Thinking outside the 5ft by 5ft box
Dungeons & Dragons usually cover a very small spectrum of human activity. There are, officially, three 'pillars' of activity - interaction, exploration, and combat. Two of the pillars (exploration and interaction) have fairly minimal rules, but there are exhaustive rules for killing things you don't like, and the vast majority of abilities improve your abilities in a fight. As I talked about last time, there's a place for that, but I don't think it's the be-all and end-all like many adventures would have you believe. I can understand why there's this focus though - fighting has the highest stakes, your character's life, so it's the one that everyone needs to be good at. But then if everyone's good at it, it becomes the preferred option. When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
One of our goals for Dragons of Tirenia is to have a wider range of genres and experiences in our adventures. One of the first ways I'm moving away from the typical action-adventure genre of D&D is by lowering the stakes in a fight. Fights can be resolved by intimidation or bribery rather than violence. Most combatants are humans, rather than monsters, and if they win a fight they will rough up the PCs rather than kill them, or let them run away. Players are encouraged to do the same thing to their opponents. This means that losing a fight doesn't mean the end of the story. It's only monstrous enemies, which are rare, or ones who have a personal grudge against the players who are out for their lives.
We're trying to write a wider range of adventure as well with our published adventures. So far, Double Cross in the Introductory Guide is a crime caper/heist story. Coming soon-ish, Death of an Artist in the Fiumenze City Guide is a murder mystery, and The Fall of the Della Squama is a farce and Shakespeare pastiche. We're also brainstorming an anthology called Fiumenze Nights, which will have several adventures of unusual genre. We're currently thinking romance, sex comedy (with the Decameron for inspiration!) and sports, although that may change. We've run war stories, mysteries, horror stories, and more. At one point, we were even contemplating romance novels!
(A digression: arguably, all D&D adventures wind up as farces. If a rules system is like the physics of our imaginary reality, D&D is about how success or failure is based on three things - your natural talent, which is worth up to a +5 bonus, your training, which is worth up to a +6 bonus, and blind luck, which is worth up to a +20 bonus. Better lucky than good!)
Other, smaller things are extremely important, but generally ignored in D&D. One of the most central parts of our lives as human beings is eating food. Different cuisines, tastes and flavours have shaped our history with the spice trade and our culture - how many customs are to do with the food that we eat, when we eat it, and how we should eat it? But eating, rather than something to enjoy, becomes a tax that players have to pay, or take one of the abilities like Goodberry or Survival which completely negates it. I'm looking into the regional and historic cuisine of Italy to use as flavour (pun unintended!) for the game. I remember the first game where I offered the characters a menu in a taverna, and they were so suspicious about the significance of all the food options. Clearly one of the wines was poisoned! But it became quite a nice thing once they recovered from their paranoia.
Another critical part of everyone's lives is their family. In D&D, it's almost a stereotype that your family will either be dead as part of the backstory, or the villains that you're fighting against, or have horrible things happen to them during the adventure. I want players to think about and engage with their family much more, so we've written new rules for a character's Bond to be their family, who will come to their aid in times of need, but will make demands on the character as well. Characters should also fall in love and have families of their own, although that can be an awkward thing to roleplay around the table with your friends.
What genres have you played in recently? Try something new and see what happens!
(Another digression: I've run a D&D adventure for Claire from How To Write Adventure Modules That Don't Suck where the plot was working retail! Her character had to look after a magical aquarium and deal with customers and stock. It was a massive change of pace and challenged a completely different set of skills! Lots of fun!)
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