Back in 2014, I began writing a blog for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition dungeon masters focusing on how to write adventures efficiently. Or rather, I created a style guide which was intended to make writing adventures more efficient. This was an age before the Dungeon Master's Guide had been released, and, although it was aimed at 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, could absolutely apply to most any RPG without a defined style guide for adventure writing.
In the interest of expanding Efficient Adventure Design, streamlining it and making it more helpful to Game Masters everywhere, I am moving the blog to this page and revisiting much of what I wrote in 2014 on the subject of Efficient Adventure Design. I will expand on writing styles and techniques as well as further explore the style guide posted on the old website.
I developed the concept for Efficient Adventure Design when I encountered a reoccurring problem that I had when writing games for my players: often I would develop quite a bit of material that just wouldn't get used. So often this material was left by the wayside, despite its presence to flesh out the details of my world. Well, that's a big problem if time is something that you don't have much of, which many working adults don't. Efficient Adventure Design is intended to be a process that helps you focus your work on the key elements of telling your story and writing it down so that you aren't wasting time writing about things that won't get used.
This style guide is a set of guidelines and not a set of rules. There are two important things to remember when you're a GM for any game: Know your players, know your story. If you know these things, then the specifics of what's written on your page can fall by the wayside and a fun time can still be had by all. Group storytelling is not an exact science, and you shouldn't expect it to be. Spontaneity is part of its charm.
Efficient Adventure Design is adventure-based instead of campaign based. This will be covered in more detail later, but in general this is because while your campaign's story is important, it is made up of the smaller journeys contained within your adventure modules. Well-written adventure modules interconnect to create fun campaigns.
Substance is part of your adventure design, but it is specific to you as a Game Master. I will talk about writing strategies for developing and keeping track of your stories, but I will also talk about what you should include in your daily adventure writing routine. It is too easy to get sidetracked on the history of a magical sword that gets picked up by your fighter and then sold because its bonus just isn't as good as one he can make himself.
I will talk about formatting your work in such a way that you can reference it more easily in the future. This will build on choosing what to include in your adventure, and will develop into discussing the individual parts of the adventure. I will discuss strategies for coming up with the different parts of your adventure and how to handle traps, puzzles, and encounters in a way that gives you plenty of information to work with but open-ended solutions that let the players feed you the answers.
It is my hope that, using this style, GMs will create games that they can share with each other freely. Having a writing style will help make adventures easier to read, and train us to focus our stories on the most cinematic, relevant parts of our stories. Efficient Adventure Design will, I hope, help us write better adventures.
In the interest of expanding Efficient Adventure Design, streamlining it and making it more helpful to Game Masters everywhere, I am moving the blog to this page and revisiting much of what I wrote in 2014 on the subject of Efficient Adventure Design. I will expand on writing styles and techniques as well as further explore the style guide posted on the old website.
I developed the concept for Efficient Adventure Design when I encountered a reoccurring problem that I had when writing games for my players: often I would develop quite a bit of material that just wouldn't get used. So often this material was left by the wayside, despite its presence to flesh out the details of my world. Well, that's a big problem if time is something that you don't have much of, which many working adults don't. Efficient Adventure Design is intended to be a process that helps you focus your work on the key elements of telling your story and writing it down so that you aren't wasting time writing about things that won't get used.
This style guide is a set of guidelines and not a set of rules. There are two important things to remember when you're a GM for any game: Know your players, know your story. If you know these things, then the specifics of what's written on your page can fall by the wayside and a fun time can still be had by all. Group storytelling is not an exact science, and you shouldn't expect it to be. Spontaneity is part of its charm.
Efficient Adventure Design is adventure-based instead of campaign based. This will be covered in more detail later, but in general this is because while your campaign's story is important, it is made up of the smaller journeys contained within your adventure modules. Well-written adventure modules interconnect to create fun campaigns.
Substance is part of your adventure design, but it is specific to you as a Game Master. I will talk about writing strategies for developing and keeping track of your stories, but I will also talk about what you should include in your daily adventure writing routine. It is too easy to get sidetracked on the history of a magical sword that gets picked up by your fighter and then sold because its bonus just isn't as good as one he can make himself.
I will talk about formatting your work in such a way that you can reference it more easily in the future. This will build on choosing what to include in your adventure, and will develop into discussing the individual parts of the adventure. I will discuss strategies for coming up with the different parts of your adventure and how to handle traps, puzzles, and encounters in a way that gives you plenty of information to work with but open-ended solutions that let the players feed you the answers.
It is my hope that, using this style, GMs will create games that they can share with each other freely. Having a writing style will help make adventures easier to read, and train us to focus our stories on the most cinematic, relevant parts of our stories. Efficient Adventure Design will, I hope, help us write better adventures.
