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I have been playing and DMing different pen&paper roleplaying games for more than 10 years. This is a collection of random thoughts on roleplaying and advice on being a good dungeon master or player.
Components of an Adventure
I think that all pen&paper adventures can be broken down into the following types of challenges. I have found this helpful when designing new adventures:
Creative Problem Solving
By far the most important in my eyes: present the players with some kind of complex problem. Besides the players creativity, the rules of a good roleplaying game should provide a set of tools (spells, equipment, special character abilities) to tackle the problem.
Challenges of this type usually are more fun if the players start out with incomplete (or even false) knowledge about the situation. Before making a plan they must gather information. This usually means asking the right questions but may also include skill checks or using special abilities.
The next step is for the players to decide on a plan followed by trying to execute said plan and spontaneously reacting to things they didnt expect or dice rolls not going as planned.
Example: The characters must break into a castle and retrieve a spell book. Gathering information may include studying the guards, talking to people who know about the castles defense and architecture, etc. The players may come up with a plan like: Use a spell to charm a merchant who will sneak them into the castle in his cart, sneak to the library at night, use a silence spell so the fight with the guards inside doesn't alarm anyone, etc.
Whats important: There should be more than one way to solve the problem. As a dungeon master its often a good idea to create many possible approaches but leave it up the players entirely to think of the second half of the plan. It is also essential that the players have the right amount of tools at their disposal: Not enough spells/abilities and their plans get very limited, too many or too powerful spells and your complex problem quickly becomes trivial (Im looking at you, scrying, teleport and fly!)
The downside is that these challenges are a lot of work for the dungeon master to prepare. You must prepare a lot of information for your players to work with. If you didnt draw a map of the castle and decided on the guards positions, how are your players supposed to come up with a specific plan?
Dungeon Crawling
The discovery of any confined, unkown, potentially dangerous area. This is classic Dungeons&Dragons. Avoid traps, find secret doors, locate treasure, fight monsters. Besides combat, these challenges include the most luck and rolling of dice (Search checks, move silently checks, open lock checks, saving throws against sprung traps). What makes a dungeon great is adding in elements that allow the players to be clever as well lucky with their dice.
Heres an example: The players are exploring a mad wizards tower. Besides the usual traps and monsters, they notice a number of paintings of odd scenes on the walls. Closer investigation reveals that some of them seem very real. For example the painting of a burning building actually emits light and warmth. At some point they stumble upon a painting of some kind of dangerous creature and while examining the painting, the creature suddenly jumps out of the picture attacking the characters. Further into the tower the players find a hint that the paintings have some sort of passwords. These allow "entrance" into the paintings. Now some painting may be traps, some may lead to other parts of the tower, some may contain a key object the players were looking for.
Now heres the important part: All hints and puzzles should be kind of easy and straight forward here. Getting stuck in a dungeons is boring. The whole dungeon should still feel fast-paced. The difficulty for the players should be created through the right mix of classic dungeon elements and brainy parts. Through the nature of a dungeon the players get to discover the necessary information bit by bit, which feels enough like youre working on solving the puzzle.
Roleplaying
Acting in character while interacting with an NPC. This can be fun and rewarding in itself but usually the players aim should be to gain some vital information or to convince an NPC into a certain course of action. When I prepare something like this I usually write down a couple of cool lines the NPC is likely to say during the encounter and paraphrase them into the conversation when fitting.
Not every player likes this stuff, but when you start with the in-character-talk, more often than not they will join in.
Heres a twist: Have an NPC approach the characters and try to cleverly extract some vital information from them. If they spill it, the rest of the adventure gets a little harder.
Combat
This is what all the many complicated rules of the game were made for. Here are some thoughts on combat in a pen&paper game: There is a right number of fights for one session of play and that number is two. One difficult fight and one really difficult fight. If a fight isn't at least somewhat of a challenge for the players, you might as well not have it. I know this is in disagreement with just about any ready-made D&D adventure ever, but it is a very strong opinion of mine. That said, there are exceptions. Very small fights that for some reason still pose the threat of costing the characters resources (health, prepared spells, items). Two examples: A rust monster, that, if foolishly attacked with metal weapons, may destroy these. A single harpy that attacks the characters while crossing a narrow bridge and tries to push one of them over the edge before fleeing. Another exception are fights that are easy but simply need to be there for the stories sake - make these quick, dont waste time.
Last but not least: An interesting environment can spice up an otherwise boring fight.
Storytelling
This is where the players are mostly passive, maybe following some streamlined path, listening to the dungeon master reveal a bigger portion of the story. The story may be told by an NPC, deciphered from a book, witnessed through a scrying spell or whatever.
A nice way to include the players is to prepare handouts instead of reading a long passage to the players. It gives them a chance to look for more subtle clues in the message and it feels more active.
This turned out longer than I thought, so there will be a part two probably.
 
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Just wanted to comment that I really liked this blog, especially after watching Rollplay and finding myself so intrigued by Pen n Paper games.. because of the infinite possibilities.
I have never played a single Pen n Paper rpg, but am at the point currently where I am debating writing my own PnP RPG and trying to find some TL'ers to play it. I would base it around the DND system with my own additions.subtractions and I have some neat idea for how I would run the game and how I would have my player interact with it, even while playing only online from however many miles away.
Just thought id say i liked the blog with a longwinded "and im thinking about trying to DM" (tho i REALLY would like to play first...and if I DM idk how id play without cheating because i know what will happen be4 it does lol)
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Dude, Jonrock, you sound like an awesome DM. Are you involved in the TL D&D setup thread?
