Navigation Games

Dungeons & Dragons began as a game about exploring mazes, trying not to get lost as you navigate spaces with complicated layouts. At some point, these conventions fell to the wayside. The focus of dungeoncrawling shifted to other forms of engagement. Even key luminaries of the dungeoncrawl tradition, like my good friend Josh, openly advocate for removing this once-foundational cornerstone of the genre from your gameplay, encouraging you to simply give your players the map so they never have to experience what was once the main challenge of dungeoncrawling!

Similarly, other designers advocate dungeoncrawls where there's nothing to navigate in the first place. Sometimes that means strictly linear layouts, like a Five Room Dungeon. Other times it means abstracting the layout into a skill challenge, depthcrawl, or other mechanical contrivances. This isn't an invalid option, but it does sacrifice the dungeoncrawl experience in favor of merely evoking the aesthetics of dungeoncrawling.

Not all forms of gameplay appeal to all gamers, and that's perfectly fine. But dungeon-mapping gameplay has become so widely misunderstood and maligned that countless gamers have never even had a chance to experience it for themselves.

I'm here to explain the appeal of this playstyle, why almost everyone gets it wrong, and how to actually do it correctly.

Look Before You Leap

Credit: Alan Lee

This is a post about a very subtle facet of spotlight management. I consider it to be one of the most important techniques a GM needs to master, and is very often one of the primary differences between the GMs I've enjoyed playing with and the GMs who I haven't. Yet I also never really see anyone talk about it, perhaps because they don't even realize that they're using (or not using) this technique.

So, what's the big secret I'm here to expose?

My (Moderately Tested) Theory of Fear

This post collects a lot of miscellaneous observations and advice, some from other thinkers and some from myself. It's all basic-level. There's plenty of stuff out there far more advanced than this. This is not written with any particular game system in mind, and it includes a mix of game master advice and game designer advice.

Here's the fundamental problem of this topic: most of the time, preserving the players' agency is paramount. But fear complicates this priority. Fear is an involuntary mental state, but it can shape your behavior in profound ways. No heroic adventurer would choose to be afraid when faced with peril.

Ideally, you trust the players to roleplay their characters' emotions on their own. "If it seems like your character would be afraid of this, then try to play them like they're afraid." And if everyone is participating in good faith, they'll try their best. But unlike other emotions, authentically roleplaying fear is much easier said than done.

There are a number of ways to help resolve this problem. Different games and playstyles offer their own answers. Some of them contradictory, some of them mix well. Here's the stuff that makes sense to me based off of all my experience. I'm splitting this into three sections: 1) Player Fear, 2) Mechanical Fear, and 3) The Overlap.

Rules Aren't Knots

[This post exists for Josh to be able to cite. Feel free to do likewise.]

This is actually one of my favorite passages in a 5E text and I want to explain why:

Like, first of all, this is kind of a cute rule, right? Like oh hey that's clever, instead of a binary pass/fail, the result of your check becomes the DC to untie the knot. That's smart. You can think of it like a "delayed contest," not unlike how Stealth vs Perception typically works. And you reassign Sleight of Hand to the Intelligence attribute instead of Dexterity because it makes more sense. That's a nifty bit of design.

But more importantly, it's not actually included because 5E thought you needed a mechanic for this. It's an illustrative moment to remind you that 5E was intended to be a game that thrives on "rulings over rules," that you should be thinking of creative ways to apply the core mechanic on a case-by-case basis. This idea is stated outright in the PHB and the DMG both, but then also again right here in Xanathar's Guide. They felt the need to include a reminder doubling down on it, by way of a good example.

Rules aren't knots. Rules are rope. A good DM should know how to use rope, because DMing is an adventure in itself.

-Dwiz

Action Mysteries

Mystery scenarios are probably the second-most popular genre of gameplay in RPGs after dungeoncrawling. Despite this, quite frustratingly, most detective-y games don't provide much support for facilitating the actual act of investigation. Call of Cthulhu, for example, just has a skill system for resolving basic tasks, much like any game would. Same with Delta Green, same with Blade Runner, same with Liminal Horror.

