Friday, April 27, 2018

Adventure modules...what we want, what we can give

SYSTEM: Any

So because I had nothing to do at lunch today, I started to think about superhero gaming products, specifically adventures.

Now, adventures are great. I like adventures. I guy adventures. But if I were ever to release adventures formally, I was wondering what I could do to distinguish mine. So I was thinking about adventures.

An adventure has a GM part and a player part. You're not going to sell them separately, but if you're doing PDF releases, is there any point to having a player product? For most of them, the player part is setting information and maps (which are, of course, setting informational). The product might include pre-gens, which would be in the player package. (Side note: it is kinda interesting to build an entire campaign world with pre-gens and setting material in the adventures. Most publishers do the setting material but not the pre-gens. Would that work? I dunno; maybe it would, but maybe it would give you too many heroes who might take away from the players.)

On the GM side, I write lots of words and I'd hate to give that up. (Imagine an ironic smiley face emoji.) One of the things that I thought of adding is a point form version of the adventure for GMs. I do this already with my adventures—I have a spreadsheet, and for each planned scene, I jot down the goal, the who and where (in ICONS terms, the location's Qualities) and the two or three things that I have to get across.

A summary sheet that presents short forms for the five or six villains, too. For reading, you probably want to have half-page or full-page size character write-ups, but with PDF you could produce a version of the page that has, say, eight character spaces and you can choose the order with a drop-down to select the character in each one. That would give you a summary sheet to play with.

More people play with VTTs now, so also including something that might work on something like roll20 or Fantasy Grounds might be an idea. (I have no idea if that's technically viable.)

Anyway. What do you want to see in superhero adventures?

No comments:

Post a Comment