Dragna's Blog & Survey: Serendipity, Reloaded's Mistakes & My Publishing Priorities

This post is adapted from a longer, more self-indulgent blog post I posted in my Patreon Discord server last week. If you’re interested in reading it, you can find it here.

The most common complaint I hear about D&D modules is that they're too hard to run—and Curse of Strahd is no exception. With a sprawling, open-world concept, but little narrative structure or game balance, Curse of Strahd is a campaign that requires exceptional effort by a DM to run—and one which has often lured an unwary or inexperienced DM into a trap of their own devising.

The original Reloaded, along with numerous other Curse of Strahd guides and resources, aimed to address this by making sense of the mess, providing a narrative and gameplay structure to a campaign that, when read from the book, more resembles a setting sourcebook than a true adventure. However, it, too, was insufficient; while it aided DMs in making sense of the module, Reloaded readers were still forced—whether they wanted to or not—to become designers in their own rights, integrating the content on the page to craft and explore particular scenes that they would run at the table.

Re-Reloaded (the current version of the guide, available at strahdreloaded.com) aimed to address this, in turn, by becoming truly "zero-prep": Every scene was pre-planned, every descriptive text pre-written, every dialogue tree pre-anticipated. Following in the wake of the original Reloaded, I aimed to use my new (and steadily expanding) interest in theoretical game and narrative design to guide player behavior and maximize player engagement and experience, using dramatic questions, resonance, and method choices to create a curated, low-stress experience.

On the one hand, I received tremendously positive feedback from DMs who ran it, who applauded its narrative focus, character-driven storytelling, improved game design, and minimal prep. The results seem to speak for themselves—as far as I can tell, Reloaded (as a guide) has never been more popular amongst the broader Curse of Strahd community, and more DMs start running it each week.

On the other hand, Re-Reloaded has received numerous critiques since its publication, such as:

• Many DMs (especially new DMs) are terrified of changing anything in the guide for fear of derailing the campaign.

• Many DMs find the guide more stressful than RAW to run, feeling that its detailed and prescriptive instructions force DMs to run the campaign perfectly; at least with RAW, they feel, there are no real load-bearing pillars and you can always make sense of whatever mess your mistakes wind up with.

• Many DMs find the guide boring, stifling, or tyrannically over-detailed, critiquing its “railroaded” or “linear” nature. 

Meanwhile, for all my efforts to make the guide zero-prep, many DMs who enjoy the guide have also insisted on doing additional prep nonetheless, making small tweaks and broad changes alike—even while assuring me that the guide itself is fine, and they're just tailoring the guide to themselves or their tables.

Over the past year or so, I’ve largely disregarded these critiques or issues, reasoning to myself that Reloaded is a guide built for a particular audience that prefers zero-prep modules, and that it’s fine for DMs to accidentally take down load-bearing pillars so long as I warn them ahead of time that the guide is a “change-at-your-own-risk” adventure. Last week, however, I asked members of the Patreon Discord server why they had made changes to the guide at their own tables—and the answers proved illuminating (if probably obvious to anyone who isn't me).

When module designers create modules, we do so for a generalized, idealized audience: a “typical player” that dwells in our heads, but doesn’t truly exist. When our modules are distributed to real tables, however, the real players differ from that “typical player” in unforeseen, random ways. Sometimes (e.g., murderhobos), these random mutations are harmful—but sometimes, these random mutations are beneficial—if only the module is tweaked in a certain way (e.g., by including a certain small backstory detail).

In short: I realized that, in insisting that all DMs run Reloaded in the exact same way, I’d deprived them of serendipity: the opportunity to change non-load-bearing parts of the campaign in order to take advantage of unique beneficial player attributes (e.g., a player who forms a much deeper relationship with Vasilka or Parriwimple than expected).

(Again, I'm not claiming this is a deep revelation—only that it felt like one to me, given my preference for pick-up-and-play modules and a general loathing for doing any personal campaign design whatsoever.)

Furthermore, as I worked to develop the theoretical foundations for my DMing narrative/game design textbook (codename "The DMG: Reloaded"), I started to realize that those who’d called Reloaded a “railroad” may not have been as off-course as I’d felt. As I wrote in my recent draft chapter on “Methods”:

A narrative segment's degrees of freedom increase with the choices it offers the players:

• Mechanical gameplay offers the players a choice of two or more verbs and/or verb sequences. A narrative segment with mechanical gameplay feels engaging (because the players' every choice matters), while a narrative segment without mechanical gameplay feels stilted (because the players are functionally reciting a preordained or obvious script).

• Tactical gameplay offers the players a choice of two or more tactics. A narrative segment with tactical gameplay feels stimulating (because the players must make and calculate tradeoffs or probabilities of success), while a narrative segment without tactical gameplay feels predictable (because the players know that, barring isolated slip-ups or miscalculations, their overall course of action is certain to succeed).

• Strategic gameplay offers the players a choice of two or more strategies. A narrative segment with strategic gameplay feels freeing (because the players have the agency to choose which "win condition" to pursue), while a narrative segment without strategic gameplay feels limiting (because only the DM's chosen win conditions will work).

• Dramatic gameplay offers the players a choice of two or more goals. A narrative segment with dramatic gameplay feels empowering (because the players have the agency to define what "success" means to them) while a narrative segment without dramatic gameplay feels alienating (because the players' definition of "success" has been pre-chosen by the DM).

