Write what you know?

[tavis]

I've been paid to write hundreds of thousands of words of RPG material, and have always been very pleased to do so. But only recently did any of this draw on an experience from actual play, as celebrated in this thread. That felt awesome, but it (and something Kellri said in Mike Briault's thread at the K&K Alehouse) also made me think about the relationship between professional RPG writing and the activity it's supposed to exist to support.

I'm deeply impressed by RPG writing that has a clear link to actual play. Rob Kuntz's Bottle City is awesome in itself, but the anecdotes about how it played out back in the day are so amazing to me that it's hard for me to judge it on its own merits. The Arduin Grimoire stuff I'm reading now is a clearer example - on the face of it I can't imagine using many of those rules in my own game, but I sure am a sucker for pronouncements like "these rules were developed in my campaign over three years, and they work."

In theory, modern first-party RPG material undergoes a depth of playtesting that involves many more hours of actual-play experience - AFAIK Rob ran Bottle City once, while WotC got feedback from probably hundreds of gaming groups about at least some of their material (e.g. the barbarian playtest). I can't speak to that first hand - I certainly have invested dozens of playtest hours in all my third-party writing, but when I use it later for actual play (tonight I should be doing pregens for a Gen Con tournament) I always find things that make me think "gee, wish I'd noticed that before." It's kind of an apples and oranges comparison because the new-school stuff demands a different order of mechanical playtesting. Bottle City has a much clearer relationship to the culture of play than a similar number of words of epic tier fighter attack powers, and a single group can experience much more of that material - part of my "gee" factor is that at any given tier, the PCs we playtested had a different selection of powers & it'd take forever to really use them all!

All this is a long-winded way of asking: what's the relationship between publication and actual play for the non-hirelings in the old-school renaissance? Do the advantages of amateur writing - a term I use in the truest, passion-driven sense - such as getting to choose your own subject and not being subject to commercial pressures lead to more writing from personal experience? Or do you write first and playtest later, or does writing offer a chance to do something different from actual play?

[Melan]

I always playtest everything* - usually once, although sometimes there are opportunities for a second run in a later campaign (which of course means huuuge delays). This doesn't mean the players will find every encounter, but at least I will have an idea how the module runs, and have an opportunity to incorporate a lot of the things that inevitably crop up at the table. Sometimes this is relatively little (e.g. The Garden of al-Astorion), but usually, there are a lot of small things that improve the end result. Of course, it's not possible to really translate the play experience to a finished text, especially with more open adventure types - you can sometimes establish and encourage the possibility of spontaneity, but that's the extent of it.

* Exception: Isle of the Water Sprites was released without seeing playtest, and I could only get back to it almost four years later - nevertheless, playtest showed no serious problems or needs for additions, so it was fortunate. Still feeling a bit guilty, though.

[edit]Also, the "people who don't play but write creating materials for people who don't play but collect" part of the industry bothers me to no end, but that is a different thread.[/edit]

[chgowiz]

I've only "published" one real adventure: Most of the stuff I did for the Quick Start was "play tested" in that S&W was play-tested, I just spun things down to the bare essentials. The Dungeon of Akban wasn't playtested - but based off of tidbits and elements from things like Tower of Zenopus (Holmes).

For the stuff I write about and release on my blog:

My Ultima stuff is pure seat of the pants - but then this is all my houseruled labor of love and I'm hoping to run/playtest it and change it as it goes (and as I get feedback) - it'll probably become some sort of wiki at some point. Dunno.

My Tomb of Hultep Khoa has been played , at least a chunk of the first level, and it's a living document as well - it's not been published. If/when I am going to publish it, I'm going to ask for playtests. It will get playtested/ran at GenCon this year. I'll do what I did when I ran it at CodCon - take tons of notes and get feedback.

My small example One Page Dungeon - Wizard's Ruined Tower has been played many times.

[tavis]

Thanks for the replies, guys!

I should have clarified that playtesting is different from what I'm talking about, or at least it feels that way to me. I will have run the adventure I'm working on for Goodman, Race through the Residuum Mine, at least seven times for seven different groups by the time I finish writing it up. (That includes the Gen Con game, which is as much promotion as it is part of the design process). But I don't count it as coming from my actual play experience because I lined up the writing assignment first, and then set about finding people that'd put up with me to trying out my idea for an adventure on them.

That seems very different to me than a dungeon that I wrote as part of the organic development of an ongoing campaign, with a specific group of players in mind, and then wrote up later. Is that the way that The Garden of al-Astorion or Tomb of Hultep Khoa (which I'm sure looking forward to experiencing!) came about, or did you have the idea of writing it first and then playtested it as a result?

It could be that what I'm concerned about here is inevitable. The adventure that are the truest organic expressions of an ongoing campaign might be the least modular and useful to other DMs and groups. Also, one thing this makes me realize is how little of the vast expanses of D&D-space any one of us can personally explore. As a customer, I'm going to want a book about adventure at sea to cover every possible aspect of the subject. As a writer, I'd pimp myself for that project enthusiastically because I ran a two-year Savage Tide campaign all about ports, ships, and islands - but when it comes time to do the outline, I'm going to quickly realize how many things someone might want to do in a seafaring campaign that I never got to try out.