Yeah, figure out the reference in THAT title. It’s pretty obscure. It would work better if Adventure and Encounter both started with the same letter. Maybe a ‘t’. Like for ‘trout.’

Anyway…

This isn’t the article I meant to write. But this also isn’t a Bulls$&% article. Usually, when I say “I was going to write this good, useful article, but I ended up getting distracted with this other idea and have to expand it into an article before I write the good, useful article,” that means you’re about to get handed 5,000 words of impractical, useless pontificating that never amounts to anything. That’s not going to happen here. This is grade-A, top shelf, accept no imitations adventure-building advice.

See, I was working on the second part of my Road to Elturel article. The one where I describe, vaguely, how the heck I designed a specific adventure. But there’s this thing I did when I was designing that adventure that is something that I do in a lot of adventures I design. And it’s a thing I just sort of worked out. Years ago. It’s just part of the adventure design thing. But it plugs a very specific hole in adventure design that D&D has left gaping wide open for… well… forever. And it’s something that has been on my mind a lot lately because of some unrelated projects, an RPG I’m definitely not designing, and a few conversations I’ve had with people. And I’ve dropped a particular term repeatedly and assumed people would know what I was talking about. Even though I know I made the term up and there’s very little basis for it in D&D. But there is a basis for it in some other RPGs. Including, possibly, Pathfinder 2. I can’t say for sure because I haven’t started reading my copy yet. But I did open it up to a random page to glance through the book and I found a specific passage that suggested that maybe it’s something that some designer over there maybe gave a tiny amount of thought to.

So, for me to discuss how I wrote my little adventure, I need to address a few general aspects of adventure building. Specifically, I need to talk about Structures. And I need to talk about what lies between Adventures and Encounters in the hierarchy of RPGs. Because, it turns out, that the Structure thing I want to explain sits at that level of the hierarchy. But most RPGs – especially D&D – don’t acknowledge there’s even a level of hierarchy there.

How an Adventure is Put Together

Here’s how a game of D&D works, right? There’s an adventure. Or a campaign. Or a module. Or an adventure path. And D&D has become really, really fuzzy on the difference between those things. Though is has also, admittedly, gotten a little better lately. For example, it calls Ghosts of Saltmarsh a collection of several adventures. At least on the cover it does. On the D&D website, it’s referred to as “an adventure.” And previous books like Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation have just been referred to as “adventures.” In the singular. Even though, some of them are structured in such a way that, in the past, they’d be called an Adventure Path – a series of interconnected adventures that tell a multi-part story.

So, who give a s$&%? Who gives a s$&% whether a thing is an adventure or a campaign or a module or a scenario or an adventure path? Well, frankly, I do. And so should anyone who wants to write their own adventures. Or anyone who wants to teach other people how to write their own adventures. Because these are the examples from game designers of how to put this crap together. And if the designers don’t seem to have any sense of overall structure, how the motherloving f$%& are we supposed to figure it out.

And don’t think for a minute that the actual structure ISN’T important. The way the adventure is put together has a lot to do with how the adventure feels to play. And to run. The reason great stories emerge from certain adventures is because those adventures lend themselves to a good, satisfying narrative structure. Structure is everything if you want a good story to emerge from your game. And if you don’t want emergent story, go play a f$&%ing board game. Even the beer-and-pretzels crowd who just want stories about descending into dark caverns, killing various things just because they aren’t human, and taking their loot? Even they are enjoying an ongoing, emerging story. They have their war stories. They have their fond memories.

And, by the way, D&D isn’t a collaborative storytelling experience. It’s a game from which a story emerges. That’s the truth. When you’re running and playing the game, you’re not building a story. You’re experiencing a story that emerges from the game. Which means the groundwork for the story has to exist in the game. It’s kind of like how plants will grow in nice, neat rows if you plant them in nice, neat rows to begin with.

Here’s the thing: D&D plays out as a string of encounters that, together, add up to an adventure. So, you’re going to the castle to fight Strahd. You have a bunch of encounters, figure out his plan, find the important MacGuffin, rescue the important NPC, and eventually confront and kill Strahd. And that IS how you write an adventure. Right? I mean, that’s what the DMG tells you. That’s how most adventures are put together. There’s a goal, a starting point, and an obstacle course. Or an obstacle maze. And if you have a good goal, a good start, and a good obstacle maze, you have a good adventure, right?

