Critical Bits for the week ending 2011-09-04
- Nominations now open for Golden Geek Awards, for board games, RPGs, and video games: http://t.co/oo6wuHe #
- RT @SlyFlourish: Three tools for the lazy #dnd DM: poster maps, reskinning monsters, the DM cheat sheet: http://t.co/NKf7Bj3 #
Preference is Puzzling
After teaching all sorts of writing at levels ranging from kindergarten to Masters-level, one thing I try to get across to my students is the importance of audience—or more specifically, recognizing your audience and working to write toward their expectations while exceeding their expectations. Audience dictates content, tone, diction, length, and countless other considerations for the writer to grapple with.
For many types of writing, the audience is a well-known quantity. In school you write for the teachers. In technical writing your audience is the end user. Novelists of fantasy or horror or police procedurals or mystery have a fairly detailed outline of what the audience wants, and they can keep one foot in the boat while dipping their toes into the lake of experimentation. While a range of preferences exists even with the genres, tropes are there for guidance.
Writing adventures for RPGs is in some ways similar. It is not terribly hard to write a typical dungeon-delve adventure with 3 encounters, a skill challenge, and the PCs rushing in at the last moment to stop the ritual before the evil creature of great power is unleashed. Many DMs and players are happy with that. Thank goodness!
However, not every DM or player is happy with the standard fare. There are many reasons for this, of course. Some are not happy with that because for them the game is about telling a story, and they have already heard that story umpteen dozen times. They want to know more about the background, more about the characters of the story, and mostly importantly, they want to know how their own characters fit into the story. Others are not happy because to them the game is a game, and unless each iteration of the game in some way different or challenging, it turns into a game of tic-tac-toe where every action just demands a rote response, ultimately leading nowhere productive or entertaining. For others still, both aspects have to be unique and engaging. [Read the rest of this article]
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