There are lots of reasons why you might design adventures, from personal pleasure up to a full-time job.

When you create levels or adventures, what are you really trying to do? In a word, you're trying to help the player(s) enjoy playing the game, nothing more, nothing less.

The two most important questions in game design: who is your audience, and what are the player(s) going to DO? Mess these up and nothing can save your effort!

Constraints promote creativity. So I tried writing what's important in game design in one page.

The process of creating a level or adventure isn't much different than the game design process in general. There are more constraints, however, but constraints can breed creativity.

Some "design documents" - the concept document and treatment - are more marketing than design documents. The actual design document tells programmers and artists how to make your level. Whether they'll read it, or just ask you, is another question.

Don't think you should write enormous detail. Here's a comment about game design documents from Christorpher Natsume: "I hope I am not the first person to tell you this, but nobody reads design documents. In fact, when working at larger studios, I made a habit of inserting the line “I will pay $5 to anyone who reads this sentence” into the center of any document over 50 pages. In 10 years of development nobody ever asked for their money. That’s a true story. Problematically, the industry has solved this problem by holding meetings. Lots of meetings."

I've added this screencast to emphasize that you don't need to aspire to be a professional, to enjoy creating levels and adventures for games.

When you start to create a level/adventure, There are questions you have to ask yourself, and then you'll look for a hook or starting place, something to be the core of the episode.

Most games using levels or adventures are for an avatar-based, tactical level. But wargames may have scenarios, which are also episodes, and even avatar-based games can include strategic considerations in adventures that are mostly tactical, in cases where a long trip is involved, or a long quest.

There's a big difference between overcoming obstacles - problem-solving where there are usually multiple ways to succeed - and solving puzzles, where there's often only one solution (that always works). What kind of challenges are you going to make?

Linear adventures force player(s) along a particular path, often associated with a story imposed on the level/adventure. Open (or sandbox) levels allow the player(s) to write their own story.

Every level/adventure has a purpose, whether the designer's or the player(s)'. Sometimes it will be completion of a quest. Sometimes it will be related to a story. But don't get hung up on story, most people play games for the gameplay, not for the story.

Video game levels are often full of fighting rather than role-playing. Role-playing requires interaction with humans, not computers, usually humans who are in the same room (MMO players are unreliable at best). Furthermore, it requires non-combat situations.

Unless you know your target market wants to be told a story, to be "led around by the nose", don't take control of the game from them unless you absolutely have to.

Realism is still important to some players, but fewer each year as TV and movies contribute to our credulous society. Belief in magic and aliens (and vampires) among us is rife, and plot holes big enough to drive a truck through are common. But it doesn't hurt to try to encourage that willing suspension of disbelief.

Insofar as level design is a subset of game design, this fundamental game design question applies to you. In a level that is part of a larger game, there's even more reason to be on the game design rather than the fiction writer side, as the designer of the game as a whole is in charge of the fiction (whatever that amounts to).

Style - the kind of tactics and strategies the player(s) use - and mood - what the players feel - plays a big part in adventures.

Tutorials are mainly a problem for video game levels; in RPGs there's a referee to help anyone who needs it.

Aspiring level/adventure designers aren't likely to be writing for "PvP" (player versus player) or for multiplayer (two sides in teams). So I keep my observations about this aspect of level/adventure design brief.

See Multiplayer Level Design In-Depth, Part 1: The Specific Constraints of Multiplayer Level Design http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1795/multiplayer_level_design_indepth_.php

for more about mp mapping.

An adventure or level could be characterizes as the player(s) overcoming obstacles. Here is a discussion and listing of the kinds of obstacles you might use.

Maps are always important in game episodes, but especially in video game multiplayer (two teams) where players may play the same map hundreds of times. Maps can provide a great deal of variety (replayability) and memorability. Lots of advice here.

Games are about opposition, not always-correct solutions. Always-correct solutions are part of puzzles. Don't use puzzles heavily unless that's what your target market likes.

Not every level/adventure is part of a quest, not every quest is executed through a level/adventure. But quests are very much a part of MMOs and other video games. What are quests, categories of quests, etc.

Video game levels focus on boss fights as the big climax; tabletop RPGs are much less boss oriented.

"Bosses" is a video game notion that does not quite work in tabletop. In video games, you can play a fight over and over again. So we expect bosses to be very tough, to kill the player(s) several times. You can't do that in tabletop because, if you die, you're (mostly) dead, you don't get multiple tries.

Any fool can give away piles of loot - money, gems, jewels, items that increase capabilities. Your adventure or level should be enjoyable because of what the player does and experiences, not what he or she gets. Keep the well-being of the entire game/campaign in mind.

