pauldanieljohnson

I'm not particularly experienced when it comes to publishing adventures for role-playing games, but my instincts say that a single adventure shouldn't take a year and a half to produce. Nonetheless, my first adventure took a year and a half to produce. But after much toil and angst, it's done. Here's a link to the product pages on DrivethruRPG (the greatest web site in the universe, with the possible exception of Deviantart): www.drivethrurpg.com/product/2… and www.drivethrurpg.com/product/2….

The product is set up as pay-what-you-want, which I think is an interesting concept. My first experience with it was back in 2007 when Radiohead's In Rainbows came out. I recall giving them $20 for the album, because back then that's what an album cost. But I'm sure many people grabbed copies for nothing, and why not? I'm happy if people take a copy and enjoy it. I'm sure the fates will shower me with wealth eventually - no need for me to be greedy now.

Next up is a couple of projects I'm working on simultaneously. One is my second adventure, Defile of the Spider God, which I've already done the cartography for, so I need to get the text finished. (It's going to be a small fraction of the size of the bloated Vampire Lord of Deathblack Peak). And the other is a set of rules options for running a business in a fantasy role-playing game. The 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide has some rules, but they're extremely abstract and not very satisfying to players who want a change to play out the particulars of operating a business. At any rate, I'm an accountant, and I enjoy researching history, so I figure I'm as likely as anyone to be able to put together something equal parts interesting and fun.

I have a habit of trying to reduce things into formulas. Or perhaps algorithms is a better term. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.

In terms of creative efforts, it does seem to be somewhat antithetical to the artistic process. Can you really generate quality creative work -- whether it's a picture, a map, a novel, an RPG adventure -- based on following a pre-determined algorithm? It seems like a paint-by-numbers sort of approach, and hardly the sort of thing that would produce a work of any particular value.

Having said all of that, that's precisely the way I like to work. This follows my earlier post about different types of D&D adventures, because what I'm working on is a method of reliably producing quality adventures. You could well ask at this point, "gee Paul... why do you need to develop a system? I mean... can't you write an adventure without using some sort of template or instruction manual?" And that would be a good question. For me it really comes down to the dreaded writer's block.

I'm sure we've all, at some time or another, found ourselves staring down at a blank piece of paper (or empty computer screen), unable to get the creative process started. I think that's natural. You see, creativity is basically a form of problem solving. Writing a novel isn't really any different than figuring out how to get a 4' wide sofa through a 3' wide doorway. It seems harder for one important reason - context and barriers. In the sofa example, you are given the situation: You know what the limits of the problem are, what variables to work with. Given some constants and some barriers to what is possible, your brain has something to chew on. Contrast that with staring at the blank piece of paper. It's blank. There are no limits, no barriers, no context. There's nothing for your brain to chew on, so there's nothing for your imagination to digest. (I just made up that metaphor, so forgive it if it's a bit forced).

Which brings me back to the idea of developing an algorithm for RPG adventure design. The goal is to build something that provides the barriers and context your brain needs to get started on the creative process. I'll expand more on the concept in the near future.

I don't like dungeon crawls, and I don't like plot railroads, so that puts me in the tough spot of disliking the overwhelming majority of D&D adventures. Let me divide adventures into three broad characterizations:

• Dungeon crawls: The classic site-based adventure, a dungeon crawl features a brief bit of exposition followed by a long sequence of encounters in an adventure site. Typically the exposition at the beginning of the adventure is just a thin excuse to push the PCs into the dungeon, at which point story takes a back seat to combat, punctuated by the occasional puzzle;
• Plot railroads: Dragonlance really started this - it's an adventure that features a strong, involved story, but one that's basically already determined. Playing the adventure is really just a process of following along a pre-scripted sequence of events, eventually leading to a pre-determined outcome. These stories can be fantastic, but it's never the players' story, it's just someone else's story they've been handed like the script of a play;
• Sandboxes: This is where I start to get interested. A sandbox adventure has the elements of a great story -- compelling setting, believable characters, dramatic motivations -- but the plot is not pre-determined. Instead, the adventure leaves it to the players to tell the story as they decide how their characters interact with the sandbox world they've been introduced to.

