As I may have mentioned once or twice or hundreds of f$&%ing times, a tabletop role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons is both a narrative activity and a game. I know lots of people will scream otherwise and vomit forth bulls$&% like “collaborative storytelling experience,” but those people are not only wrong about RPGs, they usually only have a hazy notion of the concept of story structure anyway. Like, if you tell them a story has a structure that people unconsciously expect and if you don’t make your game conform to that structure, people will get bored with it eventually, they’ll be like, “no way, moron, the only job of a GM is to let the players tell their story however they want and there shouldn’t even be a GM.”
Hopefully, we’re beyond that at this point.
Point is the game needs structure. It needs order. And when I say “game,” I mean, specifically, the individual adventures or scenarios that get strung together into ongoing campaigns. Sort of. I mean more than that. But we’ll get to that.
The problem is that when you design your own adventures and scenarios, you need to provide the order and structure yourself. You can’t rely on someone else to build a good order or structure into your game. Fortunately, D&D provides a number of tools you can use to structure your adventures and scenarios. Unfortunately, that number is two. And they both suck.
First, D&D teaches you to build your adventures around “adventuring days.” That is, you assume that the players can get through a certain number of encounters and challenges between waking and sleeping. Second, D&D tells you that when you actually create encounters and challenges, you can make them “easy” or “average” or “hard” or “deadly.” And that’s it. And I’m actually giving D&D a lot of credit here. Because all of those two structural tool deals assume the only encounters are combat encounters. D&D does give advice for stuff that isn’t combat encounters, but it’s vague and general and of the form “well, you CAN give experience for things that aren’t combats; good luck, let us know how that works out for you.” Thanks, Crawford. That’s super helpful.
The problem is that those two structural tools leave a lot of questions unanswered. Beyond “what actually IS an adventure” and “how do I handle it if I don’t want to have six combats in a day,” there are questions like “okay, but how many adventuring days makes up an adventure” and “how long does it take to get through this s$&% at the table” and “how should I vary encounters between easy and average and deadly”. And then there are questions like “how does this match up to narrative structure” and “how does this match up with game design principles”. The point is that those two s$&%ty tools are all you get to structure your own adventures. Beyond that, you’re on your own.
But maybe – just maybe – I can come up with a better way. A general way of structuring adventures that takes into how long adventures should be and the proper structure for an adventure and how much content needs to fit into an adventure. You know, a sort of basic template that I could follow to make sure I knew what to expect from my adventures. A template that can then be modified, tweaked, twisted, and bent to handle different kinds of adventures. Even the ones that don’t have six combats a day every day.
Maybe? Who the hell am I kidding? Of course I can do it. I’m a f$&%ing genius.
A Tale of Two Structures
So, what the hell is this structure or order that I’m talking about here? Well, that’s not as easy a question as it seems. And that’s because there’s two different structures at work in every role-playing game adventure. And each of those two different structures needs to work from two different perspectives.
First, let me try to be clear. When I’m talking about the structure of an adventure, I’m talking about the mechanical structure. I’m talking about the game elements in an adventure. Basically, I’m talking about how many encounters there should be. And, theoretically, how difficult those encounters should be, how many of them should be optional, how they should be laid out on the critical path, and all that crap. I say theoretically because by the end of this article – hell, probably by the end of this section – I’m going to explain why a lot of those considerations aren’t super important.
So, let me boil this down to its simplest, briefest, clearest, to-the-pointest essence: the point of all this structure crap is to tell you how many things to include in your adventure when you sit down to write an adventure. That is, if you’re writing an adventure for your fifth level party, it’ll how many plot points and how many encounters should you include and how many sessions should that adventure take to run if everything goes reasonably well. That way, you could simply break your adventure down into a list.
- The Shadowed Abbey
- Part 1: Getting There and Getting In
- Get the Location from the Grumpy NPC
- Travel Overland and Reach the Abbey
- Statue Trap
- Greater Zombies
- Greater Shades
- Bypass the Gate to the Inner Grounds
- Part 1: Getting There and Getting In
And that’s the goal. Can you come up with a sort of basic structure or template that helps you outline an adventure? At least, one that helps you make a list of the encounters and challenges in an adventure so you know how much to include when.
Obviously, the answer is yes. Yes, you can come up with such a template. At least I can. Because I’m that f$&%ing good. And if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this article. But to come up with that structure, you have to understand that every adventure – every RPG – actually has two structures.
First, any ongoing RPG campaign is going to be divided into adventures. An adventure is a self-contained story in which the heroes have a specific goal and they work to accomplish that goal. And while I know it is de rigueur these days for WotC to publish long-a$& adventures that take six months to play, most people don’t actually play that way. They – we – go in for shorter fare. We go in for adventures that span one or two levels of experience and take two, three, or four sessions at a pop to play out.
Now, I’ve talked before – A LOT – about how adventures must include certain elements to qualify as both a complete narrative – a story – and to qualify as a fun, interactive play experience – a game. And in the end, that boils down to a motivation to provide the beginning, a resolution to provide the ending, and a bunch of conflicts and obstacles to make it impossible to just skip from motivation to resolution. I’ve also pointed out that one of those obstacles or conflicts is going to be a cut above the rest. It’s going to be the one that resolves the major conflict of the adventure or else the one that allows the heroes to reach the resolution. And, for best effect, that encounter should be the biggest, grandest, most exciting encounter. Except it doesn’t have to be.
But there’s a second structure at work that we GMs rarely think about. One we often ignore. See, no matter what, whatever happens, our adventures are usually going get broken down into chunks. And I’m not referring to parts here. I’m referring to game sessions. Play sessions. The actual three- or four- or five-hour spans of time during which you play your game. Most adventures smear out over several such sessions. In fact, the single-session adventure is a rarity these days.
