This feature is part of my ongoing True Scenario Designery series about advanced adventure, encounter, and campaign design. If you haven’t followed it from the beginning, use The True Scenario Designery Course Index to catch up.

This particular True Scenario Designery lesson — which is more of an informal discussion — is a direct follow-up to last month’s Momentous and Inertial Adventure Design so you definitely should have read that.

Challenge Or Goal?

Close your books kids; we gotta talk. You see, I was watching some of y’all do your homework and I discovered that we’ve got a problem. Well, by we, I mean you. You’ve got a problem. Me? I’ve got the solution and it’s right in my wheelhouse because it mainly involves calling y’all names and telling you you’re all wrong about everything.

Look, you know this is how I operate. I call a dumbass a dumbass and if I end up making someone cry, that’s just proof I called it right. The risk that I’m gonna call you out for a screwup and make you an object lesson is part of the price of admission. Of course, we all know that the idiot I drag in front of the class to lambast is just the one I caught being wrong. If I’m making a big deal of it, that means there’s lots of you out there I know getting it wrong the same, exact way. I could pick any one of you dumbasses at random and accuse you of being wrong the same way and hit the mark 99 times out of ten.

What happened was this…

Last month — or whenever the hell it was; I don’t even know what month it is right now — last month, I posted that lesson on Momentous and Inertial Adventure Design — the one with the lame-ass goblin cave adventure — and ended by suggesting y’all try your own hand at writing an adventure premise with a focus on inertial and momentum dynamics. Well, one of you took it upon him-or-herself to make a little class project in my supporters-only Angry Discord Server.

Now, I ain’t gonna name names because that took balls, especially given that OP knew I’d be watching and judging and that, if anything went wrong, I’d write at least three thousand words of screed ripping them apart for it. Since I respect that courage, I’m only going to call this brave — but ultimately doomed — soul OP. Some of you will know who they are because they saw the discussion, but you’re going to keep your dumbass noise-holes shut, right? Especially when you post your comment about how you totally saw the error because of how frigging brilliant you are, which, since no one called it out in the discussion — well, one person sorta did, but failed — since no one called it out in the discussion, either means you’re lying or you’re an asshole for seeing a speeding train barreling down the tracks at your fellows and doing nothing.

So, yeah, maybe just skip trying to claim the smartest dude in the comment section trophy this one time since no one’s buying it anyway.

Anyway…

What Proselus did on my Discord server was post this adventure premise he had planned for his home game and then invite everyone to use it to brainstorm momentum and inertia dynamics. And everyone started spitballing and some pretty clever ideas got shared and none of them was worth jack because Proselus totally effed up. One person very briefly came very close to saving everything but then didn’t. So yeah.

On seeing the whole thing play out, I calmly stepped outside to kick a hole in my apartment building and then I… well… actually I went to urgent care and had my foot x-rayed and my broken toe taped. But after that I sat down to figure out how the hell to explain what my unnamed supporter — whose anonymity you will respect — and everyone frigging else got totally wrong.

Getting the Challenge Right

Pre-design is a big frigging deal. I’ve made that clear. Before you design anything, I want you to sit down and think about what you’re going to design and I want you to write that shit down. I’ve even told you, very specifically, precisely what things to think about in your pre-scenario-design phase, right? A scenario — be it an adventure, a campaign, a scene, or an encounter — must have a goal, a major element of challenge, and at least a couple of potential outcomes.

In my big-ass example last lesson, I started with the idea that there were some goblins in a cave raiding a village and the villagers would very much like that to stop. Thus, the adventure required the players to end the goblin menace: destroy them, drive them off, whatever. The major element of challenge was that there were too damned many goblins to kill and so the players would have to launch several attacks, thereby racking up a big enough body count to induce the survivors to flee.

Now, let’s look at OP’s premise. OP said there’s this villain conducting these regular, daily rituals that fuse demons with people — or something like that — and the players have to stop the ritual. Permanently.

Can you spot the difference between those premises? One of them is missing something and it’s not the one that was written by the sexy gaming genius as part of a professional…ish lesson in advanced adventure design. Well, one poster in my Discord server did spot the difference. They very quietly called it out with a single, simple question. When OP gave an answer that was very obviously wrong, that poster just accepted it. Then the group brainstorming began. So they get no points and neither does anyone else.

