific slices of other peoples’ campaign worlds, which don’t fit into my own.

I’ve only bought generic tools, like Gygax’s Book of Names, or completely self-contained adventures that don’t connect with my world, like a jungle temple adventure I bought.

Which begs the question: what would a more useful product look like?

For adventures, I’m reminded of ”Die, Vecna, Die!”, an adventure from 2^nd Edition D&D. The reader is presented with major plot points, providing the DM with the overall shape of the adventure and the creatures involved, leaving room for the DM to decide exactly how many enemies should be in a particular encounter and in what configuration.

This lets the writer focus on being awesome. I want n adventure that makes me think “Oh, man, I have got to use that somehow.” So, adventure writer, don’t sweat the small stuff. Yes, I want monster stat blocks, but don’t map out the entire fight for me.

Let me integrate your adventure, not drop it in whole.