“I’m doing open source”, I said to myself, in a sensible internal-monologue voice.
“I should pull from more open source creators”, I concluded with naive hopes, and then I downloaded all of the onepage dungeon entries.
As it turns out, most were not compatible with the GPL, because they did not have an up-to-date open source licence.
“Nevertheless”, I sighed, many days later, after finding all the GPL-compatible dungeons, “at least I have these few projects”.
The old A,D&D Ravenloft modules were some cheesy shite.
Even the most sullen and macabre Goth in Gotham couldn’t extract a nugget of honest fear from the campy Hammer Horror rip-offs.
But we loved them.
Why?
Ravenloft began with Dracula-but-with-hitpoints, then added wagons of gypsies carrying plot, Frankenstein’s monster off the Sea of Sorrows by Lamordia.
Adventure modules featured encounters in a crypt with spooky skeletons and D4 HP bats, followed up by werewolves which were invulnerable to everything except magic.
How did anyone enjoy themselves?
A vision came to me of a perfectly tactical RPG system, and then I realized it was worthless, because tactical RPGs are tacky.
This perfectly tactical system could be memorized in minutes, and let you play without any board or counters.
Skilled players would do well, unskilled players would do badly.
Players would represent stats and equipment with little boons and penalties to the system, letting someone with less skill gain an upper hand, but only a little.
Supremely skilled players would still win against someone with better stats, because perfectly tactical systems do not use luck.
Linear dungeons, where players see room 1, then room 2, all in order, can feel constraining.
Dungeon: any location in an RPG scenario with details of opportunity and danger.
Jaquaysing: to make a dungeon non-linear, so players must select which paths their characters take.
The ‘how’ falls directly out of the in-world ‘why?’.
Why would anyone live in a series of meandering, looping, hallways?
Answering that question shows you where to put loops in a dungeon.
Your basic combat action is an Attack roll.
If you roll Damage at the same time as the attack, then adding another roll for Initiative means every combat takes twice as long.
If you just spent 20 minutes on a combat scene that would have been 15 seconds of screen-time in a film, then 10 of those minutes may have been spent on Initiative.
My third BIND campaign ended in glorious disaster and nonsense which forced me to reforge magic.
Lax Theory
I had a magic system with a bit of metamagic ‘bend’, where people could do basic spells (fwoosh, fire!) then add a little metamagic to boost literally any spell (fwshhHHH FIREBALL!).
No more ‘control person’, ‘control people’, ‘control crowd’, and ‘control city’ spells - the system would present some choice spells, and let players put the pieces together themselves.
My RPG games follow a format which avoids railroading, without any need for elaborate settings or difficult NPC relations.
I call it ‘story weaving’, because it lets me stretch the metaphor.
Railroads are Inevitable
For all the complaints about railroading, computer games suffer from railroads far more than RPG modules.
We learn linear plot from films, books, and radio, and our thinking itself has become railroaded into A, B, C.