The Original Concept for ImperilUs Text Adventures

About a year ago, I was creating campaigns for Dungeons & Dragons. A constant issue facing Dungeon Masters is balancing out planning and improvisation. If you try to plan everything, the vast majority of your work will be wasted. If you don't plan things out, it can be great, but you had better be that type of DM.

For me, things work best when you have the next step or two fairly well sketched out and players take things where they like. It's a continuous process of iteration and making just enough content to cover the next session. One problem I have with this approach is that it's hard to have overarching themes.

To overcome this problem, I think of ways to guide players back to the arc after they have taken a sidetrack. This results in an overall plan that is less linear, and more a series of choices which guide players to certain common points. I like to flowchart the overall campaign and make adjustments as I go.

To give an overly simple example:

%%{init: {'theme':'neutral'}}%%
flowchart TD
    A[Start] --> B(Do something)
    B --> C{Decision}
    C -->|East| D[Go East]
    C -->|West| E[Go West]
    C -->|Cave| F[Enter Cave]
    D --> G[Reach Castle]
    E --> G
    F --> H[Pass through cave]
    H --> G

The first time I flowcharted a campaign like this, I was immediately reminded of the dozens of Choose Your Own Adventure books I read as a kid. They were a great way to keep myself entertained, but one thing I thought they were lacking was randomness. The roll of the dice. It got me thinking how much fun it would be to mix the concepts, but I didn't have the time or motivation.

Cut forward a few months. My son and his friends had gotten into Dungeons & Dragons, which was great. But when he was home, and had free time, he would sit on screen consuming instead of creating. I asked if he'd like to have something where he could write short text adventures with some role-playing game mechanics built in, share them with his friends, and his friends could do the same. They were super keen on the idea, and ImperilUs was born.

So that's the idea. I've got the basics working. But I'm not happy with them yet. I'll tune the play for a while, then give access to my son and his friends and get their feedback. If that goes well, I'll open it up for more people and iterate. Hopefully, it will be as much fun as I imagine it can be!