Now, this session thing is a meta thing. It’s not really part of the game or the narrative. It’s part of the meat-world reality that imposes itself on the game. When a session ends, the game is effectively paused. The heroes stand around in a state of suspended animation waiting for their brains to come back next week and continue the adventure. And the world is frozen, waiting for the gods to return and start everything going again. And I don’t suggest for a moment that we try to change that. Doing anything on a per-session basis is weirdly artificial. Even stupid s$&% like hero points or action points or bennies or whatever.
But we also can’t ignore the session thing completely because the audience – the humans playing the game – need certain structures in place to enjoy things. And although binge-watching and streaming services have destroyed people’s general sense for how to do episodic content right, a session is still at its most enjoyable and, therefore, at its best, when it also follows a narrative structure. That is to say, a good session is one that also starts with a motivation and then builds to a climax and a resolution.
And yes, I know people worship at the altar of cliffhangers. Cliffhangers, though, are a cheap gimmick compared to a solid narrative structure. They are a failsafe. A backup. The second-best narrative structure for a session. You are better off ending on a climax and resolution than you are ending on a cliffhanger. But a cliffhanger will do in a pinch.
So, we have two structures in our RPG designs we have to consider, right? We have the adventure structure and we have the session structure. We want to plan our adventures around those. So, how do we do it? Well, first we have to figure out what we’re actually planning.
The Game Parts of the Actual Game
There’s A LOT of crap in an RPG adventure. There’s a lot of scenes that don’t involve die rolls, there’s exposition and adventure setups and bookkeeping and joking and dicking around the players trying to figure out what the hell to do next and arguing about how to split the treasure or take down the witch or whatever. And every dungeon has empty rooms. But when I talk about planning out an adventure based on a structural template, I’m not talking about any of that garbage. I’m talking primarily about how much game stuff there should be in an adventure. Actual stuff that requires die rolls and presents challenges. I’m talking about encounters.
Now, thanks to evil D&D propaganda from various poorly written core rulebooks, when people here “encounter” they think “combat.” But I want to be clear that I’m not talking JUST about combat encounters. Combats are just one type of encounter. And really, most of the time, the players should decide whether an encounter devolves into a combat. I can put six goblins in a room and give them a murderous intent, but if the players find a way to sneak past them or bluff past them or bribe past them or whatever, that’s cool too. Still an encounter.
More to the point though, an encounter is any situation in which the players have a short-term, single-scene goal and there’s some source of conflict preventing them from just accomplishing their goal. For example, the players need to get through a room and there’s six goblins with murderous intent also in there. Put another way, an encounter is any challenge the players face on their way to the goal of the adventure.
For example, in my most recent adventure, the players had this adventurer’s journal and they found notes about a mysterious, ruined abbey full of magical treasure they wanted to explore. But the notes were incomplete, and the location of the abbey was missing. The only one who knew the location was one of the adventurer’s former confidants. And, for various reasons, he didn’t want to share the information. The party had to extract the information somehow. That’s an encounter.
Later, as the party began exploring the abbey, they were in a hallway full of statues and a mysterious being toppled one of the statues and ran. It was basically a trap. The party had to act quickly to avoid damage. That was an encounter too.
And, of course, the zombie elf soldiers the party encountered in the abbey AND the animating spirits of the zombies the party encountered in the Shadowfell version of the same abbey were encounters too. They were creatures of murderous intent in rooms the party needed to get through. And, yes, sometimes the party really doesn’t have an easy way to avoid a combat encounter. But if they HAD, it would have been fine.
But not all encounters are created the same. For example, that statue thing? That’s over pretty quick. The crack of a statue toppling, frantically asking everyone what they do in response to the unidentified noise, some die rolls, and some damage applied. Done and done. Some encounters are more complicated. Like the greater shades in the Shadowfell and the back-and-forth with the betrayed former comrade of the adventurer with the information the party needs. And some encounters, like the big encounter that’s coming up very soon for my players – but not soon enough for me to risk putting it in this article – are bigger still.
Now, the DMG tells you to vary up the difficulty of your encounters. Of course, it doesn’t really tell you how to vary them up. Just that you should. And it tells you that you can make encounters that are easy, medium, hard, or deadly. And it relies on you to understand the concept of a difficulty curve AND a pacing curve. But you know what? I’ve come to the conclusion – by ignoring that s$&% – that it really doesn’t matter. Players, for the most part, don’t actually NOTICE the varying difficulty of combat encounters. Because the difficulties are pretty close. Not a whole lot changes.
That said, it DOES matter that you vary up the scale and scope of various encounters somehow. It’s important for pacing that some encounters seem smaller than the norm and some seem bigger than the norm. I mean, you can’t have a climax if the climax doesn’t feel any different than anything else. It’s just that the game’s numbers don’t really do a whole lot to differentiate encounters. No matter what their stats, a dragon is ALWAYS going to feel climactic. Five goblins in a room will never be as big a deal as the goblin war chief and his two bodyguards, even if the five goblins are – statistically – a harder fight.
So, I invented a way of differentiating encounters based on how big and important and impactful they were in the actual game. What they’d FEEL like. There are three types of encounters: minor, major, and climactic. Minor encounters are small encounters. Speed bumps. Minor obstacles and small combats. My general rule of thumb is this: if the obstacle can be overcome with just a couple of die rolls, that’s a minor encounter. If I don’t need to break out the battlemat and miniatures for the combat, that’s a minor encounter. Minor encounters are consequently quick to resolve. They take up little space at the table. And so, you can get through a bunch of them in one session.
Major encounters are normal encounters. Obstacles that require several die rolls and action passes to resolve are major encounters. Combats that require me to break out maps and miniatures. Or maybe they don’t require it. But they are important enough in the adventure to deserve it. Major encounters take up a bit of space at the table. You can only get through a few of them in one session.
Climactic encounters are encounters that have a special place in the adventure. For whatever reason, they are encounters that feel bigger or more important. They are the boss fights or the mini-boss fights or the set-piece encounters. And they usually represent a major accomplishment or turning point. Climactic encounters actually don’t take up any more space at the table than major encounters. But there’s something about the encounter that makes it bigger or more important. And that’s important.