But even if the most popular options dodge such a big question, there's actually a lot of existing literature on the subject of running mystery games. Tools, techniques, and advice abound (mostly in the blogosphere).

Some offer techniques for robust level design. Justin Alexander famously has the Three Clue Rule and Node-Based Scenario Design. The disgraced Zak S wrote about Hunter/Hunted and Investigations-as-Dungeons.

Others give advice for refining the act of inspecting and uncovering information itself with smarter adjudication. Alexander also described his Matryoshka Search Technique which is a simple trick. Mindstorm wrote a post called Ransacking the Room which I find utterly brilliant. DIY & Dragons gave us Landmark, Hidden, Secret which I'm pretty sure Nintendo must have studied very closely to make the last couple of Zelda games.

Sean McCoy has argued that the answer lies in smart visual information design. Give the player a literal tool that helps them solve a mystery. I took a class in college called "intelligence analysis techniques" that had a lot of very gameable things I think could be a great foundation for a system (timelines, network diagrams, cross-impact matrices, analysis of competing hypotheses, etc.).

Still others reinvent the genre entirely by way of novel game design. Robin Laws built the GUMSHOE system to bypass the issue of players missing clues, which was further iterated on in Cthulhu Dark by adding some dice. The game Brindlewood Bay relies on "quantum mysteries" that everyone co-authors as they go along, which Prismatic Wasteland has also described.

Alice is Missing is a totally unique example because it's built around gamifying one specific mystery and set of ingredients that go into it, having players draw cards from preset decks in order to form the truth as they're discovering it.

The world of video gaming has plenty of insights, too. Game Maker's Toolkit has a really nice video identifying three types of detective challenge: investigation (uncovering and collecting information), contradiction (noticing inconsistencies and flaws in information), and deduction (interpreting available information to extrapolate new information).

These are all perfectly cromulent additions to the collective body of RPG detective theory. I am here today to offer a modest contribution of my own to that corpus. I'm going to refer to it as an Action Mystery.

How I Run the Table

After this post, Josh encouraged me to write about some of my "soft skills" of GMing. I talk a lot about game design and scenario design. I pretty rarely talk about how I personally run my games. I've never felt confident enough that I'm qualified to really talk about such things. But in the last month I wrote that post about how I do NPCs and I've been working on the GMing advice section of the Tricks & Treats rulebook. So let me copy/paste some of what I wrote and see if it resonates. Keep in mind that a lot of this is written specifically in the context of a game about going on Halloween-y adventures. I'll try to avoid the usual advice you see everywhere. "Be consistent, reward creativity, telegraph danger, blablabla" yeah if you're reading this blog then you've already heard that stuff before.

People Are Problems: NPCs as Challenge Elements

Before we get started, I swear I'm not a sociopath.

I don't think of NPCs in the same way that most other GMs do. If you're new to the hobby, you'll find no shortage of tips and tricks on "how to make amazing NPCS!" And for many GMs, a well-crafted NPC is literally their favorite part of the game. Here's an article DM David wrote called "how to create loveable non-player characters," which, in my experience, is very typical of the sorts of advice you commonly see. He advocates that your NPCs should...

1. 
   Be distinctive
2. Be flawed
3. Be relatable
4. Be useful
5. Be authentic and vulnerable
6. Struggle
7. Ask for help
8. Show warmth
9. Show admiration
10. Be entertaining
11. Be optimistic

That sounds nice and all, but it is not how I roll. If I happen to make an NPC memorable, believable, three-dimensional, and beloved by the players, then that's a happy accident I'll gladly accept. But my goals are a bit different.

To me, an NPC is essentially the same thing as a trap, puzzle, monster, or magic item. They are simply another asset in my toolbox for crafting obstacles and opportunities to challenge my players. The reason it's hard to think of them through that lens is because... well, for one thing, they're people. But also because they are the most flexible and potent tool for crafting challenges, so all-encompassing in their possible design purposes that it's hard to make any generalizations about them. But today I'll share a few things I know.