A narrative segment has a number of degrees of freedom equal to the number of types of gameplay it offers. (For example, a narrative segment with mechanical gameplay has one degree of freedom, a narrative segment with mechanical and tactical gameplay has two degrees of freedom, and a narrative segment with mechanical, tactical, and strategic gameplay has three degrees of freedom.)

A railroad occurs when a chosen goal, strategy, tactic, or verb fails to work for arbitrary, capricious, and/or unreasonable reasons. (A reason is arbitrary when it's unsupported by in-world reasoning, capricious when it hasn't been hinted at or foreshadowed, and unreasonable when it relies upon an absurd mechanic.) Examples of railroads might include:

• Mechanical Railroad. In order to stop the evil vizier from kidnapping the king, a player attempts to shove the vizier out the throne room's window (a verb); however, the DM abruptly reveals that the window is reinforced and unbreakable.

• Tactical Railroad. In order to stop the evil vizier from kidnapping the king, a player decides that they should try to defenestrate the vizier (a tactic); however, the DM abruptly reveals that the vizier can fly.

• Strategic Railroad. In order to stop the evil vizier from kidnapping the king, a player decides that the vizier needs to be far away from the king (a strategy); however, the DM abruptly reveals that the vizier will always teleport to the king's side at the end of each round.

• Dramatic Railroad. In order to keep the king safe, a player decides to stop the evil vizier from kidnapping him; however, the DM abruptly reveals that the king has chosen to accompany the vizier and wants the players to rescue him from the vizier's distant castle.

Is Re-Reloaded a railroad under this definition? I’d still argue not; it often deprives players of dramatic, strategic, or (occasionally) tactical choices (see, e.g., the fact that the only way to defeat the hags is to first bind them using Fiona Wachter’s ritual, or that the only way to save Stella is to cast Victor’s etherealness ritual), but rarely does so arbitrarily, capriciously, or unreasonably. Yet it’s also true that a lot of players and DMs play D&D because they love the opportunity to explore dramatic and strategic gameplay—and that, by frequently mapping out the exact gameplay progression sequences available, Reloaded tended to take that away from them.

Now, given the unfinished state of the guide, I definitely don’t have the time to go back and revise each arc to allow more dramatic, strategic, and tactical freedom (though I do have some ideas for how to do so eventually). But in the meantime, there are clear things that I could do to improve the DMing experience:

• Critical Paths. I could add sidebars breaking down the expected “critical path” of each act, arc, and scene, helping DMs to better understand how all of the pieces are meant to fit together and how each session is expected to (roughly) play out.

• Load-Bearing Pillars. I could add sidebars pointing out “load-bearing pillars,” so that DMs know which sections of the guide they can change freely, and which they can’t.

• Design Notes. I could add sidebars explaining each particular decision I’ve made, so that DMs know how different changes might affect the gameplay and which areas remain ripe for further development.

#1 (adding critical paths) would be pretty easy, and would probably take me around two weeks to do. #2 (breaking down load-bearing pillars)  would be a bit more in-depth, requiring a month or so to complete. #3 (adding comprehensive design notes) would be intense—pretty similar to the existing (but now often outdated, and generally discontinued) design notes at the bottom of the earlier chapters—and could take months to complete.

I do think I need to do these—so that, ultimately, DMs can make their own (well-informed) decisions about what to change, adapt, and keep. The only question is: when and how?

Right now, I estimate I’m approximately 100,000 words away from finishing the full draft of Re-Reloaded (with an estimated 5,000 words left in Arc R—Trials of the Mountain, 25,000 words in Arc S—A Sword of Sunlight, 50,000 words in Arc T—Dreams of Dawn, and 20,000 words in Arc U—The Curse of Strahd).

At 5,000 words a week, that’s approximately 20 weeks’ worth of work left (placing the completion date in late April 2025); at 7,000 words a week, that’s approximately 15 weeks’ worth of work left (placing the completion date in mid/late March 2025). I feel reasonably confident that, at my current writing rate, I’ll land somewhere in between those . . . though, of course, real life is never quite as cooperative as we might hope.

So what are my options?

• If I do #1 now, starting after Arc R is published and before I start Arc S, those timelines extend by around two weeks. 

• If I do #1 and #2 between Arcs R and S, those timelines extend by around six weeks. 

I could compensate for any excessive delay by publishing my rough bullet-point notes for the “load-bearing pillars” of the three unpublished arcs, but that’d probably delay my timelines by another week or two. (Due to the sheer length of time #3 would involve—and the ongoing churn of edits to published arcs—there’s basically no world where I do #3 before the guide is done.)

So that’s why I’ve come to you: I want to know what you think I should do (including whether I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely). Let me know your thoughts in the comments and/or vote in the poll below.

Regardless, thank you to all who have supported, shared, and run Reloaded—and especially to those who kept rightfully critiquing the guide’s flaws even when they failed to break through my thick skull. I look forward to hearing your thoughts, and I hope that, however I sequence the work, you enjoy the final product as much as possible :) 

Cheers,
Dragna

P.S.: Thank you very much for your continued patience regarding Arc R—at nearly 50k words and over 100 pages, it's easily my longest release so far. I've only got 3-4 scenes left to write, plus a scattering of edits, so fingers crossed that I can get it out before Christmas (if not sooner)!