I don’t know how the hell to classify this…

It ain’t Bullshit, it doesn’t belong in True Campaign Managery, and I ain’t responding to anyone but myself. Actually, that’s really what I am doing. Responding to myself. I’m expanding on something I said in that last True Campaign Managery lesson. But it ain’t True Campaign Managery.

Really, this has more to do with scenario design and homebrewing. But I sure as hell ain’t ready to tackle that nightmare yet. What I’m talking about, though, is useful if you’re planning to use your burgeoning True Campaign Management skills to homebrew a campaign. Especially as you set your Campaign Vision.

So, let’s call this a digression. I’m just going off on a useful tangent. That’s all.

But I Digress… Structure

I briefly mentioned in my last True Campaign Managery lesson the idea of Structure. Specifically, I said Structure is a thing you should address when setting your Campaign Vision. I then rattled off a few, quick terms I didn’t bother to define and called it good enough.

And it was good enough. After all, if you’re reading True Campaign Managery, you already know how to string adventures into a campaign. At least, you can do it passably well. You probably know how to build a functional, adequate adventure. I’m pretty sure I’ve written more than a few lessons on that as well. So I’m certainly justified in leaving shit there and letting you wait until I commit to the year-long process of turning you from amateur crap homebrewer to True Scenario Designer. You still have basic frigging leadership and social skills to master.

But it is worth knowing a thing or two about Structure as you set your Campaign Vision. And that’s true even if you’re not doing the whole homebrew thing. The problem is that Structure is kind of tricky to grasp. Partly because it requires such a delicate grasp — grip too light and it escapes; grip too hard and you crush your game — and partly because there are actually three different kinds of Structure to worry about. And they all have to work together.

Actually, it’s probably better to say that your one Structure needs to do three totally different things, but I’m rushing ahead.

First…

Structure: What Is?

Structure’s simple enough to define: it just describes how the bits and pieces of your campaign or game fit together. If you step back way far from your game and squint your eyes, Structure is the shape your campaign would sorta take. Kinda.

But as with many such game design and narrative concepts — and I know this is going to touch off ten-thousand idiotic fights in my supporter Discord community — Structure is a descriptive thing. You can’t really define or explain it in concrete terms. It’s something you can only describe. And it’s very complex and detailed and nuanced, so you can only compare Structures by broad similarities.

Talking Structure is like looking at faces in the clouds. You can’t talk in terms of water molecules and air currents. And even if two clouds have very similar faces, no two are quite alike. So, all you can say is, “Those two clouds both have old man faces. That one looks kind of grumpy and that one sorta looks happy.”

That vague, descriptive, similar-but-different bullshit might lead you to think Structure ain’t worth talking about. But it is. It’s tremendously important. It’s pretty much the most important.

Structure: Why Matters?

Do you remember how I keep telling you that Pacing is pretty much the thing that separates good games from crap games? Do you also remember that Pacing isn’t about the speed or efficiency at which things move but rather about the ebb and flow of the emotional content of your story? That it’s about, say, Tension rising and falling, or about how you foreshadow future events, or about how you resolve mysteries or a million other things? That Pacing is about how your players’ emotions pull them through the game? Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes curious, sometimes surprised?

Do you remember all that shit?

Well, Structure describes how the different elements of your game join up. How your game moves from one thing to the next. So Structure and Pacing are totally intertwined. In fact, Structure defines the large-scale Pace of your campaign. While the moment-by-moment gameplay determines how the players feel about a particular encounter or session, the Structure drives how they feel about entire adventures and campaigns.

Structure: Don’t Ignore

Now, I know there’s a bunch of you already sharpening your damned pitchforks and lighting your torches because it sure sounds like I’m saying that Scenario Designers and Campaign Managers should take a firm hand in plotting and planning. And saying that is forty-stolen-cakes-level terrible. Because a Game Master’s job is to provide an open world or sandbox or stage on which the players can play out their dramas as they choose.

While that is a good and valid point, I don’t quite agree because — as a matter of completely personal, subjective preference — I prefer to run games that aren’t giant steaming piles of shit. That’s just a me thing though.

Your game’s going to have a Pace. And your game’s Structure will drive its Pace. So if you choose, say, an open, sandboxy, player-driven kind of Structure, you’re abdicating control over the long-term pace of your game to your players and their whims. And that’s a crapshoot. This means you’re leaving it up to your random, dumbass players to stumble into a game that feels good to play. In the long run.

And since this Campaign Management crap is about setting your game up for long-term success, keeping at least a finger on the Structure wheel will only do you good. That said…

Structure: Don’t Overthink

You can really overdo this Structure thing. And in a drive to force your game to conform to a predefined Structure, you can crush the freedom and openness from your game. Moreover, Structure is descriptive. It isn’t prescriptive and it isn’t definitive. You can describe the Structure you’re going for in your campaign, but only in broad terms, and, really, you’re just better off being aware of Structure as a thing as you develop your Campaign Vision than trying to actually force one.

That said, the more you get used to looking at Structure, the more your games will just come out well-structured. It’s another one of those, “Some people are naturally good storytellers and some people get good at telling stories because they naturally tend to fit their stories to the right shape without even thinking about it.”