Well, no.

The funny thing is that the very best adventures actually do something else too. It’s just something that isn’t really discussed often. And the best adventure-writing GMs add something else too. But they don’t really know what they are doing. And the problem is, this thing is super necessary to making good adventures. And no one has talked about it. Worse, very few mainstream games have any mechanical adventure design tools to address it. A few games have addressed it in piecemeal ways. And, please, for the love of f$&%, I am begging you all not to turn my comment section AGAIN into a list of “well, my favorite game does that thing.” Because I don’t care. And that always happens. And if I hear about Blades in the Dark one more f$&%ing time, I’m going to puke. In fact, the fans of Blades in the Dark have driven me so f$&%ing crazy by trying to convince me that the game is the second coming of Jesus F$&%ing Buddha that I will never, ever play it. Or run it. Or pay money for it. Out of pure spite. Because you people are worse than Dungeon World and Dark Souls fans combined.

Anyway… about mechanical structures and adventure building.

The Mechanics of Adventure Building

Adventure building presents a tricky problem. Because, on the one hand, RPGs are very open-ended and rely on the creativity of the community. And because of that, you want to leave people free to create. But, on the other hand, most people who want to build their own adventures are not actually game design geniuses. They aren’t game designers at all. By definition, half of all people who want to build their own adventures are below average adventure designers. Because that’s how averages work.

The thing is, an RPG system is a lot like a level-builder for a video game. It’s like Super Mario Maker. Except it’s not. It’s more complicated than that. It depends on who’s making the game. Let me see if I can spell this out for you.

So, when a developer makes a video game, they start by building the basic mechanics. The engine. The program that makes the game work. Unless they just buy an engine or use an existing engine. But let’s pretend they don’t. And let’s also pretend I actually know how video games are made and this is an accurate description.

In the end, you have all of the mechanics that make the system work. All sorts of game elements. The game elements then get based to scenario designers and writers and whatever. And they put together the actual game parts of the game. They design levels. They design quests. They map the world. They put the monsters in it. Now, those guys who do that are the professional game designers. And if they need to tweak the game mechanics or push the envelope or change how something works, they usually can. And they also have a lot of power to manipulate the game elements. Eventually, they release an actual game.

So, first you had the D&D designers who invented D&D 5E. And then, you had the game designers who made, for example, Tomb of Annhilation.

And that’s sort of how Super Mario Brothers gets made. First, you have the engine for Super Mario Brothers. And then level designers come in and design all the individual levels and challenges using the tools the engine provides, but also making all sorts of tweaks and changes as they need to.

But those aren’t the only folks who make games for game engines. Or game systems. Sometimes, the designer of a game wants to let someone else make a game for their system. Or based on their engine. And so, they make a set of tools available to those third parties. A developer kit. Basically. Or, at least, a bunch of documentation that describes how everything in the game works. And those tools are generally more limited than the inhouse tools. Third parties creating add-on content or whatever based on the same engine can’t quite fiddle and tweak as much as the designers of the original. But they can still fiddle a lot. When someone like Goodman Games designs a licensed – or whatever – adventure like Into the Borderlands, this is the level they are working on. They have to work within a certain framework, but they have access to a lot of information about how the original game was designed and they can make a lot of tweaks.

Meanwhile, savvy casual players and indie designers can also make their own content. Basically, they are unofficial third parties. Unlicensed their parties. They are people who are smart enough and skilled enough to figure out all the bits and pieces and make their own content within the same framework. There’s lots of folks doing that for D&D.

Finally, what sometimes happens with video games – and what OFTEN happens in table-top RPGs – is that the designers want to allow the general fanbase of their game, the community at large, to create their own content. Their own games. The problem is, most of those people are not actually professional designers. And they aren’t savvy enough to break down the game systems themselves and make their own content. So, the designers release what amounts to a level editor. Super Mario Maker for example. Or the rules in the DMG that tell you how to write an adventure for D&D.

Now, these tools have to be approachable and understandable and they should require as little game design skill as possible. Because most casual fans aren’t professional game designers, they aren’t interested in becoming game designers, and they never will be that good. Because most people are mediocre at most things. That’s statistics.

