Why Open Writing Functions Better Than Closed Writing

A few themes come up again and again on this site--the value of player agency, creativity's importance in tabletop games, and how much fun it is to get to shape a world as you see fit as both player and GM are some of the most prevalent. And all of those are key components in what I want to talk about here. Open versus closed writing accomplishes all of those, while closed writing often creates impediments to them. When I say open versus closed writing, I'm talking about how open-ended the structure of a game is. A closed-writing game says "here's a situation, and here are the one or two things that can be done to resolve that situation." An open-writing game instead says, "here's a situation--use your best judgment as a GM to determine whether your players' actions resolve the situation." In a lot of gaming writing, particularly modules, the open or closed writing feature can make or break a player's experience. The advantages of closed writing are clear--you can set defined parameters on what player actions "win" a scenario and which do not "win" or even "lose" a situation, which cuts down on the hard GM work of deciding what works and what doesn't. Some closed writing works reasonably well--combat encounters either end with the enemies vanquished or the players dead, and that's fair. But when roleplaying and creative problem-solving are at play, closed writing is often frustrating and confusing--the players have to think exactly like the writer of the game, which is a lot more like video game gameplay than tabletop gameplay at its best. So I'd like to make an argument for why open writing is the superior option, whether you're writing a module or just notes to guide a homebrew session. 

What got me thinking about this was a module I played with my wife earlier today. I've been DMing a campaign with her as a character for several months--she plays Aurora in my Of Gods and Dragons campaign. And she knows that as much as I adore GMing and managing campaigns, I also get a big kick out of being a player when I can, so she offered to run a short module from a game manual she really enjoys. (I won't name the game manual since most of what I have to say about it is critical.) We'd actually been planning to play the module for several months, but life got crazy--as it does--and it kept getting pushed back. But we finally found the time today, and I was eager to jump in. The module calls for a three-person party as a minimum, and I had created a group of three adventurers I was to control throughout the module. I created an academic bard deadset on discovering a topic worth writing about to gain professorship at her academy, a shifty warlock with a criminal past trying to take advantage of helping the bard search for her work, and a stoic druid who'd escaped military life and tries to support nature while using her one nonviolent skill--being intimidating--to avoid more outright bloodshed while protecting the group. Eager to get started, we dove in. 

It was fairly fun, but again and again, my wife would listen to my choices and shake her head, staring at the module pages. "I didn't expect you to make that choice. There's nothing in here about what to do if you do that." The first time she said this, I laughed--I had gravitated towards a question to help a lonely animated figurehead of a building, and I could see where ignoring some of the weightier quests offered in the manual might be something of a wrench in the cogs. But as we kept playing and I kept hearing that my choices went beyond the module's writing, I started to get frustrated. It seemed that the module only allowed for one solution for each situation, and none of the solutions required (not suggested, but required) were very obvious to me. This was compounded by the fact that I had been told this was a roleplaying-heavy module, and I was handling every scenario by roleplaying as my excitable academic, my smooth-talking guide, and my weary druid guard. We really ran into a dead-end when my guide was fast-talking a troublesome NPC who he did get the better of, but the NPC was written to immediately wipe my memory if I did so. I was very soured on the experience immediately. 

Let's really delve into this situation. I had a charisma-based character who used his interpersonal skills to investigate one of the module's quests and who managed to figure out something notable that would advance that quest. But the module did not intend for me to resolve the situation in this way, and so it instructed my DM to undo my progress. This is to say, I came up with a way to use the game mechanics within the spirit of the mechanics themselves to advance a questline, and the module told my DM to make it as though I had never done that in the first place. I felt defeated. I was roleplaying, I was thinking strategically, I was pursuing the quest, and yet that wasn't enough for the module. I had to do it all in specifically the way that module wanted me to. That's not the tabletop game world I know and love. That's a puzzle. And a single-solution puzzle with hundreds if not thousands of decoy pieces that don't help even if they do fit the puzzle at that. I was unhappy with that particular moment, but we carried on, and I hoped to come up with a different way to solve the puzzle that would be more in line with the module's required solution. 

