There are a few examples of Scene Based Adventures.
This link right HERE takes you to a Hobbit version of Scene Based Adventures
Here's a highly produced campaign using Scene Based Adventures called Titansgrave
Here's a link to a Scene Based Adventure in Dragon Age featuring minor celebrities
What I am curious about is, does anyone mind playing a Scene Based Adventure? Does anyone really mind a more linear adventure?
The gut response I'm worried about is this idea that DND needs to be very sandbox. But at the core of the game is dice, character classes and monsters. Exploration is something a DM has to learn how to do better with, same for RP, but at it's core it's character sheets and monster stats.
And there's nothing wrong with that game loop of Monster is defeated by players. In fact, there are video games where the player is just out to fight bosses, like Shadow of the Colossus. There are popular linear games that have fun mechanics and tell a very straightforward narrative with a few moments to explore and drift from the beaten path.
Much like how players: are not always great at Role Play, aren't all great at puzzles, aren't the greatest at spell selection, some prefer combat over RP or RP over combat. There have to be DMs that prefer a linear story and players that don't mind as long as they get to be freaking cool!
I haven't actually tried it, but there's no reason it wouldn't work. I mean D&D is a framework so you can fit it in to what ever format you want. I think scene based would work well for shorter adventures (one shots) or for groups that don't have as much time per session. Lots of adventures (like all of the published ones) are linear anyway. They may do things to make them not feel as linear in some cases, but they are. The biggest consideration is that the player and DM expectations are in alignment (session 0 would be super important). So yeah totally viable.
I've played a couple of campaigns in Ravenloft where scenes were part of it. I always hated those. Every time we went 'on script', I was literally grinding my teeth.
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I'm not sure what exactly the concept here is. Most adventures have scenes, in the sense of "here's something that's happening that we'll play out in a detail, and then leave things vague until the next important scene comes up", but I don't think that's what the authors are talking about. Rather, the original article about the hobbit seems to be "play your way through this fixed set of discrete events, collecting points which define how the final encounter goes".
Frankly, that's not even a great mechanic for a board game (while collecting points is often the point, there are usually also things you can do that don't directly score points, instead making later turns easier or more profitable, as well as some degree of choice as to path), and it sounds like a terrible setup for an RPG, but I may be misunderstanding the concept.
My DM likes to cram all sorts of extras into published adventures so I’m never sure what is original content and what is from him. With that caveat in mind, I believe we played through a published scenario that worked like this until we were ready to start Storm Kings Thunder proper at level 5. We did a bunch of adventuring in and around Parnast that was all loosely related and culminated in a final battle against an ogre (IIRC, this was two years ago now) and his gang. The composition of the ogre’s team and some of his tactics in the final battle were decided by which quests we’d done and how successful we’d been at them. It was pretty cool but I’m not sure if the other players in my group are even aware that was the format of our first 5 levels; I am married to the DM so get to hear extra details during the week. That there were actual points involved was explained to me after the fact.
It may be of interest to you to know that, in my group, we eschew travel time and random encounters, moving from major plot point location to major plot point location by airship. This definitely creates a sense of discrete scenarios even if we’re not specifically accumulating points to determine a boss fight composition/strategy. It wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste but I don’t mind it and can see the reasoning behind it. The DM feels bogged down by the incidentals of travel because of the vast distances involved. Like if you leave town at level one and it takes three weeks to travel to the the nearest city on foot, with random encounters each day, you’re level three by the time you get there but you haven’t done anything that advances the overarching plot lol. I like that we focus on meaningful adventuring but recognize that it can create pacing issues and might feel choppy or break verisimilitude in some way for others.
I agree, the Hobbit example is very low effort and isn't representative (^_^) :-D. But I think the other two options are better examples. But I don't blame you for skipping them. Life is short and time is money.
I think a better example would be the Dragon Age example. You dont need to watch the YouTube video, but the PDF should be available for free (legally) on DriveThruRPG.
So you don't have to read the full document, below are some examples of Exploration and RP scenes, I didn't add Combat because those are standard, and exploration uses the skills in exploration. And RP is pretty simple too. The goal of exploration is "I want something from the environment" and RP is "I want something from this person"
In it, on page 5, the exploration scene is set up as follows:
The next day in the mid-afternoon they arrive at the valley where Greenthorn is located.
They see the village below them. Beyond it there is a hillock with a tower on top.
Over the village they see carrion birds circling.
They see no one on the streets of Greenthorn.
The birds lead them to the village’s main square.
There they find four dead humans and five dead horses. The humans were clearly warriors of some sort and they went down fighting. They wear mail, though no weapons are in evidence.
