From: dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com (Dennis Heffernan)
Subject: Re: Improvisation!
Organization: Xanadu Enterprises Inc.
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 06:57:37 GMT

In article <Bt8wp8.n6@acsu.buffalo.edu> swann@acsu.buffalo.edu (Stephen Swann) writes:
|Scenario:
|
[deleted for the sake of brevity]
|
|Ok, what's the plot here?  And what exactly is it that the adventurers
|are "supposed" to figure out?  This isn't like a book, where you're
|ushering them towards some pre-determined destination, via a series

	WHOA!  Who said anything about pre-determined endings?  Ain't got none
o'those, round heah these parts.

|of carefully planned critical occurances.  This is liable to get
|messy, and there's no saying for sure that the characters should (or
|will) get involved in it at all.  Maybe they'll run from the brigands.
|Maybe they'll fight them, and capture one, and find out about the
|Count's plot (most of the brigands don't know the whole story - only
|the brigand chief knows that the person who hired them to do this was
|one of the Count's most trusted vassals).  Maybe the adventurers will
|find out and not give a hot damn, because they've got other things on
|their mind.  Maybe they'll find out, and drag the bandit chief back to
|the capitol, and leave the whole matter up to the King's justice.
|Maybe they'll take it upon themselves to try and foil the Count
|personally.  Maybe they'll get run off into the wilds without their
|horses, and will be more worried about living to reach civilization
|than about who those bandits were.
|
	Why are you feeding them this encounter if you don't know have a handle
on what they're going to do with it?

|What if they attack your "prepared material" in ways you had never
|thought of?  Like magically tunneling under a manor house instead of
|going in through the gate?  Did you remember to write in your notes
|what kind of earth (clay, rock, soil?) the place is built on?  What

	I am INTIMATELY familiar with all of my PC's abilities.  If one of them
has the ability to tunnel, you can bet your lungs that I'll know the type of
earth anything they'd want to get into is built on.  If they've got
divination powers, I'll have visions prepared for them.  Et cetera and so
on.

|if, in order to follow the the adventure the way you wrote it, they
|have to talk to the gate guard to get a particular hint - and they
|just kill him instead?  Or that the tunnel that leads to the "real

	They're screwed.  They fail.  It happens.

	Generally speaking, I'm not sadistic enough to put a must-have bit of
info in only one place, especially one the PC's might miss somehow.  Or, if
I'd decided that they HAD to talk to that guard (say, because it wouldn't
make sense for anyone else to know what he knows), then I'd have clues in
other places WARNING them that they had to talk to him.  Of course, if a
particular scenario is intended to be difficult, all bets are off...and so
are the kid gloves.

|adventure" is under the stables, and they set fire to the stables and
|burn it down?  In my scenario, I don't care what they do, because

	See above.  They've hosed themselves.

|there's nothing that the players are "supposed" to do.  They're
|"supposed" to do whatever they think is appropriate under the
|circumstances, and the storyline isn't "supposed" to follow a certain
|pattern.

	The _storyline_ can go anywhere.  The _environment_ is a constant.  In
a mystery, clues are part of the latter, not the former.

|The way my group plays it, there -is- no mystery to be solved, just
|a world full of events that you can partake in, struggle against, 
|observe, or ignore, whatever strikes your fancy.

	If you don't want to run mysteries, fine, but the discussion as I
entered it was concerned with a search for clues in a mystery.


dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com   ...uunet!tronsbox!dfrancis     GEnie: D.HEFFERNAN1
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"I don't understand why you make such a big deal out of everything...haven't
you learned; if it's not happenning to me it's not important?" -Murphy Brown