But again and again, we encountered moments like this one. I would encounter a situation and do what seemed obvious to me, but it would vex my DM because it violated what the module wanted. At one point, I obtained a quest item and thought that the NPC who was infatuated with the other NPC who'd lost the quest item was the obvious solution; I gave it to the infatuated NPC to give to the questgiver to make them both happy. This brought the game screeching to a halt. In fact, I had done something that invoked three different quests and resolved none of them as desired, meaning that I closed out half the module's quests in one action, bringing all three questlines to less than ideal outcomes while closing them to further actions, and one of those questlines was the overall story arc of the module, meaning I essentially failed the overall module, and all because I hadn't asked the right question of the right NPC at the right time so I could know not to do that. And I had obtained the quest item by luring the NPC who'd stolen it into a desolate cave to kill him (he had been scamming and hurting the whole setting for years, and I reasoned that killing him would prevent him from going off to do the same to some other location); it turned out he was a god in disguise, and my DM had to nerf his hit points to a third of the intended level so as not to enact a certain party wipe. (As it was, even with the reduction, I barely survived the encounter at all.) In other words, a random NPC was secretly a god, and the only way to have known this was to break into his private room, find a well-hidden journal, decode it from a secret language, compare it to another hidden text, and speak to the correct NPC about it in order to discern he couldn't be messed with and had to be revealed to the module's population, and even then, I see no reason why a god would simply admit defeat rather than push down harder on the location to maintain his position of power, making killing him the better option anyway. And what's more, the module was designated for levels six through eight, and even four eighth-level adventurers would stand no chance of killing him as written, meaning that the module had a secret condition that the NPC couldn't be defeated except for solving this elaborate and counter-intuitive puzzle. 

To zoom in again, I botched the win condition for half the module by doing something that seemed pretty clearly indicated by the writing, and I should have lost (and would have if not for my DM's quick adjustments and kind heart) because I attacked a lone NPC who was secretly a god unless I made several assumptions that didn't make sense to make. In other words, I unwitting failed the main quest and two other storylines and committed to a suicide mission despite thoroughly investigating the location and the NPCs in it because I didn't divine the exact methods I was supposed to use as determined by the module. To put it bluntly, I was dissatisfied with this adventure. I had a great time roleplaying with my wife, and she made a lot of the failures of the module less frustrating through adjustment--this is true. But the whole point of closed writing in a tabletop game is that the GM is supposed to trust that the module is well-written and well-considered and shouldn't have to make constant adjustments nor improvise hundreds of pieces of new dialogue and reactions from the world when a player does something that makes sense on paper. 

[You may be saying to yourself, but this site has a collection of one-shots. Are you claiming that all of them are one-hundred percent open writing? Not precisely--several of the one-shots I've published here do occasionally push things in concrete, sometimes binary directions that might mean a lot of improvising on the part of the GM. But all of the one-shots that do this are based on movies, and they require some adherence to the movie's plot (and my reinterpretations) to maintain a resemblance to the movie itself. I'm not saying they're perfect--all of them are as much experiments in adaptation as they are genuinely finished tabletop RPGs. But in nine cases out of ten, I'm making them open writing in the sense that anything that the GM decides works, works. The module I'm criticizing here explicitly states that there's only one way to resolve these situations, and that's the bone I'm picking--they're purely closed writing.]

So how could this module have been improved by open writing? Well, briefly put, by trusting the GM to interpret and make choices. I have, in my career as a tabletop game player and GM and game designer, bought relatively few actual TTRPGs. When I do purchase one, it generally tends to be something with a lot of open interpretation. I've never purchased, downloaded, or played a one-shot or campaign written by someone else. Too often, that content features closed writing like the module I'm talking about here. What I opt for are radically open writing games. The manuals for these games are traditionally pretty slim--there's a few pages devoted to simple rules, a few pages about ways to define your character, and a few pages on the lore that impacts the world. These kinds of manuals are traditionally heavily filled with illustrations and have less than thirty pages. It's literally just enough to define the rules and the setting and then grant the rest of the game to the GM. This is an extreme example of granting the GM trust to guide things. But there are also modules that can grant this trust, though they tend to be pretty rare. Some of D&D's earlier modules from the late 1970s and 1980s so this--"here's a situation and who's involved--figure the rest out yourself" tends to be the approach. And before Wizards of the Coast took ownership of Dungeons & Dragons, this was actually the industry standard. I'd go so far as to say that most non-D&D game materials tend towards open writing in that they are more designed to inspire GMs than prescribe to GMs. That's a generalizations which isn't universally true--some D&D materials are more open and some non-D&D materials are more closed--but the generalization is largely true in my experience. 

