The Culture: An Expert Panel On Why Your Adventures Suck And How To Fix Them

Dunder did another expert panel.

The takeaways:

• Play first. Take notes.
• Clean up your notes as your first draft.
• Have others run your scenario as part of the revision process; they will find what you missed.
• Revise, re-test, repeat until the flaws are fixed.
• Polish the presentation and you're done.

You have other things that need to be accounted for in order to maintain the Fantasy of Agency, some of which are known things in this discourse (i.e. Jaquayes design principles for the physical plant; you need multiple access points and a non-linear plant layout), and some are not (technical writing acumen, cognitive load).

The need for deep acumen in the system you design for matters (and it explains why Palladium has so few of them; can't have deep acumen when there's sweet fuck-all system to have acumen for); you have know the ins and outs of how the game works, and you should be designing to reward players possessing that acumen, in order for the experience of play to remain consistent regardless of who's running their mans and who's the Referee.

But it would better to have a complete product that makes the need for these things irrelevant. AD&D1e, Classic Traveller, and more are exactly this.