Which is why I’m going to stop trying to define Structure here. Especially because what’s really interesting — to me, today — is that, when it comes to tabletop roleplaying games, there are three different Structures to be aware of.

Sort of.

A Tale of Three Structures

Structure is about describing how the different pieces of a thing fit together and how the experience flows from one piece to another. But games are complicated things. And tabletop roleplaying games are complicated games. Thus, they have complicated Structures. And it’s easiest to look at them as having three different Structures. All of which are important.

The Shape of the Gameplay

Gameplay Structure is all about what the players are doing as they play the game. Or rather, how gameplay switches between different ways of playing the game. I’ve talked in the past about Modes of Play and Gameplay Loops and shit like that. And that’s all about Gameplay Structure.

Imagine, for example, a dull-ass standard fantasy adventure campaign. The kind I run all the time and the kind that isn’t at all dull-ass even though pretentious, douchebaggy online Game Masters will say otherwise. In such a campaign, the players begin by exploring a town and gathering information until they find a quest. Once they’ve prepared for the quest, they set out into the wilderness and travel to wherever the quest demands they travel. At the site of the quest, maybe they delve into a dungeon to accomplish the quest’s goal. Then, they hike back to town and end the adventure where they started.

You can think of Exploring a Town, Preparing for Adventure, Trekking Across the Wilderness, and Delving the Dungeon as different broad gameplay activities. Modes of Play. And how those Modes of Play are arranged and how the players are expected to move from one to the other? That’s Structure.

It’s worth noting that Structure is kind of a fractal thing. It tends to look the same at every scale. Consider how players might Explore a Town, for example. First, they’d get a lay of the land. The Game Master might show them a map and describe the town. They’d look around for points of interest while gathering general information. Eventually, something specific might grab their attention. They’d figure out how to approach it, interact with it to complete a goal, and then go back to looking around for points of interest.

In a very general sense, that’s very similar to what the players do throughout the campaign. See? Fractal.

The Structure I described is a particular kind of Structure that ends where it begins and is thus called a Gameplay Loop. That’s not the only kind of Gameplay Structure. Another kind of Gameplay Structure is typically seen in so-called 4X strategy games in which the players Explore the Map, Expand their Holdings, Exploit Resources, and then Exterminate a Threat. And even very open-world games like Breath of the Wild and Breath of the Wild 2: The Same But Shittier have different Modes of Play if you look really closely at them. As you wander across Hyrule, you tend to switch between Wander Mode, Check Out Mode, and Trek To Mode. And that’s in addition to other modes like Explore the Settlement, Complete the Sidequest, Delve the Shrine, and Clear the Dungeon.

All of that just goes to show that describing Gameplay Structure is about describing what the player is doing and how the player is making choices at any given moment and recognizing that, really, it’s not so much the game that switches Modes as the players’ brains.

The Shape of the Story

Every game — every adventure and every campaign — is also a story. A narrative. But that’s not because games are special. It’s rather because everything we do — as humans — is a story. Every experience leaves a narrative behind. As we turn our experiences into memories, we shape them into ongoing and emerging stories. Playing a tabletop roleplaying game is just another experience. At the end of each encounter and each session and each adventure and each plot arc and each campaign, we fit the events together into a growing narrative.

The stories that endure — the ones that are the most rewarding to experience — are the ones our brains can fit into the right shape. And that shape is Narrative Structure. The Structure of the Story.

I’ve wasted a crapton of digital ink talking about Narrative Structure. Talking about acts and arcs and rising action and climaxes and denouments and crap like that. And I’ve also talked a lot about different ways of Structuring Narratives. Terms like Three-Act Story and Kishōtenketsu and the Hero’s Journey are ways of describing different Narrative Structures.

It’s worth noting now that, while Gameplay Structure tends toward nested loops and cycles, Narrative Structures tend toward rising and falling action. Not every gameplay is a loop and not every narrative focuses on building and releasing Tension, but it usually works out that way.

It’s also worth noting that Narrative Structure is also fractal. Thus, just as stories have rising action, climaxes, and resolutions, so too do individual scenes and even individual character actions. That’s just how this shit works.

The Shape of the Scenario

Here’s where shit gets tricky. What I’m about to describe can be hard to tell from Gameplay Structure, but it really is different. Let me start by explaining by way of example what Scenario Structure is all about.

When the players of the above campaign Delve a Dungeon, they’re, in some sense, just doing the same Gameplay Loop as is present in the rest of the campaign, but on a smaller scale. They enter a room, take it in, find the interactive points, pursue things, and then move on. But what they specifically face in each room and how they decide where to move on to and when to backtrack? That’s all Scenario Structure.

The map of the Dungeon they’re Delving is a diagram of the Scenario Structure of that particular chunk of gameplay. The specific path the players follow — or the sum total of all the possible paths — and the things they deal with on that path? That’s all Scenario Structure. Scenario Structure is all about how the individual elements of the game’s challenge are splayed out and how the players navigate them.

