Late last month, as I was looking ahead to September, I quickly realized that trying to find a Saturday to finish up our one-shot turned twofer was going to be somewhat difficult, with only one real day available. I knew that at this point, I just wanted to get the quest over with (not because it wasn't fun or that I didn't like running this particular story), mainly because it was a quest we had started back in the end of May and I wanted to get things moving along again without running the risk of the group breaking up and stop playing D&D all-together. So I did what any halfway decent DM would do. I went back to my childhood improvised.
In elementary school, one of my favorite genre of books was the Choose Your Own Adventure series of fantastic stories that mixed some kind of Indiana Jones excitement, with young adult novels, and absurd antagonists like space vampires. That last one, literally called "Space Vampire," was one that I had purchased (or had my parent's purchase more likely) through a Scholastic Book Sale at our school and reread that thing I don't know how many dozens of times.
So, the whole point of this meandering preamble is that I decided to take a few pages from the Choose Your Own Adventure playbook for our D&D group, which really isn't a new thing for D&D as the concept was used for a portion of the quest in The Palace of the Silver Princess back in 1981. So I looked through the remainder of the quest that I had already modified from a 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons quest into a (more-or-less) 5th Edition quest, and figured out that I could turn most of it into a Choose Your Own Adventure style quest, all the while hoping that our group would be okay with finishing the quest in this manner. My hopes were boosted quite a bit when I ran it by Conklederp and she was excited, so I knew that at the very least 11% of the group would enjoy the experience.
My plan was to take the text from the existing quest, inserting my own descriptions to make it pertain more to the world that I was creating, and offer a poll at the end for the PC's to choose from. I would then take the favorited option (only allowing people to make one choice lest we end up with nine people all voting for all four options). For each event, I usually offer about 48 hours for everybody to get their votes in and people usually throw in comments about what they want to do, and I will take that into account when I resolve the event.
We did have one battle (so far) and for that I rolled the first round explaining what happened in probably more action and flare but with less detailed strategy than what we normally do during battles for just the first round, then I described the outcome of the battle. Now, since this is a different way of running a quest and doing battles, I was not going to be an asshole and kill off any of the PC's because who wants to receive a notification on the Facebook that their character died when they had absolutely no control over them?
In the current event, I described an area, then told the group that they could tell me what they want to do and that I would respond with what happened. Kind of more like a traditional setting. I did this because it made more sense given what was in the area and I did not see a good way of having options like:
Presently, we are finishing up the second week and I have been beyond thrilled with how the group has responded to this unorthodox way of running/finishing up a quest. I really do appreciate these people and do count myself fortunate that the people who have joined our group over the years are open to alternate ways of playing a game that we all enjoy even when our schedules have become so adutled that even finding a couple of hours one day a week has become increasingly difficult.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I'm Just A Man Doing The Best That I Can
So, the whole point of this meandering preamble is that I decided to take a few pages from the Choose Your Own Adventure playbook for our D&D group, which really isn't a new thing for D&D as the concept was used for a portion of the quest in The Palace of the Silver Princess back in 1981. So I looked through the remainder of the quest that I had already modified from a 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons quest into a (more-or-less) 5th Edition quest, and figured out that I could turn most of it into a Choose Your Own Adventure style quest, all the while hoping that our group would be okay with finishing the quest in this manner. My hopes were boosted quite a bit when I ran it by Conklederp and she was excited, so I knew that at the very least 11% of the group would enjoy the experience.
My plan was to take the text from the existing quest, inserting my own descriptions to make it pertain more to the world that I was creating, and offer a poll at the end for the PC's to choose from. I would then take the favorited option (only allowing people to make one choice lest we end up with nine people all voting for all four options). For each event, I usually offer about 48 hours for everybody to get their votes in and people usually throw in comments about what they want to do, and I will take that into account when I resolve the event.
We did have one battle (so far) and for that I rolled the first round explaining what happened in probably more action and flare but with less detailed strategy than what we normally do during battles for just the first round, then I described the outcome of the battle. Now, since this is a different way of running a quest and doing battles, I was not going to be an asshole and kill off any of the PC's because who wants to receive a notification on the Facebook that their character died when they had absolutely no control over them?
In the current event, I described an area, then told the group that they could tell me what they want to do and that I would respond with what happened. Kind of more like a traditional setting. I did this because it made more sense given what was in the area and I did not see a good way of having options like:
- Search the leaves around the cairn?
- Examine the cairn?
- Drink the watery liquid from the cairn?
- Collect the watery liquid from the cairn?
- Collect the leaves from the beech-like trees surrounding the cairn?
- Question the shadowy figure standing just outside the perimeter of beech-like trees that only one PC spotted because their Passive Perception is ridiculously high?
Plus if multiple people wanted to search the leaves, how was I going to determine (aside from randomly) who would find the Lyre of the Sandman, or the Gloves of Oil? And after finding them, would they use them? Would they simply be like, "Sweet, gloves! But I love my gauntlets so I'll just put them in my satchel here." I knew that if I gave a time limit to this event, that the group would come up with things to do (or not, their choice) and then I could move things along, which is what I did (or will do?) later/earlier today.
Presently, we are finishing up the second week and I have been beyond thrilled with how the group has responded to this unorthodox way of running/finishing up a quest. I really do appreciate these people and do count myself fortunate that the people who have joined our group over the years are open to alternate ways of playing a game that we all enjoy even when our schedules have become so adutled that even finding a couple of hours one day a week has become increasingly difficult.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I'm Just A Man Doing The Best That I Can
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