On the Releasing of the Necessity of Content

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 No dungeon room is ever really empty. This is because every room starts with nothing. It goes through various contents, a monster, some treasure, an adventuring party. Between sessions, there is nothing.

 Is an empty room ever encountered? No, that is wrong thinking. If you think this is because a party must encounter a room with nothing in it, and thus it is not empty, that is also wrong thinking.

 When a room is encountered, one may think "combat encounter," or "social encounter," or "stealth encounter." It is from this that actions are adjudicated and consequences are resolved. These myriad interpretations fail in the face of a room with nothing.

  The duality of design is thus: a room must give the opportunity to do anything imaginable and feasible, but still keep a coherent playstyle and encourage the party into those constraints. There is a freedom in constraints, and it breeds creativity in play.

  When your constraints are four stone walls, the opportunities are boundless. When there is a combat encounter, your viewpoint is limited to a zero-sum game. The game of the world becomes a game of the room in combat, the game of the room becomes game of the world when there is nothing. 

 If a room is never empty, then a dungeon is never empty, and a map is never empty.  A game grows not by having much of anything, but having nothing that it may fill.

 


 

 

A further exploration of empty rooms.

 

JOESKY:

 

Character creation procedure: GM creates 5-15 pregens, shuffles them. When a new character is needed, a random pregen is handed to the player, who decides on the spot to keep that character or throw the sheet in the trash, never to be used. If trashed, repeat with the next character. Should the last pregen be reached, they must be played.

 Online character generator is helpful.

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