RPGaDay 2025 #6 Motive

 What drives a character to adventure?

I think that we've sanitized the idea of "adventure" in gaming. Historically speaking, "adventurers" have been troublemakers. Mercenaries and pirates. Very often they left their homes to go to war and then never returned once the war was over. The biker culture that got its start in the US after WWII is another example.

The idea of "wandering adventurers" as a sort of "hero for hire" is a modern invention presumably to accommodate gaming. While early gamers were rather mercenary, as encouraged by the amounts of XP offered for treasure recovery, with the rightness of their actions perhaps a secondary concern.

It's also possibly a matter of destiny, though the character is certainly allowed to have an opinion of what they're destined to do.

RPGaDay 2025 #5 Ancient

Adventures involving the Ancients are rather common. It seems like the Ancients always knew better than modern people.

It's a trope that crosses genres. Many fantasy settings have some sort of Golden Age in their past. Science fiction is full of xeno-archaeology, digging up ancient galactic empires. Some people even go so far as to presume that something similar applies to the real world. There are people who believed that the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians or some other ancient culture had things all figured out. Then there are those who believe that there are truly ancient civilizations like Atlantis, or Lemuria that knew cosmic or magical secrets that have since been lost.

RPGaDay 2025 #4 Message

 As a Xennial, one of the biggest jumps in technology that I've experience is in communications technology. Seeing younger generations that have grown up around the idea of having a device in your pocket that connects you to any person or data and allows you to broadcast the mundane details of your life to any potentially interested parties and if you become popular enough that can be your job is just a wild thing.

And we see that ease of communication in our media. All of our favorite superheroes have the ability to communicate instantly with their team mates as well as a home base to provide them with additional information and support. In D&D, magic items like sending stones can be used similarly. 

But what if the party had to communicate with the technology I had as a kid (or equivalent)? There are a lot of Stranger Things/Kids on Bikes-style games these days, so maybe it's exactly the technology they're using. Landline phones, so you had to hope the person you wanted to reach was near the phone you were dialing. If some else answers, you had to take the time to have a polite if perfunctory conversation and maybe ask them to take a message for when the person you were trying to reach gets back. Long distance calls were expensive, so it had to be important for you to make one. If you had to get in touch with someone a long distance from you, mail was typically cheaper, but took more time.

RPGaDay 2025 #3 Tavern

I remember a time in my gaming career when I kept trying to redeem the old "You all meet in a tavern" gaming trope. The easiest way to do that is to place the campaign's inciting incident in the tavern. In one case, this inciting incident was the tavern blowing up, with the campaign proceeding from there.

One thing I haven't really done is used the tavern as a home base. In my CivCrawl "blank map" campaign that I ran for a few sessions during COVID, I did make an attempt at this. There was a tavern at the center of the world that was a home base and provided essential services, but the campaign fell apart and I was dissatisfied with a number of things in the setup. I might go back to the concept, but I might try to simply learn the lessons from that game and apply them to the next OSR campaign that I run.

I don't think using the tavern as a home base was one of the problems, so it's definitely something that I can come back to.

RPGaDay 2025 #2 Prompt

 I love random generators for just about everything. I struggle with inspiration, but they let me skip that step and go right into fleshing out a concept. My #Dungeon24 project was entirely procedurally generated. But I think my favorite random generator is the Instant Story Generator from Pandemonium: Adventures in Tabloid World. 

Part of it is that it helps me create tabloid-style adventures for D20 Modern. I could probably use the system from the Pandemonium book to run adventures, but I also think that D20 Modern is really suited to a tabloid world approach as well, especially if you want to escape the D&D-isms that it tries to import into the modern day (2003 AD!).

The other part is simply that it's at my sweet spot where it gives me just enough of the right details to build from there. Everyone has their own sweet spot and this is mine.