So, when you pop open your DMG and find game design advice that tells you that you should have this many encounters in a day and each encounter should have this many XP worth of baddies and that this particular baddie is an appropriate challenge for this particular level and so on and so forth, that’s a level editor. And it’s dumbed down. That’s why the CRs are off in the Monster Manual and why the monster design numbers don’t align with them. And why published adventures don’t actually follow a lot of the guidelines in the DMG that are considered good adventure design. It’s like comparing Super Mario Brothers 3 – made in-house by Nintendo and Shigiyoto Migiyoto or whatever his name is – to any random, average level made in Super Mario Maker.

Now, eventually, you have a small group of community members who learn how to push those tools to their limits and do things with them that most fans would never think of. There’s some amazing s$&% out there for D&D based entirely on using – and sometimes breaking – the rules of adventure design presented in the DMG. And there’s some amazing s$&% out there for Super Mario Maker.

Do you follow all of that? Because I feel like most GMs don’t think about this. In fact, I KNOW they don’t. Because people STILL ask me in e-mail all the time why the published crap that D&D churns out doesn’t seem to match up with the adventure design rules in the DMG. Or why certain monsters don’t match up with the monster design stuff. Well, the reason is because the DMG is a crappy level editor for dummies and the designers are working with the development kit for professional f$&%ing game designers. Despite the fact that some of them – *cough* Crawford *cough* – seem to have been awarded the honorary title of “professional” for some reason that has nothing to do with credits, credentials, or skills.

But I digress.

So, what’s the point of all of that? Just this: the DMG is essentially a level editor for D&D. And, as such, it should be focused on allowing the average fan to build a reasonably enjoyable adventure. Because the people who are good at building adventures – or who are dedicated to becoming good at building adventures – they will eventually push beyond those tools on their own. You can count on that. The tools are, for them, just a starting point. Which means, they should also provide a good starting point.

Which means the tools should focus on approachability and usability rather than open-endedness. In other words, guidelines and structures are more important than a blank canvas.

Yeah, I know the bile is rising in your throat. And I don’t care.

The problem is, there is a big hole in those adventure design tools that is screwing a lot of people out of being able to write even okay adventures.

Between Adventure and Encounter

There are certain structures that are built into the D&D game system. And Pathfinder. And all the rest. For example, there’s the Action. The player declares an action, the GM determines the outcome, using the rules as necessary, and the GM describes the results. And there’s the Encounter. The GM describes the scene, invites the players to act, acts as the opponents, resolves all the actions, and keeps going until one side or the other wins the Encounter. And then there’s the Adventure. The GM presents a goal, a string of Encounters happens, and eventually the players win. And each of those structures has rules or mechanics or advice and guidelines or a format or something to help the GM and the players understand how it goes together and how it plays out. Some – like Adventures – are loosey goosey. Others – like Combat Encounters – are very tightly structured, both in design, and in play.

But there’s a big gap there. There’s a hole. There’s a chunk of the game that doesn’t have any name or description or advice or guidelines or mechanics or structures or formats or anything, loose, tight, or in between. It’s the part of the game that plays out inside the Adventure but outside the Encounter. It’s the space that some people – and MAYBE Pathfinder 2 – has taken to calling Exploration. Even though that’s a stupid name for it.

Basically, when the players are wandering around the dungeon, moving from room to room and Encounter to Encounter, game is happening. But the game is sort of in this inbetween state of freeform whateverness. When the party is traveling across the wilderness, from point A to point B, and having random encounters along the way, they are stuck in an undefined state of playing, but not in any structured way. And when the party is exploring a town getting to know the locals and the lay of the land or when the party is wandering around following leads during a murder mystery, they’re in this non-state of just sort of dicking around.

Now, you may not see the problem here. And that’s fine. Because lots of GMs eventually figure out how to run the game in that state, in a more freeform way. And lots of adventure writing GMs allow for that stuff by, say, making a map of the town and a key that shows who is where and has what information. Or just making a dungeon map. Or a flow chart. Which all works perfectly well.

