I kind of forgot to do the whole Long, Rambling Introduction™. Sorry.

Your Ad Here: Ask Me How

I’m just kidding. I don’t run ads. Nor do I host sponsored content. Nor do I post guest content. Please, please, please take me off your f$&%ing mailing lists.

AOWG Lesson Five: And Now for Two Completely Different Somethings

I’m back with the fifth of four lessons about running your own Angry’s Open World Game. Why a fifth lesson? Because shut up, that’s why. Do you not want a fifth lesson? What’s wrong with you? You were that one a$&hole in every class who reminded the teacher they’d promised a pop quiz, weren’t you?

Seriously, though, the reason there’s a fifth lesson — and the reason there might be more in the future — is that, as I keep running my own Angry’s Open World Game, I keep discovering new s$&% I’ve got to teach you. And I keep learning new s$&%.

Today’s lesson is about two things that’ll seem totally unrelated at first. It’s about seeding your AOWG with stuff to do. And it’s about presenting a living, breathing world that seems like it could be a real place full of real people.

The Reactively Proactive

Way back in my third AOWG lesson, I taught you how to create a sense of open-world exploration by sticking your players on rails. And how to make damned sure they knew they were on rails. See, if the players are always pursuing a goal or moving in a direction, every opportunity or distraction or side path feels like a chance to explore.

And in the fourth lesson, I told you that the key to AOWG game prep was to know at all times what direction the players were heading in. Remember that? All that s$&% about Player-Do lists and Session Scripts?

See, the truth is that exploration-based gameplay ain’t as proactive as you think it is. I mean, the players do have to drive themselves forward. They have to be proactive. Make choices. Pick directions. All that crap. The problem is the vast majority of players just suck at being proactive. And no, I don’t want to hear about how your players are special and different. Because I know they’re not.

I mean, that’s why invite the players to act is one of the three major GMing steps I described in my brilliant, definitive work on the subject of running pretend elf games. It’s so that all you GMs remember that your players usually need an engraved f$&%ing invitation before they’ll do anything other than debate s$&% in committee or stare at their character sheets making a noise that sounds like “duuuuuuuhhhhhh.”

But I’ve explained this before. And I got a lot of s$&% for it. And I don’t care. Either you believed me then or nothing I say now is going to make a difference. So, let’s just pretend we all agree with the totally correct assessment that you always have to give the players something to do. And the only thing that makes open-world gaming different is that you’re also giving them the chance to do something else instead.

That’s why you’ve got to fill your world with s$&% to do.

A Worldbuilding Dynamo

But there’s something else that’s super important in this whole AOWG formula. Something I haven’t talked about a lot yet. It’s literally the thing that puts the W in AOWG. It’s the world.

“But Angry,” I hear you whining, “you did talk about the world. You told us specifically not to build one!”

Well, yes, I did tell you not to do a whole bunch of worldbuilding bulls$&%. But that’s only because I know you. Worldbuilding is, to you, what backstory is to a player. It’s a bunch of unnecessary crap that completely misses the point of playing a role-playing game. It’s the s$&% that gets in the way of you discovering and exploring the world through play.

Besides, I never told you not to build a world. I told you to build it by playing in it and then to write down all the s$&% you built after the fact.

The thing is, though, that the world is really important. And I don’t mean that an open-world game must, ipso facto, take place in a world. I mean the world’s got to feel like it’s open and explorable and packed to the gills with s$&%. It’s got to feel alive. You know, that whole living, breathing fantasy world that so many GMs blather on about? That.

In most D&D campaigns, the world’s only there as a backdrop for the players’ adventures. Every goal, every dungeon, every NPC, every city, all of it, it all exists to serve the needs of the players and story. But that’s good, right? Well, yes. It’s good for some games. But pull that s$&% in an AOWG and you might as well just grab that shotgun on stage and blast your game in the face.

Here’s the thing: if the world feels like it only exists to serve the needs of the current adventure, then it really doesn’t feel like there’s anything to explore off the path does it? There is no off the path. And most D&D games feel like that. They feel like the world only exists within the players’ perceptions. Everything comes to life when the players enter the room or town or forest and then it all goes back to sleep the moment they’re gone. Like a reverse f$&%ing Toy Story.