As with Gameplay and Narrative Structure, we have lots of terms to describe Scenario Structure. We say adventures are Event-Based or Site-Based. We talk about Branching Paths and Gauntlets and Open Worlds. Those are all ways of describing Scenario Structures. They’re all to do with how the players pick their paths through the game.

Whereas Gameplay Structures often settle into nested loops and Narrative Structures are about wobbly rising trendlines, Scenario Structures are often depicted as flow charts. That’s a point I made years ago when I claimed every adventure is a dungeon.

The Terminology Trap

Before I explain how all these Structures are one and the same, I have to appeal to you — especially certain very specific yous — not to fall into a certain trap when discussing this shit. I want you to stay out of the Terminology Trap.

I’ve plopped a lot of Structure-related terms like little turds throughout this and other articles. Terms like Open-World, Adventure of the Week, Gameplay Loop, 4X, and Three-Act Story. While such terms are useful for broadly lumping together games with similar Structures, they’re far too broad and general for actual analysis or planning purposes. And they shouldn’t be viewed as templates or forms to fill in.

If you want to have an intelligent discussion about Structure or if you want to devise a Campaign Vision or tell folks about your game, you can’t use those terms. It’s like trying to fully describe a painting by saying, “It’s a still life of flowers” or “It’s a winter landscape.” You’re not saying enough to be useful. You need to describe the color palette and composition and shapes and painting style and medium and so on. You’ve got to ramble. Especially if you want to do anything interesting.

I can tell you my current AD&D 2E campaign is a Three-Act Dungeon Delve with a Link to the Past-Inspired Accordion Structure and even if you actually knew what I meant — and if those terms had any actual set definitions — you still wouldn’t know anything remotely useful about my campaign.

Never use jargon to describe your game’s Structure. You need at least a paragraph to describe a structure usefully. You need several. Those jargony terms are just a way of saying, “Hey, those several paragraphs you wrote have some broad similarities to the several paragraphs I wrote about my campaign.” That’s fun to know, but not useful.

The Three That Are One

Structure describes how you order the different bits and pieces of your campaign together. And campaigns are made of lots of pieces. But, really, they’re made out of just one piece. Or one kind of piece. A campaign is nothing more than a string of events. It’s just a bunch of, “Here’s what happens; what do you do?”

Thus, in the end, a campaign has but one Structure. It’s all just about how one event follows another. Sometimes, it’s about how one action in combat invites the next. Sometimes, it’s where you go when you leave the room by the eastern door. Sometimes, it’s how you move from Being in Town to Trekking the Wilderness. But it’s all just choices and transitions.

Nevertheless, those three Structures are all present. They’re just all hidden in the same tangled mass of actions and resolutions and choices and transitions. As the players Delve the Dungeon, they go through Gameplay Loops. Delving the Dungeon is part of a larger Gameplay Loop. But the players are also picking a path through a Scenario every time they decide where to go next. And they’re experiencing rising and falling tension as they move toward the Narrative’s climax.

Designing an adventure or campaign is about interweaving this shit. It’s about building one Structure that works as a Gameplay Structure, a Narrative Structure, and a Scenario Structure.

Need an example? Consider Boss Fights? Why do Boss Fights work? Why do so many games use Boss Fights? Why should yours?

The answer is that Boss Fights provide all three kinds of Structure in one neat little package.

From a Gameplay Structure perspective, the Boss Fight is part of a cycle of gathering information and resources, building power, and using them to overcome challenges. From a Narrative Structure perspective, the Boss Fight is the climax that resolves the final conflict of the adventure. Either the boss is the source of the conflict that started everything or else it’s the last — and greatest — obstacle between the players and their goal. And from a Scenario Design perspective, a well-placed Boss Fight is the culmination of a path the players chose — wittingly or unwittingly — to prepare themselves for the challenge. Used properly, anyway.

What about the Adventure of the Week Campaign? Why is that a thing? Well, I already described above why it works as a Gameplay Structure. It’s the Gameplay Loop I talked about above. But it also allows each individual adventure to act as both a self-contained Narrative and a self-contained Scenario. By their nature, Adventures of the Week have incitements, rising actions, climaxes, and resolutions.

That said, note that Adventure of the Week, by itself, says very little about the Scenario Structure. It just assumes there will be one. This is why, again, these terms are insufficient to describe a campaign in any useful way.

But what’s the takeaway here? What’s my point? Well, I don’t have one. As I said, this is just a digression. I just want to make you aware of something. But it’s an important enough something that you should put some thought into it. And by thought, I don’t mean running your mouth — or your fingers — off in my Discord server with jargon-laden metaconceptual discussions. That’s the opposite of thought. Instead, take some time to think about your own home games and your favorite video games. Try to describe their Structures. In prose. Not in terminology. And look for the three different kinds of Structures as you do. Get good at recognizing them in other works.

And if you don’t feel like doing that, if you’re just happy reading the discussion and marinating your brain in it, that’s fine. But do take one important lesson to heart. Absolutely do not under any circumstances ask me for a fucking list of adventure and campaign structures so you can Mad-Lib yourself to a game.

I am not joking. I’ll slap you.