Except, because that state of play is this vague sort of “inbetween the game parts” state, very few people actually think to do any more with it than just let the players wander around through it until an encounter happens. Basically, the adventure becomes this featureless ocean and the players are just sailing from island to island. And all the interesting things happen on the islands. And the best mechanics anyone can come up with for the featureless ocean is to roll randomly to have another island appear. A random encounter. No one thinks of doing anything with the ocean. Because it isn’t anything but the space between encounters.

And that’s bad. Not just because you spend a lot of time on that ocean and that’s a lot of wasted time. It’s bad because a lot of GMs do struggle with how to run those parts of the game. How do you manage wilderness travel and make it interesting? Can you make wandering the dungeon more interesting than just “do you go left or do you go right” and occasionally “suddenly, a monster jumps out from behind the statue?” A lot of GMs have lately been talking about Exploration mechanics. And a lot have been talking about things like making travel interesting. Or bringing more discovery into the game. And they have a hard time articulating what they are after. I know. I keep asking them. And what I’m coming to realize myself is that they want something interesting to do with the featureless ocean of gameplay between the Encounters. The space in the game design hierarchy between Adventure and Encounter.

Because, here’s the thing: D&D has become more and more interested in making sure that each Encounter is a self-contained thing. Losing one Encounter shouldn’t cost the entire adventure. Or make the Adventure more difficult. And gamers have been more concerned about the idea that the only structure in the DMG is “the adventure day” which amounts to “make sure you get in six good fights before you let the party sleep.” Which is extremely limited.

Beyond that empty feeling that many GMs are starting to have about the featureless sea of gameplay between Encounters, there’s another reason to want to put something there. It’s the perfect place to manage winning, losing, and setbacks. See, we’re all pretty much of the opinion that losing a single Encounter shouldn’t lead to losing the whole adventure. But it should still be possible to lose adventures. So, how can the players lose? Where can you put the stuff into the game that tracks win states and lose states? Moreover, if the players lose an Encounter, what happens? If you say that the players can’t continue in the Adventure, well, you’ve just declared the Adventure a loss.

Redefining Scenes

Once upon a time – like last f$&%ing week, probably – I would use the term “Scenes and Encounters” to loosely describe a small, self-contained chunk of the adventure that took place over a short period of in-game time in which a dramatic question was resolved. And the difference, according to me, was that Encounters were Scenes that had some conflict that had to be resolved. So, for example, imagine the party goes down to the local tavern to ask the landlord what he saw on the night of the murder. If the landlord just gives the PCs the information with a minimum of fuss, that would be a Scene. If there was a bunch of die rolling and social interaction crap because the landlord was paid to keep quiet or if there was a fight because the landlord’s bouncers were paid to beat up anyone the landlord didn’t like, that would be an Encounter. It was a good distinction.

Except it was utter crap. Why not just use Encounter for all self-contained chunks of adventure that take place of a short period of time in which a dramatic question is resolved? Who gives a s$&% if some of them don’t have conflicts? They still have the same basic pace and structure. It’s just that, in one of them, the GM is smart enough to not ask for die rolls. And knowing how to Adjudicate Actions tells GMs when to roll die rolls and when not to.

The reason I wanted to get the word Scene out of there is because I needed it. See, one of the things I’d noticed is that I had a particular way of structuring my adventures. I had an extra layer between Adventure and Encounter.

For example, imagine the players are hired by the villagers of Knoware to figure out what’s happening to the villagers’ sheep. Or more specifically, why the villagers have fewer sheep today than they did last week. And the mayor of Knoware helpfully suggests that the PCs begin by asking the affected shepherds and farmers and such for information. In reality, there’s a monster in the Hills of Sumplays Els nearby that is wandering out of its lair every few days, stealing some sheep, and then eating them. As monsters will do.

The way I’d structure that particular adventure is to break it down into three major sections. First, the PCs are going to wander the village, getting to know NPCs, gathering information, checking out crime scenes, and pissing off the locals. Because they are adventurers. Adventurers always piss off the locals. Eventually, the PCs would have enough information to figure out that there’s a monster coming from the Hills of Sumplays Els.

The second section would involve the heroes wandering the Hills of Sumplays Els trying to track down to the monster to its lair. And maybe finding clues as to what kind of monster it was.

The third section would be the cavey dungeoney bit where the monster lives along with a bunch of, you know, slimes and giant spiders and other random dungeon vermin. Because it’s the dungeon bit.

