11 November 2011 caused irreversible damage to my mental development. I grew up knee-deep in the seemingly infinite world of Skyrim; living in it when I had time to play, and day dreaming when I was in school. Endless supply of dungeons and caves, many smaller factions spread across the region to get into the world, and a civil war backdrop that shadows the main campaign where you hunt dragons – still sounds like a dream.
You are chucked into a huge unknown world. You are the chosen one and must travel across the realm to understand why the ancient dragons are back and are assaulting the people. You do some odd jobs here and there, until you realise that you have seriously strayed off the main plot and are in the middle of something completely unrelated.
The special sauce was always in discovering these huge quests when you strayed off the path and found them tucked in corners.
Anyone who has played Skyrim will tell you that the dragons are only there for you to kill when they jump you as random encounters on your way to do side quests, and that The Blades are the least important of all the factions in Skyrim.
Very few people actually defeat Alduin, but anyone who has sunk their teeth into the game has either destroyed or rebuilt the Dark Brotherhood.
So, naturally, I tried to capture the same feeling in my first ever self-written adventure.
I put towers on top of dungeons on top of caves. I put quest boards to collect missions. I built a hex map and placed everything on it, evenly spaced out. I tried to fill the region to the brim with quests.
I had the map of Skyrim open on a second screen as I drew my own map. However, there was a problem with this approach: "How exactly are the players supposed to do all of these things?"
The beast that broke my campaign was pacing. I had a main plot for the players, and built lots of secret points of interests that they would discover, which were to help them in their main quest. But it's just so much stuff… and they are kinda chunky too?
Brittleshin Pass from Skyrim, a side quest dungeon that many would bump into as they move west from Whiterun (or on their way back from Bleak Falls Barrow), offers: multiple combat encounters with different enemies, puzzles, and traps of varying complexities and types, lots of world building and environmental story-telling, a necromancer boss fight, and a s**t ton of loot; all resolved within fifteen minutes, a fraction of your playtime in a session at the table.
The exact same dungeon will take at least a full session for my players to clear, disqualifying it from giving that same experience as Skyrim.
My players were tasked with finding a scouting party that went missing up north; the scouts were jumped by some creatures and dragged into a cave.
I thought of placing a very large dungeon on the way that the players would bump into, fight the guardian at the entrance, peek in, clear the first room or two, then skedaddle to return back later, after their main quest was done.
This was supposed to be the main dungeon throughout the campaign that they would return to multiple times.
It took an entire real life month for the party to depart on their quest, get a taste of the big dungeon, and reach their actual destination.
Lesson learned. Blindly copying a Skyrim-type open world where a high quantity of secret caves and dungeons to explore is a major feature does not translate to overland exploration in Table Top Role-Playing Games. There is no way to make meaningful progress through a narrative with so many pit-stops along the way.
What I wanted was to simulate the experience of Skyrim, not bring Skyrim to the table 1:1. Then, I must pick and choose exactly what elements of Skyrim I want to present at my table, and before implementing them, fit them into a framework that suits my game.
If I want my players to be running around doing lots of episodic side-quests without really connecting them, I should just ditch the main quest altogether. If I want to catch players by surprise with secret content as they travel to their destination, I can implement this with some intentionally designed random encounters.
Maybe I want them to get caught up in side-adventures that escalate into much larger plots? This one is the trap, and the answer is: we don’t need to prepare this ahead of time. This can be done at runtime, between sessions. We can escalate things as we play.
That month of seeing my players stumble around, trying to get to the northern cave really drained me. I knew how much cool content I had prepared for them, but seeing the pace at which we were playing, we would NEVER get to do any of these things...
This upset me a lot, causing me to get tired and bored of my own game. No one should hate their own game.
What I will be keeping in mind from now on is that video games or other mediums that we get inspired from have drastically different pacings. TTRPGs, by their nature, can be very slow. There is only so much I can accomplish in my weekly four hour sessions – assuming that the session did happen, attendance was proper, and we weren’t interrupted before the usual time to wrap things up.
It is very easy to get ahead of ourselves and prepare a bunch of social encounters and dungeons back to back, only to realise that this is two months of content, which, if fully committed to by the GM (game master), will block any chance of emergent gameplay. This is a disconnect between the GM and the players that we want to avoid.
So, what’s my concrete advice? Do the cool thing that you buried behind two months of content in your very next session. It doesn't have to have this dramatic build-up that you think it requires.
The drum roll, although seems cool in prep-time, is often failing at delivering the tension at play-time. Players wanna do the cool s**t, not look at the cool s**t on the horizon. It’ll be cool, I promise.
Written by Umut Ucak
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