Work implosion. I'm still going to El Paso and Juarez. In fact, now there's urgency to going. I'm going crazy with family drama, work drama and all kinds of things. I'm super frustrated, pretty angry, and kind of anxious about how to juggle all of this crap. Needless to say, I doubt that I'll be doing much that's "productive" in a hobby space other than maybe some reading. I can't even have lunch, as I've got emergency meetings over lunch every day now. It's ridiculous. Maybe I'll have some time mid-afternoon to take my lunch and take a break. The drama is frustrating, but manageable. Stupid, even in some cases. The work drama is more challenging for me than the personal drama, because the personal drama isn't as serious as the people involved think it is, and in a day or two, it will be gone. The problem, of course, is that by personality I'm the kind of person who has very little tolerance or patience for drama, especially stupid drama, and my natural inclination isn't to try and help resolve it, but rather to simply check out and say, "this is dumb; come back when you're not being dumb" in so many words.
So what do I like? I like well-run trad style with a focus on player agency, but not an obsessive spergy focus on it. Just an acknowledgement that in order to run a good game, you can't force and railroad your players. Most people are prone to the fallacy of the false binary. Just because railroads are bad doesn't mean that sandboxes are good. Games improved tremendously in the early 80s as the trad playstyle became more mainstream. Sure, there were plenty of bad trad modules and games. It took a bit of trial and error before people figured out how to run trad well, and many people today still aren't great at it, honestly. But the promise of the medium wasn't just in exploration, dungeon-crawling, puzzle solving and pseudo-wargaming. The promise of the medium was getting something much closer to the literature that allegedly inspired D&D, except with player buy-in and involvement in the creative activity through running their agents, characters, through scenarios and situations simulated by the GM.
Therefore, what are some of these tools? One of them specifically is drama. The boys at Black Lodge Games made a video a year or so ago about how the secret to successful games is to make them soap operas. On its face, it sounds wrong, because D&D players don't really like soap operas, but... they're actually right.
Anyway, I was thinking about that in particular while reading Paizo stuff. Paizo has an interesting approach to module writing, and in some ways, I feel like their modules are written to be read almost even more than they're written to be played. There are all kinds of NPC character drama, but it's often in the background, and it's often not presented in such a way that there's any way that the characters or their players would ever find out about it, unless the GM just does an uncharacteristic and awkward info dump of the information that he's read about the situation, the location, the NPCs, etc.
Obviously, drama is interesting in gaming, but only if there's a way to use it. If you have interesting drama associated with your villains, your locations, your set pieces, you have to foreshadow it and you have to have an organic way for the player characters to discover it. And in many ways, the sooner the better. You can keep some secrets to surprise and delight your characters, of course, but there is nothing really very fun in encountering a brooding villain with a backstory that's full of drama and human interest of some kind or another, but you never hear of the villain until you run into him, you never learn anything about his background, and he goes down like a chump in one fight never to be heard of or thought of again.
Drama adds weight to what you're doing, so that it's not just disconnected and vacuous action sequences, and so that your NPCs, especially villains and/or antagonists aren't just cardboard collections of statistics, but actual characters with some heft and some emotional gravitas. But to use it effectively, it can't be buried so deep in the background that you never see it at the table. You have to be willing to play it up and bring it forward; foreshadow it, remind them of it. Don't be afraid of overdoing it. Chances are, it's not as ham-handed and silly as you think it is, and most people are too subtle with these kinds of things. Broad is better. You can tone it down if it's coming across as too big, but in my experience, that's not likely unless you're just doing silly caricatures. And sometimes, even that is not as broad as you think it is. There's a reason melodrama is popular, even if the soi-disant guardians of what is sophisticated and urbane tend not to think so. Heck, they probably don't even know what soi-disant means anyway.
UPDATE: Oh, I meant to say, obviously I spent some time reading last night. Read most of the adventure portion of Paizo's "The Skinsaw Murders". It does have a lot of this kind of drama, and you won't necessarily understand or discover much of it as a player; you have to actually read the module to know it. Other modules are worse, but there's a bit of that here. I actually think "The Skinsaw Murders" is one of my favorite modules, but I've only ever run it in a very disjointed fashion. To be fair, the author, Richard Pett, specifically suggests doing so, and specifically says that it was written in such a way that you can take each of the three main acts out of context and adapt it easily into some other framework—which it turns out is exactly what I've done, especially with portions of the first part. I mean, I would do that anyway, and have been recommending it for years, but it's nice to see it specifically being touted as a design principle in a module.
The biggest chunk of post-adventure material is background on Magnimar, but this reads as merely an abbreviated version of the Magnimar book, which I also own. I'll probably read through it pretty breezily in the next day or so and finish it off.
I also read a fair chunk of Exile, the second in the prequel trilogy story of Drizzt. I still feel like doing a "how did he become who he was" prequel was not a great idea, but at least the second one he is quite a bit more of who he will become already. But some of the character drama that he undergoes feels forced. That's what happens when you already know what's coming because... it's a prequel. Just write stuff in chronological order, I say. Going back and exploring how things became what you already know that they will become just isn't all that interesting unless there's some kind of twist to it; something that will affect what comes after what you already know. Secret histories that offer alternative narratives and alternative options to your interpretation of what you thought you knew is interesting. Stuff that predictably just marches towards the status quo already established in the original work isn't.
It's reasonably well written. That's not my complaint. My complaint is that I question whether it was a good idea to write it in the first place. And, of course, in retrospect the drow society that I thought was interesting ~25-30 years ago is actually caricaturishly silly. And this second one feels like kind of a holding pattern book, honestly. To be completely fair, even though I just read them a couple of year or so ago, reading the prequel trilogy just makes me want to re-read the main original trilogy again. It's honestly better, and more importantly, better conceived.
Anyway, I think I will send some of my pdfs to my tablet to take with me to El Paso next week. Probably the rest of the Rise of the Runelords volumes (i.e., volumes 3-6, or 4-6 if I finish 3 before I go, and probably the four volumes of the next Cthulhu Mythos Saga, with the laughable name of Yig Snake Grandaddy. Even though I doubt I'll read all that, I might like having it on my tablet so I don't have to sit at my desktop to read these when I'm back at home.
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