So what leads game materials to be written in a closed fashion? I'd argue that it's not easier to write a closed adventure--that makes considerably more time and effort than open writing where you can just tell the GM to figure it out themselves. It's also not necessarily from demand--there are countless closed writing game materials out there, and it can feel like more work to find open writing materials a lot of the time. I think the answer is that the core belief of closed writing is that the developer of the materials can come up with something more interesting, compelling, and complex than what a GM can do on their own. And I don't like this position, which I doubt regular readers will be surprised to learn. The strength of closed writing is to say, "here's a situation you won't think of and how to make it satisfying for your players." The parallel strength of open writing is to say, "here's a new way to think of gaming, and I think you should explore that on your own." What this means is, a closed module capitalizes on an established game (hence the popularity of modules for D&D), while open modules are meant to push the boundaries and promote creativity from GMs (hence the popularity of open writing in original games). But even that is a generalization, and it's not the thing that I want to take away from all this.

Open writing promises an opportunity to explore a game as you see fit as the GM; closed writing promises a way to rely on something that's finished without having to do all the work yourself. And that's the hidden secret failure of closed writing. The module I played earlier with my wife was very closed--each quest had one hidden solution with infinitely more "incorrect" approaches than the single "correct" approach, the extreme of closed writing. And if the goal is to provide something that's interesting, compelling, and complex like I mentioned above, we've failed. It's not interesting to play as a game would could just as easily be a novel. It's not compelling to be forced into one way of thinking. And it's not complex to have just one right answer. Closed writing wants you to think that it's giving you a shortcut to good GMing. But it can't do that. The only way for a closed module to be rewarding for players is to have a GM who heavily edits and improvises, and at that point, they're forcing the closed writing to be open writing by ignoring vast chunks of it to reach the players. 

So why not just go with open writing to begin with? I find again and again that players of tabletop games would be great GMs if they tried, even when they're unwilling to make the leap and try it out. The skills are basically the same--creativity, improvisation, imagination. I argue that the difference between an intermediate tabletop game player and a good novice GM is the willingness to try it out. And the difference between a novice GM and a strong intermediate GM is just experience. So, basically, an intermediate player and an intermediate GM is basically just some moxie and a few game sessions apart. 

One of the refrains of this site is the value of homebrew. I preach the extreme of it--craft a world and NPCs and missions and everything else. But I also advocate for a piecemeal approach--take the established things you like, add your own ideas, and go wild. My first games as a DM were in nameless, faceless places with undeveloped NPCs and only a vague idea for quests. What I was good at was responding to the players. And if you can bring an interesting idea--more than I brought to my early games--and bounce off your players, you'll be figuring it out and almost certainly bringing some joy to your players. The worst that can happen is you realize you don't like GMing, at which point--at least you tried and you know now. But the potential rewards are enormous--you could be well on your way to a point where open writing is a welcome invitation to your own creativity and closed writing is something you can adjust and fix with ease. 

That's all for now.

That's all for now. Coming soon: general mapmaking tips and guides to clans amongst the Faninites and dwarves. Until next time, happy gaming!

Of Gods and Dragons: Session Nine

Last time, the party recovered after Aurora's encounter with Hromar, the man from her past, and her realization that she needed to destroy her hometown; as the group rebounded, they headed to meet with Tasselman, the strange academic about his research and his knowledge of Boccob. Brokk prayed to Boccob and heard a reply: now is not the time, but we will speak soon. The party returned to Aurora's mom's shop and met with Aurix, who suggested that a larger thing than the prophecy united the party and teleported the group to Kallett City to speak with Rupert, the copper dragon. After some searching and running into Moira, the talented smith who made Brokk's battleaxe in Talon Gorge, they found Rupert drinking alone on the mountainside outside of town. They had a roundabout conversation with him about morality, and when they brought up their quest to repair the rift, Rupert suggested instead destroying the veil between worlds, killing the dragons, and killing the gods so that normal people could live normal lives.

