As some of you might know I've been developing a totally-not-ScoobyDoo game for a while now (started in 2019), dang it's hard to do cartoon slapstick comedy right.

I was hoping to release it this year for halloween, not gonna happen, still need to make a lot of rule changes and come up with new rules to make it work as I want to.

What has been the stuff you have found more challenging to write? Be it a homebrew adventure, or whatever.

Hardest thing for me is concise but evocative text.  Though I think that is inherently challenging to do well for anyone.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on October 26, 2023, 01:44:48 PM
Hardest thing for me is concise but evocative text.  Though I think that is inherently challenging to do well for anyone.

Fuck, yes, concise but evocative text that grows the lore/worldbuilding IS hard.

Time travel just causes my mind to unravel.  Causality, multiple timelines, and looping reality is enough to just shred my focus.

Quote from: BadApple on October 26, 2023, 03:27:53 PM
Time travel just causes my mind to unravel.  Causality, multiple timelines, and looping reality is enough to just shred my focus.

I just avoid it, not worth the headache IMHO.

Writing short stories and novels, it isn't the genre so much as having the setting, characters, and the story in my head, understood. Without that, the story tends to be flat and short and to the point. My wife comes along for the next draft and makes it interesting. But one where I know the character personalities, setting, and story, it just flows like water.

I've mentioned it before, Cyberpunk. A focused campaign (Solos, Cops) is easy, but getting a bunch of disparate Roles together for any length of time and giving them all stuff to do is a challenge.

Quote from: Tod13 on October 26, 2023, 04:27:03 PM
Writing short stories and novels, it isn't the genre so much as having the setting, characters, and the story in my head, understood. Without that, the story tends to be flat and short and to the point. My wife comes along for the next draft and makes it interesting. But one where I know the character personalities, setting, and story, it just flows like water.

Maybe I need to binge watch some Scooby Doo.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on October 26, 2023, 04:36:31 PM

Quote from: Tod13 on October 26, 2023, 04:27:03 PM
Writing short stories and novels, it isn't the genre so much as having the setting, characters, and the story in my head, understood. Without that, the story tends to be flat and short and to the point. My wife comes along for the next draft and makes it interesting. But one where I know the character personalities, setting, and story, it just flows like water.

Maybe I need to binge watch some Scooby Doo.

It should inspire you. Or Marvin Martian shorts? Three Stooges movies? Something with story definitely.

I answered for short story/book writing, since I don't "write" adventures in the way you seem to mean. The setup for the adventure is the same. I could run any of them slapstick or otherwise. It's all in how the world and NPCs react.

And that drives how the PCs react. They won't act slapstick if they think it will lead directly to their death. (Not a 100% rule, but a general tendency.)

Quote from: Ratman_tf on October 26, 2023, 04:34:28 PM
I've mentioned it before, Cyberpunk. A focused campaign (Solos, Cops) is easy, but getting a bunch of disparate Roles together for any length of time and giving them all stuff to do is a challenge.

Yes, especially with how deadly combat is in Cyberpunk, guess that's why they love to turn the hacker into a spell caster with a thin coat of paint.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on October 26, 2023, 04:34:28 PM
I've mentioned it before, Cyberpunk. A focused campaign (Solos, Cops) is easy, but getting a bunch of disparate Roles together for any length of time and giving them all stuff to do is a challenge.

The trick to cyberpunk is that combat is something that PCs should be trying to avoid at all cost.  Getting in a gun fight is the punishment for bad decision making. 

Players should be driven by an external force to engage in risky endeavors.  (The classic trope is a bomb implant like Escape from New York.)  To avoid railroads, your best option is to say that they have a fixed payoff they have to make in a certain amount of time or there's a big job they have a certain amount of time to pull off but they need to do other things to get the scratch to buy the necessary tools.  Another great pressure is a cop investigating a crime that the PCs involved themselves in that they need to clean up while the the cops put the case together. 

The next big key is that NPCs don't trust the PCs.  Now the players either have to figure out how to earn trust or get info that NPCs don't want to share some other way.

Lastly, NPCs are the key to good cyberpunk experiences.  Try to focus a game around the PCs sorting out who they can trust with what.  Then have them build a network of NPCs; contractor specialists, fences, info brokers, police contacts, employers, neighbors, and anyone else that they can form a working relationship with.  All of them should have their own motivations and goals and all of them have some form of trigger that will cause them to turn on the PCs. One NPC might turn on the party if he find out that they robbed the company the NPC works for.  Another NPC might betray them if some sensitive information the PCs reveal makes them believe they can collect a reward on the PCs if it's enough to get the Pc out of poverty. 

Quote from: Ratman_tf on October 26, 2023, 04:34:28 PM
I've mentioned it before, Cyberpunk. A focused campaign (Solos, Cops) is easy, but getting a bunch of disparate Roles together for any length of time and giving them all stuff to do is a challenge.

I would also recommend you look at the RL stories of hackers and pen testers.  Here's a couple to get you started.

Kevin Mitnick
Karl Koch
Deviant Ollam
Julian Assange

You can also look up DefCon and watch some of their presentations.

While I wouldn't have touched it before, after a recent conference attendance I'm finding generative AI as a quick way of inspiring the 'ole muse (though I wouldn't use it as-generated--only for inspiration when my muse is dead).

I find modern realistic to be the most challenging.  For fantasy and science fiction you can make almost everything up.  For historical there's few enough genuine experts around that if you get the broad points right not many people will care about the rest.  For modern realistic most folks know an immense amount about how things work, and you'll get called on anything that's not quite right.  So I spend way too much time making sure there aren't significant errors.

I find the key for any genre is preparation.  Frex, I was writing a teen adventure post-bioapocalypse book.  I had a lot of ideas but instantly hit about a week of writer's block.  Then I stepped back and wrote about a ten page overview of the main characters, history, geography, technology, and politics of the region where the story was taking place.  Once I did that it just flowed.

I'm going to agree with the poster above me and say modern. I'd want it to make sense and not become handwavium silliness like every TV show when it comes to cyber. Gearing it in reality would be tough. We see modern reality, yes, but we also find there's so much utter bullshit being spouted, especially on social media and corporate news. I can see why so many writers do cyberpunk-esque books - it's easy, like doing fantasy.