Part of being a GM is learning to deal with that s$&%.Īnd, to some extent, the wobbliness, the shakiness, is a feature. If the party starts burrowing into the Fiery Abyss at third level, the GM can decide to let them die in there like Minecraft Steve digging straight down or she can decide to warn them not to or just disallow the action or slap the players and find a group of players that isn’t trying to break everything. More importantly, the GM can make adjustments for the party doing really ridiculous things. If the druid does pull that sequence-breaking s$&%, he’s probably strained through the digestive tracts of a swarm of vampiric dire quippers and the rest of the party never knows what happened to him. And then they make new characters and start again. And probably get killed by an encounter too powerful for them to handle. First of all, the game will not crash because people ended up in the wrong place. Could you imagine watching a speedrun of, say, Tomb of Horrors? But, it’s not actually a huge problem. Or worse, someone is complaining that their game crashed and their save is unrecoverable because they saved in a place they should never have been and now can’t get out.Īll of that s$&% can happen in role-playing games too. If you go into the wrong area before a certain flag is set, dialogue starts popping up out of order, maps don’t load properly, and the next thing you know, someone is on YouTube posting an any percent speedrun of your thirty-hour epic with a completion time of seven minutes. The druid might decide to turn into a fish and swim all the way into the Crystalline Caverns.
#Little big adventure 2 flowchart how to
Or the players might – because of the freedom inherent in role-playing games – figure out how to f$&% up the sequence. What do I mean? Well, first of all, I mean that – as much as we’re planning things – there’s a few combinations of abilities and mechanics that might break things. On top of that, there’s also an issue of wobbliness. So, if I don’t feel like dealing with jump physics as reflected in DCs and Athletics checks today, I can just leave a bunch of blank spaces on my maps that say things like “need a hard jump here, figure it out later.” I won’t f$&% up the scenario design by suddenly having to move everything two grid units to the right because the jumps need to be wider. I can work in sequence.īut I can also bounce around. If I decide to tweak the physics on my Boots of Jumping, yeah, I might have to change the DCs on a bunch of jumps, but I really don’t need to decide on the physics UNTIL I’ve reached my first jumpable chasm. I don’t have the advantage of teams working simultaneously on different parts, but I also don’t have the problem of dependencies – work that one team is doing relying on what another team does. And that can happen because you have bunches of people working in parallel.īUT, I am one human being. Even with all of the planning, there’s a lot of feedback between different teams and things gradually get tweaked. And Fred – who just needs the damned thing to ship on time for once – is going to slap all of them. And Dave might have to add a bunch of animation frames to make up for the longer jump cycle. And if Bob and Carol decide to change the physics, say because Elaine discovers a problem in some other scenario, Alice is going to have to go back and fix all of the Frostfire Rift to account for the new physics. Alice and Bob and Carol have to agree on how the rocket boots will work before Alice can start designing levels and Bob and Carol can start coding physics and Dave can start doing animations. And Alice in scenario design can’t just start banging together the Frostfire Rift before Bob and Carol have worked out the basic jump physics for the rocket boots. The thing with video games is that they are big, complicated beasts built by several or several dozen or even several hundred people. And that is why we’re going to step AWAY from video games for a little while.
Especially when it comes to table-top RPGs. We also haven’t discussed treasure.īut – and it’s going to blow your mind when I say what I’m about to say – but, there is such a thing as OVERPLANNING. We haven’t figured out how all of our keys and gates work from a mechanical perspective. We have a skeletal backstory with a lot of missing pieces.
We have only a vague notion of who the antagonists are. Now, there’s a lot of details left to fill in and work out. We had a big spreadsheet that laid out the entire plot, encounter, and experience progression for the whole honking dungeon. The last time we did one of these dungeon things – a long, LONG time ago – we reached a major milestone.
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