There is nothing about my descriptors – minor, major, and climactic – that implies anything like difficulty. In fact, I’ve given up even considering the difficulty of encounters as a factor. Almost all of my encounters are built kinda sorta around average difficulty these days. Minor encounters are minor because they are straightforward and easy to play through, not because they are easier. Climactic encounters are climactic because something big or important or unique is happening. The big differentiation in combat encounters is whether or not I use the grid and miniatures. If I am not using the grid – and I decide that in advance – I have to build the combat in a more straightforward way. If I am using the grid, then I have to add some features to make the grid worth using. Even if it’s just a weird layout that screws with lines of sight.
But encounters aren’t the only game thing that needs considering in the structure of an adventure. See, sometimes, the players are trying to achieve a goal that gets accomplished across several encounters. Or outside of encounters. For example, if the goal of an adventure is to recover a magical treasure from an ancient ruin, the actual recovery of the magical treasure is something the party accomplishes by overcoming a bunch of obstacles and going through a bunch of scenes. Which, really, is what an adventure is. An adventure is a goal that the party has to accomplish by getting through several scenes and encounters. I call these things objectives.
Every adventure has to have at least one objective. That’s the thing that pulls the players from scene to scene and encounter to encounter and drives their choices. But many adventures have intermediary objectives, side objectives, and optional objectives. So, I invented the concept of major and minor objectives. A major objective is THE objective that resolves the adventure. Minor objectives are smaller goals the party may or may not accomplish along the way. Objectives can be intermediate steps along the way to the major objective. Or they can be completely optional side pursuits the party may or may not discover.
Essentially, then, the skeleton of an adventure is just a list of encounters and objectives. And you can plan an adventure as just such a list. Everything else around the encounters and objectives is just filler. Which I am not, by the way, discounting. The filler is important. But, from a mechanical perspective, it doesn’t really require the same level of planning as the actual encounters and objectives. And it doesn’t have the same impact on the flow of the game.
So, now we have a list of adventure components: minor, major, and climactic encounters and minor and major objectives. Can we figure out how many of each of those an adventure should have? For a given definition of an adventure, that is. Sure we can. But we need a way to measure their relative values.
Awards for Everything
Click the Goblin’s Jar to Leave a Tip
Those of you who have been reading my site for a while are no doubt familiar with the concept of an XP award. See, while I assert – correctly – that XP should always be given out in direct proportion to things that the players do and that GMs who use systems of just giving out milestone XP or levels whenever they want are just lazy-a$&es who should turn in their f$&%ing screens, I also don’t think you need to make life too difficult for yourself. The important thing is to be able to say to the players that they earned umpteen many XP for this particular encounter or that particular objective or whatever. The whole concept of adding up XP on a per monster basis is just a waste of time on unnecessary math.
So, I break everything down in terms of “awards.” An XP award is the amount of XP one character earns for one XP-worthy thing. If five heroes kill the six goblin guards and then evade the trap and then beat the goblin chief and his two bodyguards, each of the five heroes has earned three XP awards. One for the encounter with the goblin guards, one for the trap, and one for the encounter with the chief. Easy as that.
How much is an XP award worth? Well, don’t worry about how I do it at my table. Because I rewrote the XP tables and level progression for D&D for my home game to make it better. But I won’t bore you with why or how. Just make it easy on yourself. An XP award is the amount of XP one PC is supposed to earn for one medium difficulty encounter of their level. Just open up your DMG page 82 and use that table.
Of course, you don’t want to give out the same XP award for everything in the game. After all, if some encounters are bigger and smaller and some objectives are smaller, some awards should be bigger and some should be smaller. So, here’s how I break it down:
XP Awards for Encounters and Objectives
- Minor Encounter = 0.5x Award
- Major Encounter = 1x Award
- Climactic Encounter = 1.5x Award
- Minor Objective = 0.5x Award
- Major Objective = 1x Award
“But hold the f$&% on there, Angry,” I can hear you saying. “This is supposed to be about a template for designing an adventure, not about how to hand out XP AGAIN. You’ve talked about this s$&% before.” Well, first of all, there’s no need for that kind of f$&%ing language. And second of all, this IS about an adventure template. You just don’t see the genius of it.
See, there’s two important things to consider. First, it’s that I’ve brought all sorts of different types of encounters into the fold including obstacles and social interactions. And not all of those things take up the same amount of time as a combat. So, as long as you vary your encounter types, the average amount of time you spend on any one encounter is drastically reduced. And second, minor encounters take less table time to resolve than major encounters. Like half as much time if you consider the effect of non-combat encounters shortening the average table time. Objectives generally require a scene to set them up. A briefing scene, for example, at the beginning of an adventure. Or a meeting with an NPC who offers an optional question.
This means that those awards are not just XP awards, they are also a measure of the relative amount of table time that each thing will eat up. That is, setting up a minor objective takes a short scene, about the same amount of time as overcoming a trap. And setting up a major objective can take a bit of time because you’re basically starting off the adventure. That eats up about as much time as a moderately complicated combat. It isn’t perfect, it’s relative. Combat still takes longer than non-combat. But minor combats really ARE doable in half the time if you really do them without the grid and limit the complexity.
In other words, if you wanted to build an adventure based on both a good adventure structure and a good session structure, all you really need is a budget. How many awards worth of stuff should fit in an adventure or into a session? And then you could use that budget to stock your adventure with encounters and objectives. And that’s the key to Angry’s Amazing Adventure Templates.
Angry’s Amazing Adventure Templates
Now, I have been working for months – lots of months – on some basic assumptions about how the average game of D&D actually works. How it’s put together. I’ve been observing my own games, talking to my own players, talking to other GMs, doing polls, and reading other blogs. And what I’ve observed is that people think a normal adventure should eat up anywhere from one session to four sessions of play and that on average, people can get through about one encounter every twenty minutes to a half-hour of play. That jives because the game assumes that one adventuring day is about four to six encounters and most people tend to play games in three- to five-hour sessions. And those numbers all jive with my own experiences, especially if you average out the combat and the non-combat encounters and assume some of that half-hour of play per encounter is spent on the crap between encounters. And also if you assume the GM pushes to keep the game moving forward.
