In my previous craft post, I included a paragraph about adventure writing. There’s posts about why writing adventures is more interesting than systems (here for example), but if someone’s joy is ruleset tinkering, they should do it. Today I just want to develop why I see adventure writing as an important part of the craft.
Consider, for a moment, you want to take fiction writing as a hobby.
For the writing craft, you need to write every day. You need to find time in your schedule (if you only have ten minutes a day to write, write those ten minutes and don’t skip it). You need to develop the secondary craft of persistence. You need to discover the tools for that and how to best apply them, like chronometers, alarms, setting up a writing desk, carrying a notebook and pen with you, determine which other hobbies you are willing to set aside for writing. You need too to learn to feel bored through the day to get the imagination flowing, avoiding stimulus.
There’s also the daily word quota, which by the end of the year will prove that you can write much more than you ever thought possible. The daily word quota can teach the craft of proper outlining and planning, keeping at it, getting into the flow of the hobby, and properly doing research to have material to fill those words. The secondary tool for it is keeping a journal so your memories, feelings and observations serve as inspiration. You may also keep a writing journal where you write about the writing itself to unlock ideas and understand the craft.
Once you built the techniques for consistent practice, you assess the creative tools of writing itself. You try taking notes by hand vs typing. You try which is the better writing space among your options, as well as time of the day. You try outline structures and which suits you best. You try whatever the first draft is better by hand or using the word processor. You try editing it in the processor vs printing the pages and altering them by pen. Even if you don’t like writing longhand, doing it once and then typing it teaches self-editing. Daily writing is used to figure out all that.
In the meanwhile, you read every day. In amounts much larger than your word quota. Serious reading, Twitter doesn’t count. You also grab style guides and dictionaries. By taking notes, you gather specialized knowledge. Reading makes you aware of sound and structure, which leads to the valuable tool of reading your own prose out loud while editing. You grab a novel, take chapter notes, and compares them to verify how the writer develops themes and mood reversals through them. You grab a short story, rewrite it by copying word by word to rediscover it, sets it aside, then rewrite it word by word without looking, using your own voice when memory falters.
The above is barely a tenth of everything you can use to begin writing. The writing hobby has knowledge and practices that must be learned through tools, and adventure writing is the equivalent tool in our hobby. I believe adventure writing covers, for roleplaying, most of the craft elements.
“Let’s pretend” is the first contact we have with key elements such as world simulation, negotiating outcomes, sharing information, and appropriating imagery/concepts from many sources as your personal toy. In the playground, the proposal for the afternoon’s game was the actual point of engagement, with rules negotiation being just an interruption, if sometimes necessary. Soon we returned to the back-and-forth of imagining the characters and situations.
We have adult maturity to engage with roleplaying, but we still contend with childish play principles. Adventure writing acts as the tool for the referee to tap into that source, even away from the table.
It’s not a talent or gift, but craft, the result of daily effort and deliberate thought, plus a boundless enthusiasm for imaginative play that energizes through the dreary and frustrating parts of writing itself. Through scenario design, we are forced to consider what will actually happen on the table, moment by moment, during a session or many. Back at the playground, back at the characters and situations. You are forced to consider 99% of what playing as a child was, instead of the 1% of interruption, and that’s intimidating.
Practice brings the crafts-person closer to the other tools as well. Rules are only considered to the extent they aid in running a specific adventure. Rule creation becomes more involved, specific, and better – I look fondly at adventures with their own specific procedures more than new systems. Writing adventures without first considering how it will be resolved at the table, just what would be interesting, brings productive reflection as to what you want from rulesets. This is why system-agnostic adventures are engaging, as the presentation of play is priority.
Constant adventure writing forces the referee, much like constant fictional writing, to destroy any muse-like model of creative inspiration in favor of inspiration as duty, returning to childlike imagination where everything can be a starting point, every character in a movie can be an NPC, any room you pass by can be the dimensions of a dungeon, any object can be a treasure or MacGuffin, any memory can be a hook. You get away from the internalized shame that adulthood brings through a combination of Failed Novelist Syndrome, “cringe” avoidance and the need to be wholly original to sell oneself; Plastic Man can show up, name and all, in a D&D campaign because it’s just play pretend, like he used to show up in the playground. Recently, watching stand-up, I took note of both the comedian’s mannerisms and the strange grumpy clown he described, NPCs to lift wholesale. The practice of stealing for your creative ends, not just “inspiration” but concrete stealing, is key to writing adventures consistently.
When writing an adventure, you are forced to contend with player agency and creating meaningful decisions, learning those concepts through repeated practice better than thousand iterations of social media discourse can teach. You must decide your preferred way to open a session and introduce a situation, and why. Decide how to involve characters and set consequences for a campaign. Which touchstones better communicate the scenario’s mood and ideas. How to apply expectations and desires to the campaign as creative project. How to write NPCs, making them impactful and easy to interact. How to set challenges and telegraph risks. What should be included in your prep for the preferred GMing style.
That and much more, reaching for the childlike source of play, learning to do it better. Nearly all the questions included in my first craft post can be discussed through adventure design.
Writing adventures forces you to be at the table while away. Not as important as actual play, but compared to writing rules, it makes us look at what’s written and say “I will be doing this with other people for hours and hours. This is what we are there for.” It teaches us the craft by targeting everything meaningful about it. And if you don’t know how to start writing an adventure, why not use some of the tools I listed for writing in general?
Roll to Doubt 