Alas poor Otto

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• Art. Punk. Crusade.

  • Continuing doing God's Work sir.

• I sure hope Bryce is ok? This "emergency protocol"-stuff is starting to worry me ...

  • Yeah, I'm fucking back now.

    • Hurrah!

      • Yes, Bryce, welcome back from the land of sunshine, margaritas, tropical seas, and scantily clad beauties. Here is your bench, here are your chains, and here is the next Mörk Bork adventure.

        .)

        • Hot damn ... with all that a fella could have a pretty good Saturday night

• Just yesterday I was thinking about writing a Mork Borg adventure without all the edgy artpunk design. Just a basic dungeon, but statted for MB and with the dark, doomy narrative flavor of the Mork... because I actually quite like the MB rules. Maybe I'll try it. The new wave of ultra-minimalist layout in the Mork scene.

  • Yes please. It's a good system that gets run over by people trying to one-up themselves in the aesthetics department.

• Like Anonymous, I am also tempted to attempt a competently designed MB dungeon. I think there's a fun rules-light system to play with beneath the artpunk.

• I think it's unhelpful to pretend that poor procedural exploration design is a product of some kind of art style or aesthetic - it muddies the waters about what bad design is, seemingly implying that if you merely play AD&D and write orcs and grey corridor adventures with b&w line art you'll have a decent adventure. You won't.

  My own suspicions about why Mork Borg's 3rd party products tend to be poor dungeons is that:

  A) They aren't trying to be dungeons - the game doesn't support exploration, and the crowd coming to it is often breezing in from indie and 5E places. They aren't used to writing dungeons and don't know how. This for example sounds like some kind of social roleplay thing (not really sure from the review - and I ain't buying crap) - if you compare it to Grognardia's Mork Borg play reports you'd think it's a different game.

  B) Ultralights don't give very good directions for adventure design, especially to new designers who are left trying to "draw the rest of the fucking owl" without guidance and without even rules that might point one in the right direction about what's important in an adventure (be it Indie style relationship systems, 5E combat powers & tactics, or Classic movement & supply limits.) FKR has the same failing - so again it's not an aesthetic.

  Mork Borg is troubled here because it's own sample adventure is basically a one pager, but this isn't definative - B/X's ruined keep is likewise small (though B/X's real sample adventure was B1 or B2). People copy what the designers give them, and mistakes were made.

  So I don't disagree with Bryce that this sounds like a bad adventure, or even that Mork Borg has a rather productive community producing poor adventures ... but have you looked at DTRPG? Poor adventures abound for every style of play and system. The Mork Borg (and ultralights generally) issue of producing short adventures that lack meaningful detail for play seems at least partially a marketing issue, based on the usefulness of quickly produced short works/pamphlets/one page dungeons for brand building and cheap production. I don't love it either, but I fear it's here to stay.

  • Poor encounter design is a result of a focus on esthethics, layout and novelty over gameplay, map design and adventure complexity yes.

    • The fact that you use the post 3E - 5E phrase "encounter design" rather then adventure design or level design suggests a far deeper root to the problem. I see profound lack of community knowledge about how location based adventures function. Sure, the market favors short, pretty stuff, but just as there's a lot of bad stuff in fake B/X trade dress, there's good stuff in grunge or other highly aesthetic wrappings: Hole in the Oak, Gradient Descent, and Willowby Hall come immediately to mind.

      Spittle froth about "Art-Punks" doesn't serve to get to that root problem, and pushes away those attracted by aesthetics away from the Classic playstyle they were looking for.

      • I wonder if the aesthetics aren’t, though, becoming more of a bug than a feature. Looking at the preview for this particular product doesn’t lead one deep into “art.” It’s actually looks fairly clumsily-put together.

        I do note that Bryce, bless him, has run into a plethora of offerings lately that are more akin to brief outlines of modules than actual modules and “dressing them up” with color, fun fonts, weird-for-sake-of-weird and extra umlauts only serves to underscore what they’re missing.

        • Quality certainly varies, regardless of aesthetic, and layout and are both skills that take knowledge and practice.

          New designers and those unfamiliar with the play style are most at risk for screwing this stuff up as well though I suspect. They don't understand how maps or tables work in play and drop them in to offer a look rather then with purpose. I also suspect you are right that it's more glaring in works trying to emulate minimalist design, because with fewer words more utility has to be hung off the few one has. One page dungeons are tricky - not at all a good place to start for a new designer.

        • You are ignoring the correlation of poor adventures to high aesthetics. Mork Borg/Troika are among the most elaborate yet adventure quality is all but absent. The appearance serves as the primary outlet for the creative focus. The underlying craft is neglected or never picked up in the first place.

        • This.

          It is an art project. An adventure in layout and style rather than an actual adventure.

        • Gus equivocates because he and Ben L make Artpunk.

        • I can't know the intent of system publishers, and haven't looked at Troika, but I do know that both Mork Borg and it are ultralights. Much like various other, less lavishly designed ones.

          As mentioned above I'd look to the system mechanics for reasons why such systems don't have many adventures that support procedural location based exploration. Again, the aesthetics of Knave or Black Hack aren't shared with Mork Borg, but since many of the ultralight system conciets are, I'd expect similar adventure design issues.

          This isn't something one can blame on the layout team.

        • Telepathy is not neccessary to perceive an obvious disparity between the effort put into the presentation versus the actual adventure, only a modicum of discernment.

          The problem is self-selecting. The type of creative types that are largely ignorant of or indifferent to the actual classic playstyle (among other things) gravitate towards ultra-lights but are by no means exclusive to them. You can find beautifully laid out shallow drivel for OSE aplenty. These in turn attract other types that don't play DnD but love buying and talking about not-DnD. Sometimes you can even get these people to write reviews of one page troika dungeons.

          Play-testing is so highly regarded here because it serves as the demarcation criterion between the tourists and the living breathing hobby.

      • In addition: Layout team is a straw man. The argument is not that a layout team produces bad material, the argument is that a DnD design philosophy rooted in aesthetics will produce material with a primary focus on aesthetics instead of the underlying fundamentals. Try to keep up.

  • Beware of style over substance. Also, playtesting matters. I'm not the king of adventure design by any means; but every one of our products has been playtested, and we hear from enough buyers who've successfully run (and enjoyed) our stuff to feel justified in our efforts to play the damn thing first. Not that it shouldn't be obvious. I got a chuckle out of 'layout team' though. A lot of this stuff is one guy doing everything and trying to do it well enough to look at least credible. It's easy enough to get caught up in the physical production and forget there has to be a good adventure underneath, although I understand that other things come into play, including the whole 'arthaus conceit' (I'm reluctant to diagnose this in people I don't know, however). I suppose it's multivariate...

• I like what Ben is doing. Knave is a good ultralight but had no procedures. He thought I did this in Maze Rats why write it again. BUT GUS IS WRIYE PEOPLE COPY

  Ben saw this and said
  LET THERE BE KNAVE 2e LIGHT LET IT FLOW THROUGH YOU
  PENETRTHISISASIDENOTEBENHASSWEETSTUFFATRTOQUALITYEYOUWILLSEEMYWRATHLOVEANDPOWERMAKEARTFORYOUTOBESTRONGANDLUVRLONANDPROSLER

• The umlaut over the second ‘O’ tells you everything you need to know about this product.

• Here goes Bryce, saving me another couple of bucks. A good man and a patriot.

• DEERGA

• "Are you worried about being judged? Is that why you don’t put anything specific down? If you don’t make a decision then no one can blast you for the decision you have made? "

  "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice." --- Rush "Free Will"

  • Now we're talkin'