Successful DC10 Medcine Check (translated for 5E players) determines that they’ve been there for at least two days.
Successful DC10 Perception Check turns up an armband with a griffon engraved on it in a saddlebag. This is the emblem of the Grey Wardens.
The Queen’s Boot is on the square.
A page down the next exploration encounter looks as follows:
EXPLORATION
This room was originally a barracks as well, but during the siege the bunks were broken up to make barricades and the room was set up as a trap for the Orlesians.
The door to this 40-foot by 80-foot room is unlocked.
The floor, walls, and ceiling are scorched black.
Scattered across the room there are burned and cracked bones.
There are three pressure plates in the center of the room. They can be detected with a successful TN13 Perception (Searching) test and disarmed with a successful TN 13 Dexterity (Traps) test.
If any of the pressure plates are stepped on, the room fills with roiling flames that inflict 3d6 damage.
The trap resets in 10 minutes.
The RP Sections are like this:
The Queen’s Boot is a typical Ferelden Inn: bar, kitchen, and tables downstairs; rooms for travelers upstairs.
There are front and back doors and windows that look into the main room.
The only survivor left in Greenthorn is inside The Queen’s Boot. Her name is Cally and she was the barmaid and sometime cook at the inn.
As the PCs approach, Devouring Corpses are trying to kill Cally.
Combat Option: There are five Devouring Corpses inside. The PCs can aid Cally in defeating them. Stats for Devouring Corpses are on the previous page.
Roleplaying Option: The PCs arrive just as Cally plants a cleaver into the head of the last Devouring
Corpse. She then says, “Speak to me and prove you are alive!”
The PCs can find out that the weirdness started two days ago.
Cally says that skeletal creatures appeared in the village and began killing people. Then some of those corpses rose from the dead and also attacked.
As far as she knows, she is the only person left alive in Greenthorn. The rest were killed or fled into the hills. She survived by “hiding and being good with a cleaver.”
The key piece of information that Cally can pass on is that the tower on the nearby hillock was not there 3 days ago. It appeared from nowhere and that’s when everything went crazy.
I think my reason for getting more linear games is, many of the games we're used to are very linear anyways.
To expect every DM to be a walking GTA or Skyrim Simulator is becoming less and less fun. But there might be other DMs that want to enjoy running scenarios. And players who view RP and exploration as moments to be cool and push things along. And you can fulfill that goal with linear stories as well.
I think what is challenging for a lot of DMs is trying to present an open world the appeals to all players, when in the end that world will have rules the players don't expect. I've played in these DM's games and the objectives are unclear. And the players have very little to hook them in meaningfully.
Call of the Netherdeep is linear, and tying players to: The rivals, the religions of Exandria, the dodecahedrons, the knowledge of the calamity, the two moons of Exandria and more importantly characters that have a reason to fight against victimhood and narcissism. Because a character who has victimhood mentality and moves on from it before the climax has so much to teach the villain of the adventure. The rivals can teach how narcissism and selfishness don't work for a great team. Characters that love the god's and their lore can learn a lot from the perspective of a person used by the gods. And ask questions about what that means to hold proper faith as a cleric or paladin.
These moments take so much more planning on the DM to do if it's more open world. But when everything is catered to the larger narrative, moments that fit the theme really hit.
But just like EA Games, Ubisoft, and From Software make different games, I think it's fine to make DND games that are for different types of players as well.
I think a huge difference between regular adventure writing and Scene Based Writing is wasted content. You can go into a dungeon and find empty rooms. Here you 'yadda yadda, so on and so forth' the empty rooms. Because at the end of the day an empty room can be every room when the enemy is defeated.
It sounds like the scene based games are basically a railroad with little or no place for character choice of path or action. Having the empty rooms/travel/ etc basically disappear eliminates options for downtime, side quests, etc as well. I’m running a mashup campaign of all the Phandalin modules + Saltmarsh reset in and a round Luiren in southern Faerun and the PCs are taking things from different modules as they see fit not in any DM proscribed order.
Born of Fire, I disagree with your 3 week exploration/travel description as having done nothing for the overarching storyline. To my mind you’ve done something highly significant - you’ve grown the characters from babes in arms to functional adventures actually ready to take on significant plot challenges. They are now (at level 3) far more skilled and far more survivable. Do you as a DM have to take that into account in encounter design? Yes but that really isn’t that hard. Characters normally grow from L1 to L3 quickly but slow down significantly at that point. The same 3 week trip started at L3 would not move you to 2/3 of the way to L4 so unless you had to have them at L1 (why?) it’s actually a significant step forward in the arc of the campaign.