This time, we picked up in the middle of that conversation. Brokk argued that the greater good required more than destroying everything, and when that didn't work, Aurora reasoned that Rupert's thinking was flawed and that destroying everything wouldn't really solve the problem either. But Rupert refused to concede to their arguments. The party grew frustrated, and on the belief that they could get by without Rupert, they decided to simply leave him alone. As they left, Lethanin told Rupert that he needed to simply love himself enough to do the right thing. Rupert became confused but was intrigued--what did Lethanin mean by this? Lethanin explained that if Rupert chose to take action and choose what matters, that was the only real way to do something about the problem--not giving up and destroying everything. Rupert said that he felt he was always making situations worse and agreed to hear the plan out of curiosity. Brokk explained that free will is the most important thing, and the leaking magic from the divine realm was impairing free will. Rupert puzzled out that his recent extreme chaoticness could be because of the leaking magic--since becoming a dragon, he'd felt especially uncontrollable, and he had no dragonhood before the rift to compare that to. Ultimately, Rupert tentatively agreed to help the party with at least fighting Thomas. Aurora and Rupert spoke for a moment about the ability to strip gods of their immortality with glyphs, which Rupert had done, and with nothing further to discuss at that moment, Rupert teleported away to experiment with spells to combat Thomas. Brokk commended Lethanin on getting Rupert to listen, and Lethanin expressed deep surprise that the strategy had actually worked. 

Out of game, this was a really delicate moment to DM. Rupert was, very intentionally, a difficult person to talk to. As I've noted previously, Rupert was a player character in my D&D podcast, Listen Check, and Rupert as a character was often a subject of contention. Rupert's player insisted that he was chaotic neutral or even chaotic good; I felt that Rupert's actions were often chaotic evil, as Rupert frequently took joy in threatening or hurting people. One core belief of mine is that fighting an evil person does not necessarily make you good--taking joy in helping people makes you good. Rupert never really did that. He relished a contentious fight and often sought to "punish" people he disapproved of, sometimes psychologically torturing them (which was his main complaint about the archvillain of the campaign). So in playing Rupert for this campaign, I wanted to preserve both halves of that--Rupert is vengeful and spiteful and somewhat nihilistic but also feels he has good intentions about the whole thing. And above all, Rupert was hard-headed--he rarely changed his mind and was hard to dissuade once he made his mind up. So I had to make some very calculated decisions. 

Initially, Rupert was approached by the party with a moral argument. But Rupert's belief that he was moral and the fact that he saw things differently from them (paired with his stubbornness) meant that he wouldn't really listen. So at first, in last session and the beginning of this one, those arguments were met with ridicule and opposition. This was true to the character, and it also presented Rupert as a kind of exception to the rule with the good dragons so far--he wasn't swayed by simple morality and wanted something that affected him personally. So when Lethanin suggested that Rupert needed to love himself, we had a new idea to consider. Rupert was always a character who was deeply sure of himself, but he also had lived a life full of mistakes that deeply hurt him, so suggesting that he himself had some deep flaw that might have caused that pain was effective where moral arguments were not. And Rupert, in his own way, is worried about free will too--he fought a god in order to regain the ability to do as he pleases. So discovering that he was being restricted by the leaking magic would even more deeply affect him. Still, Rupert was stubborn, so he didn't exactly jump onboard the plan wholeheartedly--he merely said he'd be willing to consider and try to help, which is the most the party would reasonably get out of him. 

