Geek day....

Saturday's geek day was fine. We started The Standing Stone, and the players discovered there's a mystery involved. Will they unravel it? We'll find out next time....

As I posted before, The Standing Stone is another event-based adventure, but there's no flow chart to use as an aid. In a way it gives the players more freedom to explore and investigate in whatever order they wish, but a flow chart, even if it involved "loops," would have been helpful.

I'm not sure how much I like event-based adventures. They certainly allow the characters more freedom in their actions, and it also allows the DM to tell a more complex story and maybe add some mystery, as well. However, even after having read this adventure at least three times, it was hard at times to keep things moving along. This was especially true when the players were interacting with an NPC, and I had to ad lib dialog. The characters were not my own, and even with the guidelines in the adventure, making up dialog on the fly was difficult. I think I've always had this problem with adventure modules, though. It's much easier when the adventure is one I've created myself, and the characters are my own. I know the nuances of each character I've created, what they know and don't know, and how they'll interact with characters in general.

I think the next time we run an event-based adventure, I think it will be one I've created myself.