Why so little Scenario Oriented Design?

[Andrew Norris]

I think the replayability issue is interesting. It's very true that many people buy games they'll play only a few times. (Or not at all, but this isn't a thread about reading metaplot in lieu of gaming.)

Marketing is arguably about pushing the best possibility that could come from purchasing a product. I'm buying a bottle of scrubbing cleanser, but in the back of my head maybe I'm thinking "This stuff will work faster than the other brand, so I'll have more time to spend time with my loving family in our sparkling kitchen." In fact, I'm just going to give the kitchen a once-over. It's not going to change my life.

I would argue that there's a similar thing going on with some RPGs. People may only play them once, but that little Pollyanna voice in the back of their head is saying, "Maybe it'll be a new campaign, and we'll all have a great time, and Bob and Jim won't argue like they used to."

I think there's some element of purchasing a new RPG that, for many people, reaches past what they'll actually get out of it to what they'll hope to get out of it. And scenario-based games don't promise more than just one evening's play, so they don't cater to a purchaser's desires in the same way.

The irony is that I see plenty of Actual Play threads about games like Inspectres and My Life With Master where a group playing through a single scenario provided them with just those benefits. (They aren't scenario-based games, but in practice they're used a lot as one-shots.)

[contracycle]

Admittedly, I'm stating the case rather strongly for the sake of argument, but your idea does seem a *very* hard row to hoe. I hope you have a lot of success with it. I'd likely buy Far Marches if you published it.

What horrors, RPG companies would then have to keep producing!

The music business does not produce one record for a band and then leave the buying public to make up their own music.  The paper publishing industry does not prduce one book for an author.  Having several people eagerly awaiting the next publication is about as good a goal as the product can aim for.  You have not written 4 games and made one sale - you have written 1 book and made 1 sale.  Fair enough

[brainwipe]

As a GM, I run what my players want to play. As a designer, I write up what I run and make it available for fun and free.

My players want to play long, involved campaigns that are quite complex. I could take a SOD and then expand it but I feel that the aim of a SOD is to create a short, single game. The aim of a campaign is to weave a number of games together into a coherent story. Although I have never actually expanded a SOD to a campaign, intuition suggests that a campaign is better formed from inception rather than an alteration of a SOD.

Perhaps a solution to this is to write an Iterative SOD (ISOD). An ISOD would be a campaign setting that is written like a SOD on a game-by-game process. The first chapter would be your typical SOD, with all the rules and setting required to play. The second Chapter would include a few more rules and a bit more setting and another goal for the team. Each chapter from here on would continue to add to the setting and mechanics until you were playing a campaign world with as much depth as any system.

A benefit of this ISOD is that you can stop reading Chapters when the complexity has got to a level you're happy with. If you don't want the additional complexity, don't read further! This is achieved by using advanced or optional rules in non-SOD but the ISOD way appears more elegant.

An ISOD would be a challenge to write as it would not present the game in the order that designers are used to writing in. It would also be frustrating for the experienced GM to pick through. It would have the same detail as the non-SOD game but would cost the same. So the game is unlikely to be 'cheap and cheerful'.

I'm not about to make an ISOD version of Icar as the PDF book would be in excess of 30MB (most of you know I like my graphics!). I am planning to do a SOD version, though.

[komradebob]

Side thought:
I've noticed that a lot of indie-published games are the work of one or two people primarily. Do you think that this fact is a barrier to creating follow up scenario products to a core game, much less SOD as I've defined it?

I have to admit that when someone had mentioned the hypothetical SOD product I'd posited on another thread, I'd considered taking a hack at designing it. Then I started getting a headache just considering it.

Big companies, as I recall, when they were putting out lots of modules/scenarios basically tapped their committed fanbase to create more scenarios to then publish and sell. Does this model fail for indies?

[Michael S. Miller]

What horrors, RPG companies would then have to keep producing!

The music business does not produce one record for a band and then leave the buying public to make up their own music.  The paper publishing industry does not prduce one book for an author.  Having several people eagerly awaiting the next publication is about as good a goal as the product can aim for.  You have not written 4 games and made one sale - you have written 1 book and made 1 sale.  Fair enough

Good point. However the music & publishing biz is looking at sales in the tens of thousands range per each unit (a CD, a book) produced, while the indie-RPG biz is looking at sales in the couple-hundred range. Shrinking that potential pool of consumers (by making the product non-reusable, in this case) even a little bit, will hurt us a lot.

[willofgod]

I don't think that there is anything inherently unsalable about prepublished scenerios, but I think that the most like SOD I have seen that was successful is Living Greyhawk.  All of the scenerios are prepublished, but any you can play "any" character in the scenerio and they a scalable for higher threat levels.

However, LG isn't really SOD as I understand it as not all the rules are in the scenerios.  You still need seperate core books.  The idea of each scenerio being completely stand alone appeals to me as it would allow a game effect that would be otherwise "broken" if it were in the hands of min/maxers to apply as they saw fit.  This would allow a high fantasy big-gun such as magic sword of slay anaganist to be doled out when appropriate without the worry that it will ruin every scenerio from then on.