Before I embarked on the perilous journey of speculative fiction author, my primary writing gig was in the tabletop RPG and tabletop miniature game industries.
Started with DnD in the blue box. Then the supplements. We did a few premade campaigns. Also Traveller, and a multitude of board games. Enjoyed the hell out of all of it. Played through college and afterwards. Still GM various TTRPGs to this day. I firmly believe that all the RPGs and GMing have made me a much better writer.
I remember playing the game decades ago, and we only played one adventure module.
One of the problems with adventures that are made up for the DM to use is it takes a lot of world building away from the DM, which is something some members of my group, especially me, tried to do. In fact, I was reminded of how much work I put into this when I was cleaning out my mother‘s house after her passing and went through my old desk and found how I had created this entire town with its own trade, secret societies and cults.
I was never focussed on any kind of rescuing the world adventure, I think I personally thought of DND a lot more like the Conan adventures, where you’re in it for the treasure, or the magic items.
Also, the modules don’t really allow for player characters who want to be evil.
And there were a couple of us in my group, myself included, who wanted to play evil characters.
But that’s just all about my complaints about modules in general.
On the writing part, thank you for this, it was quite enlightening!
Right, and some DMs absolutely don't like to use published modules. They want complete creative control over their world and adventures, and I completely understand that. The modules are great for folks who just don't have time to design their own adventures or for folks who want to do kind of a hybrid thing, where they start with the module and tweak it to fit their world and characters. No wrong way to run a game in D&D. :)
That’s another thing. I don’t think we really play balanced our campaigns very well. The casualty rates among player characters was probably pretty close to 90%, so we never really got to play at the higher levels, because we all insisted on starting with first level characters.
That's very high. In the modern game, character deaths are actually kinda rare. The highest casualty rate we ever had was playing something like Call of Cthulhu, a game designed to be incredibly tough for players. Most characters didn't last more than a few session before dying or going insane. Fun times, though! :)
We weren’t playing the modern game. We started off with DND with the old white original box set, plus Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldridge wizardry. And where you could align yourself with law, neutral, or chaos. Later from magazines and stuff, we added the dual alignment idea of something like chaotic neutral. It was something I really wanted to explore, but we never got the chance. Especially because most of the guys couldn’t be got together to play games but that’s a whole other story. I also wanted to explore the difference between intelligence and wisdom a bit, because my first and favourite character was a cleric, who was neutral, but nobody was interested in any backstory of being a servant of any particular God or not. I was also interested in the charisma attribute.
But then, for reasons I forget, we stopped playing DND, and started playing a game called the fantasy trip, which was based on older games that were basically arena combat between either warriors or magic users, called Melee and Wizard . That game actually offered a lot of promise but again we didn’t get deep enough into it. And one of our group members ran a campaign for the game traveler. And one of the guys was going to start up Runequest campaign, in which he handed us out a set of rules, the biggest one of which I remember was aimed that myself and another member of our group, being that no character could be 100% evil. But we never even got to that game. After high school, our group went our separate ways.
Incidentally, the casualty rate in the fantasy trip was just as bad. But nobody got killed in traveler, but that’s probably because we never really got our first adventure off the ground even.
Started with DnD in the blue box. Then the supplements. We did a few premade campaigns. Also Traveller, and a multitude of board games. Enjoyed the hell out of all of it. Played through college and afterwards. Still GM various TTRPGs to this day. I firmly believe that all the RPGs and GMing have made me a much better writer.
Oh, absolutely. Storytelling is storytelling.
I remember playing the game decades ago, and we only played one adventure module.
One of the problems with adventures that are made up for the DM to use is it takes a lot of world building away from the DM, which is something some members of my group, especially me, tried to do. In fact, I was reminded of how much work I put into this when I was cleaning out my mother‘s house after her passing and went through my old desk and found how I had created this entire town with its own trade, secret societies and cults.
I was never focussed on any kind of rescuing the world adventure, I think I personally thought of DND a lot more like the Conan adventures, where you’re in it for the treasure, or the magic items.
Also, the modules don’t really allow for player characters who want to be evil.
And there were a couple of us in my group, myself included, who wanted to play evil characters.
But that’s just all about my complaints about modules in general.
On the writing part, thank you for this, it was quite enlightening!
Right, and some DMs absolutely don't like to use published modules. They want complete creative control over their world and adventures, and I completely understand that. The modules are great for folks who just don't have time to design their own adventures or for folks who want to do kind of a hybrid thing, where they start with the module and tweak it to fit their world and characters. No wrong way to run a game in D&D. :)
True enough, as long as everyone enjoys it! And I’m sure your work has brought a lot of joy to a lot of players.
Joy and consternation. A couple of my adventures were real meatgrinders. lol
That’s another thing. I don’t think we really play balanced our campaigns very well. The casualty rates among player characters was probably pretty close to 90%, so we never really got to play at the higher levels, because we all insisted on starting with first level characters.
That's very high. In the modern game, character deaths are actually kinda rare. The highest casualty rate we ever had was playing something like Call of Cthulhu, a game designed to be incredibly tough for players. Most characters didn't last more than a few session before dying or going insane. Fun times, though! :)
We weren’t playing the modern game. We started off with DND with the old white original box set, plus Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldridge wizardry. And where you could align yourself with law, neutral, or chaos. Later from magazines and stuff, we added the dual alignment idea of something like chaotic neutral. It was something I really wanted to explore, but we never got the chance. Especially because most of the guys couldn’t be got together to play games but that’s a whole other story. I also wanted to explore the difference between intelligence and wisdom a bit, because my first and favourite character was a cleric, who was neutral, but nobody was interested in any backstory of being a servant of any particular God or not. I was also interested in the charisma attribute.
But then, for reasons I forget, we stopped playing DND, and started playing a game called the fantasy trip, which was based on older games that were basically arena combat between either warriors or magic users, called Melee and Wizard . That game actually offered a lot of promise but again we didn’t get deep enough into it. And one of our group members ran a campaign for the game traveler. And one of the guys was going to start up Runequest campaign, in which he handed us out a set of rules, the biggest one of which I remember was aimed that myself and another member of our group, being that no character could be 100% evil. But we never even got to that game. After high school, our group went our separate ways.
Incidentally, the casualty rate in the fantasy trip was just as bad. But nobody got killed in traveler, but that’s probably because we never really got our first adventure off the ground even.