The question was, “What is the main challenge for the adventure?”

OP replied, “Stop the ritual.”

Now, look, it’s easy to see what I’m driving at. It’s super obvious when you’ve got an angry, sweary me sarcastically pointing out the issue. But this is a mistake that many of you have made — I know; I’ve seen it — in your own premise-writing pre-design. It’s not a big deal with you’re Merely Building an Adventure, but it ain’t the kind of bullshit a True Scenario Designer can get away with.

OP confused challenge and goal. This is something lots of you have done and so you won’t give OP any shit for it. OP is a supporter. He pays me to abuse him, but he isn’t paying any of you for it and none of you are any better at this shit than he is. Trust me.

Anyway…

OP didn’t merely forget to set a major element of challenge, he confused his challenge for his goal. If you read what he said very carefully, what he actually did was skip stating his adventure’s goal and simply provide what he thought was the adventure’s major challenge. If he hadn’t done that, he probably would have noticed something was wrong.

See, if you’re writing an adventure premise — specifically the goal and the challenge parts — and you write the same thing twice, you done effed up. Goals and challenges are very different things. They can’t possibly be the same. If you find yourself repeating yourself, you need to rethink what you’re doing.

Another sign you done effed up is when your major challenge element can be described with a single imperative statement, phrase, or sentence fragment. If it doesn’t take you several words — maybe even a couple of sentences — to describe your adventure’s major element of challenge, something’s wrong.

Notice that I didn’t break my adventure premise down into bullet points like…

• Goal: Drive Off or Exterminate the Goblins
• Challenge: Exterminate Enough Goblins to Drive Off the Rest

Instead, I said this…

That pretty much defines the goal and the major challenge, right? There are goblins in a cave and the players need to destroy them or drive them out. There are too many to kill in one go, so the party will have to make several sorties. Hell, there’s probably too many to kill at all. The heroes just have to build up a big enough body count to demoralize the survivors into fleeing the region.

If I’d done the bullet-point thing, I’d have lost some vital information.

I know y’all think I’m prosaic and wordy out of style concerns — or just to pad my word count — but I’m not. It’s because I’m doing what I do right. The point of this design-statement-and-vision-crafting nonsense is to describe what you plan to design. Not outline. Not list. Not define. Describe.

It’s really easy to confuse goals and challenges. The difference is obvious when I point it out, but not so much when you’re actually doing the work. It’s a mistake everyone makes. Professional adventure designers screw this up all the time. Hell, I’ve screwed it up more often than I care to admit. It’s actually so easy to confuse goals and challenges that I’ve struggled to spell out the difference in a nice, clear, digestible, pithy pair of mutually exclusive definitions. Every time I come up with good ones, I also come up with a premise that breaks them. That’s just part of the nature of tabletop roleplaying games. Narrative and fantasy smear into gameplay, challenges and goals overlap, and everything is a giant mush.

In the end, the clearest difference is that a goal is something the players accomplish while a challenge is something they overcome. But there are other differences too. Goals tend to speak more to the players’ characters while the challenges are more directed at the players. Goals tend to be clear to the players — the players really should be able to state the goal they’re chasing — while challenges are rarely explicitly stated to or explicitly understood by the players. Goals tend to provide context while challenges are more about gameplay. Goals tell you how to win while challenges tell you what’s in the way. Goals are usually brief and concise while challenges require prose descriptions. And so on and cetera and nauseum.

Me? I prefer to remind myself that goals tell the players what they’ve got to do and challenges explain why they can’t just do it. And if I can’t put my goal and challenge into a phrase of the form the players must accomplish X by doing Y and Y is hard because of Z, I probably need to go back to the drawing board.

The players must drive off the goblins by exterminating enough of them to demoralize them, but the goblins have vast numbers and the players will have to make several successful assaults on the goblins before they are finally driven off.

None of those are perfect because, again, scenario design is ultimately a creative art and not a science and the goal is to produce a subjective gameplay experience, but conceptually, they help you see the differences.

Stop the ritual doesn’t work as a challenge by any of those comparisons. It doesn’t clearly describe what the players have to overcome, it doesn’t define any gameplay, and it doesn’t explain why the players can’t just make their goal happen. If the challenge is just stop the ritual, does that mean the players can just walk up to the villain and say, “Right, stop it you!”

