Quote:
Originally Posted by Shadekeep
One feature I hope to add soon is the ability to add more rows to the node map. As it stands your are limited to 120 total nodes by the grid size, and adventures like Death Test are larger than that.
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Thanks for putting this up. I'll be interested in taking a look at how it works.
You can do a pretty extensive adventure with 120 nodes.
Death Test was 167 paragraph nodes.
Grail Quest was about the same, but had longer paragraphs for a significantly greater word count.
Death Test 2 was huge with 287 paragraph nodes and about 15,000 words of paragraph text. My own
Vampire Hunter Belladonna had 194 paragraph nodes, but was heavier on the story telling with about 16,000 words of paragraph text. (The longest paragraph solo adventures I'm aware of are the various book-length ones e.g.,
Fighting Fantasy and the extensive
Call of Cthulhu solos)
So far, I think the pure paragraph adventure format with inset Melee/Wizard scale tactical maps has been most popular for TFT, with "strategic" movement handled strictly through text nodes whether you were moving in a dungeon (
Death Test,
Security Station, etc.) or through a wilderness (
Grail Quest, Belladonna). This is more or less the same format used in the pioneering
Tunnels and Trolls and the successful
Fighting Fantasy adventures, albeit generally without a tactical map, in the
GURPS Conan and
Runequest solos and in most of the solos that were at one point a popular vogue for introductory adventures (I recall ones for
Basic D&D, Star Wars, James Bond 007 in the 80s/90s. I think the
Legends of the Ancient World adventures like Orcs of the High Mountain also use this standard format.
However, both SPI and Metagaming also did some hybrid formats where you moved about on a hex grid or area grid that was fully visible to the player and some or all hexes were keyed to encounters. I think
Voyage of the Pandora may have been the fist to do this, and of course it was used in
Treasure of the Silver Dragon and
Unicorn Gold, and there have been other variations. I am not sure I like it as month as the pure paragraph format, but it adds interesting options. Finally, there is the "Chit Building" solo which SPI pionereed with its
Citadel of Blood and
Deathmaze games where you assemble a wilderness or dungeon by laying down tiles in a semi-random pattern as you explore each room.
SPI mostly used it for hybrid board-game rpgs, but the format might work well today for a high-budget kickstarter TFT game where the kickstarter funds an entire set of custom room tiles that you assemble to build your labyrinth as you explore it.