By the way, that’s why random s$&%’s so important. A lot of people gave me s$&% for all the randomness in my AOWG. Random encounters, random treasures, random mini-dungeons, random other crap. Everyone decided to tell me why they hate that s$&% and why they don’t use it. Or why they roll for it away from the table. But have you ever thought about how that random crap feels from the player side of the screen? When players see you making rolls and pulling s$&% out of you’re a$&, it proves they’re not just maneuvering through a pre-planned adventure connecting the GM’s quest dots. It makes the world feel more dynamic.

And that, by the way, is the world you’re actually looking for when you say living, breathing fantasy world. Dynamic. A dynamic world feels like it’s always spinning away, whether the players are on-screen or not. And you can’t fake that s$&%. No matter how many branching paths and conditionals and options you put in front of your players, no matter how much you adjudicate on the fly, it’s still an uphill battle to make the world feel like it keeps existing after the PCs leave the room.

An open world’s got to be dynamic. Otherwise, it won’t feel open. It’ll feel like a scrolling backdrop. Whether the players act or not, the world’s going to keep changing. Of course, this is an RPG. So the players have to be able to change the world. At least, to nudge it along a different course. That’s agency. But the world’s got to have this sense that stuff’s happening everywhere whether the players see it or not.

By the way, the key to heroic open-world gaming is making it feel like the world’s always evolving in a crappy direction until the heroes get involved. Left to its own devices, the world won’t just go right on sucking, it’ll suck more and more each and every day. Sure, the players might f$&% things up with failed actions and stupid choices sometimes, but if they don’t get involved, there’s no chance s$&% will ever get better. But that’s another story.

Point is dynamism. The W in your AOWG needs to keep spinning even when the PCs are just gambling and wenching in the local alehouse.

Things To Do In An AOWG When You’re An Adventurer

Let’s jump ahead a bit, then circle back. You’re trying to keep the world swirling around your players. Wherever they are, whatever they do, something is going on in the world. And whenever the players walk up to something going on — whenever they click on something — it’s got to lead something, right? There’s got to be something to do. Before I tell you how to do that, let’s talk about what there actually is to do.

In my AOWG, there’s basically three categories of s$&% to do. When the players get involved in some happening or going-on, it’ll lead to either a Story, a Task, or a Problem.

Story: Interactive Flavor Text

Stories are the simplest things adventurers might stumble over. A story is just that. A story. It doesn’t lead to anything. It’s just the players discovering that s$&%’s happening in the world that doesn’t involve them.

So, the players see some washerwomen arguing at the fountain in the town square. And the busybody adventurers decide to get involved. They find out that Betty and Wilma are arguing because Betty’s son has been sneaking around with Wilma’s daughter. Secretly, Wilma doesn’t think Betty’s son is good enough for her daughter. Years of neighborly friendship between two gossips is falling apart as one reveals she thinks she’s better than the other.

No matter how much the players dig, all they’ll find out is that these two people have their own lives and stuff happens to them. Stuff that doesn’t involve adventurers at all. That’s a story.

Anything anywhere can tell a story. A piece of indecipherable graffiti on a dungeon wall. An empty treasure chest with a broken lock. Those tell simple stories, but they’re still stories. “Once upon a time, someone got here before you and took the treasure and you’ll never know who they were or what they took. The end.” A pile of rocks with an offering bowl and the remains of some rotted fruit says, “once upon a time, people made an offering to some unnamed spirit or god.” Same thing.

Stories can be complicated and require a lot of interaction — in the doing stuff with the world sense, not in the talking sense — or they can be simple and incomplete. They don’t offer any rewards. There’s no XP to be had. No quests, no opportunities, nothing to be gained. They’re the narrative equivalent of empty rooms. Just there to show the players that the world has a life outside of their adventures.

Except when they’re not. I’ll get to that below.

Tasks: Roll a Die and Get a Prize

A task is more than just a story. Tasks require actual action. At least, they invite action. Just not much action. And tasks usually offer some kind of reward. Just not much of a reward.

Tasks are invitations to act, but only barely. Tasks usually require a single player to take a single action or make a single decision. The player might have to sacrifice a minor resource — a little bit of time or a little bit of money, for example — and they might have to make a single die roll or take a small risk. In return, the party might get a little bit of treasure, gain access to a resource, enjoy a minor bonus, make a small discovery, or gain access to an opportunity for further adventure. Basically, anything that might prove useful later.