Struggling with Momentum and Inertia? Check Your Challenge

Let’s get deep and philosophical and conceptual for a second here…

At the heart of this goal-and-challenge thing is a subtle but important point about the relationship between context — story, fantasy, theme, call it what you want — between context and gameplay. This is why, by the way, in roleplaying games, goals and challenges are easily confused. That shit gets smeared together in roleplaying games.

An adventure’s goal is mostly about context. It’s mostly about the game’s story and fantasy and all that crap. The challenge is where you transition to thinking about gameplay. In End the Goblins, there’s this story about villagers desperate to end the goblin menace and the heroes’ efforts to help them. The challenge is the part where I explain how I make a game of that crap. It’s about how the players bring about the goal by playing the game. More importantly, it’s about how the players will interact with the game throughout the adventure.

Hot take… if you’re trying to design a game, it’s important to bridge the gap between the goal and the gameplay properly. Especially when you’re trying to make a really good game by bringing in advanced good-feeling gameplay dynamics like momentum and inertia. Gameplay dynamics are things that arise as the players interact with the game, right? Challenge is about how the players interact with the game to accomplish the goal, right? So challenge is obviously very close to both momentum and inertia on this deep, fundamental level.

Now, I ain’t gonna say that momentum and inertia are easy things to bring into your design — especially when you’re still getting used to the idea that they exist — but they are easier to evoke if you’ve got a solid grasp on your adventure’s major challenge element. If you can describe clearly what the big challenge in your adventure is all about, it tends to naturally inspire some ideas for momentum and inertia.

The point here is that if you’re having trouble coming up with ways to bring about momentum and inertia, it’s worth giving your challenge a hard look. Did you confuse a goal with a challenge? Is your challenge underdeveloped? Is it unclear? Did you not describe it well enough? Maybe give it another pass.

Speaking of things that might make you want to give your challenge element another pass, let me vaguely tease that x-factor thing again. Especially as that little thing can help you nail down your challenge if you’re having trouble defining it.

Let’s Vaguely Discuss X-Factors Again

Last month — whenever — I brought up this thing I called an adventure’s x-factor. I was kinda vague then. I can be less vague today, but I’m still not going to give it a full treatment. That’s for another lesson on another day.

I said that an adventure’s x-factor is the thing the adventure’s primarily about, right? Whatever the hell that means. Well, what it means is that the x-factor describes the players’ primary mode of interaction throughout the adventure. Or scene. Or campaign. Or encounter.

Can I stop tacking that on every time yet?

Players interact with the game through their characters, right? And, broadly speaking, there are several different modes of interaction in tabletop roleplaying games. Players can explore the world, they can interact with nonplayer characters, can fight monsters, can glean information, can acquire items, blah, blah, blahdy-frigging-blah. I’m not trying to build a comprehensive list here — that’d be a dumbass thing to do so don’t fucking ask — but to just get you thinking of gameplay in terms of the players’ broad activities or modes of interaction.

An adventure’s x-factor is the mode of interaction that spends the most time in the spotlight. It’s not the only thing the players will be doing in an adventure, but it’s what they’ll be doing most. Or, at least, the one that’s most directly likely to get them their goal. In End the Goblins, the x-factor was killing monsters. The players were going to do a lot of violence and violence was going to get them the win. They’d also explore and acquire and interact and so on, but violence was the key to victory which, let’s face it, is how it should be. Violence is the funnest and best way to win fantasy adventure roleplaying games.

I mentioned that it was helpful to identify your adventure’s x-factor because it provides a sort of through-line between the goal, the major element of challenge, momentum, and inertia. When we get to the part where we’re thinking in terms of progression — when we start stringing encounters into scenes, scenes into adventures, and adventures into campaigns — this x-factor shit is a seriously awesome secret sauce, but we’re not there yet.

Given that your adventure’s major challenge is the fulcrum around which you pivot to gameplay and this x-factor nonsense is all about the primary kind of gameplay you mean to highlight, it’s pretty clear that the challenge should basically scream your adventure’s x-factor, right? Well, stop the ritual doesn’t really say anything about the adventure’s x-factor. This is another sign you’ve accidentally mistaken a goal for a challenge.