And so, I’ve come up with four basic types of adventures: the side-trek, the short adventure, the medium adventure, and the long adventure. Short adventures generally take one to two sessions of play. Medium adventures generally eat up two or three sessions of play. And long adventures chew up three or sometimes four sessions of play. Side-treks are my own invention. They take up a half-session to one session of play. They are great for short sessions or to squeeze in between adventures or to run as one-shot convention games because they should never spill over into two sessions.
Now, based on everything above, it’d be easy to just give a certain award budget for each type of adventure and build to that – and I have, I will give you that – but that’d be ignoring some pretty important aspects of the whole structure discussion above.
For example, every adventure – regardless of length – has to have a major objective and a climactic encounter. I really hope, at this point, I don’t have to explain why. So, you might as well just pull those things out of the budget and make them requirements right upfront.
Beyond that, though, remember that sessions also need a structure. It’s really, really nice if every session of play has something that feels like a climax and something that feels like an accomplishment. So, if you’re planning an adventure that requires a minimum of two sessions, you want to have at least one minor objective and one climactic encounter that’ll hopefully fall somewhere during the first session. So, before the halfway point. That way, each session has a setpiece and a victory of its own. You see how this works?
And so, you come up with something like this:
Side Trek (1/2 to 1 Session, 4 Total Awards)
- 1 Minor Objective
- 1 Climactic Encounter
- 1 to 2 Awards
Short Adventure (1 to 2 Sessions, 8 Total Awards)
- 1 Major Objective
- 1 Climactic Encounter
- 5 Awards
Medium Adventure (2 to 3 Sessions, 12 Total Awards)
- 1 Major Objective
- 1 Minor Objective
- 2 Climactic Encounters
- 8 Awards
Long Adventure (3 to 4 Sessions, 18 Total Awards)
- 1 Major Objective
- 2 Minor Objectives
- 3 Climactic Encounter
- 11 Awards
So, let’s say you decide you’re making a medium adventure. You need to set a major objective, obviously, and include a climax for the adventure. But you also want to include a minor objective before the halfway point and some kind of lesser climax somewhere in the first session. Perhaps the goblin clan’s shaman and his necromantic pets would serve as a lesser climax. And the minor objective could involve finding the village’s stolen medicine if the major objective is to oust the goblins from their lair. And then you have 8 awards to “buy” encounters and other minor objectives with major encounters costing 1 award, and minor encounters and minor objectives costing a half award. And you’d assume you were spreading those out over two sessions, with the possibility it might spill into three.
It’s a simple structure, but it helps immensely to have an idea of how much game space you have to fill before you start designing encounters and drawing maps and all that crap. And it helps you make sure you’re thinking in terms of game and narrative structure by forcing you to include intermediary objectives and climaxes throughout longer adventures. Beyond that, though, it’s a pretty flexible structure. And it’s easy to adjust. Or to not adjust. Depends on what you want to do with it.
To Adjust or to Not Adjust and Other Final Thoughts
Angry’s Amazing Adventure Templates have become my default way of outlining adventures recently. But I need to note that I don’t follow them religiously. And also that they don’t always work perfectly. They don’t work perfectly because D&D is an open-ended game and nothing can be planned perfectly and because it’s impossible to gauge how much time the players will take actually doing something or where they will get held up or what extra scenes and encounters they might add. For example, in the adventure I was talking about above, the party basically split up and had two different encounters with the confidant. And I had planned the climactic encounter for the first session to come right at the end of the session. Unfortunately, due to some slowdown, they didn’t quite get there. And that means the first session didn’t actually have its climax.
And, look, that’s the nature of TTRPGs. That’s what makes them great. Sometimes, things don’t go as planned. We still had a great time. And the adventure is still following a good pace. And it’ll still have an intermediate climax and victory. It just didn’t quite line up with the sessions the way I hoped. For that matter, I didn’t even plan this adventure exactly according to my own template. See, in this adventure, the players are plundering a ruined site for magical treasures. And I decided I wanted them to have the chance to find three different unique magical treasures. So, instead of one major objective, I set three minor objectives: find treasure one, find treasure, and find treasure. Early on in the adventure, the party found some paintings that depicted the abbey’s three great treasures. Each one represents an intermediate victory. There is no major objective. That’s fine. And there are a couple of other minor objectives as well, including a side quest to recover a lost adventurer for her lover.
So, obviously, you should feel free to f$&% with the templates and change things up. But there’s another question too, and that’s the question of whether you should edit your game sessions on the fly to make sure the climaxes and intermediate objectives happen when they should. And the answer is: if you want to. It depends. See, I could have dropped an encounter from my adventure to make sure the players hit the climax during the first session. That would have been fine. But it’s also fine that I didn’t. See, the templates let me see the structure of the adventure and make that call. That’s their real power. They just make you look at the structure of the game and let you make decisions about it.
Not only that, but the template has helped me zero in on how valuable the game time is and how much I want to squeeze into each session. And that has been helping me drop unimportant crap, to not use maps and minis when I don’t need them, and to push the game forward instead of becoming distracted. Basically, it’s pushing me to drive the game harder than I otherwise would. Well, it’s helping.
I mean, if it had worked completely, we would have gotten to the f$&%ing climax. Oh well. There’s always next time.
This is perfectly timed since I am just getting back into running DnD-style adventures again after running other games for the last several years. Thanks!
Well now, this sh*t’s just useful.
Something I noticed (and assume has explicitely come up in another article, is that each of these bullet points either directly follows from the last, or there is a clear funnel that forces players from one point to the next.
Travel Overland and Reach the Abbey (if you know where a place is and where you are, you can automatically attempt to go there).
