Dragna's Patreon DevBlog | Putting the Pieces Together

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Patreon DevBlog #2 | Putting the Pieces Together

This week, I worked on an assortment of projects:

• building out Curse of Strahd: Re-Reloaded, my massive overhaul of the original Curse of Strahd: Reloaded,
• brainstorming my additions/revisions to the DM’s Toolkit, and
• finalizing the draft articles and scripts for my Dungeon Mentor course, Dungeon Master Basics.

While I did a solid amount of creative work on these projects, a lot of my mental effort this week was also spent on organization and planning—figuring out which pieces should go where, which kind of presentation I should use, and what tools I should use along the way.

Problem 1: How can I avoid letting Strahd’s introduction fall flat?

In my revision of Curse of Strahd: Reloaded, I chose to introduce Strahd at the River Ivlis Crossroads, with a goal of emulating the tense introductory “black carriage” encounter from Curse of Strahd: Twice Bitten.

Here was my initial take on the encounter: Strahd shows up in his black carriage, gets out with Escher, and chats with the PCs. He diplomatically interrogates them as to their intentions and destinations, using his charm ability if they resist, punishing rude, charmed PCs with his bite, and calling on a horde of dire wolves if the other PCs get handsy.

This was fine in theory—but in practice, it fell utterly flat. Why? It had no dramatic question—there was nothing, utterly, for the players to do. The scene relied entirely on Strahd’s agency, and ended only when he got bored—a sure recipe for leaving the players bored as well. If the players didn't inject some tension themselves (e.g., by mouthing off to Strahd), there was none to be found for miles.

I decided I needed to introduce a dramatic question, or at least the shape of one—something to introduce actual tension to the scene. Then, I remembered that Gertruda exists, and remembered that, in Reloaded, Mad Mary explicitly visits Ismark while the players are in Barovia to tell them about her missing daughter.

My first, gut instinct was to use this as an opportunity to set up Escher as an antagonist. As a bard, I’ve given him (among other spells) access to disguise magic. Why not have Escher disguise himself as Gertruda, have Strahd introduce him as “a lost young woman that he had found in the woods,” and have Ireena point out Gertruda’s identity? For added good measure, I could make “Gertruda” a little disheveled and give her some bite marks on her neck.

As much as I liked the initial idea, I also soon grew uncomfortable with it. It seemed undignified for Strahd to play this kind of “practical joke” on the PCs—if there’s one thing I know about him, it’s that, as per his Lawful Evil nature, lying is something he takes very seriously. Plus, making Gertruda look explicitly like a victim of his went against the “civilized” veneer that Strahd tries to wear in public. While Strahd is a cruel brute at heart, I felt that now wasn’t the time to make that clear.

New plan: Instead of Escher in disguise, Strahd is with the real Gertruda. Instead of being roughed-up or bitten, she’s in tip-top shape (though, of course, charmed by Strahd). In the words of TVTropes, Nothing is Scarier than the unknown; instead of telling the players what Strahd has already done with Gertruda, freak them out by forcing them to imagine what he might do with her.

From here, the dramatic question is simple: Will the PCs overcome their natural cowardice and challenge Strahd for Gertruda’s safety? Or will they back down and prove their unworthiness?

Obviously, this is a no-win encounter—Strahd’s got six dire wolves, plus Escher, ready to take on the party if they get mouthy. At the same time, this is a fantastic opportunity to aggressively push the players to define who their characters are in a way that is hopefully guaranteed to be evocative, memorable, and all-around engaging.

It’s not whether the players win or lose—it’s how they play the game.

(As an additional benefit: This cleanly, with largely personal stakes, conveys why Strahd is a bad dude and why the PCs need to take him down for the good of Barovia.)

Problem 2: How do I streamline and simplify the existing session/adventure-planning materials in the DM’s Toolkit?

Right now, the Patreon DM’s Toolkit on the Bronze Masterpost contains an assortment of materials intended to help new and intermediate DMs. They include, among others, the “Building an Adventure” reference sheet, the “Planning a Session” reference sheet, the “Session Plan Template,” and the “Three-Act Adventure Planning Template.”

These specific materials, unfortunately, have two big problems:

• Most of them were written at different points in my DMing educational career, so they’re both practically and theoretically disconnected from each other.
• Many of them are overstuffed with content—both in a way that patrons have told me feels intimidating, and in a way that I, personally, feel is far more complicated than my own approach to running games.

Given the community’s interest in additional focus on the DM’s Toolkit, I decided to prioritize revising and simplifying these materials this month. At the same time, I wasn’t entirely sure where to start. How do you boil down this much content into something digestible, comprehensive, and (above all else) practical?

While reviewing these materials, however, I realized something: In almost every one of these materials, I had confused the process of organizing content with the process of creating content. This was an understandable mistake—I’ve got a lot of experience organizing content (while running modules such as Curse of Strahd) and a lot of experience creating content (while building homebrew adventures), but I had never actually bothered to distinguish the two in my mind.