I think a huge difference between regular adventure writing and Scene Based Writing is wasted content. You can go into a dungeon and find empty rooms. Here you 'yadda yadda, so on and so forth' the empty rooms. Because at the end of the day an empty room can be every room when the enemy is defeated.
Empty rooms aren't wasted content, because they aren't content at all. That said, there are only two ways of entirely eliminating wasted content: don't generate the content until the PCs actually go there, or don't give the PCs any choices, and both make for bad games. You can minimize wasted content by outlining (only filling in details and creating a scene when the PCs go there) or by providing tools and building blocks instead of scenes.
The Dragon Age example you give is a perfectly adequate scene description that I could see being inserted into a game -- with a substantial chance of being unused. And it's fine as long as you're willing to leave it unused.
It sounds like the scene based games are basically a railroad with little or no place for character choice of path or action. Having the empty rooms/travel/ etc basically disappear eliminates options for downtime, side quests, etc as well. I’m running a mashup campaign of all the Phandalin modules + Saltmarsh reset in and a round Luiren in southern Faerun and the PCs are taking things from different modules as they see fit not in any DM proscribed order.
Born of Fire, I disagree with your 3 week exploration/travel description as having done nothing for the overarching storyline. To my mind you’ve done something highly significant - you’ve grown the characters from babes in arms to functional adventures actually ready to take on significant plot challenges. They are now (at level 3) far more skilled and far more survivable. Do you as a DM have to take that into account in encounter design? Yes but that really isn’t that hard. Characters normally grow from L1 to L3 quickly but slow down significantly at that point. The same 3 week trip started at L3 would not move you to 2/3 of the way to L4 so unless you had to have them at L1 (why?) it’s actually a significant step forward in the arc of the campaign.
I can see where you might get the impression of a railroad but it’s actually the biggest sandbox ever. We often have so many things to do, we suffer from a bit of analysis paralysis when it comes time to decide where to airship next.
Last session, we wrapped up a scenario in Luskan that involved solving a gothic horror mystery and banishing an evil wizard to her own Ravenloft realm in order to save the city. This was a side quest that you won’t find in the published SKT. We discovered it something like a year ago (real time) and it’s been sitting on the back burner since then. The DM has leveled it as we leveled to keep it relevant and challenging. During the course of solving the mystery to save the city, which took about eight sessions, we did a fair number of things that didn’t advance the plot of this particular scenario nor the overarching plot, and we had many random encounters—it’s just the ones associated with travel that we don’t do.
Next session, we need to decide where to fly. We have five options to choose from ranging from attacking a cloud giant base to investigating a ranger’s disappearance (prolly culminating in a dragon encounter) to searching for leads on a party member’s long lost wife. Only two of the quests available are published SKT material, the rest is added homebrew so while it might sound like a railroad, you’ll just have to trust me that it’s really, really not. Like I said my DM loves to cram in extra stuff. Some of it does get ramped up as we level; it’s still there for us to get to no matter how long we wait, like Luskan, but he creates so much extra stuff that some of it falls to the wayside out of necessity—we’re over two years into SKT as it is heh. Leveling through random encounters between scenarios would just mean even more stuff saved for later or maybe even never getting to it. He’s got so much planned for material that I get why he doesn’t like rolling on the random encounter tables.
I suppose I should have mentioned that we adopted milestone leveling for this SKT campaign so random encounters during travel don’t even get us levels these days. They are pretty much just combats that waste time away from what we are trying to accomplish with a larger intent than just beating the people or critters we happen across between point A and point B.
Just wanted to add that, although we only adopted milestone leveling at the start of this campaign a couple of years ago, it’s been about a decade since we’ve been doing the airship thing. A TPK that prematurely ended our Rise of the Runelords campaign was the nail in the coffin for poorly tuned random encounters. My DM was very frustrated with himself and the whole turn of events; this change has worked well for us.
There are a few examples of Scene Based Adventures.
What I am curious about is, does anyone mind playing a Scene Based Adventure? Does anyone really mind a more linear adventure?
The gut response I'm worried about is this idea that DND needs to be very sandbox. But at the core of the game is dice, character classes and monsters. Exploration is something a DM has to learn how to do better with, same for RP, but at it's core it's character sheets and monster stats.
And there's nothing wrong with that game loop of Monster is defeated by players. In fact, there are video games where the player is just out to fight bosses, like Shadow of the Colossus. There are popular linear games that have fun mechanics and tell a very straightforward narrative with a few moments to explore and drift from the beaten path.