Statue Trap (the arrival at the place automatically sets off the trap)
Greater Zombies, Greater Shades, Bypass the Gate to the Inner Grounds
(The abbey serves a a funnel for these to occur)
If there are points where there is neither an automatic transition, nor a clear funnel in place, that is a place where the adventure is in danger of crawling to a halt. After all, the players don’t know what the next bullet point is going to be, and the momentum of the previous point has worn off. So now what?
That means that is a place where the GM will have to provide additional structure, either by making another bullet point or by inventing a narrative funnel.
This probably also doesn’t always work, but it is a great way to look back at my planned adventure and identifying places where I can lose the PCs It has usually been at spots like that.
I was looking through some of your other posts literally last night to find this kind of information. Thank you! This is incredibly helpful and logical.
I don’t do it every time because I’m lazy, but one of my best adventures I ever ran I took the outline of events that was going to happen and figured out roughly how long they would take at the table and then wrote those times down next to the outline. 10-15 minutes for a conversation with an NPC, 10-20 minutes for a puzzle, 5-10 for a trap, 20-40 for a battle. And an hour for the climax to the adventure. Then figure out which encounters are the most important for you and which are optional and mark that down. Then create a bunch of extra encounters in a list to the side of your outline.
Keep an eye on the clock as you complete each encounter. If you are running ahead of schedule (this never happens) and your session is going to end early, add in a couple of the extra encounters, challenging ones if they are doing well, or beneficial ones if they are getting hammered. In the much more likely situation that everything is taking longer than you expected, start crossing off encounters, least important to you first.
My group only gets together to play about once every month or two, so I try to make each session a self-contained adventure unless I know we are going to get together again soon.
To what extent (or more specifically, how) do you account for uncertain outcomes in your planning?
Taking your example of the party going to the confidant for information. Suppose they failed horribly at all attempts to get the information from him. Did you have a backup scenario planned for that, or some way to ensure they would get at least the essential information? How would that affect the structure, if at all?
I have to deal with this situation a lot because my players consistently make terrible decisions (foremost among them: sacrificing children to a dracolich to resurrect a favourite NPC).
Generally I make it so that the backup plan has a cost associated with it, so they aren’t just getting a free pass when they completely bungle an encounter. Maybe the person refuses to talk to them and they have to try and break into his home to get the information, risking incarceration and worse, as well as permanently burning their connections in that community. Otherwise, have another NPC approach them and offer to guide them to the abbey. This NPC will later betray the party, adding another encounter to make up for the one they bungled.
They Came Back Wrong is a favorite consequence of mine.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CameBackWrong
That’s pretty much exactly how it played out. What’s even better is that the NPC was a follower of said dracolich, the final boss of the campaign, and was just supposed to be a dungeon miniboss. The party bluffed their way in and convinced him to join them, but he eventually got murdered by someone who figured out his past identity and had his soul claimed by his god.
After the sacrifice, the party had gotten their first look at the final boss of the campaign, as well as a permanently scarred NPC to convince them how awful said Big Bad™ was.
Wouldn’t the situation you describe count as one of those failure points Angry said to not be afraid to include? If they can’t get the information they need to continue, they would basically fail the adventure, or at least a portion of it and have to live with the resultant consequences.
E.g. If they needed to get information about a possible Bandit Stronghold to prevent a Raid, the failure state would be that they logically can no longer prevent the raid in time without risking it by doing a search without information, potentially going in a completely wrong direction and neither finding the stronghold nor being in town to help in the defense.
Not sure if it’s something Angry has mentioned, or it’s somethimg from another blog, but use the “Three Clue Rule” – break the key info down into three chunks, and seed them in the adventure (and there’s no reason that a key NPC shouldn’t know all the info). For the above scenario, if the characters bungled the social interaction part during the converstation, have a secondary visual clue that can be spotted (like a partial map, or a skull of a creature unique to the abbeys location) easily, and have the NPC appear to lock something up when the PC’s enter, or unlock as they leave, and have people in the nearby tavern/inn/marketplace mention something odd about the area when questioned.
This usually, in my experience gets the PC’s to the right spot/conclusion, but slower than the quest giver NPC would, which depending on the scenario, may have consequences.
I integrate party resource-recovery to dramatic milestones.
In this model the party can’t simply rest and regain all spells etc. Because being able to flip-the-switch and regain all powers is horribly undramatic. Also: party rests are usually out of sync with the narrative highpoints.
Instead the party only regain renewable resources after each Climactic Encounter, and then only (say) half or a 1/4 of them.
This keeps the tension up. It maintains the sense of the party battling desperately against a hostile universe as they progress through the adventure.
And it synchonises their heartfelt relief at getting ‘a few spells back’ to the moment they resolve each Climactic Encounter.
GMs who adopt this should adopt some kind of ‘costed encounter’ structure to avoid overstretching the party. You’ve given an excellent example of one here.
Remind me to play a Champion fighter if I’m ever in your game.
Seriously, though, what if the wizard casts Legend Lore and Find the Path to point the party to the lost temple, and those are all of his spell slots? Is he stuck with nothing but cantrips for the two-week journey to the temple, plus the entire dungeon up until after they fight the boss? Why would anyone play a spellcaster under those conditions? Your parties must be full of fighters, rogues, and warlocks.
For that matter, how do non-adveturers get their spells back? What about hit points? Do injured peasants have to find four boss fights to participate in before their twisted ankle will heal?
I avoid resource depletion by giving every encounter an EP (Encounter Point) value.
8 EP would equate to a ‘standard encounter’. A standard encounter is one where the party fight a force 1/4 of their power.
For instance: In DnD terms a party of 4 PCs (each of level X) fighting a level X NPC would be an 8 EP encounter.
(In passing – it’s vital to understand that the scale isn’t linear. A party fighting an enemy 1/2 their power is *not* facing a 16 EP encounter, but 24 EP. If anyone is interested I can supply details of the curve.)
If 8 EP is a standard adventure, then 32 EP would be a ‘standard adventure’.
Every 16 EP is a Milestone, when the party get 1/4 of their non-hp resources back.
This is the framework for encounters. I then try to make the 16 EP milestones match to dramatic end-points.
