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!
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