Change of pace, change of plans…

My site stats are telling me there’s been an influx of new eyeballs on the site. If you’re two of them, welcome; don’t touch my stuff.

Lately, I’ve been steeped in two long-running, heavy series about advanced gamecrafting and gamerunning theory and that ain’t great for fresh faces. Given that I’m not a total dumbass, that means I need to need to mix up my content going forward with heavy stuff for the old guard and inviting stuff for the fresh meat.

Today, I’m splitting the difference. For those of you who’ve been following my long-running series on artful, masterful adventure design — True Scenario Designery — this Feature fits right in and sets the stage for some future stuff. It’s also a direct response to some of the side discussions I’ve had with folks already trying to implement those lessons to build their own great adventures. For the rest of you, this stuff doesn’t demand any actual investment in that long series; it works on its own. It also illustrates some of the crap that makes my approach to adventure design unique.

Meanwhile, I promise I’ll have a better mix of more approachable content in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

Angry’s Five Rules for Amazing Adventure Design

Next month, those of you in my True Scenario Designery course are going to see how to use the high-minded conceptual game design crap I’ve been blathering on about to plan out an actual adventure design. Specifically, you’re going to see how to turn a simple, cliched Dungeons & Dragon adventure into an engaging — and Winnable and Losable — gameplay experience with the ideas I’ve been teaching you.

But, there’s a lot more to how I build adventures than those heavy game design concepts. I can’t say it’s a philosophy really. It’s more of a style I’ve cobbled together in my decades-long quest to run the best damn gameplay experiences I possibly can for my players. See, I look at tabletop roleplaying game scenario design differently from most of the folks writing adventures out there. Which is what makes me a genius.

Since it’s going to come up next month — and since some asshat on social media accused me of not even knowing what the hell I meant by Game Design — I thought it would be fun and useful to list a few of my underlying beliefs or philosophies or whatever about Game Design. Or Scenario Design. Or adventure design. Whatever you want to call it. This ain’t an exhaustive list — it ain’t everything I know is absolutely true about Scenario Design — but it’s pretty much the core philosophies that underlie my approach to making adventures.

These five rules will definitely come up for you True Scenario Designers next month.

The Game Must Include Everything the Players Need to Play It

This first point got me a lot of flak on social media recently, but social media is full of dumbasses, so what can I do?

It is the game’s job to arm the players to play it. Games should teach people how to play them, games should help people discover the strategies and tactics that’ll lead to victory, and games should provide people with any information they need to make good choices. It’s a game’s job to arm players for victory.

Even at ten years old, when I was totally excited to use my Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set for the first time, I knew asking my friends to read even those relatively short rules would utterly frigging destroy any chance I had of getting them to play with me. It’s the game’s job — and the Scenario Designer’s and the Game Master’s — to teach people how to play. You shouldn’t need to read an entire textbook to get started.

Now, when I say a game should teach people how to play, I’m talking about more than just the dice-rolling rules. The mechanics are easy to teach anyway. Any Game Master can teach a group of players all the game mechanics they need in one play session. I’ve done it myself hundreds upon hundreds of times. Experienced gamers forget how much more there is to playing an RPG than just knowing what to roll when.

If you look at my introductory module — designed to teach both Game Masters and players the ropes — The Fall of Silverpine Watch, you might note that several of the tutorial encounters don’t involve any rules or dice. Instead, they teach players ideas like, “Your character is you in the world,” and “You get information from the world by taking actions with your character,” and teach Game Masters how to handle an encounter with players going in several directions at once all at the same time. That’s why the adventure starts with the Game Master — as Oona — talking to the players as if they’re the characters and why the players have to turn the corpse on the road over before they can get information out of it with Ability Checks.

Every adventure’s a game unto itself, right? And every game requires unique approaches and strategies to win, right? You don’t win horror adventures by going in guns-a-blazin’ and you don’t win actual, fun fantasy adventures by thinking and talking and plotting and planning. As such, every adventure also has to show the players what strategies will lead them to victory. The Fall of Silverpine Watch teaches the players very early that “Exploring is how you win.” It’s a dungeon delve, after all, that’s how you win dungeon delves. That’s why it starts with the ghost fleeing through a locked door and a key hidden in a basement room. The players know the way forward is blocked and have to discover the solution is down a side path. Even if the players happen to have a rogue who happens to roll well enough to bypass the door, they eventually have to discover the key because that side path ain’t a side path at all. It leads to a room that contains one of the adventure’s goals.