Not All Balance is the Same

Artist Credit: Wayne Reynolds

This is a spiritual sequel to a previous post about crunch. Everyone uses the word "balance" in reference to something in RPGs but they frequently use it to refer to different things. Sometimes completely unrelated things. And yet it's become intensely emotionally-charged despite being, essentially, a non-word.

So while you very likely have strong opinions about this word, it might be useful to take a closer look. In this article, I'm going to examine six ways that the word "balance" commonly comes up when discussing RPGs, and why it's important to recognize that they are indeed distinct.

As usual, I will mostly be making reference to ol' D&D as my primary example, but don't mistake that for meaning that this only carries relevance to D&D alone. All kinds of gaming philosophies might benefit from a little bit of thought about these six different meanings for the word "balance," even if there are some that you can safely dismiss. So yeah, balance matters to other crunchy games like GURPS and Lancer and Genesys-system stuff of course, but it can also come up in your rules-lite games, story games, FKR games, lyric games, and so on. If you want to design a Star Wars game and you aren't sure about how to handle the Force, or if you're going to be running a Call and/or Trail of Cthulhu and are crafting a mystery for your investigators, or you're making a random mutation table for a Mothership adventure you're writing, then there's likely something in this post that you should be thinking about. It just might never have occurred to you before because you're only ever thinking of one possible definition out of many.

You Suck at Keeping your One-Offs as One-Offs

Okay I'm sure that isn't true of all of you. But statistically speaking, it's probably true of you. Because I have never once met another GM who can run a game they say will be a one-shot and then actually finish it within a single session.

I have gotten pretty good at it, though. Pretty good. I still fail now and then. But I'm usually able to pull it off.

Here's my advice:

1. Ask for everyone to commit to a long session length to begin with. Last one I did, I said "at least 5 hours" and everyone braced themselves accordingly. I'm not saying it's impossible to run a short one-shot (people manage it at conventions all the time, I hear). But I just feel like saying "we're gunna have a complete adventure, with a beginning, middle, and end, by the time we all head home tonight" and then only giving yourself 2 or 3 hours to do it is just setting yourself up for failure. You might pull it off, but it's so much safer to prepare for a longer session and assume you'll need that extra time. Nothing wrong with an occasional big marathon session anyway (provided that you let your players take a break every hour or hour-and-a-half).
2. Have as much prep done ahead of time as possible, especially player prep. They should have their characters finished, equipment bought, basic setting info learned, and quest established before you even begin. It is so easy to lose precious time at the beginning of a session to "pre-adventure" gameplay. Regular readers of my blog will know that player-driven, open-world sandboxes are my favorite style of play, but they are optimized for campaigns. If it's only going to be a one-shot, then it's okay to just thrust upon the players your choice of today's quest, and then kick things off as close to the good stuff as you can get. They won't mind the lack of agency regarding that kind of stuff, because they'll be too busy having fun actually adventuring.
3. Have something in-game that escalates the situation and keeps things moving forward. The stuff that tends to bog games down the most is player inaction. People talk a lot about "keeping your world moving even when the players aren't" but that's not just a saying. That's actionable advice. Personally, I like to use a timeline with planned events that make the scenario increasingly dire as the session goes on. I find that when I'm keeping track of time, and I'm routinely updating my players whenever the clock ticks ahead, then that does the trick by itself. You might prefer a more time-independent source of regular pressure application, like introducing more monsters or fatigue or darkness or whatever. Dread has escalation built-in because you're literally just playing a game of Jenga but with a story attached.
   
   Most importantly of all, there should be a natural and visible conclusion to that escalation that will inevitably happen by the end of the session unless the players divert it. Think about it: how does a one-off end up needing 2+ sessions? Because you got to the end of that first session's scheduled time allotment but felt like the players still had more they could do. But if you decide beforehand that "the moon will crash into the PCs' hometown by the end of the session" and make it very, very clear to the players, then you can't be tempted into giving them a second session.
   