Compared to the other dragons, Rupert was a high-stress character for me to play. The others are creations by me--I've been loosely working on them for twelve years and closely working on them for two years. Aurix was actually pretty well defined for all of that time since he was a central character in Listen Check. But Rupert is not mine in the same way--he's a player character who was and is massively important to my world. I had never played him before these last two sessions, and I wanted to do him justice. Even then, I know that I played him somewhat differently than his old player would have--Rupert would have been likely less combative, less depressed, and more prone to moral arguments. Probably, anyway--it's impossible to know for sure. But there was also the matter of what dragonhood under the leaking magic would do to him. My understanding of Rupert would be that he became almost impossibly powerful at the same time that the leaking magic would impair his decision-making, and that would make him irritable (or more irritable, more accurately) and fairly disillusioned. So this whole thing was a very complicated dance, and while I have doubts that my performance as Rupert would make his old player entirely satisfied, I think I did what I needed to do to respect my understanding of the character, have Rupert play an important and interesting role in this campaign, and advance the story without dishonoring Listen Check, and that's something I'm proud of. Now back to the session. 

Content for the time being with Rupert's agreement, the party decided to call it a night. They initially considered finding an inn room in Kallett City, but Aurora requested they teleport to Drumchapel for the night so they could rest not far from Finiel, where they meant to find the brass dragon, Hriskin, the next day, and also because her mother, Heather, was already staying in Drumchapel. They all agreed, and while Aurora developed a spell to teleport the group to Drumchapel, Brokk searched for an found Moira watching over the festival, which was still quite lively. Brokk and Moira stood at the edge of the crowd and people-watched, discussing the merits of simply being a spectator and about the value of the greater good even when it brings pain on the one fighting for it--they agreed that the right thing to do is the right thing to do even if it requires a little sacrifice. Brokk returned to the group, and Aurora opened a portal to Brokk's house, where they all rested in various ways until the following morning. 

Brokk gathered a very Drumchapel kind of breakfast for the group just before they rose--pear pastries, coffee, and pear cider--and they sat on the dock behind Brokk's house to discuss plans. Brokk and Aurora talked about their progress in the novels they'd been reading, Aurora and Lethanin thanked Brokk for breakfast, and they all began a conversation about the proper ordering of their plans--do they target Thomas before heading to the gods' realm out of fear he oppose them in that aim, or do they tend to the Boccob conversation and deal with Thomas when they return. They did not achieve a completely solid resolution, instead agreeing to play the situation by ear and see what Thomas throws at them. They also noted that Boccob speaking directly to Brokk was a very good sign--Boccob was said to have never spoken directly to a mortal, so their words to Brokk seemed to be a good omen. Heather awoke and joined them on the dock, making small talk about their days before heading out into the woods to forage for local insects as alchemical ingredients. Brokk suggested she look for his friend Curtran, a priestess of Ehlonna who might help Heather to find what she was looking for. Once Heather was gone, the group discussed Aurora's "all or nothing" approach to magic, and Aurora acknowledged that she had sacrificed the knowledge of basically her whole life in order to gain that magic. They decided to set out for Finiel to find Hriskin. 

The road to Finiel was not long--really only a couple of miles, which the group covered quickly. The road was fairly busy, and a traveler named Cori, an elven woman with a large spear, walked alongside them for a time, making conversation. She asked what each of them was like and made observations about their appearances; when asked, she said she was a ferry boat captain who was on vacation to Finiel to see a play by her favorite playwright, whose newest play was supposed to be about a moral conundrum--do you go with the known but flawed situation and work to make it better, or do you forge a new path to the unknown and try to improve things that way instead? She posed this question to the group, and everyone offered vague, guarded answers that indicated that all of them would in fact opt for "the devil you know." Cori expressed satisfaction in knowing that there are people like them in the world, telling them to keep making good choices to continue a legacy of good via the known option. Aurora asked to speak to Cori after the play was over, and they agreed to meet at a tavern called The Empty Stage across the street from the theater. After Cori hurried onward to catch the play, the group discussed the likelihood that Cori was a god. Lethanin said she almost certainly was; Brokk was skeptical of the idea that everyone they meet must be a god; Aurora argued that she was likely Corellon Larethian and looked up the eleven god in her book about deities. Upon reading that Corellon Larethian is a spear-wielding elf with strong chaotic good leanings and a love for the arts, even Brokk admitted that Cori was likely Corellon Larethian. 