Incidentally, that also says, “Some characters can bypass obstacles others can’t, but there’s always a way forward for every party if they explore enough.”

I got shit on by some folks last week because I suggested, similarly, that if the key to surviving an encounter is doing some research in town before setting out, the adventure was responsible for showing the players that research was an option. Those of you who think I’m wrong can suck it. Good games arm the players for victory. Don’t run those other kinds of games.

Action Beats Exposition

I could have started The Fall of Silverpine Watch with a speech about how this adventure was about exploring and about how exploring is how you win most Dungeons & Dragons adventures and so you players should make sure you explore everywhere and look under everything and also if you ever encounter an obstacle and can’t see an obvious way to get past it you should maybe check other places for a solution because…

Man, that’s boring as hell to even type out. Worse, yet, telling the players shit like, “Before you explore those ruins, you might want to do some research because you have no idea what’s there and it might be deadly unless you’re extra specially prepared,” is basically playing the game for the players. If I’m willing to say, “Do this if you want to live,” what do I even need the players for? Then, too, winning has to be on the players. It’s them — the players — who have to overcome the game’s challenges by making the right choices. If I tell them what choices to make, their only challenge is rolling dice extra really good. News flash, rolling dice good isn’t actually a challenge.

Thus, I create situations in which attentive, clever players can find the right choices for themselves. How obvious I make those choices depends on how challenging I want the game to be and how high the stakes are. If the weird magic in the ruins will kill the characters outright if they ain’t prepared, I’m going to make “Research first,” a pretty obvious lesson, well, sorta. It’s complicated. In fact, I was asked just yesterday to talk about how Game Masters can adjust the subtlety or obviousness of information in their narration as a sort of difficulty slider. You can bet your ass I’m going to do a whole long thing on that subject very soon. Information management is vital and word choice is a Game Mastering superpower.

That aside, the point here is that, when I wanted to show my players, “Exploring is how you win,” I created two encounters in The Fall of Silverpine Watch that came up before the switch to open-ended exploration. One demanded the players follow breadcrumbs around a murder scene and interact with it to glean information. The other involved looking for a solution to a locked door. And I used the adventure’s critical path to make sure the players would receive both messages even if they bypassed the obstacle by other, creative means.

The Most Natural Way To Play Should Be the Best Way To Play

That whole Action Beats Exposition thing implies some stuff about people. About player people specifically. It implies that people don’t like to be told what to do but would much rather fuck around and find out. It implies, further, that you can count on people’s intuition to guide their choices. Games, especially, tend to follow certain patterns and exhibit certain preferences. Some are more universal than others. For example, most fantasy tabletop roleplaying gamers — or people who would enjoy fantasy tabletop roleplaying games if they ever tried them — actually like to explore. They’re driven to satisfy their own curiosity.

Imagine what a screwjob it would be, then, if I presented a fascinating labyrinth full of interesting paths to explore, but my adventure also punished exploration. Say, for example, there was a brutal timer on the adventure and every side path just wasted time and resources. I knew players like exploring and I built a space that’s basically hiking up its skirt and saying, “Hey, sailor, why don’t you come and explore these branching paths,” and then I’m going to reward them with the gaming equivalent of crotch rot and tell them it’s their own damn fault?

Note — and I realize the innuendo in this wording given my previous, delightful analogy — note this idea goes both ways. First, it means designing games that are the most fun to play if you play them the way they want you to play them. Second, it means designing games that don’t punish you for playing them the most fun way.

For example, modern fantasy adventure roleplaying games are all about badass heroes built, armed, and equipped for combat. They’re big damned heroes with a host of awesome combat powers. Thus, the most natural thing for any modern gamer to do when they encounter a hostile monster is… anyone? Beuller?

That’s right: it’s to kill the monster in combat. You can piss and moan all you want that the game shouldn’t be about combat and players shouldn’t default to combat and gaming was so much better when combat was what happened when you failed to stealth or ran out of your one sleep spell for the day, but that doesn’t change reality. If you’re running modern D&D, players want to fight the monsters, and if you don’t like that, you can join the RPG Amish and play any older edition you want and I won’t even try to stop you.

