RPGaDay: Write

One reason I GM as well as play is because I love to write.

I didn't love writing too much as a small child, because it took so long compared to reading.  Writing was something that actively got in the way of reading because after I'd read something, I was then made to write about it before I was allowed to do more reading.

Five year old me would be quite surprised by today me.

Long before I'd even heard of RPGs, I was writing fiction.  Mostly short stories; I like being able to tell a whole narrative in a compact form.  (I like reading them too; some of the largest books on my shelves are anthologies of horror, thriller and crime short stories.)  With most TTRPG adventures being a similar length to a short story, one might wonder if writing the one prepares you well for the other? 

And the answer is...kind of.

While it might not appear that way on the surface, writing adventures for TTRPGs is a very different business to writing fiction.  When I write fiction, I'm writing a story where I control all the characters and every aspect of the narrative.  Writing an adventure, I control very little.  So what I write isn't a story; it's a situation.  In my previous post that's what I was doing.  The situation may incorporate a story, in this case Rihanna's bloody revenge against a scheming accountant, but that's not the story of the adventure.  It's just the events that have lead to the current situation of a house where a horrific murder took place and a group of people who want to pay it a visit.  The story is going to depend on what they do when they get there.

I've definitely played in games where it felt like the GM had written a story rather than a situation.  I still enjoyed them, since they were good stories, but part of the fun of TTPRGs is the feeling of being part of the story, and of having an active effect on how things go.

Coming up with the situation is close to the best part of adventure writing for me, because it flows smoothly, similar to fiction writing.  The bit I have to do next for that Kult adventure where I start thinking about scenes and events is going to take much more work.  But the best part of all is when I get to a point in adventure where the only thing I have to write is 'See what happens.'