One of my favourite pathed computer games is Panzer General 2, where success in prior missions has a big effect on the direction of the campaign – whether you end the game fighting to take the Oak Ridge nuclear reactor from the Americans, or fighting to defend Berlin from the Red Army, is up to how you did previously: relative failure does not have to end the campaign, it can open up interesting new directions.

By contrast, there’s a cutscene in the computer game Heavy Gear where the protagonist’s traitorous girlfriend tries to seduce him away to the other side. In the cutscene the hero rejects her advances and the final battle is him dueling her to the death. I felt it would have been a lot cooler if they had just included a simple yes/no ption in the game where you could choose whether or not to go with her, going over to the other side would then open up a different scenario where you eg led the final assault on your old comrades.

IMO any decent RPG campaign should be able to accommodate some branching paths based on both player success/failure and the decisions they make.

“Use your dungeon tiles to build a generic street scene, a wilderness scene, a dungeon scene, and a cavern scene”

I find that the predrawn Paizo flip-mats are ideal for this, especially the wilderness scenes. They don’t have a generic street scene one, that’d be nice to have for urban campaigns.

Great blog… I’m gonna add it to my “news ticker” this morning.