Believe it or not, this applies to both Game Masters and players. You can see it in modern monster design in D&D. Each beast’s mix of traits and special attacks suggests particular strategies, approaches, sequences, or synergies. If you — a Game Master — play a modern monster like you’re trying to win with it, you’ll naturally settle into a behavior pattern that suits the monster. Moreover, doing so empowers the players to beat the monsters. It lends them logical, predictable, deducible behaviors and strategies the players can recognize, exploit, and counter. Thus, if you’re one of those Game Masters who insists you purposely play monsters stupid — because, really, why should an apex predator in a deadly fantasy world actually be good at killing shit — if you purposely play monsters stupid because of some misguided understanding of what animal intelligence means, you’re actually making the game harder to play. Dumbass.

Now, to follow this rule, you’ve got to know how players perceive things and how you can expect them to react, on average, to various situations and stimulations. That’s something you figure out through experience and intuition over time. Fortunately, you’ve got sexy game design geniuses like me to help. And to remind you that patterns and averages aren’t guarantees and you’ve got to build around that too.

You also have to realize that, if you want the players to do something that isn’t natural or intuitive, you’ve got to find a way to make the path you want the players to follow the natural path and you’ve got to make that path fun. You totally can build a good encounter about escaping from a too-powerful dragon — by which I mean one that doesn’t simply demand the players guess they’re supposed to run from the dragon they just tripped over or else they learn by dying — but you’ve got to find a way to overcome their natural inclination to fight every hostile monster and you have to do so without just telling them, “This is too powerful; flee or die,” and you have to find a way to suggest a strategy for escape.

Nothing Is Absolute Until the Players See It

This was a rough one. Originally, I wanted to say, “Nothing is real until the players see it,” or “Nothing is true until the players see it,” but I realized both of those phrasings failed to capture the full extent of my philosophy.

Let me explain…

Next month, I’m going to help you design an adventure based on depopulating a dungeon. Lots of y’all would expect me to set, in advance, a specific monster population and to tick it down as the players kill the beasties off. I’m gonna tell you that that’s totally the wrong way to do it. I’m going to say, “Don’t track the monster population; that’s not how you do this shit.” That’s gonna baffle the hell out of some of you.

Also…

In the past, I’ve told you to plan wilderness encounters the same way you plan dungeon encounters, but, instead of placing them at specific spots on the map, plan them for specific stages of the players’ journey. Or make them contingent on the players choosing certain paths. I’ve gotten reamed for that and even been accused of advocating for Quantum Ogres by people with piss-poor reading comprehension skills. I don’t do Quantum Ogres. They’re shit.

Players don’t know how many things live in a dungeon. Not until they count all the bodies, anyway. Players have no idea where encounters are placed — or not placed — on the map. Not until they encounter them. Until that point, the encounters could be anywhere and the population could be anything. If you can design a better adventure by not acting like a Skyrim save file that has to record the position and state of every cheese wheel in the entire frigging world, then don’t do it. Or do do it. Design the better adventure; don’t act like Skyrim.

You don’t build good adventures based on population numbers, you build them based on proper encounter design and challenge progression. Don’t constrain yourself by population numbers. The wilderness ain’t a dungeon and it doesn’t flow like one. You can’t map encounters in the wilderness like you can in a dungeon. But encounter planning is still how you make good encounters. So design good wilderness encounters and don’t tie your hands by forcing yourself to treat the wilderness like a dungeon.

The reason I phrased my rule the way I did though — and this paragraph is going to get me a lot of trouble — the reason I said what I said how I did is because this same philosophy also lets me handle a bunch of stuff rationally that screaming internet dumbasses drive themselves bonkers worrying about. This same philosophy, for example, solves the problem of whether it’s possible to redeem an orc even though some Monster Manuals say they’re always evil. Likewise, it means that I can design proper challenge progressions without getting agita over the idea that my world levels with my players and that’s sooooooooooooo unrealistic. Hell, it even lets me run a fantasy world that looks a lot like a traditional, medieval fantasy world driven by values of faith, family, and community but still brings in modern egalitarian views so I can include all players. I don’t have to tell my female players, “Sorry, you can’t play a fighter or a knight or rule a kingdom because your job is to pop out babies.”