In town, tasks usually involve delivering messages, collecting debts, picking up goods from a merchant, watching someone’s possessions for a little while, tracking someone down, shadowing someone, anything that can be done within a few hours with a single ability check or by paying a small fee.

In the wilderness or in a dungeon, tasks might present themselves as blockages or obstacles. Simple things one PC can clear by climbing, running, or jumping. At the other end, they might find a small bit of treasure, some useful information, or a shortcut they can open for the party. PCs might be able to make offerings at shrines to various gods or spirits or decipher magical scripts to enjoy minor boons. Hell, a locked treasure chest is basically a Task. It’s just a reward gated behind a single, simple action.

Tasks provide a payoff for interacting with the world. At least, they provide a chance to earn a payoff by interacting with the world. The players learn that if they poke and prod at everything, they’ll eventually turn up some useful s$&%. As long as they do some legwork for it. And many tasks also suggest there’s a world beyond the player characters. Especially town tasks. Those usually have stories wrapped up in them.

But tasks aren’t just for the players. They also help you. The GM. Tasks let you send the players off in some direction or another so that they’ll stumble over some opportunity or resource or whatever that you want to put in front of them. But when the players scuttle off on a task, they think it was their own choice. So anything they find on the way feels like a discovery they made through their own exploratory efforts.

Remember when the blacksmith in Perrin’s Mill in my AOWG sent my players playing stoop-and-fetch to earn a discount? And along the way, they met a bunch of other useful NPCs? That was me using tasks to get my players to discover things and think it was their own damned fault.

Aren’t players just the cutest little f$&%ers?

Problems: More Than Just Another Adventure

Stories and tasks make for boring games. They’re not exactly the stuff of fantasy adventure, are they? That’s why the players also have to stumble over problems sometimes. Because problems are the stuff of adventures. In fact, what I call problems, other GMs might call adventures. Or quests. Or, at least, side quests.

A problem’s an opportunity for the adventurers to adventure. It’s something that demands a solution. It’s a goal, basically. But accomplishing the goal demands a series of actions, choices, risks, costs, and consequences. And it usually takes the skills of an entire adventuring party.

The reason I don’t call these things adventures or quests or campaigns is because that s$&%’s for boring-a$&, linear D&D. I don’t want some dude standing in the town square with a glowing arrow over his head saying s$&% like, “go to the tomb and recover the sword of undead bane.” That ain’t very open-world, is it?

Instead, I want people scared s$&%less because some powerful undead’s roaming the road north of town and everyone’s afraid to travel. Meanwhile, there’s a tomb nearby where some undead-slaying paladin got interred with all his stuff. Oh sure, the solution might still be the same, but it doesn’t have to be. The party could go get the paladin’s sword. But they could also just try to hit the undead hard enough with enough s$&% to overwhelm its supernatural resistances. Or they could gather the materials so the Citadel’s forgemaster can make a mace of disruption.

To complete an adventure, players have to go where they’re told to go and do what they’re told to do. No more. No less. But to solve a problem, the players have to think about the world. They’ve got to think about what they know. They’ve got to think about what they’ve got. And they’ve got to think about how they can learn more and where they can get what they need. And that’s what you want. Even if it’s as simple as putting together undead monster with tomb where undead-slayer’s stuff is buried, it’s still connecting two things in the world.

And it doesn’t have to be that simple.

Problems are also better than quests because even when a problem comes with a ready-made solution, the players can reject the solution. Hell, they can reject and redefine the problem. Early in my own AOWG, the players found this outlaw camp in the way of something they wanted. The outlaws asked them to hunt down a traitor and lead him into an ambush so they could dispense some justice. Well, the players — especially the paladin and the cleric — just weren’t super-duper comfortable with that. In fact, they were downright worried about outlaws dispensing vigilante justice on the streets of their town. So, they decided they’d hunt down the turncloak so they could get to the bottom of the story and do the right thing. And hopefully find a way to get what they wanted in the process.

Look at it like this. A quest happens when the GM hands the players a goal and sends them on their way. But an open-world quest happens when the GM points out a problem and the players make it a goal and decide how to solve it.