The benefit of distinguishing them, though, is that it let me offload most of the actual theoretical complexity onto the building-an-adventure materials, and place most of the practical content onto the session-planning materials.

Here’s where I settled:

• The building an adventure reference sheet should tell you how to create an original, homebrew adventure.
• The adventure building template should give you a template for creating that original, homebrew adventure.
• The planning a session reference sheet should tell you how to organize the content you already have into a coherent session plan.
• The session plan template should give you a template for organizing that content you already have into that coherent session plan.

This might seem obvious in retrospect, but at the time I was putting all these together, it wasn’t! (Or, at least, it wasn’t to me.)

Problem #3: How do I distinguish between “narration” and “description”?

As part of the Dungeon Master Basics course for Dungeon Mentor, I knew that I needed to teach new DMs how to properly, y’know, talk at the table. I didn’t want to take any skill for granted, and that meant I needed to teach DMs how to describe things and how to narrate them.

At the same time, my first draft of the course put a lot of things into “Description” that could also easily fit under “Narration,” or vice-versa—diction, show-don’t-tell, volume, speed, and so on. Moreover, the “Narration” section didn’t really tell you what narration actually was or how to do it, aside from the basic idea of “narration means describing events.” Similarly, the “Description” lesson seemed more focused on guides to specific examples (e.g., "How to Describe an Environment") than a general-use guide. The whole point of the Dungeon Mentor project was to stop giving guides to specific examples like most of YouTube, and start teaching people generalizable skills!

Plus, things got even more complicated when I remembered that I’d already run a Patreon workshop on Improving DMing Narration and Description, which had lots of stuff in it that I’d forgotten to include in my first draft of the Dungeon Mentor lessons. So now I had to organize a lot of stuff and figure out where everything should go.

As I sorted through all this material, I found myself revisiting a design principle that I’ve been trying to stick to over the past several weeks: do everything intentionally.

In short: Don’t just design something because it seems cool, or you saw it on TV. Do it because it actively scaffolds or develops the narrative or gameplay experience that you’re trying to create.

Once I saw my work through that lens, everything fell into place.

What is the purpose of description? It provides exposition (what can you interact with, and how do you expect these things to behave?) and immersion (you’re actually in a fantasy world!).

What is the purpose of narration? It also provides exposition (what around you is changing, what might you need to react to, and how do you expect these things to behave?) and immersion (this fantasy world exists independently of you).

That let me start from a much firmer and cleaner theoretical foundation when revising these lessons. As an added benefit, it also made clear to me that a lot of the concepts I’d been developing under Description and Narration weren’t actually about those topics at all. Instead, stuff like diction, volume, and talking speed were about creating atmosphere—and so I created a new lesson called Creating Atmosphere and shoved all that stuff into it.

Problem #4: How do I convince people not to use personal hooks in Curse of Strahd: Reloaded?

In the original Curse of Strahd: Reloaded, I proposed what eventually became a fairly popular community modification: an adventure hook called Secrets of the Tarokka. Instead of the RAW hooks offered in the original module, the PCs received dreams from Madam Eva inviting them to Barovia to “secure their destinies.” Once in Barovia, each PC had their own individual quest to pursue, plus the group’s overall quest to find the Tarokka items and kill Strahd.

While I was initially happy with this adventure hook when I published it, running Twice Bitten and developing my understanding of dramatic questions and narrative/game design has convinced me that, in many ways, this hook is worse than some of the RAW hooks. In my own experience, I’ve seen how this homebrew adventure hook makes the Strahd plotline feel like a distraction at best and pointless at worst. “Why are we preparing to fight Strahd?” the question goes. “Because the DM (through Madam Eva) told us to,” the inevitable, unspoken reply comes.

As such, I felt that I needed a way to convince people reading and running the revised Reloaded to stick to my new adventure hook—by which Death House lures adventurers into it and then spirits them away to Barovia upon their escape—rather than trying to push personal, tailored adventure hooks into the adventure as well. 

This wasn’t just a vanity project, either—despite speaking with some DMs who have pulled this off beautifully in their own campaigns, I’ve become nonetheless convinced that, as a general rule, and for most DMs, Curse of Strahd is a far stronger and more memorable experience when Strahd is the centerpiece of the adventure, rather than the players’ personal backstories.

I spent a long time typing up and rewriting arguments for the Strahd-centric experience and against using personal hooks or Tarokka readings, but none of them really got to the core of the issue—all of my points were easily answered by “But I want to give my players individual side quests.” I didn’t really have a good response to this other than the wordy, messy, and arcane: “But it will complicate the experience, weaken the overall dramatic tension, and risk unforeseen complications in the future! Woe! Woe unto thee!”