   And if they fail? Then fuckit, they fail. Honestly, failure is funniest and most easy to deal with in one-shots anyway. It almost always makes for a better story years later. "Remember when we all got together to play D&D at Bob's bachelor party and we went in the dungeon and the dragon killed all of us?" Fuckin' hilarious.
4. Similarly, you can combat player inaction by giving them lots of shit to think about. You don't just tell them what today's adventure is. You give them rumors, relationships, personal complications, and lots of telegraphed resources and points of interest to seek out. I know it might sound like a lot for just a one-off, but think of it this way: 1) Bro, you should be re-using your one-shots on multiple groups anyway, and 2) Your players otherwise won't have much to invest themselves in knowing that this character they've made won't be seeing any more action after today, so giving them a handful of little things to grab onto can go a long way towards, in a sense, jumpstarting their investment in the game and churning their imagination. In a campaign, it's usually best for those things to emerge naturally over time. Players will befriend NPCs they like, build a mental picture of the world piece by piece, entangle themselves in drama more and more each session, and so on. But in a one-shot... it's surprisingly effective to just skip ahead and say, "alright, here's your character's life. Spend a few minutes catching up."
5. If your game has crunchy tactical combat, then don't plan to have more than one fight in the session. I'm serious. Better to prepare one really cool and dynamic boss fight at the end of a short dungeoncrawl than to deceive yourself into thinking you can run a medium-sized dungeon with 4 or 5 combats in it. Only folks with fast-paced, rules lite combat get to have that experience.

-Dwiz

Stranger Things and "Puzzle Monsters"

[This post will contain spoilers for Stranger Things up through season 4]

The best monsters are not merely a big sack of hit points you hack-n-slash your way through because of a random encounter table. No, they're something more. They have qualities possible only through the conceits of fantasy. They challenge your brain just as much as your stats and dice. They stick in the mind. They're not just a one-and-done encounter. They're grounded in the world and its rules, and can't be understood merely with numbers. And maybe most of all, they're robust enough that reckoning with them is the whole adventure, or at least could be the whole adventure.

A very popular piece of advice in the OSR is "Just Use Bears." The basic argument is that, "monsters which don't have elaborate special abilities could probably be represented sufficiently with the stat block of a bear, since the minutiae of individual stats rarely has a significant enough impact on a fight to be worth the trouble of always having a custom stat block prepared."

As practical advice, this is good. But in spirit, I feel like it's a concession. A failure. If you're using a monster that could be substituted with a bear, then maybe you shouldn't even have that monster at all. Monsters should be special. You could be running a better game where you never use that advice. Not because it's bad, but because you've made monsters good enough that the advice isn't applicable.

To illustrate what I'm calling "puzzle monsters," we're going to go through the monsters used in the Netflix show Stranger Things as well as some examples I've created for my own adventure scenarios. After that, I'll walk you through the steps I take to create a puzzle monster, and other considerations that help a lot in the creative process.

How to Make Combat Spicy

I have bigger, better articles in the works but I noticed my output has slowed down, so back into the vaults I go. I've dug up this list from many years ago and adapted it. This was inspired by a recent claim I made that there's such a thing as "system-agnostic combat encounter design" that you can and should learn, which many people were resistant to. Here was the original pitch I wrote for this:

I've talked to many people who think that combat in 5E isn’t really fun. There are many arguments for this, some of which are perfectly valid and some of which just come down to subjectivity, but by far the most common argument is this: they say that because it removed so many mechanical elements from the process (e.g. flanking mechanics, using miniatures and grids by default, having to take feats and shit to move in conjunction with an attack, having to spend actions on drawing weapons and reloading crossbows and shit, no full-round attacks, etc.) that there aren’t enough options in combat to keep it interesting. And they say that, because of this, every combat is just, “I make a basic attack. ...I hit. …alright I attack again. ...I hit. ...alright I attack again. ...I missed" for like 10 rounds.

But I can’t say that I agree. My own group doesn’t have this problem and it’s not like we're working that hard to avoid it, either. No, it doesn't have a bunch of "cool power buttons" to press like 3.5E and 4E. But you still can do all sorts of creative things as long as you think of something useful and cool other than “basic attack,” and the DM thinks they can run with it.

The goal of 4E D&D was to have the rules do all the heavy-lifting for you. It has intrinsic tactical depth, but the effort they put into that came at the expense of pretty much everything else. 5E asks you to put in some extra work if you want to have an action-oriented adventure, but it does so because it's also granting you the freedom of tactical infinity.