Out of game, Cori was in fact Corellon Larethian. In these session recaps, I've been slow to admit directly to you, the reader, which NPCs are in fact gods. But let's get explicit here. Ollie is Olidammara, the goddess of rogues and revelery, as the players suspect. Rhodes is Fharlangh, the god of travelers, as they suspect. Cori is Corellon Larethian, the goddess of the elves, as they suspect. The only god they haven't directly diagnosed is Moira, who they do believe to be a god but don't have a direct belief about the identity of--she's Moradin, the goddess of the dwarves. Each deity they've encountered has been pretty obviously divine, and that's been intentional. The gods have been sequestered away from humanity for millennia and have little sense of human subtlety, so their behavior is a bit unsubtle. Further, the players know for a fact that gods are involved in life on Evanoch, so their hackles are up, and they know to suspect that gods are in the mix. This is something that I didn't directly anticipate. I figured that the gods would pass as normal people more often, but that didn't really happen. But I'm okay with that. The actual way it's all played out is even better, as far as I'm concerned. 

Meeting with these gods has been tense each time because the players are paranoid about being contacted by gods. Brokk even said that he doubted Cori was Corellon Larethian because being paranoid about stuff makes you see problems where they don't exist. But Cori really is the goddess of the elves, and the party is not being paranoid, but they do feel like they're being paranoid. I've been careful to add NPCs presented in similar ways to keep them guessing, but they still have been accurate every time. I don't think that's bad DMing--I'm not exactly trying to keep the gods a secret. If I were, I wouldn't have been so upfront about gods coming to the mundane world. So the result, mostly unintended, is that the players are really freaked out about simple interactions. The players actually discussed directly asking Cori is she was a goddess next time they see her, and that's an interaction that will be utterly wild, especially since my version of Corellon Larethian would absolutely just say "yes" without a second thought. It might even lead to something really supernatural happening. So really, the fact that the players are really sure she's Corellon Larethian means that the story is ramping up, heightening, and driving towards the next phase of the story--dealing directly with the gods. And I'm very pleased with that. Just as they're on the way to meet with the last dragon they intend to speak to, the gods storyline is coming to the forefront, which means that the campaign is shifting in that direction pretty organically. I'm excited--I think a direct conversation with Cori will be a great opportunity to start looking ahead now that the dragon storyline is settling down. 

Speaking of the dragons, the players were still searching for Hriskin in Finiel. They arrived in town and went directly to the arena since they knew that Hriskin was a former arena champion. This threw me--I hadn't really considered what at the arena might point them in the right direction and was erring on the side of having an arena superfan give some information pointing in the right direction. But Brokk gave me a better alternative--he looked for a "Hall of Fame" in the arena. This was a great moment to remember that players will often give you better ideas than you have yourself. So I said that yes, there is a Hall of Fame, and the players went to investigate it. After doing some searching, they found a massive portrait of Hriskin, the "Champion of Champions" who always took her opponents down non-lethally and never lost a fight no matter the odds, winning match after match for forty years and then disappearing. This benefited me a lot, since I had decided Hriskin was an arena champion but never really thought about her fighting style or what made her so legendary--in this moment, I could lovingly embellish her legacy and make her fighting style match her personality (principled, stubbornly good, remarkable, and humble) in a really colorful way without having to have someone talk about her. The worst case scenario would have been asking Hriskin directly about her time in the arena--her humility would dictate that she not sing her own praises, so Brokk's Hall of Fame idea let me build her up so I could show her to be humble later on and be clear about her characterization. 

But the party of course found no direction towards Hriskin in the Hall of Fame. So Lethanin once again played a song to find her, a rousing and dramatic song on the violin that stirred the party and revealed that a dragon was off to the south outside of town near a river. For a magical reason, Lethanin felt compelled to end the song on a very melancholy note, and the party set off out of Finiel to find her. Once outside of town, Aurora cast a spell to find Hriskin, and a magical trail appeared leading them down the road toward a major river, then off into the woods and well away from civilization. After a long walk, they found a large cottage by the river, and the cottage was overgrown with ivy and mosses, appearing totally abandoned. Brokk knocked at the door, and for a long time, there was no answer. Lethanin scouted the cottage for signs of life but couldn't find anything definitive. Eventually, Brokk fired an Eldritch Blast into the air, and the crackling boom that resounded did get Hriskin to barely crack the door open. She asked in a tired voice what the group wanted, and the party asked for a few minutes of her time, identifying her by name. She shrugged and allowed them inside, and her appearance was different from what they'd seen in the Hall of Fame portrait--her hair was long and unkempt, her clothes dirty and disheveled, and her expression defeated. 

