"For the player, nothing."
... is my long-standing "bumpersticker slogan" for what #HTTRPG is all about, encapsulating (but not explaining) why passionate roleplayers love the form.
It also echoes the yearning I feel.
I haven't had a GM who could deliver on that promise for a while, now. The last one (brilliant, lovable guy who _gets_ roleplayers) is focusing on his career/staying afloat and hasn't had time/energy. 😥
I've still been gaming, and it's been ... fine. Just, LOTS for the player.
Dragon's Flight, Challenge 41, is a case for how a thing can be HTT "shaped" but still frustrate.
There's a well-defined problem, the PCs are made aware of it, and that's the entire structure. Same as an HTT adventure, yay.
But ... all the actionable facts provided are military and/or hardware facts. So no amount of flex can expand the range of supported approaches beyond military and/or hardware actions.
20 minutes and some elbow grease could expand it dramatically.
Reading for the next adventure I'm going to run. Trying to find the overall threads so I can understand the adversaries in order to run a more high trust game. I just realized the front men are the "law and order" faction of the conservative party in the world. Which makes the people behind the scenes the... Project 2025 folks? Something like that. Holy shit, this makes it easier and also more disgusting.
Can someone who's not a white cis guy (or at least not the one I just blocked because he pulled a "gamers are the real persecuted minority" on someone) explain to me what the fuck "high trust gaming" is? Because from that guy's self-important morass of marketing buzzword drivel, it sounds like "just trust the GM to walk you through a wonderful land where player agency does not exist" and I want to know if this is some kind of dogwhistle, or if that one guy is just full of some kind of shit.
I'm doing a #HTTRPG design workshop with @SJohnRoss and it is expanding my tools for #ttrpg immensely.
I just watched someone presenting an adventure/campaign outline which I would just have accepted just two weeks back.
Now I'm going "There is no engaging problem to draw the PCs in, just a simple goal the players have to buy into." and "You talk about agency, but you only offer video game choices."
Might still be fun to play. Just talking about how *my* views are changing.
Some ways of trying to describe #HTTRPG to strangers. It's mostly about #AdventureDesign, in a style that existed commercially (on the fringes) from the early 80s until sometime in the mid-to-late 90s, before disappearing from game retail.
I run Discord workshops that teach the basics of designing in this style. Even if you don't have an interest in HTT itself, there's plenty to pilfer for other styles. Just ask! Workshops are free, text-only, and 1-on-1. I'm ghalev on Discord.
I'm currently digging through my lengthy conversation with him looking for the right approach and the right tools to go about this, but it was a very long and wordy conversation where we touch on every topic related to RPGs, occasionally getting back on track again. So it's not easy to find.
He can be critical about stuff that doesn't appeal to him, but I did just come across this:
So wherever I start is fine, just refine until we get there. Let's give this a try.
One hint for how start that he gave was:
Not having started the campaign, it's hard to tell what they care about, but I think part of the campaign, especially the start, is getting to know people, so they'll care about them. People do live in the wilderness. There will be some isolated farms, maybe even a small village, eking out a living under harsh circumstances. These are likely early victims of monsters and banditry.
And maybe I'm going to give them some hints for helpful character backgrounds. Like someone's relative disappeared disappeared, and the PC wants to find out what happened. Maybe even save them.
Recently I was fortunate to have a super interesting discussion ad-hoc adventure design workshop with S.John Ross, who has some very interesting ideas about adventure design, called High-Trust Trad. Trad meaning non-D&D, non-storygames, which is my sweet spot too (though I'm less purist); high-trust is a bit harder to explain, and I won't be able to do it justice here, but it focuses on the characters and how they approach the problems they encounter, the choices they make, how they interest with the various NPCs, etc. It should be roleplay-heavy, driven by in-game motivation, not by predetermined plot, mechanics or meta-game considerations.
A good HTT adventure is non-presumptive, which means it has no expectations about how the PCs will approach the various aspects of the problem. The adventure is made up of a cluster of problems, and for each problem, it should be trivial to come up with 6 different ways to approach it, and 6 more with a bit of thought. A limited list of options is not good enough.
From how I understand it, an HTT adventure is like a complex machine that's already in motion and will cause suffering unless the PCs can stop it. Which may involve discovering what the problem is in the first place.
S. John Ross's Toast of the Town is a great (and free) one-shot adventure that's a great example of HTT design.
He has a bunch of tools to help him flesh out the problems in his adventures. And he tried to explain them to me, and while I doubt I fully grasp them, I figured I'm going to try to apply them to my campaign ideas. Let's see how far I get.
S. John Ross
FredricT 😷💉🌻🌈
DThoris
Jenny (public node) 
Jens Reineking
Kevin Eagles
Martijn Vos