——————
If someone wanted to apply this structure to DnD then I recommend atomising spell levels to ‘spell points’.
That way a 3rd level caster with (say) 3x1st, 2x2nd and 1x3rd level spells actually has 3+4+3 = 10 spell points. She regains 10/4 = 3 spell points at each milestone (you round up).
——————
This example of a wizard who expends all of his magical power on spells to guide the party. It’s not possible in classical DnD, but it *would* be in an atomised spell-point system – so let’s look at it.
Remember: that 32 EP of adventure isn’t just the monsters. Its the sum of *everything that the players need to defeat*.
The GM should cost *all* obstacles: monsters & non-Monsters – in EP terms
So – if the wizard finds the bandit camp with magic, then he has resolved an obstacle set up by the GM. That obstacle was worth (say) 2 EP.
If the wizard defeats 14 lethal traps with his Find the Path, then he just defeated (say) 5 EP worth of traps.
Alternatively the GM can reward the resolution of these non-monster obstacles with some form of Narrative award such as Hero points, Action points or whatever fits the game system.
Whatever he does, he must make sure that he rewards the use of non-combat resources with progress along the EP-track and/or with Narrative awards.
Otherwise he’s punishing the players for engaging with his narrative in non-combat ways. This rapidly drives the game into ‘Combat Monoculture’.
Hope this was helpful.
On NPCs:
NPCs regain their resources at their own milestones, whatever those are. They’re not living the same high-octane life as the adventurers. It’s safe to assume that their non-hp resources recharge on a timescale longer than the adventure.
This means that they live under the same scarcity model as the players, and don’t act as infinite wells of healing or Identify spells or whatever.
The example of a peasant with a twisted ankle is an important one. GM’s should still use some form of natural healing mechanic.
The resource/milestone system that I’m proposing stops a night’s sleep from acting as an undramatic ‘full reset button’.
But GMs should still have some (minor) natural recovery in the game.
For instance: allow PCs to regain (say) 1 spell point and 2 hps per full nights rest, and double this if they are resting in a warm inn, or if they are a Ranger or Druid resting in the wild.
Otherwise sleep and rest become dissocciated mechanics, which would never do.
Hope this is helpful.
If a GM wants to use an Encounter point system like this, then he obviously needs to be able to estimate an EP price for non-Combat obstacles.
Games like Dnd provide a system for estimating the value of monsters, but not for the value of resolving clues.
You as a GM must decide how important clues are to your game.
If your game is like Call of Cthulhu then clue solution is maybe ~75% of the game. The players have to use ‘Library Use’, ‘Persuade’ and ‘Latin’ to resolve 24 EP of the scenario. The other 8 EP comes in using guns and dodge rolls to survive what they find in Old Whateley’s cellar.
If your game is like DnD then clue solution is maybe ~10% of the game. The players have to use non-combat abilities to resolve 3 or 4 EP of the scenario – opening doors, tracking the goblins – or just knowing where the Abbey ruins are without having to fast-talk the town drunk.
With this in mind: solving a Hard clue might be equal to resolving 1 EP of the scenario. An Easy clue solve might be 0.5 EP.
If the GM doesn’t want to use EP progression as a reward for clue resolution then he gives the PC a narrative award equivalent to 0.5 or 1 EP.
A quick way of sizing this award is to examine the total spell points available to a dedicated spell caster at the game’s sweetspot. In DnD this is (say) 5th level.
Let’s say that a 5th level wizard in DnD gets – I don’t know – 16 spell points.
In a 4 PC party this is assumed to be how many spell points the wizard has to expend to progress the adventure by 8 EP. (The other PCs are also contributing to party success, so the Wizard only has to personally ‘defeat’ 8 EP to be a useful party member.)
It takes the wizard 16 spell points to defeat 8 EP, so each EP takes about 2 spell points to resolve. So if the Wizard figures out the Abbey location with a kickass Religious Lore roll, his reward should be roughly equivalent to 1 or even 2 spell points.
It’s then up to the GM how he handles this. He could simply reward the PC with spell points. “Wizard – after your moment of inspiration, you realise that you feel cleverer. You remember how to cast Web again”
Or he awards “Hero Points” that can be cashed in for spell points, or dice rerolls, or extra actions or hps. As long as these awards can be roughly equated to spell points then the system works.
Hope this is helpful.
I’m too inexperienced to properly assess this as written, but after applying the tension pool and Angry’s non-cr approach to monster building (does it have a name?) and getting the best session yet as a result I have no doubt this is another one of those things that improves the game significantly. Best thing is the players probably won’t even notice..
Based on one of your megadungeon articles, I’ve been using 15 awards as the goal for each level. With this system and session breakdown, that comes out to PCs leveling up every 3-4 sessions depending on group speed. Was that part of your goal for this template, or is it just a result of how everything else worked out?
I’m not going to go OT and ask why they previous two posters haven’t read more on Angry’s stuff. If they had, they wouldn’t. Key words: player’s motivations.
Imagine your adventure is, instead of a funnel, a big toilet bowl. The abbey and other stuff is at the bottom. Your players are crawling bugs. If they try to climb out, pour some motivations on them, Have paper objectives that temporarily block the view buy not the scent of the stuff.
How can the party fail horribly if the DM wants them to have this motivating information? Of course the DM will have to improvise, but only because of stupid play by stupid players. The only blame I could give the DM here is they let their players roll dice (risking “failed horribly”) when there was no need to roll dice. It was in the script that Barfly McDrinkerton was going to give up the secret to the Abby d’Crapar. Knowing which bar on whcih night, well there’s an investigation roll to be had to get it in one guess. But given there’s ten bars, one jail, and one drunk shelter, the only way to fail is to not move in the direction the adventure is tilting.
I could be wrong, but as Angry is my witness i don’t think so..
As one of the previous two posters I haven’t got a clue what you’re trying to say, unless comment order is mixed up somehow..?