To put it shortly, are you really all that surprised that your combat hasn't been fun when you keep throwing your players against 5 regular goblins in a blank, flat room with no secondary goals or complications to the situation? Doesn't it feel a little silly to blame the rules when that ends up being a boring experience?

Of course, I know you believe me. You know what I'm talking about. There've been many other writers who've developed some theory as to what makes this work. Chris McDowall has "Information, Choice, Impact." Patrick Stuart has "Game vs Threat" (found in his book Silent Titans. [EDIT: I've decided to just splice the page in at the bottom of this post since it was bugging me that I couldn't find anything about it on his blog]). The Monsters Know What They're Doing has made a career of their theory. Runehammer has a great series on "Room Design" that covers what I'm talking about. 4th Edition D&D made use of one of my favorite game design concepts innovated by DOOM: "Orthogonal Unit Differentiation" (watch that video, it rocks). I even once claimed that there are literally only two enemies you ever need (which is a lie, but a good lie).

But this was my own effort from years ago that I think holds up pretty well. It's just a list. Not a theory or a formula, just a list of elements to include.

My (Untested) Theory of Nautical Campaigns

You know what I'm talking about. "The pirate campaign." "The wavecrawl." A "saltbox." "Maritime adventures." A notoriously elusive type of D&D campaign, for reasons fathomable only to those poor fools who've attempted it. And me, for I have infinite wisdom.

No really, I've casually mentioned this as being a "famously tricky" thing on several occasions and gotten a mix of confused stares from some and knowing agreement from others. But it's true. This shit is deceptively hard to pull off right. Today, I want to talk about the reasons why and the angles of attack to combat this. Because it's something nearly everyone who's ever been in this hobby has dreamed of at some point: buckling your own swash like a pro. Yarrr.

A Thorough Look at Skill Challenges (Part 2: Analysis)

After my last face-meltingly long post compiling every variation on Skill Challenges (SC) out there, it's time to do a critical analysis of this concept. When I started this project, I was just imagining that I'd be making a simple pros and cons list. But after all that research, I have a lot of things to say.

So, this post will sorta have three main sections. Firstly, we can talk about Skill Challenges just, like, as a concept. Then, we can start reviewing each of the little variations on rules and deciding which ones are good and which ones are bad. Lastly, the results of this thinking, which ideally should be "the best version of how to do Skill Challenges for a D&D 5E game, at least in the style that Dwiz enjoys," but which is also the part where I note some things I feel like stealing for my OSR game Brave.

A Thorough Look at Skill Challenges (Part 1: the Rules)

Who's ready for another stupidly long post? That's the spirit!

The "Skill Challenge" is an interesting type of generalist gameplay procedure that's not a core experience of many games, but which often comes recommended as a good level design trick for all sorts of reasons. Here's kind of a funny game you can play: try asking a question on any RPG thread or forum or Discord community about "how would you adjudicate so-and-so challenge?" and see how long it takes for someone to recommend using a Skill Challenge (SC).

But even though there are so many people eager to recommend them, I have more... complicated feelings about them. So maybe it's worth taking some time to explore their design in a more dispassionate, neutral fashion.

Another reason I thought this could be of some value to write out is that, to my surprise, we cannot all agree on what precisely a Skill Challenge even is! Yes, individual variations are actually very common, and some of the seemingly-minor changes people make have a huge impact on the end result.

I'm splitting this post into two parts. Here in Part 1, I'm comparing and contrasting different versions of the SC, with occasional observations about them beyond just stating the rules. Once we've covered every major iteration of the SC that I can find, as well as a few similar systems from other sources, in Part 2 I'm gunna do a deeper analysis of the pros and cons of this system and its greater role in game design. Expect that article in a couple days.

I hope you like mechanics, because these two posts are detailed. There are tons and tons of "introduction to Skill Challenges" articles and videos out there if you want something quick. But this here is for the game design nuts. Even with me already splitting it in two, you'll still probably want to split this first part up into a few separate reading sessions.

