Quiet Time

The rest of the trip into Aronsburg passes without incident. See you tomorrow.

Yesterday, I was finishing up and thought "every day it is another fight... D&D doesn't need to be that. You can have a session or encounter without it turning into a fight." Yet when I sit down to add this kind of content, there it is... you're ambushed, you see orcs or dragons...

So, here you go, nothing happens, next day. It's not enough, is it? The trouble is that when I start putting anything out there that isn't combat oriented, it comes off as exposition. Since I'm not trying to write a book here, I guess I'll keep offering combat scenarios.

It is an interesting microcosm of the current concept of D&D. So many times it gets boiled down to story, specifically story over combat, dice and grid-based game play. When we started playing back in the early 80s, it was all about tables and dice, ac and hp. Yet, 30 years down the line, what we remember about those games are the story elements. What's up? I know that I never made a dungeon thinking "what's the story here?" I (maybe) had an idea, drew a map, then flipped through the Monster Manual and Fiend Folio, dropping in whatever looked good. Looking back, those dungeons look bad! But no one remembers the ghost in the room next to the party of 6 NPCs next to the 10 orcs next to the green dragon, probably all in 20' square rooms.

We remember John the Fighter/Magic User elf trying to break up an altercation in a bar by firing his Wand of Wonders. First, there was a stream of butterflies. Not useful, he tried again, 6 inches tall. Not useful, he tried again - fireball! In a wooden bar, in a wooden town, high in the mountains... Heidrich's Strike was soon renamed Fireball Gulch. In a nod to the modern game, I do remember us working with townspeople to fight the fire, street by street, in a losing battle. Not who started the fight, how it went, what we rolled to fight the fire, none of that. We just remember the story.

My point is that I never designed a story. The "story" we remember is what happened when we played the settings, numbers, and monsters I did set up. I can pull those out of a notebook, and they'll just make you cringe, but that was the skeleton that grew the body of the story. I feel like story is what happens when you invest characters with players, sit down around a table (real or virtual), and start talking and rolling dice.

I don't know how to write the story elements. Only the encounters. Let the people playing them decide the story that works with the situation they find themselves presented with. That is kind of what my mantra with this site was meant to be, to create the bones of encounters in order to help gamers build their own stories. Here's a location and a situation, some adversaries and motivations, some natural effects and complications... begin.

I'm finished with my rant. I'd like to actually offer suggestions of non-combat encounters, but I have trouble presenting information that way. My solution is to pour out encounter scenarios, and to expound on locations and NPCs so that others can create their own non-combat situations based on them. I think the next section of this adventure is going to be through mostly inhabited territory, so it will work best to sketch out details about the town, leaders and NPCs, etc. In other words, I'll be flipping my comfort zone on its head to try another approach.