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On March 27 2013 14:06 MaestroSC wrote:
Just wanted to comment that I really liked this blog, especially after watching Rollplay and finding myself so intrigued by Pen n Paper games.. because of the infinite possibilities.
I have never played a single Pen n Paper rpg, but am at the point currently where I am debating writing my own PnP RPG and trying to find some TL'ers to play it. I would base it around the DND system with my own additions.subtractions and I have some neat idea for how I would run the game and how I would have my player interact with it, even while playing only online from however many miles away.
Just thought id say i liked the blog with a longwinded "and im thinking about trying to DM" (tho i REALLY would like to play first...and if I DM idk how id play without cheating because i know what will happen be4 it does lol)
Glad you enjoyed it. I havent watched Rollplay myself but Ive been meaning to have a look for a while now.
If you can find the right people to play with, pen&paper ist the greatest hobby in the world and you should definitely try it. Unfortunately finding the right people can be really tough. I have no experience playing pen&paper online at all. I suppose via skype it might work, if your players stay focused.
What changes to d&d did you have in mind to make it more viable for online play?
About your concerns of "cheating your players", I was going to write on that in part two. Basically you must have your adventure prepared ahead of time and your players must be able to trust you, that you will not change it on the fly too much. Also keep in mind that you are not playin AGAINST your players. Your goal is not to stop them or kill their characters. Your goal is to create an exciting challenge of exactly the right difficulty (which is much harder than the former).
On March 27 2013 14:50 Random_0 wrote:
Dude, Jonrock, you sound like an awesome DM. Are you involved in the TL D&D setup thread?
Thanks  . I am currently not. Can you give me a link, though, because I couldn't find a thread like that.
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On March 27 2013 22:19 Jonrock wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 14:06 MaestroSC wrote:
Just wanted to comment that I really liked this blog, especially after watching Rollplay and finding myself so intrigued by Pen n Paper games.. because of the infinite possibilities.
I have never played a single Pen n Paper rpg, but am at the point currently where I am debating writing my own PnP RPG and trying to find some TL'ers to play it. I would base it around the DND system with my own additions.subtractions and I have some neat idea for how I would run the game and how I would have my player interact with it, even while playing only online from however many miles away.
Just thought id say i liked the blog with a longwinded "and im thinking about trying to DM" (tho i REALLY would like to play first...and if I DM idk how id play without cheating because i know what will happen be4 it does lol) Glad you enjoyed it. I havent watched Rollplay myself but Ive been meaning to have a look for a while now. If you can find the right people to play with, pen&paper ist the greatest hobby in the world and you should definitely try it. Unfortunately finding the right people can be really tough. I have no experience playing pen&paper online at all. I suppose via skype it might work, if your players stay focused. What changes to d&d did you have in mind to make it more viable for online play? About your concerns of "cheating your players", I was going to write on that in part two. Basically you must have your adventure prepared ahead of time and your players must be able to trust you, that you will not change it on the fly too much. Also keep in mind that you are not playin AGAINST your players. Your goal is not to stop them or kill their characters. Your goal is to create an exciting challenge of exactly the right difficulty (which is much harder than the former). Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 14:50 Random_0 wrote:
Dude, Jonrock, you sound like an awesome DM. Are you involved in the TL D&D setup thread? Thanks . I am currently not. Can you give me a link, though, because I couldn't find a thread like that.
im not talking about cheating them... im talking about playing AND DM'ing in the same game.. as i really want to play...but there are infinitely more players than DM's in which case every move I make as a character would be somewhat cheating as I know what the DM had planned.
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On March 28 2013 05:20 MaestroSC wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On March 27 2013 22:19 Jonrock wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 14:06 MaestroSC wrote:
Just wanted to comment that I really liked this blog, especially after watching Rollplay and finding myself so intrigued by Pen n Paper games.. because of the infinite possibilities.
I have never played a single Pen n Paper rpg, but am at the point currently where I am debating writing my own PnP RPG and trying to find some TL'ers to play it. I would base it around the DND system with my own additions.subtractions and I have some neat idea for how I would run the game and how I would have my player interact with it, even while playing only online from however many miles away.
Just thought id say i liked the blog with a longwinded "and im thinking about trying to DM" (tho i REALLY would like to play first...and if I DM idk how id play without cheating because i know what will happen be4 it does lol) Glad you enjoyed it. I havent watched Rollplay myself but Ive been meaning to have a look for a while now. If you can find the right people to play with, pen&paper ist the greatest hobby in the world and you should definitely try it. Unfortunately finding the right people can be really tough. I have no experience playing pen&paper online at all. I suppose via skype it might work, if your players stay focused. What changes to d&d did you have in mind to make it more viable for online play? About your concerns of "cheating your players", I was going to write on that in part two. Basically you must have your adventure prepared ahead of time and your players must be able to trust you, that you will not change it on the fly too much. Also keep in mind that you are not playin AGAINST your players. Your goal is not to stop them or kill their characters. Your goal is to create an exciting challenge of exactly the right difficulty (which is much harder than the former). Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 14:50 Random_0 wrote:
Dude, Jonrock, you sound like an awesome DM. Are you involved in the TL D&D setup thread? Thanks . I am currently not. Can you give me a link, though, because I couldn't find a thread like that. im not talking about cheating them... im talking about playing AND DM'ing in the same game.. as i really want to play...but there are infinitely more players than DM's in which case every move I make as a character would be somewhat cheating as I know what the DM had planned.
Oh, I get it. Yeah that probably won't work.
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