Yes, I meant the two at the top. Others were added whilst I editied, causing confusion. It’s now entirely unclear which postings I referred to. And so I fear it must remain.
That’s a perfectly valid way to provide the information, but as Angry said, he wants the conversation to be an encounter. That means there has to be some chance of failure.
You absolutely can just script that Mr. McDrinkerton just gives them the information, provided he has no motivation to conceal it. But if he does, well here come the dice.
As a fail state, the party could have a location to search instead of clear directions; the cost of failure becomes having to waste resources on the way to the adventure instead of starting at full strength.
I hope I have this right. In AngryGM terms an encounter that can’t fail is not an encounter. It’s a scene.
Scenes are ok, but they are not encounters. Scenes have no conflict or chance of failure.
As we don’t use ‘Fail Forward’ the GM has to think about fail states.
The Three Clue Rule from The Alexandrian provides a safety net. The players might fail to get McDrinkerton’s clue, but the GM provides at least two other ways of finding the Abbey’s location.
And then there are floating clues.
And (if you have to) you use some kind of forced clue.
And you patiently keep using forced clues until the players pick up the thread. And if they never pick up a clue then you use a scene to resolve the plot.
Here’s a worked example that I hope makes sense.
—–
“You knifed that scum McDrinkerton as he tried to speak to you. Good for you! Drunks are your favoured enemy and need to die. Also: you set fire to his papers.”
“And that strange medallion on the body in the cellar, the one inscribed with a map to an abbey in the woods? The one that you sold to the Goldsmith without even looking at? You jingle the extra coins in your pocket happily”
“And that girl who came up to you, the hard-faced slattern who said she was McDrinkerton’s girlfriend and that she was willing to give you directions to some Abbey in the woods if you paid her coach-fare to Hommlet? Yeah, you sent her packing”
—–
“It is hours later. You lie asleep in your bed in the tavern. Rain patters on the window shutters.”
“But then the door smashes open, and the room is filled with a stench like an open grave”
“An animated corpse wearing an Abbot’s robes stands there in the gloom. He is rain-soaked and has left muddy footprints behind him. His robes have been rent and torn by thorns. Clearly he has come far this night, to exact horrible vengance on you”
—–
The players kill the Abbot-Zombie but ignore the trail of muddy footprints leading into the woods AND the deeds to the Abbey in the Zombies pocket. This is a forced clue, ignored by the party. So you provide a no-fail scene to finish up with.
—–
Next day the NPC Ranger comes over and says “I tracked the Abbots footprints into the woods! They led to the …. Black Priory of Averghast”
The Mayor comes over. “No, not the Black Priory of Averghast! I need to hire four adventurers to deal with this! You four, will you help me?”
Hope this was useful.
Yes. Awesome. A very patient DM in action!
Thanks Ralph.
We always have to remind ourselves that the PCs navigate the gameworld using the imperfect information we give them.
Also: – they are the stars of the show. We GMs just provide the universe and everything in it :0)
So when the PCs are – or seem to be – boneheaded – it’s best to (good-humouredly!) treat their wanderings as a spur to innovation.
We still allow them to fail and die horribly. We’re the universe, not their moms.
But we never get cross with them just for not following our script.
IDK I feel like it is a collaborative story experience. Then again I let me players tell me what they want and I make it happen and I’m more than happy to take it off the rails only to move around important story points to fit my player’s lead. Even written adventures will go sideways, you have to be ready to adapt and make adjustments to ensure necessary story points are reached. Same reason you’d fudge dice rolls. You want the players to get the most out of the story.
At one point in this article you say, ” every adventure should.have empty rooms” and just brush on past that like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. And I, a rookie gm, am just stuck thinking, “Is that really true? Also, what does he mean by empty rooms? I’m assuming it’s not a featureless room but what qualifies as empty? Also, why do we need empty rooms?” I’m very confused. Help? Please?
I think he means a room that does not have a fixed encounter in it. Basically an area that is somewhat save and would allow a party to rest once they have secured it against wandering encounters as best as they are able to.
At most, there might be some room dressing and minor treasure in there (e.g. a single potion of minor healing on a shelf full of rancid potions or a very weak spell scroll in a library of moth eaten scrolls and bugs or even just a few copper coins scattered around the area)
If every room has something of significance, they all lose significance and there’s no feeling of exploration.
If your players know every room has a clue, encounter or treasure, then rolls to Search have no meaning because if they fail they’ll just come back when they have enough time to take 10 or 20 because they know there’s something there.
Your dungeon becomes a checklist, “Did we get the stuff in here and here…”
An empty room is a blank space left intentionally undefined for you to add in or move encounters as needed. They are spaces that are entirely adaptable should the players, or you, need a certain kind of space for any reason.
Rewards can be sprinkled into these rooms like treasure troves, private libraries, places to rest, etc. Or you can use them to up the difficulty by making them monster lairs and outright traps. Level transitions for clever adventurers; maybe turn that blank space into a secret passage that get you to another part of the dungeon faster. Or they can just be places of interest or future use – “we set off the alarms? Well we can go back and fortify in that old forge we saw!”
They are there for you to fiddle around with and do with what you like. Maybe the empty room is just an empty room, and that’s all that should be there.
Excellent answers here.
The GM should include rooms that have the usual level of description/atmosphere, but that turn out not to have monsters or treasure.
These are good places to present ‘dungeon narrative’.
Maybe the party find recent graffiti scratched into a wall by a half-ogre. Or they find signs of a struggle. Or they discover a dead bat inexplicably nailed to the underside of a chair.
These spaces provide a change in pace. They frame the more dramatic rooms and add elements of tension, doubt and wonder into player hearts.
“Did we miss a secret door? If we keep searching, will the tension (dice) become unbearable? What was that dead bat all about?”
Empty rooms also provide the canvas for dynamic changes in your dungeon.
“You pass through the deserted forge, and on into the L-shaped corridor beyond. But then you hear a grinding sound from behind. It sounds like a huge forge oven is being s l o w l y pushed across flagstones …”
Has anyone compared the XP gains from Angry’s method vs the XP awards in published modules?