It's All Levers

Your game is just a bunch of levers. Everything in it, every single thing, is just a lever that your players pull. Your prep work going into a session is a list of levers you know are in your world and what you know will happen if they're pulled. During the session, you'll see your players pull some of those levers and the answers in your prep notes will be useful. You'll also watch them discover levers you didn't know are in your world. If they pull those levers, then the effect may be obvious. But more likely, it's a conveniently delayed effect. Delayed until the next session begins, when you've had some time to think about what happens when that lever is pulled.

You go into every session with a list of known levers and answers. Your Players discover more, you write them down and stall until the session is over, and then go into the next session with answers for those levers and some other new ones.

The game is just levers.

-Dwiz

Model United Nations: the Most Popular FKR Game

We don't actually have the numbers of how popular Model UN (MUN) is but we can reasonably guess there's as many as 180,000 people who participate in it just in the United States alone. It's played all around the world by students ranging from middle school up through university and has been around for many decades. And even if it turns out I'm totally wrong and the number of people playing Matrix Games actually outnumbers the people playing Model UN ten to one, the point is that Model UN has a Parks & Rec episode.

And yet I bet you don't know much about it. I bet you didn't know that it's an FKR game. And yes, it really is. Not in like a "you know, if you really think about it, it kinda fits the definition!" way or something cheeky like that. It's very straightforwardly an FKR game, and if more was known about its history (it's a bit murky tbh) then I strongly suspect we could probably trace its lineage back to the original Prussian kriegspiel games.

I have not written much about my experience with FKR games before. I've mentioned them here or there, and at least once have pissed off some of its fans. But I have actually spent many years using the FKR philosophy of play! Just not in the form I think that most people would imagine.

I've written about Model UN before so if you've read that post, you can skip this. But I decided to write all of this again for 2 reasons: 1) I think it needs another pass and I've written it better this time, and 2) I think it deserves a post of its own, independent of the context in which I wrote about it in that series. And I promise that if, after this article, it is clear that no one in the RPG community gives a shit about this then I'll shut up about it forever.

But if Model United Nations is one of those things you've always been vaguely aware of from pop culture or the club fair at your high school but you never really gave it much thought, then let me tell you all about it and how cool it is.

A rough outline of this post (with each of these containing some sub-sections):

1. What is Model United Nations?
2. The "mechanics" of how it works
3. What to take away from this for RPG stuff
4. Some fun stories where I gush indulgently

The Only Two Enemies You'll Ever Need

I have two types of enemies that I fall back on if I don't have something interesting or appropriate prepared:

A. Powerful but dumb

B. Weak but cunning

Between those two types, you can create nearly every type of OSR creature challenge you'll ever need. The key is that both types tell you about how the enemy thinks, which is the main thing the PCs must interact with. When you look at a big fancy statblock for some monster from a new school "Combat as Sport" game, you don't have any idea how it thinks. Well, pick one of these two.

Type A Enemy: Powerful But Dumb

I had a party of six different level 1 knaves all on a quest to go hunt down a troll. They were terrified, and the further they got into this quest, the more reasons they discovered to be terrified. The troll has a ton of HP and decent AC, does a lot of damage with a basic attack, but most importantly, is really fucking strong. A player tried chasing it down alone and got a tree thrown at him, shattering his arm. When the party tracked the troll down to its lair, they watched it being awoken by a damn fool NPC knave, whose spine was then compressed like an accordion.

But the players killed the troll with not a single tree thrown at them this time. Why's that? Because they talked to it, and they lied, and they made it angry, and they kept distracting it, and so on. They did everything they could to play on how dumb it was. My rule of thumb for a Type A enemy is this: any type of trickery the players attempt against it will succeed by default.

Type B Enemy: Weak But Cunning

The most frequent candidate I use for this type are NPC knaves, because I like to show the players a dark reflection of themselves. Other common choices are any kind of monstrous humanoid, such as frog folk or hobgoblins. The key is that each individual member is either roughly as powerful as a PC, or less.

