Last post I stated that Wizards of the Coast should make a better guide to fledgling Dungeon Masters and teach them (us, really) in a better manner how to create encounters, dungeons, adventures, and campaigns. Pathfinder from Paizo Publishing, easily the biggest competitor to D&D in the realm of medieval fantasy tabletop RPGs and possibly the 2nd largest RPG period, also does not teach its Game Masters (Pathfinder has Game Masters, because Dungeon Masters is a copyrighted, trademarked, proprietary term exclusive to D&D, but a GM is the same as a DM) any of the above in a satisfactory manner. I can't really think of ANY RPG that does this satisfactorily (excluding the aforementioned 1983 D&D Basic Red Box set), but that could just be my lack of experience. I cannot, however much I may want to do it, play every RPG out there, so I may very well be wrong. I do however know from first hand experience that Pathfinder is just as lacking as D&D is in this area. But as you may (or may not) know, Paizo is gearing up to release a new version of Pathfinder, which gives them the perfect opportunity to rectify this neglect. More on that in a moment.
Paizo - and pretty much every other RPG publisher out there that's not WotC - tends to get a pass on this complaint, because they tend to get experienced gamers, not first timers. Most first timers tend to pick up D&D first, no matter what other genre of RPG they intend to play, that's just what gamers tend to do. By the time gamers go for other RPGs, they've generally spent enough time with D&D not to need the hand holding I think they should provide. And for most of the RPGs out there, they are way too small to be expending resources on producing instruction manuals for their games, but Paizo and Pathfinder are big enough that they can afford to do it. I think they should, because that has been their selling point from the beginning - doing D&D bigger and better than D&D is. Pathfinder is starting to get a lot of first time gamers these days, so I think they need to step up their game.
After typing up the last post about Frank Mentzer's 1983 teaching tool, I started pondering about that piece, and I think that while it was good, it still didn't go as far as it should have. Yes, it was a fantastic bit of instruction on how to make a dungeon, and as part of that, an encounter. Yet there is still more to be taught. D&D (and many RPGs, in broad, general strokes) is at its base a series of encounters - a fight with monsters, a negotiation with a magistrate, an investigation of a dark, dank place, a chat with a local innkeep - and you combine all types of encounters to make a dungeon. Yes, not all dungeons take place underground, but since dungeon (or at least the base word for dungeon, the Old French word donjon) doesn't mean what you think it does, I'm going to use dungeon here to mean a collection of encounters, whether they're in a cave, in a forest, under the noon day sun, in the darkest night, or whatever. Next up the chain is adventure (I've also called it a campaign arc before, either one works), and an adventure is just a series of dungeons, or can even be just one big dungeon. Finally, campaigns are collections of adventures and/or single dungeons, trying to get the PCs to the end of one final storyline all the way from bumbling, monster-killing neophytes where they started out.
Mr Mentzer's 1983 work handles dungeons well, and as an unintended consequence, eludes to how one should create encounters. I now think that, while this was ground breaking and sadly forgotten, it did not go far enough and that any work in the future that attempts to emulate it should provide instruction at all levels of the chain: encounter, dungeon, adventure, and campaign. I am by far not the first to talk about any or all of these together, but I'd really like to see the big boys tackle their basic training documents for their DMs (or GMs, or Storytellers, or Referees, or whatever they call them) in this manner.
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