Tips based partly on my own experience (which includes contributing monsters to the original Fiend Folio, and to Dungeon and White Dwarf magazines), and what I gleaned from a GenCon panel that including Wolfgang Baur and Jeff Grubb. Part 2.

Games (like life) benefit from variation in tension/relaxation. The contrast makes both more intense and enjoyable.

Many people think there's an ideal way to construct stories, though they cannot agree on what that ideal is. Here are some possibilities. But games are mostly about overcoming obstacles, not about stories, and when there's a big story in a game, a studio hires a writer to write it, not a game designer.

There needs to be a "fair" relationship between effort/skill and rewards in games, but the old style (earn it) is being displaced by the reward style (awarded for participation).

Co-operative play is the norm in tabletop adventures, where no single character can survive for long, but in video games the tradition has been single player, mostly because the technology couldn't handle more. Co-op is now technically possible and widely popular as attitudes of video gamers change.

Here are lots of Do's and Don'ts (and in part 2, some Principles) for level design. Many have been discussed in other videos, some have not.

Here are lots of Do's and Don'ts (and in part 2, some Principles) for level design. Many have been discussed in other videos, some have not.

When Warren Spector was developing the famous video game Deus Ex, he wrote "rules" for his team. Explained here (by Lew, not by WS, from an article by WS).

Unless you're making a tabletop adventure to run for friends, you need to playtest your work before it goes out to the public at large. That means gathering people who were not part of the development, but who are representative of the target market, to play the level/adventure. What you think you've made will turn out not to be what you actually made. There's no substitute for playtesting.

If you're writing something for others to read, you need to be as clear as you can. There's a process involved, you won't get it done all at once, and you'll revise it later (if it's a document for programmers and artists to use).

In the modern world we don't do thing by pencil and paper, we use computers with all their advantages. Here's software (much of it free) that can help you design levels/adventures.

Story takes a more important place in a campaign/series of levels. You have the major story arc, and possibly subsidiary ones that last two to X number of adventures/levels.

From my book "Game Design" (McFarland, 2012)

Text adventures, though old-fashioned, still exist. And present somewhat different problems to designers.

A brief discussion of how to think about designing scenarios for wargames.

When creating a level or adventure, do you set up a situation and let the players make of what they may, or do you lead them specifically from one thing to another? Do you want them to act independently, or do you in effect hold their hands? There's no pat answer other than "whatever your audience prefers".

The state of the tabletop RPG market can be described in one word: poor. The only way to make anything close to a living is to work full-time for one of a few companies, with few openings and lots of competition. Crowdsourcing is one reason, an accumulation of decades of adventures is another.

An icv2 report about the state of tabletop games (Dec 14) shows how small the RPG market is. RPG market ($15M) is one fifth the size of boardgames ($75m), which in turn is only 1/6th of CCGs ($450m). http://www.examiner.com/article/icv2-releases-hobby-2013-hobby-survey-results-d-d-drops-out-of-top-5

Monte Cook observed several years ago that adventures seem to be much more story-oriented than in the past. Here's my suggestion for why that may be so.

End of the class, and what's next for you as a level/adventure designer: make complete levels and adventures!

Want to see what a one-day "boot camp" for level design looks like at GDC (Game Developer's Conference, San Francisco)? Here's a summary:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/213219/Level_Design_In_A_Day_bootcamp_returns_to_GDC_2014.php

Part 1. General tips for those intending to design RPGs.

Part 2. General tips for those intending to design RPGs.

Tastes in games vary so greatly that it's impossible to make a universal list. There is no universal "fun", there are so many ways that people enjoy games. So here's my list for hobbyist games, games for adults that play games as a hobby. Part 1

Part 2. Tastes in games vary so greatly that it's impossible to make a universal list. There is no universal "fun", there are so many ways that people enjoy games. So here's my list for hobbyist games, games for adults that play games as a hobby.

All the slides used in the course, excluding Bonus material.

Lew's online courses and information resources

While this video discusses game design portfolios, the same applies to level design, if you want a commercial job as a level designer. You have to let people, especially potential employers, see your work. If you're really interested in working in the video game industry you might want to try my "Get a Job in the Video Game Industry" course.

The video game industry is both unusual and unstable. Here's how it works.

This is closely related to open versus linear levels.adventures.

Why write a book in the 21st century, an era when people rarely read non-fiction books? And why a game design book? Here's why…

http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6952-9

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Create-Tabletop-Finish/dp/0786469528/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?