In this example, I had three different level 1 knaves enter a dungeon that had been set up as the HQ of a band of brigands. Long story short, they had worked their way into the center of the dungeon and had either killed or scared off each NPC they'd come across, funneling all of them towards one corner of the dungeon where their leader tried to coordinate a counterattack. There ended up being a standoff in two dungeon chambers with a closed door in between them. The players were desperately holding the door shut on their side, as were the NPCs. Neither realized that the other was not trying to barge in. But that gave both sides the chance to prepare a surprise attack.

The players lost. They were simply not as clever as the NPCs. When the door swung open, they saw a brigand training a musket towards the ground, and a gunpowder horn rolled to their feet. The gun shot and hit the horn while the door was simultaneously slammed shut. One of the PCs died in the explosion.

My rule of thumb for a Type B enemy is this: they play like an experienced, skilled player would in their position. Retreat, ambush, strength in numbers, leverage resources, and NEVER FIND THEMSELVES IN A FAIR FIGHT.

-Dwiz

Splitting the Party Isn't That Bad

I guess it partially depends on how patient and cool your players are, but I am here to argue my case that it's just not that bad in general.

The party usually operates as one unit. When they come to a major decision point, they get everyone's perspective and maybe take a vote. When they come to a complicated situation, each person contributes what they can to the course of action. And unlike in film or TV, the "camera" is pretty much always pointed at the party the entire time, with no occasional dramatic cuts to the villain's lair to show him talking to his cronies or whatever. That's the idea, anyway.

This does not always work out. Sometimes just because of circumstances outside of anyone's control, but oftentimes it's because of a deliberate decision. The party will eventually find themselves in a situation where they ask, "should we send the rogue to scout up ahead alone?" Even most experienced players will be uncomfortable taking the risk, and still always try to return to the status quo as soon as possible. "Don't split the party" is one of the most oft-repeated mantras in tabletop gaming.

But I have done it a fuck ton and it's been fine.

Princess Mononoke and "DM-Prepared Plots" in Old School Games

Alternatively titled, "How to Have Your Cake and Eat it Too."

There is a commonly recognized dichotomy of gamers who like linear, "scene-based" games where the DM is a storyteller and has an epic and enchanting plot prepared in advance they're trying to deliver, versus games where the DM is a referee who impartially simulates an active world and hands the reigns off to the players to do whatever the hell they want. In the latter game, to the extent that there's a "story" or "plot" at all, it's usually one that emerges naturally and unplanned out of the consequences of the PCs' actions and how the world responds to them, but the point is that "player agency" is maintained above all else. In the former game, there's usually a much-needed Session 0 conversation where the DM convinces their players to try to "play ball" as often as possible so as not to "ruin the game," and typically as long as you're playing with reasonable people then you'll have a great time.

It's not actually as though all gamers fall strictly into one of these two types, but boy do these two types fight a lot and get very defensive.

There are essentially three main ways to think of this situation:

• Broke: DMs are/aren't storytellers and that's the only correct way to play
• (most sensible people recognize this is a childish take)
• Woke: There are many different playstyles that are all equally valid, and you should try to just figure out the one you prefer and then go find players who agree
• (this is what most sensible people settle on)
• Bespoke: A good DM can achieve a game that both keeps player agency perfectly intact and features a good amount of "emergent story" from the simulated world and has a DM-prepared plot that unfolds and wows the players with their storytelling prowess.

I am here to explain how. 

Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Brave Design Notes 6: Settlements

Go to the master post

Brave is a hack of Ben Milton's Knave, an old-school adventure game toolkit without classes and a lot more emphasis on equipment. The earliest changes I made were miscellaneous tweaks and houserules I added as I would run Knave, but at this point I've bolted on several advanced play procedures. While Knave is optimized for a DIY "rulings over rules" style of play, I still felt it was valuable to write down many of those rulings that I've made over the years and codify them. One of the best parts of the original Knave were the designer's notes, but I've taken them out because I needed to make room for new stuff and I assume that anyone playing my game would already be familiar with the original version anyway. Instead, you get my blog.

These notes are written for version 1.9, which you can find on the sidebar of this blog or by clicking here. These rules also make use of a resource called a "settlement info sheet," which you can find here, along with the player copy template here and the version adapted for villages here.