I love the concept and, having read Angry’s older posts on the topic, have been awarding XP for objectives and encounters from each of the “three pillars” since I started DM’ing again about a year ago.
My concern is that my players will level too quickly when running published adventures using Angry’s method. In the new year, I’m going to run Against the Cult of the Reptile God which was advertised as L1-3 though I see a lot of folks recommend starting 5e PCs at L2. I’m going to crunch the numbers some time soon for that adventure and, if the comments are still open, let you all know what I find.
Short version: Angry’s recommendations should work perfectly!
Long Version:
Against the Cult of the Reptile God is “an adventure for characters levels 1-3.” So I assume that *ideally* the PCs will reach level 4 at the end of the adventure. Using the table on page 82 of the DMG and the xp / level table on page 15 of the PHB, I see that reaching Level 2 takes six Awards, reaching Level 3 takes another six Awards, and reaching Level 4 takes an additional twelve Wards. Thus 24 Awards to make Level 4.
I used “Long Adventure” as the template for Against the Cult of the Reptile God – it should have 1 Major Objective, 2 Minor Objectives, and 3 Climactic Encounter. Those structural elements account for 7 Awards.
Subtracting the 7 Awards for the structural elements from the 24 Awards to make Level 4 leaves a “budget” of 17 Awards to buy the encounters in rest of the adventure. I know I can split those 17 Awards up later between Minor Encounters (.5x award) and Major Encounters (1x award.)
I counted about 30 encounters which the module expects to be result in combat. [Note: I did not count all the cultists around town as I don’t expect my party to go around fighting all the citizens. If the PCs undertake a pogrom against the cultist citizens, most of those “fights” won’t require any die rolls as there is no way the PCs could lose, thus they aren’t “encounters”, and thus they don’t result in XP Awards.] Of those ~30 encounters, 3 of them will be the climatic encounters I accounted for earlier which leaves ~27. Of the those 27 potential encounters, I’d already planned on removing a few from the module (the goblins, most of the undead, and the harpy for example.) However, I also want to add traps and social “interACTIONs!” around town, as Minor Encounters.
So with my remaining budget of 17 Awards, I can easily “buy” 8 Major Encounters and 18 Minor Encounters (8 + 18/2 = 17). Those 26 encounters that I budgeted for are REMARKABLY close to the ~27 encounters that I expect in the module! Angry’s method works out perfectly for this module.
In fact, knowing that the PCs are likely to not slay every opponent and disarm every trap, I want to create ways for them to earn a few extra Awards and for me to be able to adjust the pacing if I need.
I like what you’re doing here: back-fitting the Angry Encounter profile to a known scenario.
I guess one of the Climactic Encounters would involve fighting Explicita Defilus.
I’m guessing that another CE would occur in the big temple in town (and that the GM should ensure that this IS climactic, and that any other clean-up in town should be ‘off-camera’)
I don’t remember the scenario that well. I’m wondering: where would be a good place for the 3rd CE?
My current plan is that the first CE will be with Misha and/or Abramo at the Temple of Merikka in Orlane. For the second CE, I’m going to move Garath Primo from the 2nd level of the swamp dungeon up to the 1st level. The confrontation with Garath will also be confirmation that there is another power behind the cult (i.e. E. Defilus.) And yes, the fight with Explicita Defilus is the 3rd and final CE.
We still have to finish our prior campaign so I’ve probably got 2-3 months to tweak ideas before anything goes live in front of my players.
Garath Primo is a great choice!
His elevation to second Climactic Encounter is an good example of how Angry’s method imposes proper spacing on an old-school scenario.
———-
Garath does need to be built up a bit dramatically to carry the burden of second CE.
Maybe you could make him a ‘Colonel Kurtz’ character.
E.g. he’s not controlled by Explicita. instead he’s a once-good Cleric who is now living in the swamp worshipping his strange Snake Goddess.
To prefigure Garath properly – maybe one of the PCs was sent to find and ‘rescue’ him.
And they encounter Garath in the temple that he created for her.
And with his dying breath, Garath points at her veiled statue and says:
“Horror has a face … you must make a friend of Horror. I have. Her name is … Explicita”
I’m curious to see how you rewrite the experience table.
I’d hazard a guess that you would actually re-write the tables based on the campaign you are running and your desired milestone progression. 80% of the time you could use a standard table though, and that should be pretty easy to come up with.
Overall you just work this backwards to get where you want to be. If you think a medium adventure should be worth 1 levels worth of XP you are basically doing the math X * 12 = Y. The cool thing about this algebra is that you can pick either the X or the Y value and just solve for the other.
Example: If you are going from level 3 to level 4 you can use the arbitrary number “30” as the “award” value, and the total XP needed is now 360 (30 * 12 = 360).
There are probably specific levels that you’d want to either rush through or stretch out (level 1 is a 5e rush level and I think that makes sense), but you just change the algebra to fit if you want it longer or shorter.
What I mean is, on average, an adventuring day at each level constitutes 60% experience yield of the entire level. Therefore, each level constitutes on average 1.667 adventuring days. However, if you dole out XP as per the DMG the adjusted XP is hardly ever equal to actual XP but that’s just the weird system that the rules put forth which I agree are so convoluted and don’t make a lot of practical sense.
If you use Angry’s method the numbers match more closely to what I would assume is around 1.5 adventuring days per level. If a day has average 6 encounters and you can run through an adventuring day in a single session you would level up every 1-2 sessions.
I would like to know if he has adjusted his tables to stretch that out a little more. What levels would be stretched, what levels would be condensed? Do you condense the levels where the PCs are just entering a new tier of play? Do you extend the levels where the PCs are at the upper end of a tier? I feel like higher levels should take longer to get to but when the experience chart is so linear you get robbed of that feeling.
How do optional and random encounters fit into all this?
They are optional and random.
Angry said in an old article that he used 1/10 Award for random encounters (wandering monsters, tension pool complications, etc.)