Thursday, March 30, 2017

On Writing Premiere Issues For your SHRPG Group


Writing adventures for Superhero Role Playing Games pose unique challenges for GM's. It is especially tricky when writing an adventure for the "Premiere issue" of New Campaign, and the player character haven't yet even been created.

This is kind of the challenge I'm facing right now, Seeing as I don't want a long delay between character creation and actual play. This is because in my experience I've found that too long of a delay between these two events will most assuredly kill the initial enthusiasm that is extremely beneficial to start of a fledgling campaign. I have to start writing the Initial adventure pretty much right now.

I think I've picked a potentials group of adversaries, now I need a interesting situation, a motivation for the villains, and a location for it to happen. I once read (I think it was in the Original DC Heroes RPG by Ray Winninger), that a GM should create a time line for her villain’s plans. It should describe how and when the various stages of the villain’s plan go off if the players never get involved. That sounds like very sound advice to me. Of course, the villains will have to modify their plans as the player become involved, they’re not just going to throw their hands up, and give up at the first sign of player / hero involvement. After all, they do want to accomplish their end goal; otherwise why even bother starting the whole enterprise to begin with.

Another hugely important, in my opinion, piece of advice I’ve heard is: Come up with problems for the players /characters to face, not solutions; solving them is the players / heroes job. Coming up with potential solutions, is a complete waste of time tends to make you not see the players devised solutions for the works of genius that they very well could be. Even if every solution they come up with is lame, and couldn’t possibly work let them try, and be fair about the adjudication of the attempt. I guarantee that it will lead to gaming stories that will be retold for years.

Welll to quote W. Pooh Esq. “Think, think, think … oh bother” 
Midnight

Any, and all, comments and suggestions are welcome

Erik a,k,a Midnight

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