Now, that’s probably not a major revelation or anything. That’s a nice logical structure. But the other thing I do is consider each part in terms of an overarching goal and possible conflicts and win and loss structures and things like that. And in terms of a climax and resolution. So, in the first section where the party is wandering the village gathering information, maybe the leader of the Hunters’ Guild is miffed because he wants to be the one to kill the monster. But everyone is all impressed with the adventurers. So, while the heroes are doing their thing, he’s trying to discredit them. Spreading bad blood. The more active they are and the more encounters they screw up, the more popular opinion turns against them. And if they screw up too much, the villagers might run them out of town and withdraw the job. So, the social encounters have some stakes. And the way they treat the villagers can drastically affect the adventure. On the other hand, they might gain more information if they do particularly well. They might gain insights about the monster. Whatever.

In the second part, the longer they wander without finding the lair, the more supplies they waste and the more likely they are to stumble on random encounters. That’s just normal wilderness exploration. But, the longer they take, the more likely the monster is to wander back to town and kill him some more sheep. Or maybe even kill a villager.

You can see how this works.

So, those broader chunks of adventure – which, obviously contain Encounters, but also contain the sea of stuff that happens between encounters – can now have all sorts of overarching mechanics built into them that play into the encounters. The mood of the village can affect the investigation. Locations have wandering monsters or random encounters or other consequences of exploring. A haunted house might take periodic actions against the party regardless of where they’re at. Or a fairy forest might do the same. Strahd might teleport around the castle whenever the heroes attract his attention, periodically making trouble and then flapping away like a bat in the night. Are the heroes fighting through a burning building to kill the fire elements causing it and also rescuing villagers trapped in the blaze? Well, those fights and rescues are single Encounters in the larger chunk of game that is the burning building. And, as a GM, you can build mechanics into that larger framework to govern the spread of the fire or the risk of smoke inhalation or provide a timer.

Good adventures do exactly this. They tie stuff to particular locations like the village the party is wandering around or the haunted house or the spooky forest or whatever. But there’s no real format for it. No precedent for it in the level designer stuff that’s given to amateur GMs in the DMG. And thus, there’s also no list of tools or mechanics or formats or even just general advice for it. Which means a big part of what makes adventures more than just a string of Encounters and obstacles is missing from the Super Mario Maker that most amateur GMs use to make their first adventures.

And the thing is, it all starts by telling GMs to structure their Adventurers not just as a goal with a string of Encounters in the way, but to break the Adventure down into Macro-Encounter-Containery-Things first and make sure you know what the smaller goals in those sections are and see if there’s a way to build some overarching conflicts or progressions or win and loss conditions or whatever into them. The closest the books get is by telling you to draw a map of your dungeon to put your Encounters in. Or a flowchart of your Encounters for a non-dungeon Adventure. Very rarely is the GM advised to give any sort of stats or mechanics to the map itself. To the flowchart. To treat IT as a game mechanic. As an entity that might have game effects keyed to it.

And so, that’s why I’ve reclaimed the word Scene. And that’s now how I write Adventures. I break the Adventure down into broad Scenes. Mostly location-based or sometimes based on a subgoal or a particular chunk of time. For example, the first Scene in one of my recent adventures was Arriving at Town. The party needed to secure lodgings, register for the upcoming tournament, and I wanted to have a few Encounters to introduce some townsfolk and foreshadow events. The next Scene was the tournament itself. Which took place over two days and had a bunch of different events and Encounters also. And because one of the events was a dance, there was this little mechanic I used to track the popularity of each PC and see who would get invited to the dance by whom. Which might lead to other Encounters. And also would determine where everyone was and what was going on when disaster broke out the dance.

And now that I have a term for the layer of the game design hierarchy that sits above Encounters and below Adventures – and, look, it’s not the greatest term, but it works – well, now I can give some advice for designing good ones. And for making various mechanical Structures and Frameworks to manage the game and the narrative at a higher level.

And that’s where I’ll be picking up the story of how I wrote my adventure, The Road to Elturel. Or Flight to Elturel. Or whatever the f$&% I actually called the thing. So, come back next week.

Oh, by the way, it’s also a good idea to synch up your Scenes with your Sessions so you can end every Session on a Climax, Reversal, or Cliffhanger. Gives people a reason to come back.