Brent P. Newhall's Blog
Role-playing – Nov 2008

28 Nov 08 – How To Invent a Role-Playing Adventure, Part 2

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When last we left our adventurers, they were swimming north in hot pursuit of Princess Teela, who adamantly refused to return to her parents until she'd wrought vengeance on the sahuagin for their invasion of her country.

Endings are crucial. I can forgive a rocky beginning, and I can push through a dull middle, but a bad ending will ruin a story for me.

The ending has to feel bigger than the rest of the story. It may not be flashier, or have more action; that depends on the type of story. But since this is a war story, I wanted this to have a big war ending. I wanted the equivalent of ending Wolfenstein 3D by fighting a powered armor-wearing Hitler.

This meant two things: a battle against a powerful enemy, and a battle against the sahuagin king. However, according to D&D lore, sahuagin kings are simply more vicious than the others; they're not inherently powerful enough to take down half a dozen seasoned adventurers.

So I could have gone in two directions. I could have increased the sahuagin king's power, by giving him some magical artifact. Or I could add a separate, powerful martial character.

I chose the second route, though I just realized that I could have tied the adventure together much better by going the first route. The sahuagin king could have stolen the magical artifact that the players are seeking from the merfolk king, and that could be giving the sahuagin king the power to raise this army. Ah well.

So I created a separate martial antagonist. Since this adventure is designed for Dungeons & Dragons, I figured I should put a dragon in somewhere if I could, so I decided that the sahuagin king is pushing a priestess to summon a white dragon to do their bidding. (For the record, this would never have worked.)

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So, the players venture northward, and come upon a huge sahuagin city, which sits mostly empty as the army is down south fighting the merfolk. But a strange glow is coming from a temple in the city. This is the only distinguishing characteristic.

So the players travel there, and navigate through its twisting passages to a large, amphitheater-like room in the back. There, they find the priestess, holding an orb and murmuring a ritual, while the sahuagin king and a bunch of bodyguards stand nearby, watching. The water swirls around the priestess, and small wisps of light flash in and out of existence within it. The players can just make out the ghostly form of a dragon inside, slowly growing more distinct.

So, the players must fight the bodyguards first (who rush towards the players immediately to prevent them from getting to the king or priestess), then the priestess (who has plenty of spells), and the king (who is a very good fighter). After their defeat, the war is effectively over, and Teela can return to her father and people.

And that's the adventure: 3 to 5 encounters (depending on the number of sahuagin raiders that the DM decides to toss in), moving logically from one location to the next: the western sea, the aquatic elves, the merfolk capitol, the northern front, and the sahuagin capitol.

As you can see, my adventure creation method involves consequences. At each stage, I look for a next step that's logical and interesting. Logical because the alternative frustrates players; interesting to keep players engaged.

Works well for me. Now to design the next one....

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21 Nov 08 – How To Invent a Role-Playing Adventure, Part 1

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I've been working on a D&D adventure, War in the Deep. It's an underwater adventure in which the players are transported to an undersea kingdom, where they have to rescue a princess consumed with bloodlust.

(Which, incidentally, you can buy at DriveThruRPG for $5!)

Anyway, here's how I designed it:

I started with the reason for the adventure. This was originally part of a larger campaign, where the players are seeking seven different magical stones, and the king of this undersea kingdom has one of them. So, they were going to travel there to meet him. The question was, what would prevent the players from just requesting and taking the stone back from the merfolk?

I didn't have a good answer for that, so I began flipping through the Monster Manual to get ideas for the creatures that might be in that area. That's when I stumbled on the sahuagin.

The sahuagin are nasty brutes who mostly raid coastal towns. They're basically underwater goblins: they sneak up out of nowhere, attack anyone they find, and steal supplies.

Sound like fun antagonists. So what if they're the real antagonists? What if they're attacking the undersea kingdom?

Okay, so how to get the players involved in a war between the merfolk and the sahuagin? Well, the players are traveling to see the king. What if his daughter is in danger? An easy reason would be kidnapping; let's flip that around. What if she went off in search of danger, lusting after sahuagin blood?

And there was my plot.

