Critique and Advice; the treadmill of adventuring.

This is both a case of learning better writing and also learning how to forum adventure better. Such as, early on I stopped the updates at places where the only choice was "Open the door" or "The obvious answer" now I no longer do that because it doesn't really work and I know readers don't want to state the obvious. (Unless of course I'm trying to buy up time or cause tension.)

The best place to stop an update is at a moment of conflict; with a clear problem that has to be solved, but has a lot of potential approaches. Another good option is, if you have a bunch of exposition to do, just ask the audience for questions; usually this isn't visually exciting, but it's a very open prompt.

Of course, doing that sort of thing isn't always possible, especially with the demands of a daily update schedule - there have been times in Swamped when I've had trouble thinking of a good prompt to end on. As a basic rule of thumb, I'd say you want to change the situation, and then give the readers an opportunity to respond to the way it's changed.

In the event that you do end up needing to do an "open the door" update, the best thing to do is ask "okay, is there anything you want to do before opening the door?" Here you acknowledge that the door is opening, most likely in the next update, but you give one last opportunity to play with the room.

Actually, that gives me a weird adventure idea, so I'm going to toss it into the ideas thread.