Originality is something of a legendary beast these days. Or perhaps mythical is a better word. I'm sure there was a time when an artist or author could create something that truly had never been done before, but I don't think that's possible any more. The problem as I see it is simply the volume -- the tremendously vast volume -- of work that's come before. In terms of writing, I think that asshole Shakespeare basically charged ahead and wrote effectively every story that could be written, and he's just one of the thousands and thousands of writers who have already left their mark on the literary history of civilization.

In fact, there's so much out there an author can very easily find himself retreading old ground without even knowing it. I recall a submission I made once to Dungeon magazine. It was a pitch for an adventure arc I was working on. The basic premise was that the party wakes up on a deserted beach amidst the wreckage of a ship, but with no memory of who they are or how they got there. I went on to develop this idea that the party had been evil, and over the course of the adventure arc they would slowly recover their memory and discover that they had been involved in some evil plot, but now they had a chance to start over and work against the forces of evil they had previously been aligned with. Steve Winter, who at the time was editing Dungeon, was kind enough to send a rejection letter (these days you usually won't get a response to a submission at all, so a rejection letter is a welcome surprise). In it, he mentioned that my idea had merit, but it read like the plot of "Lost". Well, I had never seen Lost (and still have not), so this was news to me, but it underscores an interesting point -- that idea I thought was so original was anything but, completely unknown to me. Now that I'm thinking of that adventure idea again, it also sounds a lot like the plot of "Total Recall". So there you have it, originality is tough.

Having said that, I do have an idea on how authors can continue to produce original works. The basic idea is that although everything has been done before, originality can be found in combining ideas in new ways. I like to think of it like a good chef. A good chef isn't inventing new ingredients -- he cooks with the same meats, vegetables, and spices that have been available for centuries. The mark of a good chef, then, is not introducing new ingredients, but rather in combining the old ingredients in new and interesting ways (and, I should point out, demonstrating the technical skill necessary to produce something that's worth eating, aside from whether it's original or not).

So to apply that analogy to RPG adventure design, the thought is that an author simply needs to take some existing concepts and blend them into a combination that hasn't been seen in any other adventure. This has been done many times, of course. Consider the original AD&D module I6: Ravenloft. That adventure stands as one of the greatest of all time, not because it introduced anything new -- vampires were old news even in the early 80s after all -- but because it introduced the theme of Gothic horror to Dungeons & Dragons, something that at the time was a novel concept.

The real challenge is to find some themes and concepts that are not only new to role-playing games, but that can be effectively applied to the concept of adventure design. I don't think I've ever seen a D&D adventure stylized after a romance novel, for instance, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to either.

I have a buddy who does graphic design work for a bank. We were chatting a while back and he mentioned that, although he likes the work, the pay is just awful. The problem as he framed it is this: Doing artwork is fun and inherently rewarding, so artists tend to undervalue themselves. In a nutshell, no one needs to pay an artist all that much, because there are so many other artists willing to work for cheap. Of course, there are some artists of such unique skill they're able to command a premium, but those are the rare few. So my buddy actually works the night shift at Starbucks to make ends meet.

Now, I don't consider myself an artist. I don't have a goatee, nor do I own a single beret. I'm an accountant who plays role-playing games, and to facilitate that hobby I got into cartography. One of my other hobbies is writing, so it makes sense that the role-playing, cartography, and writing would all come together and I'd start writing adventures. As an accountant, I can't just enjoy that, I also need to analyze the economics, which is why I'm dwelling on the paycheque-to-paycheque life of the artist. I'm fortunate in that I can pursue a well-paying day job and dabble in adventure design in my off-hours, but I honestly can't image the kind of risk one would take trying to make a living off of game design. I suspect, strongly, that the vast majority who try it give up and end up as accountants (or something similar) like me.

I'll have a lot more to say about adventure design in the future, but for now to close off my thoughts on digital maps, I wanted to get down the fact that I believe -- and feel free to disagree, but this is what I believe -- that in the current day, when people enjoy gaming over the coffee table as well as over the Internet, that it's incumbent on designers to make the game resources ubiquitous to any (or effectively any) gaming environment. With that in mind, I've decided that every adventure I design will include high-resolution copies of every map. No extra charges, no needing to ask for them - they'll be there.