Much like how players: are not always great at Role Play, aren't all great at puzzles, aren't the greatest at spell selection, some prefer combat over RP or RP over combat. There have to be DMs that prefer a linear story and players that don't mind as long as they get to be freaking cool!
"All I'm hearing is words... DO SOMETHING!"
I haven't actually tried it, but there's no reason it wouldn't work. I mean D&D is a framework so you can fit it in to what ever format you want. I think scene based would work well for shorter adventures (one shots) or for groups that don't have as much time per session. Lots of adventures (like all of the published ones) are linear anyway. They may do things to make them not feel as linear in some cases, but they are. The biggest consideration is that the player and DM expectations are in alignment (session 0 would be super important). So yeah totally viable.
I've played a couple of campaigns in Ravenloft where scenes were part of it. I always hated those. Every time we went 'on script', I was literally grinding my teeth.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I'm not sure what exactly the concept here is. Most adventures have scenes, in the sense of "here's something that's happening that we'll play out in a detail, and then leave things vague until the next important scene comes up", but I don't think that's what the authors are talking about. Rather, the original article about the hobbit seems to be "play your way through this fixed set of discrete events, collecting points which define how the final encounter goes".
Frankly, that's not even a great mechanic for a board game (while collecting points is often the point, there are usually also things you can do that don't directly score points, instead making later turns easier or more profitable, as well as some degree of choice as to path), and it sounds like a terrible setup for an RPG, but I may be misunderstanding the concept.
Out of curiosity, what sorts of freedoms do you as a player want? And what sorts of freedoms would seem unreasonable?
"All I'm hearing is words... DO SOMETHING!"
My DM likes to cram all sorts of extras into published adventures so I’m never sure what is original content and what is from him. With that caveat in mind, I believe we played through a published scenario that worked like this until we were ready to start Storm Kings Thunder proper at level 5. We did a bunch of adventuring in and around Parnast that was all loosely related and culminated in a final battle against an ogre (IIRC, this was two years ago now) and his gang. The composition of the ogre’s team and some of his tactics in the final battle were decided by which quests we’d done and how successful we’d been at them. It was pretty cool but I’m not sure if the other players in my group are even aware that was the format of our first 5 levels; I am married to the DM so get to hear extra details during the week. That there were actual points involved was explained to me after the fact.
It may be of interest to you to know that, in my group, we eschew travel time and random encounters, moving from major plot point location to major plot point location by airship. This definitely creates a sense of discrete scenarios even if we’re not specifically accumulating points to determine a boss fight composition/strategy. It wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste but I don’t mind it and can see the reasoning behind it. The DM feels bogged down by the incidentals of travel because of the vast distances involved. Like if you leave town at level one and it takes three weeks to travel to the the nearest city on foot, with random encounters each day, you’re level three by the time you get there but you haven’t done anything that advances the overarching plot lol. I like that we focus on meaningful adventuring but recognize that it can create pacing issues and might feel choppy or break verisimilitude in some way for others.
I agree, the Hobbit example is very low effort and isn't representative (^_^) :-D. But I think the other two options are better examples. But I don't blame you for skipping them. Life is short and time is money.
I think a better example would be the Dragon Age example. You dont need to watch the YouTube video, but the PDF should be available for free (legally) on DriveThruRPG.
So you don't have to read the full document, below are some examples of Exploration and RP scenes, I didn't add Combat because those are standard, and exploration uses the skills in exploration. And RP is pretty simple too. The goal of exploration is "I want something from the environment" and RP is "I want something from this person"
In it, on page 5, the exploration scene is set up as follows:
The next day in the mid-afternoon they arrive at the valley where Greenthorn is located.
A page down the next exploration encounter looks as follows:
EXPLORATION
for the Orlesians.
The RP Sections are like this:
"All I'm hearing is words... DO SOMETHING!"
I think my reason for getting more linear games is, many of the games we're used to are very linear anyways.
To expect every DM to be a walking GTA or Skyrim Simulator is becoming less and less fun. But there might be other DMs that want to enjoy running scenarios. And players who view RP and exploration as moments to be cool and push things along. And you can fulfill that goal with linear stories as well.
I think what is challenging for a lot of DMs is trying to present an open world the appeals to all players, when in the end that world will have rules the players don't expect. I've played in these DM's games and the objectives are unclear. And the players have very little to hook them in meaningfully.