RPGaDay 2025 #1 Patron

This is year is going to be a tough one. I easily have 31 RPGs on my shelf that I can discuss. I have close to 31 anecdotes and gaming stories. But ideas have always been hard for me, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to come up with 31 ideas.

The idea of a patron NPC isn't something that I've worked with. Most of my campaigns have been either player-driven, murderhobo or both. Each individual scenario might have a "questgiver" character, but they are only of nominal authority i.e. the village elder who wants you to clear out the nearby goblin hovels. Which might count.

When I hear about patrons in a gaming context, I imagine a developed NPC that assigns the PCs missions. The closest I came would have been the GURPS Prime Directive game I ran, though then only by implication. The characters got missions from their chain of command, but I don't remember if went into any depth on that.

Developing a patron NPC might be helpful for a couple of campaigns that I would like to run. My #Dungeon24 megadungeon might benefit from a patron or factions outside the dungeon to plant hooks for things to do other than dungeoneering. I've been struggling for a hook for a potential Stars Without Number campaign that I've wanted to do for ages, and a patron might be just the thing to help that coalesce.

How I Prep

 I'd been seeing some RPG bloggers responding to this Roll to Doubt post and discussing their prep process. I decided I would give it a shot. My gaming has been erratic, but I have been able to muster some one-shots, so this is focused mostly on that sort of prep. I have been dong some playing, but I do feel like I have a GM brain.

How do I prep?

An interesting question that I haven't really thought about. I don't know that I have a good answer because I don't know that I have a really refined process. And I admit that I spent a fairly long period as a terrible GM. Enthusiastic, perhaps, but terrible.

The first thing I do is get an idea. This typically comes from random tables, but sometimes an actual idea will occur to me.

Then I engage in a little something I call "Backwards <-> Forwards." This means that I think about the backstory of the scenario and what happened previously to set up the scenario and project into the play experience of the scenario itself. And then I think about the play experience that I want to create and work out how the backstory and logic of the scenario need to work in order to support that. Repeat as needed.

Not really after that, but somewhat apart from it, I build the structure for the adventure. This is not necessarily consistent from adventure to adventure. Sometimes, I'll use the Beat Chart method that appeared in a couple of R. Talsorian games. I do that for D20 Modern, predominantly. For my apocalyptic zombie scenario, I built a series of escalating zombie encounters and a separate progress tracker for the *actual* conflict of the scenario. For my "Expendables save Christmas" adventure, I devised it as a series of "layers," flexible objectives that the players had to move through to save Christmas.

And as part of all of this, the mechanics need to be considered. For D20 Modern, I needed to make sure that the obstacles all had Challenge Ratings and XP values worked out. My zombie game was in Fate, so I statted the opposition and the progress bar in those rules and put some thought into Aspects and other elements that could be used. All Outta Bubblegum was the hardest. The mechanics are so loose that you can't have a lot of structure. No method to really set difficulty levels or stat opposition. So that scenario had to be particularly loose and flexible.

This is also the point where I consider my Laws of Gaming. Specifically, 3 and 4. "Respect player agency" and "Never roll the dice unless you are willing to abide by the results."

Where do I need to make sure that there's room for players to make decisions and take action? Where do I need to trim options that don't lead where I want to go? If I'm running a campaign, this should be fairly open. In a one-shot, which is more common for me, I will generally try to have more control. A simple version of this is to think of the 3 "pillars of D&D" from the current rulebooks (Exploration, Combat, and Interaction) as verbs that are applied to each encounter. For example, if the party encounters a squad of orcs, our expectation is that it's a Combat encounter. But what if they try to Explore the orcs? What if they Interact with the orcs? This doesn't mean that those approaches are viable, but making the effort to have an answer for what happens if they try will make your scenario stronger.

Also, be looking for die rolls. If there is something that the players can do without as they move through the adventure, it's okay if there's a die roll to determine if they have it or not. If there is something that they need in order to resolve the scenario, they don't need to roll for it. Again, this is something that is more relevant in one-shots than campaigns, but still something to think about.