So then it was a matter of designing the conflicts. I wanted to expand the time spent traveling to the merfolk's central city, so I added an early encounter with a sahuagin raiding party. I then added an enclave of aquatic elves who would help the players get through that area if the sahuagin proved too powerful. I also conjured up a High Council of the aquatic elves, who could answer the players' early questions about this area of the world, and the conflict between the merfolk and sahuagin.

After encountering the merfolk king, the players then had to find the princess. I figured the king would know at least roughly where the princess was, so I made that easy; the players just traveled north to a border town. On the way, they traveled above abandoned merfolk villages (as the merfolk prepared for war, they abandoned their easily-attacked villages).

Up to now, the players had been fighting sahuagin raiding parties, so I wanted to get across the feel of a large war. So I designed the next battle was a real battle, with dozens of sahuagin and several siege weapons assaulting this northern border town. The princess is in among the fray, giving it something of a Battle of Helm's Deep feel.

Now what? How to finish this up with a satisfying ending? I'll let you think about how you'd do it, and I'll answer in part 2.

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11 Nov 08 – What I Don't Like About Playing in a Tabletop RPG

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Much as I enjoy running tabletop RPGs, I don't much enjoy playing a character.

This is partly because characters have relatively little to do at any given time. Consider combat: in a four-person party, I'll spend at best four-fifths of the time twiddling my thumbs, watching everyone else fight. Even outside of combat, I'm just one of several adventurers.

Also, role-playing is social. As quoted in a recent post on Sin Aesthetics: "Enjoying roleplaying is rather like enjoying dancing: At some point you have to throw your inhibitions to the wind, admit you might look like a fool to passing spectators and enjoy the moment. Also like dancing, which at first may seem like a fairly limited activity, roleplaying has almost infinite depth and variety in the experiences it provides."

While I can "throw my inhibitions to the wind" with good friends, that's tough to do outside of intimate groups. And my role-playing friends don't really reward good role-playing. They're good guys; they're just focused more on killing stuff and taking loot than on role-playing, at this stage.

And that's one of the big limitations of role-playing: it requires a certain kind of mentality. Now, I think practically anyone can learn to role-play, just like anyone can play a game of charades. But it's a mentality that I don't get much of a charge out of.

Part of the trouble, too, is that I create worlds. I love thinking up cities and societies and people. If there's going to be someone in the whole process doing that, why not me?

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4 Nov 08 – What I Like About Tabletop Role-Playing Games

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I love role-playing. This is odd, since I only started role-playing a few years ago. And yet I've loved it since I was a young boy.

My older brother was a role-player. He played D&D, and Car Wars, and others, I'm sure. After he died, I looked over his few remaining hand-written materials. I was amazed at his creativity, not thinking at the time about how much of his stuff may have been copied from published work. Either way, he definitely loved it. Even if it was all copied from published books, it was lovingly and carefully copied.

I was drawn to the idea of role-playing, of thinking up an adventure and living it in my mind. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy at the time, so I was naturally attracted to the idea of collectively imagining an exciting adventure.

But I was also shy, so I never had anyone to role-play with. Not until I was in my 20's, when a few co-workers involved me in a short game of Nobilis, then I found a few younger friends for whom I could run games. And when I did, we had an absolute ball. That's when I realized what I love about role-playing.

I didn't own any role-playing source books, so I found and printed the simple Sherpa rules. They're brilliant; you can easily create a character and write up him or her in five minutes. They focus on simple conflict resolution, so we spent most of our time playing around instead of rolling dice.

We played a rip-roaring game of low-level mafia thugs in a science fiction setting, which culminated in a city-wide mafia war involving giant walking tanks. Then we moved to a short-lived heroic Greek fantasy game, then a D&D-inspired game before the group fizzled out.

Role-playing requires a huge imagination and a little guts (to yell "Och, y'not be wantin' to double-cross a dwarf, laddie!" to your friends). The result is a collaboratively created story, which can have everything from pathos to action to comedy, and in which you are involved. You're actually driving the story in whatever direction you want to take it. If it's not fun, you can make it fun.

As a GM (Game Master), I present the world, situation, and antagonists facing the players. So I get to create a world—or at least simulate one—which I love to do anyway.

A fun, imaginative game where everyone is actively involved and collaboratively push each other to greater and greater heights of story and personal interaction? What's not to like?

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