Note that this means I also don’t have to demand that any of you run your game worlds the way I think you should. Nor do I have to demand the designers do things or not do things that support my particular view of what fantasy worlds should be. I don’t have a dog in this dumbass fight.

Not that I actually care what the screaming internet dumbasses think anyway. This is just a side thing. People really overestimate how many craps I give about whether they’re swayed by my arguments. I know I’m right; I don’t care if you’d prefer to run a shitter game by not agreeing with me. I’m giving you the opportunity to run a better game smarter. You can do with that what you will.

But I digress…

My point is, never constrain yourself to any absolute the players have no way of knowing, and remember the players only ever encounter the parts of the world that make for good gameplay. That doesn’t mean the entire world is driven by gameplay.

No Mechanics are the Best Mechanics or Know the Hierarchy of Mechanics

Yeah, I’m cheating here. There’s a lot wrapped up in this last rule or philosophy or whatever we’re calling this crap. I really need a couple thousand words to explore the whole thing and you can bet your True Scenario Designery ass that you will be exploring it with me in that particular course. But the underlying idea’s simple enough and you can follow it even if you don’t care about my nonsensical lists and terms and hierarchies and all that horseshit.

When it comes to Scenario Design — when you’re making an adventure — don’t build game mechanics if there’s any way to avoid it. That’s the simple version of the rule. Do not rely on game mechanics to create the gameplay experience you’re going for.

Imagine, for example, you’ve got this dungeon you’re building with The Guardian at its core. You want to make the adventure all about the players empowering themselves to beat The Guardian through exploration. So, you decide to hide information nodes throughout the dungeon. Each node reveals an interesting fact about The Guardian and also grants the players a +1 bonus to Attack The Guardian or some shit like that. Something that reflects how the knowledge makes them more powerful.

That is a mechanical solution. Don’t do it.

Instead, design The Guardian — stat it up — so that certain strategies are more effective than others. Build a monster that rewards players who fight it the right way. Give it a trait that makes it vulnerable to back attacks, or give it lots of ranged or area attacks in an open arena with lots of cover, or something like that. Then, write clues that suggest those strategies and hide those around the dungeon. That way, if the players find none of the clues but still guess how to fight the monster right, they can still win. They played wrong but saved themselves with clever, quick thinking. Roleplaying games are supposed to allow for that shit.

The point is, don’t do with specialized game mechanics anything you can do without mechanics. If you want to build an adventure that rewards exploration, find a way to reward exploration that isn’t just trading in Exploration Points at the Prize Counter.

The more advanced version of the rule goes like this…

Don’t use mechanics unless you have to. If you do use mechanics, use mechanics the players can’t see over mechanics they can, rely on your game system’s existing game mechanics as much as possible, and leave some unpredictability and wiggle room in any mechanics you do build. That last one’s kinda weird, but I’ll give you an example. Remember last week when I was talking about an adventure whose goal was to cure a plague? I said that instead of using a hard-and-fast timer — “Every X days, Y people die from the plague, and at the end of Day Z, everyone’s dead?” — you should use a soft, randomized timer — “Each day, there is an A-percent chance someone dies.” That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about.

In other words, the Mechanical Hierarchy goes like this…

• No Mechanics beat Mechanics
• Background Mechanics beat Player-Facing Mechanics
• System Mechanics beat Scenario-Specific Mechanics
• Soft Mechanics beat Hard Mechanics

… but don’t sweat that crap if you don’t want to. Just don’t lean on arbitrary mathematical mechanics to build gameplay dynamics or experiences if there’s any other way to get where you want to be.

Of course, you can totally expect I’ll be revisiting this Mechanical Hierarchy thing in True Scenario Designery. Likewise, you can expect a future lesson about the Game Mastering Information Management Superpower that is Narrative Word Choice. Hell, if I get enough shit about it, I’ll probably even revisit how my No Absolutes rule let’s be both a terrible OSR istaphobe and a modern railroading wannabe novel-writer pretending to be a Game Master.

By the way, that’s how you know I’m right. Because I get shit from every side.