While discussing this issue with my friend Paintknight, he pointed out that a lot of DMs choose personal hooks to Barovia because they want to avoid the feeling of railroading. He went on to suggest some fascinating ideas for how the adventure might be changed to give the players an engaging, personal mystery experience that extends until the end of the campaign.

My response (paraphrased): “That’s a great idea, but it’s not what I think Curse of Strahd is about. Curse of Strahd is about deciding to go kill a vampire because he was a jerk to you and won’t let you go home. If someone is looking for a personalized, tailored campaign, they should either go look somewhere else or completely rework the module in a way that I'm not prepared to help with.”

His response (paraphrased): “...why not just say that?”

And he was absolutely right.

This, I think, somewhat echoes the concept of “intent-driven design.” In order to properly argue your intent for a design feature, you need to make clear what your goal is for it.

And, in this case, because I hadn’t actually enunciated my goal for the guide I was writing (tell a kickass fish-out-of-water story about killing a vampire in a strange, forgotten land), I had really struggled to make an argument for why people should use what I’d designed.

Know your goals! Know how to communicate your goals! Make sure your design follows those goals!

From that, even if everything doesn’t immediately fall into place, everything should at least become significantly easier.

Problem #5: How do I write Rictavio’s story?

One of my design goals for the players’ first night in Vallaki in the revised Curse of Strahd: Reloaded was introducing, or at least hinting at, all of the key players as quickly as possible. As such, I knew that I had to introduce Rictavio, the colorful ringmaster, by having him put on some kind of performance for the Blue Water Inn while the players are having dinner there.

At the same time, I knew that he couldn’t play music. (As per the book, Rictavio is not particularly musical.) I also wanted his performance to be memorable, such that this colorful character would actually stick in my players’ minds. I also knew that I wanted to use his performance as a chance to shine a light on the Wachter brothers, because who else would demand a performance and interrupt this poor ringmaster’s evening?

The problem: The Wachter brothers are drunkards. They don’t want something sad; they want something funny.

And I’m very very bad at writing comedy.

Fortunately, as I’ve previously noted, Open AI’s ChatGPT is, at least theoretically, pretty good at it! After a few back-and-forths with the chatbot to generate ideas, plus a few iterations to shape and clean up the material it was generating, I sent it the following final prompt:

Rictavio is an entertainer in search of new acts for his traveling carnival. His writing makes frequent mention of conversations with Drusilla (which the journal fails to mention is the name of Rictavio's horse) and recounts many long and tedious journeys by wagon. Rictavio has also written about various "oddities" he has seen in his travels, including:

- A "werehare" child (a boy who transforms into a rabbit on nights of the full moon)

- A half-orc woman named Gorabacha who could chew through iron chains

- A giant, man-eating plant that had the most remarkable singing voice

- A pair of conjoined goblins

- A small man with no legs named Filmore Stunk, who could drink whole casks of wine without getting drunk

Write, in detail, the story of the "giant, man-eating plant that had the most remarkable singing voice." This story should not be dramatic, but comedic in a way that would entertain bawdy drunken adults in the medieval era. Try to fit in as many comedic moments as possible. Don't summarize anything that happens in the story; instead, write it beat-by-beat, including dialogue.

The story should also be written in the first person, and should include the following plot points: (1) Rictavio hears the singing voice from a distance, (2) Rictavio approaches the source of the singing, (3) Rictavio observes the plant singing, (4) one of Rictavio's carnival members approaches the plant and tries to urinate on it, (5) the plant eats that carnival member, and (6) a short sequence of events that leads to a hilarious punchline.

The result it spat back out blew me away, and actually made me laugh out loud the first time I read it! After some tweaks from myself and Paintknight, plus some positive feedback from the Patreon Discord, I was pretty confident that Rictavio’s story would go over pretty well. (You can read the final draft of the story, as well as the rest of the draft content for the Blue Water Inn, in the current Re-Reloaded draft guide.)

Dragna’s Campaign Advice Roundup | January 21, 2023

• Remember that bringing PCs to a new tier (e.g., from level 10 to level 11) represents a HUGE boost in power. Remember also that giving the PCs a single additional NPC of comparable power to a single PC also represents a HUGE boost in power.
• Remember that, while solo boss monsters work best in three-phase boss battles, there’s no reason why you can’t bulk those multi-phase battles up with additional minions, with each “wave” of minions linked to a separate “phase” of the boss. Due to the “action economy” (i.e., the mathematical implications of Challenge Ratings 2.0), adding a few low-CR minions goes a long way to strengthening even a high-CR foe. Plus, the three-phase setup means that the players can’t really focus-fire the boss and ignore the minions—the fight will go on for too long for the players to let wave after wave minions pile up!

If you enjoyed this blog and would like to see a weekly developer’s blog series replace the current monthly homebrew content packs, or if you would prefer to keep the monthly homebrew content packs and forego a blog series, please vote on the Google Form here.