But — as I’m going to show you as I bring all this shit together with some examples — you can actually use this whole x-factor thing to help you define your challenge if you’re struggling.

Let me end this discussion by showing you what I mean. It’ll also let me give you some homework.

Let’s Make Up Some Challenges

To end this, I want to bring all I’ve said together — and prove my genius — by fixing our unnamed OP’s stop the ritual premise. I’m going to come up with a proper…ish challenge that fits the goal. Actually, I’m going to quickly spitball four different challenges. Why? Because I also want to show you this trick to do with x-factors.

Now, I ain’t going to go into a lot of detail here. These are gonna need some fleshing out. They’re just enough to make my point and to show off what I want them to show off. I am, however, going to invite you to add some details to any or all of them. Try picking one — or more than one — to refine and to add some momentum and inertia dynamics to. That was, after all, the point of OP’s little group project. Share what you come up with in the comments or on my Discord server if you’ve got access. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be anonymously lambasted in a future lesson like our OP Proselus. Won’t that be an honor?

The trick I’m gonna use is actually pretty simple, but it’ll be super useful later when you’re planning scene or adventure progressions. I’m going to pick an x-factor first and then come up with a major challenge element based on that x-factor.

So… there’s this villain and he’s doing a daily, ongoing magical ritual thing that invests people with demons or some crap like that. The players’ goal is to permanently end the ritual. What might the major challenge element be?

Let’s start with exploration for our first x-factor. How might we make this an exploration challenge? The obvious answer is that the villain is doing his thing in a secret location somewhere in a sprawling necropolis. The players can easily capture or kill him if they can find him. The trouble is, there’s a lot of ground to cover and he’s in a secret, hidden, or hard-to-find place. The players can take as long as they need to, but the ongoing nature of the ritual makes time a factor. Thus the players have to cover a lot of ground quickly but thoroughly lest they overlook something.

Also, as noted in some sidebar somewhere above, they will face encounters throughout the ruins. I just feel like I have to keep reminding some of you of that.

Now let’s say the x-factor is acquire. Or maybe gather. The players have to stop the ritual, but they’ve got to amass resources. Suppose they’ve got a relic — or they discover it early on — that can disrupt the ritual or remove the magical shield protecting the villain, but it needs to be charged up with holy power. We’ll move this from a necropolis to a ruined or overrun city. The players need to find sources of holy power and do little ceremonies to gather it. Ruined temples and shrines are the most obvious places to start with. You can think of them — and other sources — as nodes. The trouble is that each node provides a small — and variable — amount of power, so the heroes have to go from node to node, charging up the relic. Once it’s charged, they can confront the villain in the heart of the city at the base of the skybeam and use the relic to break his power. Obviously, the challenge is in finding the nodes and gathering enough energy. There are encounters, as noted above, and some might also allow the players to gather more holy energy. Time pressure, blah blah blah, done.

Now let’s assume the x-factor is interact. To stop the ritual, the players need information. They need to know where the villain is, they need to know how to sabotage the ritual, they need to know where the sabotaging relic is, and so on. His cultists, spread throughout the area, have this information. The problem is it ain’t written down so the challenge is extracting the information from the cultists. Maybe that means capturing and interrogating them — which might include moral dilemmas — or maybe that means disguises and infiltration. Once the players have all the information, they can grab the relic, go to the location, and sabotage the ritual. There’s still a time pressure here and maybe an added level of challenge comes from the fact that the adventure’s in a civilized area and the players can’t just start cracking skulls lest they get into trouble with the law. Or maybe it’s an isolated location but as the ritual goes on, cultists keep turning into demons. Whatever.

Finally, let’s do exterminate. Easy, right? Kill the villain. That’ll stop the ritual for sure. The trouble is the villains at the heart of a sprawling necropolis. He’s not hidden, but the place is crawling with monsters and more keep pouring out of the Abyssal rifts as he conducts his ritual. The players have to cut a bloody swath through the minions while keeping enough power in reserve to actually defeat the villain in an epic boss fight. They can retreat any time they want, rest, and try again, but the outpouring of demons means the gauntlet basically resets every time they rest. They just need to pull off one perfect run.

Now, see what you can do with those ideas. But also keep these examples in the back of your mind. I think I can do something more with this shit. Meanwhile, expect another lesson soon about what the players need to know about their adventures.