The key to drawing upon your personal likes and interests for adventure fodder while keeping the players happy and responsive to your scenarios is moderation. Role-players pursue this hobby because it provides them an outlet for their imaginations, exploring and experiencing places and events they might not otherwise ever perceive. If every game session involves exploits into the complex world of art and art history, for example, and the players are looking for dungeon crawling hijinks, nobody is going to be happy. The players will become bored with the repetition and the game master will be frustrated when no one seems interested with the adventure.
Michael Curtis, “Know (and Love) What You Write” in How to Write Adventure Modules That Don’t Suck (2017)
Category: quotes
What you can control…
Mind you – you can never guarantee that any given gaming crew will have a good time playing your adventure. A million things can go wrong, up to and including incompatible styles between yourself and the group playing through your dungeon. Games go off the rails all the time, and there is nothing you can do to prevent that from happening. What you can, and should, control is the quality of your design. The better adventure you write, the more likely it is to facilitate a fun night of gaming for a group when the GM picks up your adventure.
Brendan J. LaSalle, “Unleashing Your Dungeon Creativity” in How to Write Adventure Modules That Don’t Suck (2017)
Because of the rules…
It’s hard to deny that magic is the default mode of human storytelling. All the old myths and poems contain transcendent magical powers and transitions. Medieval romances and epics are full of fantastical and miraculous things. It wasn’t until the 18th and 19th centuries in which stories arose in which nothing magical happened, and verisimilitude became the watchword. We sometimes call it realism. I have nothing against realist novels, as it happens… I just think we need to acknowledge that they are the aberration in the larger context of humanity’s appetite for stories. For the moment however, this rejection of the power of miracles extends even to our stories about the miraculous. One feature that Rowling’s and Pratchetts’ series share with nearly all narratives and stories predicated upon magic is that magic has rules. This is because magical thinking has rules. Psychological rules, that is. Magical thinking is that near-ubiquitous human state of mind at work in ritual, prayer, and religion, as well as obsessive compulsive behavior. The belief that there is a causal relationship between human actions and beliefs, and cosmic eventuality. I wonder what it would be like to write a fantasy novel in which the magic has no rules at all. That would be bracing, and might bring out this buried truth: millions who think they love fantasy because of the magic actually love it because of the rules.
Adam Roberts, forward to Monday Starts on Saturday (2017)