RPGaDay 2021 - Day Fifteen

 This would be half way... If I'd started on Day ONE!?  

A day late and a dollar short... but better late than never...?

Rather than discussing the obvious noun-version of supplement (my favourite suplement for a role-playing game or what I like to see in a supplement), I'd rather address the verb.  I very often feel I have to SUPPLEMENT published adventures with my own content as they are often so full of plot holes a battle cruiser could be flown through them...

I often feel this was due to the adventure not being play-tested by enough different people! If you just play things with the same group - that has the same sensibilities and assumptions about how a game is to be played, you will miss out on so many potential flaws. But that level of play-testing takes time and time constraints with having to keep up with the need to crank out NEW PRODUCT to keep everyone's attention (and money rolling in) prevents publishers from being able to do so. 

I think players DEMAND more "realism", in some ways, much like with making modern films. Making a World War Two movie in 1970s was easy - you just used whatever tanks you had on hand - Use modern Leopards for generic german tanks - why not? Nowadays, you can't get away with that. If that Tiger tanks doesn't look exactly like a Tiger tank - there will be a LOT of whiners. 

Maybe it's because we play as and with adults who "know better". If we played the same adventures as kids, no one would have noticed. 

As an example, I tried to run the classic Dragonlance games a few years back using Savage Worlds... in the FIRST adventure (of TWELVE!? - which I had spend some time and not a small amount of money to track down an acquire) one of the key plot points is recovering the Discs of Mishakal. Of course with the adult group I was running it for, when they came upon them, one of the players (an engineer) said "Wait, what are they made of...? Platinum...? There are 16 discs, each a foot in diameter and a 1/4" thick...?" Whips out phone, looks up density of platinum, calculated the volume of said discs and then the weight and declares... "yeah, that bunch of discs would be over a tonne..." Kind of just KILLED the momentum in that whole campaign right there... 

On the spot I suggested that the Discs of Mishakal were magical and, if carried by someone of Lawful Good alignment, it weighed next to nothing... but what about when it was loaded in the back of a cart - did they have to sit in the lap of someone with a lawful good alignment? Did the person holding them weigh more if someone not of lawful good alignment tried to push them or pick them up? 

And then there was the escape from that first dungeon - The cavern is slowly collapsing around the characters and they have to get out quick and the most obvious escape route is this "elevator" that's basically two bit "pots" attached to each other with a cable over a great big pulley at the top and you ring the bell and a bunch of slave Gully Dwarves at the top jump into the pot at the top, creating a greater weight than what's in the pot at the bottom, and the one descends while the other goes up... but... the Gully Dwarves aren't Lawful Good... so do even MORE have to jump in to help lift the carrier of the Discs of Mishakal... Is a character with Lawful Good alignment REALLY going to be cool with sending a giant pot full of Gully Dwarves to their ultimate doom so the player characters can make their escape? I could go on...

More recently I ran the first (of five) adventures in the first campaign book for Wrath & Glory and in said first adventure they are investigating the murder of a high-ranking member of a Noble house... the FIRST location they are sent to investigate the crime scene and, right away, one of the characters makes the completely sensible and obvious suggestion of asking to see the surveillance video... Despite the fact that that is the FIRST THING characters in EVERY modern investigative TV cop show, there is NO mention of any sort of surveillance - and indeed if there was, that would make ALL THE OTHER CLUES completely irrelevant!? So I said, "There are no surveillance cameras"... He said, "You're telling me, that in the far future, in the most paranoid, heavy-handed, authoritarian dictatorships... there are no surveillance cameras... anywhere!?" I feebly countered with "Not here, nobles prefer their privacy...?" He started to moan about how ridiculous that was and I said, let it be or I murder your character or you start losing glory point or something... In retrospect, I COULD have said, sure there were surveillance cameras... but they'd all be tampered with... but the level of technical expertise required to do so would have been vastly greater than the bad guys had at their disposal, if they had, they would have done much nastier things than just murder this one dude... and if they WERE that professional, they wouldn't have been so sloppy as to have left all of the other clues... GAH!? 

I almost feel like I just shouldn't bother with published adventures and just go with a hook and make shit up as I go... but that's hard when so much of a setting is about large webs of conspiracy - it's very difficult to make that shit up on the fly and make it seem believable. Also, with a system and setting I am new to, I like to use the published adventures as I feel like they SHOULD have thins sorted out - like having the right balance of bad guys for a starting party to deal with an "set the tone" for how the game is to be played... but so many just fall flat in that regard. 

Don't get me started about Tales from the Loop... i don't have all day.