And that's where we ended. Again, our session time indicated the end--we'd reached the point where we would customarily call it a night, and finding the final dragon of the group's plan and being granted an audience with her seemed a fitting point to stop. It will also be an interesting start to next session. A while ago, Wing told the party that Hriskin had gone silent after the death of her husband and was likely deeply depressed. The real scope of that will become evident next session. The truth is that Hriskin has spent about four hundred years so depressed that she's barely alive and functional. She doesn't see a point in life, really, and she's gone to extreme ends to test how truly immortal she is. That conversation will share some things with Rupert's conversation--she will be harder to convince to help than the other dragons--but will also take another direction--Rupert was bent on destroying everything, whereas Hriskin will be more inclined to simply give up and take no action at all. Seeing how the party deals with Hriskin will be interesting, but I really don't know how they'll have to work with her to convince her to help. 

With the conversation with Rupert, I didn't set down some magic words that would shake him from his gloom and anger. I really just went from a point of characterization--what would he say in return to any given argument. In the moment, it was clear to me that moral arguments wouldn't work; Rupert believes himself to be moral and simply disagreed with the party's morality. But Lethanin's tactic of questioning Rupert's identity shook him. Rupert's identity had radically changed in recent times and was very much up to questioning, and Rupert responded to the idea that he may be suffering from something outside of his control rather than the assertion that everything was within his control. That's all consistent with his character. Similarly, I don't have magic words that will "fix" Hriskin. There's no one thing I'm waiting for the players to say to her. But I do know that arguments about duty and obligation won't work--she sees no purpose in her life and will actively argue that dragonhood shouldn't exist because of the misery it's brought on her. That means that the party will need to come up with something that does appeal to her, and I don't know what that will be yet. 

I think that in general, tabletop games are not the kind of thing were a single answer is ever appropriate. The point of TTRPGs is that we can imagine and do anything--anything at all. Deciding that there's one right answer flies in the face of the very concept of a TTRPG. So I'm not going to say that there's a right answer or even a few right answers for how to deal with Hriskin. I'm just going to listen to the players and judge how convinced she'd be by them. It's an arguably harder strategy to use as a DM, but with a good understanding of what a character is like, it's certainly possible. And I think that having a conversation be resolved by a genuine appeal to what makes a distinct character tick is satisfying for the players and for me. Think about this: if there was some specific sentence that could convince all of the dragons to cooperate, would it feel satisfying to say again and again? No. Aurix needed to see beyond black and white. Jarvia needed to know that free will would allow her to live as she chooses, as did Niela. Wing needed to know the greater good was being served. Rupert had to question his own shortsightedness to see clearly. Hriskin will need to see that life is worth living. But all of those distinct needs can be resolved in many ways--the players just need to speak to the dragons for long enough and get enough of a sense of who they are to understand those needs and reach out to them. That's ultimately the mechanism that this campaign hinges on--how do you understand an NPC and convince them to work with you even when they have their own goals and perspective? It's how they've worked with the dragons, and it's how they'll work with the gods, and it's how they'll ultimately address Boccob in the end. Roleplaying is about being in character and responding to the gameworld like it's real, and this mechanic really pushes that roleplaying into focus. So I'm very eager to see how the dragons, who are still real people, are convinced to help, and how that differs from the how the gods, who are not exactly real people, are convinced to help. 

That's the big picture. For next time, we'll be seeing how Hriskin plays into things, how the conversation with Cori goes, and what the party plans to do once they've gotten all the dragon business in order. Keep in mind, reader, there are twice as many gods as there are dragons, so what will follow will likely be far more complicated. And one thing I have yet to acknowledge is that unlike the dragons, who have all been pretty isolated and on their own, the gods have formed alliances along the lines of their goals, which is sure to complicate things further. We have all these things to look forward to in our next session. I look forward to it and to telling you all about it. 

That's all for now. Until next time, happy gaming!