Call of the Netherdeep is linear, and tying players to: The rivals, the religions of Exandria, the dodecahedrons, the knowledge of the calamity, the two moons of Exandria and more importantly characters that have a reason to fight against victimhood and narcissism. Because a character who has victimhood mentality and moves on from it before the climax has so much to teach the villain of the adventure. The rivals can teach how narcissism and selfishness don't work for a great team. Characters that love the god's and their lore can learn a lot from the perspective of a person used by the gods. And ask questions about what that means to hold proper faith as a cleric or paladin.
These moments take so much more planning on the DM to do if it's more open world. But when everything is catered to the larger narrative, moments that fit the theme really hit.
But just like EA Games, Ubisoft, and From Software make different games, I think it's fine to make DND games that are for different types of players as well.
"All I'm hearing is words... DO SOMETHING!"
I think a huge difference between regular adventure writing and Scene Based Writing is wasted content. You can go into a dungeon and find empty rooms. Here you 'yadda yadda, so on and so forth' the empty rooms. Because at the end of the day an empty room can be every room when the enemy is defeated.
"All I'm hearing is words... DO SOMETHING!"
It sounds like the scene based games are basically a railroad with little or no place for character choice of path or action. Having the empty rooms/travel/ etc basically disappear eliminates options for downtime, side quests, etc as well. I’m running a mashup campaign of all the Phandalin modules + Saltmarsh reset in and a round Luiren in southern Faerun and the PCs are taking things from different modules as they see fit not in any DM proscribed order.
Born of Fire, I disagree with your 3 week exploration/travel description as having done nothing for the overarching storyline. To my mind you’ve done something highly significant - you’ve grown the characters from babes in arms to functional adventures actually ready to take on significant plot challenges. They are now (at level 3) far more skilled and far more survivable. Do you as a DM have to take that into account in encounter design? Yes but that really isn’t that hard. Characters normally grow from L1 to L3 quickly but slow down significantly at that point. The same 3 week trip started at L3 would not move you to 2/3 of the way to L4 so unless you had to have them at L1 (why?) it’s actually a significant step forward in the arc of the campaign.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
If I wanted to play a CRPG, I'd play a CRPG.
Empty rooms aren't wasted content, because they aren't content at all. That said, there are only two ways of entirely eliminating wasted content: don't generate the content until the PCs actually go there, or don't give the PCs any choices, and both make for bad games. You can minimize wasted content by outlining (only filling in details and creating a scene when the PCs go there) or by providing tools and building blocks instead of scenes.
The Dragon Age example you give is a perfectly adequate scene description that I could see being inserted into a game -- with a substantial chance of being unused. And it's fine as long as you're willing to leave it unused.
I can see where you might get the impression of a railroad but it’s actually the biggest sandbox ever. We often have so many things to do, we suffer from a bit of analysis paralysis when it comes time to decide where to airship next.
Last session, we wrapped up a scenario in Luskan that involved solving a gothic horror mystery and banishing an evil wizard to her own Ravenloft realm in order to save the city. This was a side quest that you won’t find in the published SKT. We discovered it something like a year ago (real time) and it’s been sitting on the back burner since then. The DM has leveled it as we leveled to keep it relevant and challenging. During the course of solving the mystery to save the city, which took about eight sessions, we did a fair number of things that didn’t advance the plot of this particular scenario nor the overarching plot, and we had many random encounters—it’s just the ones associated with travel that we don’t do.
Next session, we need to decide where to fly. We have five options to choose from ranging from attacking a cloud giant base to investigating a ranger’s disappearance (prolly culminating in a dragon encounter) to searching for leads on a party member’s long lost wife. Only two of the quests available are published SKT material, the rest is added homebrew so while it might sound like a railroad, you’ll just have to trust me that it’s really, really not. Like I said my DM loves to cram in extra stuff. Some of it does get ramped up as we level; it’s still there for us to get to no matter how long we wait, like Luskan, but he creates so much extra stuff that some of it falls to the wayside out of necessity—we’re over two years into SKT as it is heh. Leveling through random encounters between scenarios would just mean even more stuff saved for later or maybe even never getting to it. He’s got so much planned for material that I get why he doesn’t like rolling on the random encounter tables.
I suppose I should have mentioned that we adopted milestone leveling for this SKT campaign so random encounters during travel don’t even get us levels these days. They are pretty much just combats that waste time away from what we are trying to accomplish with a larger intent than just beating the people or critters we happen across between point A and point B.
Just wanted to add that, although we only adopted milestone leveling at the start of this campaign a couple of years ago, it’s been about a decade since we’ve been doing the airship thing. A TPK that prematurely ended our Rise of the Runelords campaign was the nail in the coffin for poorly tuned random encounters. My DM was very frustrated with himself and the whole turn of events; this change has worked well for us.