Planting the Seeds of Open-World Life

So, you’ve got this world. And you’ve got to fill it with Stories, Tasks, and Problems, right? But how? Where do Stories, Tasks, and Problems come from? And how do you shove them up your world?

Well, if I were a doctor and I had rubber gloves and a tiny flashlight, I’d show you exactly where these Stories and Tasks and Problems come from. They come from the same damned place everything in your game comes from. Seriously. You just make this s$&% up like you make everything up. Either you prep a bunch of Stories, Tasks, and Problems between sessions, or else you just weave them into your game during play.

Sometimes, though, your players will invent Stories, Tasks, and Problems. Not because you gave them narrative control or any stupid-a$& thing like that. But because sometimes your players will decide that some random townie or bit of dungeon junk must be concealing a Story. Or that some bit of random treasure pilfered from a corpse belongs to its next of kin and now it’s a Task. Or they’ll decide some meaningless Story — like the one about the lord’s disappointing son’s increasingly desperate attempts to win his father’s approval — is a Problem and that they’re going to solve it.

Yeah, my players did that. They recruited the lord’s idiot son and tried to get him killed by a ghoul to improve their own relationships with the lord. Players. Am I right?

And how do Stories, Tasks, and Problems end up in your game? The same way everything ends up in your game. Through the Power of Bulls$&%. You know, the thing most GMs call Narration.

So, while the players are wandering around the world and doing things, they’ll spot signs of stuff happening around them. People in town. Things in the wild. Signs of ongoing Stories, potential Tasks, and Problems crying out for solutions. It’s like those old point-and-click games, right? The world’s full of busy, busy backgrounds and there’s all sorts of stuff to click on just hidden back there.

Except everything’s clickable.

Thing is the players can — and will — suddenly decide they’re interested in any random little detail you mention while you’re setting scenes and describing outcomes and transitioning. And that’s exactly what you want. So you’ve got to make sure there’s plenty of interesting s$&% to click on. Even when you’ve got no idea what Stories, Tasks, and Problems they might give rise to.

The trick is to be specific. Like amazingly specific. Even if you have to pull the specific out of your a$&. Even when you’ve got no idea what the specific means.

Look, a treasure chest is just a chest, right? A container for treasure. A bit of background. It might as well be painted on the dungeon wall behind the treasure. But if it’s marred with scratches and burns? Now it’s a Story. Even if no one ever finds out how it got burnt and scratched. Even if you don’t know how it got scratched and burned.

Hell, between sessions, you might figure out exactly how it got scratched and burned while you do your prep work. This means that random-a$& detail just became foreshadowing and now you’ve got a hellhound to fling at your players. Or whatever.

Weave specific details into your narration. All the time. Not just when you’ve got a Story to tell or a Task to assign. Never describe anything in general without adding something specific. Mention the thronging crowd in the market, sure, but call out one or two specific people that catch the eye. A performing wizard, a street preacher proselytizing to a crowd, a half-orc beggar, whatever. If the players have been in the city for a while, have them randomly spot people they know. Every time the players in my AOWG walk through the village square, the blacksmith sees them from his workshop and waves.

There’s lots of trees and plants in the forest pressing close on the path, but is there a specific tree or plant that catches the eye? Or a terrain feature? Or an object? A waymarker? A ranger’s mark? A rabbit caught in a hunter’s snare? Struggling? Or dead and forgotten.

There’s debris all over the ruined abbey’s floors, but what specific bits of debris might the players notice? The broken gnomon from the smashed sundial? A crumpled pewter cup that held sacramental wine? A jagged bit of a serrated bone dagger blade?

You don’t need big, crazy-a$& s$&%. It doesn’t need to be fantastical and amazing. Small and simple works fine. Better even. After all, this stuff’s just background details. And, at worst, that’s all it’ll ever be. Just signs that the world’s lived in. That it’s got s$&% going on beyond the adventurers and their adventurers. But once you make a habit of specificity, you’ll be able to weave Tasks and Problems seamlessly into your narration.

And while you’re practicing this specificity thing, it’s totally okay to stop the players in their tracks once in a while to show them something big and obviously interesting. Like a duel that interrupts their dinner at the local tavern. Or screams from a monster attack outside the tavern. It’s okay if some Stories, Tasks, and Problems drop themselves in the players’ laps like lusty tavern wenches. Or lusty tavern rakes. Whatever they prefer.