0
Martin Ralya over at Treasure Tables asked me to do a guest post expanding what I said in my last post. Anyway, here it is. Since being posted, it’s attracted a few comments; one in particular (from ScottM) got me thinking about how I avoid railroading my PCs with my adventure-creation approach.
My answer is, basically, that I don’t plan a linear story path or even a branching story path. Instead, I have a general idea of a story arc with a very vague beginning and end, and I fill in the middle with a bunch of disconnected scenes. I design these scenes intentionally to have no particular beginning or end of their own; instead, each one is a middle, the meat of the scene, and I ad-lib a beginning based on what the PCs do and transition to the next scene based on the same thing.
Related posts:
