This Feature is part of my ongoing True Scenario Designery course. If you’ve not been following it from the start, the convenient True Scenario Designery Course Index is a convenient way to start at the start. Do that.

A Scenario Design Interlude: Why Are We Here?

It’s time to put the textbooks and lesson plans away, kiddos and kidettes, and hash some crap out. We’re at a transition point.

We just finished this three-lesson thing about basic game design concepts. I taught you that a game — and therefore a scenario — needs a goal, rules, challenges, and context to be worth a damn. I also taught you that you can’t make a game — and therefore a scenario — until you identify that game’s goal, starting point, likely possible outcomes, and its major challenge element. I also implied heavily that there’s a super secret, super important relationship between the goals, outcomes, and major challenge.

Does that jive with your recollections? I hope so because I wrote half a novella worth of words explaining all that crap.

I’m about to start a new multi-lesson series and I’ve come to realize it’ll be a long time before we’re doing anything that looks like writing an adventure. Especially if I don’t find a way to crank out more than one of these lessons a month. That might leave you wondering why it’s taking so long to get to the part where we draw dungeons and fill them with scary monsters.

That’s what I want to discuss today. Why it’s taking so long to get to the part with the graph paper and the Encounter Balance Tables and why it’s worth taking so long.

I also want to plant a couple of seeds in your brain that’ll be very important in the next bunch of lessons. See, I’m probably going to challenge you to think very differently about tabletop roleplaying game scenario design than you’ve ever thought before. In fact, I’m going to make you stop thinking about the roleplaying part at all. That’s gonna rustle some jimmies.

I’m also going to leave you thinking that tabletop roleplaying games are actually pretty badly designed for what they do. Or, at least, what they expect you to do with them as a Scenario Designer. Which is both true and totally untrue and unfair.

For what it’s worth, though, launching True Scenario Designery early completely changed my goals for Slapdash. I know some of you won’t know what that sentence means, but don’t worry about it. It’s not important.

Anyway, today, I’m gonna do one of those rambly, stream-of-consciousness things to check in, make sure you’re still here for the right reasons, and warn you that there be rough waters ahead. Then, I’ll start the next multi-lesson module about Winning and Losing which will include in-depth discussions about Goals and Outcomes and the twin concepts of Momentum and Inertia.

The Game Designer Game Master

I ran my first Dungeons & Dragons game back in early 1988 and, despite all my jokes about being trapped behind the screen forever and wishing for the sweet embrace of death to finally release me, I was hooked. To this day, I still remember what hooked me and why. It’s actually precisely the reason I’m doing this whole True Scenario Designery thing.

I love games. I always have. I love board games and video games and I even kind of like physical sportsy games. Kind of. It’s probably just in my nature to love games, but I blame my father for a lot of it. He loved games too. My family played a lot of board games when I was young, but my dad and I played a lot of games just between the two of us. I inherited his love for complicated, fiddly little games, but I also went my own way. When my cousin left us his old Atari 2600 console and then later when I got my very own Nintendo Entertainment System, I came to love video games too.

My entry to D&D was through the 1983 edition of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules written by Frank Mentzer. The Red Box, as it’s called, with the iconic Larry Elmore dragon cover. To be honest, if I’d encountered any other version of D&D as my entry point, I probably wouldn’t have stuck it out, but Mentzer’s version did something no other product before or since has done. It taught me how to build my own dungeon adventures. I don’t mean that it had instructions and guidelines and shit. I mean it literally presented a sequence of adventure-building tutorials disguised as an exercise in running games. It was exactly what I wanted.

I love games. As a kid, I was always inventing games to play with my sisters, my cousins, and my friends. The Mentzer Red Box presented D&D as a game invention kit. Here was a way to create an infinity of games for my friends to play.

That’s why I’m a Game Master. I love games and I want to make games for people but coding is hard and roleplaying games are basically game creation engines that let you watch your friends play what you build. That’s also why I’m pretty exclusively a homebrewer. I’m only interested in running what I create because that’s what I want from roleplaying games.

Over the years, I’ve developed a very sophisticated appreciation for games. I’ve learned there’s way more to a game — a good game — than just a goal and a string of obstacles or puzzles or monsters to fight or whatever. There’s a magic in how it’s all put together. It’s a total package thing. You can have all the pieces and put them all in a row and have an okay thing, but when you also have that magical understanding of how to fit it all together right, you get something amazing.

I’ve also learned that game designers don’t just drop puzzles and obstacles and monsters between the players and the goal. Game designers create the challenges, yes, but they want the players to win so they create them to be winnable. They help the players along the way. Game designers partner with their players to create an amazing gameplay experience. Game designers don’t just make games, they make playable games that feel good to lose and better to win.

Most Game Masters just don’t see adventure and encounter design that way. Most roleplaying game engines don’t present shit that way. Let’s be real: most adventures — even expensive, published adventures — come in just two flavors.

The first flavor of adventure is the maze to navigate with obstacles on the way and a prize at the end. That’s most dungeon crawls, sure, but it’s also lots of other things. A flowchart of events and scenes and branching paths is as much a maze to navigate as any physical dungeon space. It’s all just boxes and lines and challenges in the boxes. Beat the challenges, follow the lines, get to the end, and win.

I ain’t saying that’s a bad game, mind you. You can make great games that way. Some of my favorite creations are just really fancy mazes to navigate with obstacles and prizes.

The second flavor is the And Then… adventure. They don’t get published as often because they’re hard to write down, but published And Then… adventures do exist. An And Then… adventure is a series of happenings and resolutions and responses that lead… well… somewhere. The players do stuff and then stuff happens. Maybe they get to an ending or a prize or a goal or maybe they just get somewhere different from here. Obviously, this is the demesne of improvisational and character-and-story-driven Game Masters, but it’s also where lots of Oldschool simulationist gamers land. And Then… lies just as much at the heart of “I don’t create adventures; I just create situations and let the players resolve them” as it does at the heart of Four Monks, One Noodle Shop.

Again, that ain’t a bad way to make a game. I’ve run a fair few And Then… games. I’d even argue that without that kind of open-endedness, you ain’t running a roleplaying game. There’s got to be some And Then… in every tabletop roleplaying game or else what the hell are you even doing?

But, I’ve learned that tabletop roleplaying game adventures can be so much more than either of those. Even if all you want is a maze with monsters and a prize, a solid underpinning in advanced game design can turn Lair of the Cave Goblins into something that feels amazing to play and to run. Likewise, you can elevate any free-wheeling “play to see what happens” narrative just by letting a big-picture sense of the game design help you decide what should happen next.

Not Everyone Is Me, But You Probably Are

Now, I ain’t saying every Game Master secretly yearns to be Yoshio Sakamoto or Keiji Igarashi or Vlaada Chavtil or Richard Garfield or whoever. There are lots of reasons to get into the roleplaying gaming hobby and lots of reasons to plant yourself behind the screen. Hell, you don’t even need to homebrew your own content to run games. Lots of Game Masters don’t give a crap about writing their own games. I could argue that my motives are the best or the purest — they are — but it wouldn’t get me anywhere. I ain’t gonna win any converts. Hell, it’s not even really worth trying to argue that a solid foundation in game design can improve any kind of tabletop roleplaying game anyone wants to write or run. That’s true, but I can’t make people believe me and I don’t really care.

I am assuming, however, that you believe me. If you didn’t yearn to build games like the games you love so you can share them with your friends or your followers or your customers or whoever the hell you write content or run games for, you wouldn’t be wasting your time on all this True Scenario Designery crap. Because of that yearning, I also assume that you’ve got a more sophisticated palette for game design than most people and you’ve realized that the toolset roleplaying game engines give you, while perfectly adequate for general use, just aren’t advanced enough to let you build games like the ones you love. You want more.

Now, I’ve already given you the bad news, right? There’s no advanced toolset. The tools ain’t the problem. The problem is that game design is hard. It’s an art. It takes creativity, skill, and practice. Writing a good tabletop roleplaying game adventure is the same as designing a good board game or video game from start to finish. The engine helps, but the design comes from you.

That’s why we’re not drawing dungeons and sprinkling in some monsters. We can all do that already. It’s easy; the instructions are in the book. Likewise, we can all make event-based adventures and basic mysteries and heists and whatever. We all know the basic tools and we can all build birdhouses and bookshelves and credenzas or whatever the hell people build in woodshop.

That said, you might be shaking your head and saying, “Actually, that ain’t me. I ain’t you.” If so, this series isn’t for you and that’s okay. Hell, that’s why True Scenario Designery ain’t my entire content schedule. You’re welcome for that but you’re never going to like this series and you’re gonna like it a lot less in the next couple of weeks. You’re never going to agree with it.

The Quest Mindset

Still here? Good. Let’s talk about some ugly shit you ain’t gonna like. First, let’s talk about how World of Warcraft is the perfect foundational framework for everything we’re gonna do here.

See? Ugly.

One thing I’ve left unstated but have strongly implied is this thing I’m calling The Quest Mindset. You need to grok it. It needs to sit next to Game Design Über Alles on the scenario design shelf in your brain. The idea is that you want to design everything as a discrete little chunk of adventure gaming. Campaigns, adventure paths, adventures, scenes, encounters, they’re all discrete little scenarios with goals, starts, outcomes, and major challenge elements.

That might not seem like a really weird idea because fantasy adventure roleplaying games are kind of built around basic units of adventure called Encounters, but it’s also really easy to forget that you need to apply the same logic to every level of your scenario design. Especially if you’ve been running games for a while.

Actual roleplaying game adventures and campaigns are continuous. They’re analog. The players smoothly glide from one event or scene to the next. They might move from town to wilderness to dungeon and back, but the action’s continuous to them and to the Game Masters running the game. Because of the way most Game Masters run their games, it’s hard to even spot where one goal ends and another begins. Where the adventures start and stop.

Honestly, that’s a good way to run a game. It’s organic. It’s natural. You don’t want to start every adventure with a quest-giver just spelling out the next assignment and then rewarding the players when they come back two sessions later. You can if you want to, but it ain’t the only way, and most Game Masters don’t.

If the players in most of my campaigns sat down and really thought it about, they could probably put lines between the adventures and find all the starts and stops and they could probably circle all the side quests too. The structure’s there, it’s just not obvious. Which is how it should be. I really am running just an endless succession of World of Warcraft quests. Kind of. Don’t think too hard about that.

I know lots of you are expecting something totally different. When I say, “I’ve got this sophisticated understanding of game design and I’m gonna share it with you so you can build truly great roleplaying game scenarios,” you ain’t expecting me to follow it up by saying, “So, basically, just make video game quests. That’s the basic foundational structure you always want to build on.” But I am saying exactly that and it’s not because online multiplayer games are the best or most fun games to play. Rather, it’s because good scenario design relies so heavily on goals, outcomes, challenges, and all that shit that you need to be able to break your big games down into discrete, manageable chunks so you can make sure each and every chunk is a good bit of game design.

Don’t Sweat the Roleplaying Thing

If the idea of breaking your brilliant, sophisticated roleplaying game scenario down into a bunch of discrete little MMO quests didn’t drive you away, maybe this will. “You’ll write better roleplaying game scenarios if you just forget about the whole roleplaying aspect of roleplaying gaming.” Broken yet?

There’s this board game called Pandemic, right? It’s a good one to discuss in this course for lots of reasons, so if you don’t already know it, you might want to check it out. It’ll come up a couple of times in the next few lessons.

In Pandemic, you are your friends are trying to eradicate four diseases before they overrun the world. You travel around the globe, gathering resources and trying to limit the spread of the diseases while also building unique medical cures that you can use to eradicate each disease in turn. Each player can interact with the game in the same basic ways, but each also adopts the role of a particular specialist like a Researcher or a Medic or a Dispatcher. Each specialist has — unsurprisingly — a specialized skill or ability they can use to help the team.

Now, Pandemic is actually a perfect game for roleplaying. Everyone’s got a single, specific character with a background and role. Everyone takes individual, independent actions, but the team can coordinate and communicate to achieve their shared goal. The team in Pandemic is a lot like an adventuring party in a roleplaying game. But no one roleplays. No one develops a backstory and no one projects themselves into their role. No one uses their understanding of their character’s motivation and personality to choose their actions.

That ain’t surprising. Pandemic is a really well-designed game and we’re going to be looking it at as an example of scenario design done right, but it’s not a roleplaying game, and no one mistakes it for one. But let me ask you this: Could you run it as a roleplaying game? Of course you could. Easily. All the elements are there. You wouldn’t even need any extra rules. You just need someone to make a few judgment calls and bring the world to life through narration and character portrayal. In short, you need a Game Master.

The roleplaying part of a roleplaying game has nothing to do with the rules, mechanics, or scenario design. It’s all down to one, unique gameplay feature: a human Game Master with a brain. The Game Master facilitates open-ended actions, continuity, and consequences that the world remembers and the Game Master turns the mechanics into a living, breathing world purely through narration.

The truth is, the whole roleplaying thing is kind of a veneer slathered on top of the game. It’s a smoke-and-mirrors trick the Game Master pulls off. The underlying rules and systems and adventure design can make it easier to pull off, but they’re separate from the trick. In fact, the whole point of designing a good scenario is actually designing a game that’s fun to play even if the Game Master doesn’t do the best job or the players don’t get too terribly absorbed in all the immersive bullshit. A good scenario is a good scenario even if the players play it totally by the book and no one cares to speak in character.

It’s actually really helpful to approach roleplaying game scenario design like a board game designer or a video game scenario designer. That’ll get you through most of the process. Design Pandemic first. Get the solid game design framework laid out. Make it playable and winnable and good. Then add whatever you must so the Game Master can pull a roleplaying game out of the box or out of his hat or out of his ass or whatever.

Am I saying you should completely ignore the roleplaying aspect of roleplaying games? Obviously not. You can’t. You have to have some sense, in the back of your mind, that your game has to work as a roleplaying game and not any other kind of game. But making a game work as a roleplaying game is actually the easy part. The hard part is making a game that feels as good to play as something like Pandemic or The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past or whatever else is displayed in the Museum of Game Design Greatness in your head. Whatever game it is that you want to make great games like for your friends.

Looking Ahead

As I’ve mentioned several times now, in the next lesson, I’m going to start a long discussion about Winning and Losing in Roleplaying Game Scenarios. Those two ideas — Winning and Losing — tend to give roleplaying gamers — and game designers — apoplectic fits. Game designers tie themselves in knots trying to explain in rulebooks how the concept of Winning even fits into the roleplaying game space and no one knows how to sensibly discuss Losing. Hell, most gamers don’t think either of those two concepts belong anywhere near roleplaying gaming. That’s why I need you totally on board with the whole “Don’t even think of this as roleplaying game design,” thing. Meanwhile, breaking everything down into simple, discrete chunks of game makes it easier to see how all this shit fits together and answer questions about what it means to lose an Encounter and win an Adventure or whatever.

I’ll be using board games as my primary go-to examples in the next few lessons. Very specifically, I’mma have a lot to say about Matt Leacock’s Pandemic published by Z-Man Games and Richard Garfield’s Magic: the Gathering published by Wizards of the Coast. They’ll help me explain some of the more difficult aspects of Winning and Losing and explore some advanced ideas like Momentum and Inertia. It’ll help, a lot, if you know how those games work so maybe treat this like a homework assignment.

Meanwhile, take a moment to reflect on what we’re really doing here. We’re not just making roleplaying game adventures; we can already do that. Can you do that? If you can’t, go make a few. It’s actually really easy and it’s kind of a course pre-requisite. Our goal here is to make good, well-designed adventures that feel good to play and run however the Game Master — you or anyone else running your work — manages to pull them off.

Ironically, that means we won’t be building actual adventures for a while yet and we won’t be building roleplaying adventures at all. If you can’t handle that, well, there are lots of blogs out there.

Actually, there aren’t. Everyone’s on YouTube these days. I’m about the only dumbass blogger left.