A few weeks ago, I started this whole “practical guide to adventure building thing” by listing the basic components that every adventure needs. Remember? Every adventure needs a goal, some background, motivation, a structure, pace, scenes and encounters, and a resolution. And then I talked extensively about goals. And then, I took some time to evaluate role-playing games as “games” according to the theories of one particular, very accomplished game designer. And that whole evaluation thing was kind of a disaster. Because it broke my brain.

Here’s why I bring all of that up. I bring it up because I’ve realized I really don’t know HOW to talk about adventure design. That’s not because I don’t know how to design adventures. I am a freaking adventure design boss. I write great adventures. The problem is that I just sort of do a lot of the things I do. By instinct. Or natural talent. Or, more likely, because I’ve been doing it for thirty freaking years and I’ve actively devoted myself to getting better every time. And that last part is a big deal. Lots of people do lots of things for thirty years. But after a few years, they assume they have it down. And they get complacent. And they settle for good enough. They figure just doing something counts as practice and therefore automatically makes them better. Nope. Sorry. Not only do you have to do something over and over again. You also have to assume you always have something more to learn and actively try to figure out what you’re still doing wrong. Never trust anyone who says they know how to do what they are doing. Because they’ve given up at getting better at it.

And that is why, every so often, in one of my articles, you’ll see me admit I don’t have all the answers and that I’m still trying to figure crap out. Despite all of my braying about how brilliant I am and how much I know about what I know, you can always find a place where I say “look, I don’t know this as well as I could.”

Anyway, as I was getting ready to talk about resolution in the next step in my grand tour of writing the bare minimum number of things that are needed to have an adventure, I realized there was a big concept missing from my list. And it was thanks to some asshole commenters on that Mark Rosewater piece who, unlike me, know absolutely everything about everything they know and have no room for improvement and who therefore should never be listened to by anybody who is interested in getting better at anything.

So, today, we’re going to talk about games, goals, and losing.

Why the Adventure is the Game

Apparently, when I talked about goals and then analyzed Mark Rosewater’s ideas about what makes a game a game, I made a controversial statement. Imagine my fucking shock. I said something that people took issue with. Who would have thought? Well, guess what everybody who disagrees with me? I’m right and you’re wrong. And the thing is, if you want to write your own adventures, and you want them to be as good as my adventures, which is better than any adventure you can buy on any shelf ever, you need to understand why I’m right about this and why everyone else is wrong. Because there’s a big, BIG hole in almost all adventure design that stems from a lack of agreeing with me. Yes. That’s right: the reason published adventures suck is that the designers of said adventures don’t agree with me.

Here’s the deal: whether you agree with all the other crap Rosewater and I said, the one thing you have to accept is that a complete game – in order to be a satisfying gameplay experience – it must have a goal. Without a goal, people are just acting at random. And holy mother of crap, that should NOT be controversial. But here we are.

And yes, there are fun things that you can do that don’t have goals. But they aren’t games. They are hobbies. Pastimes. Diversions. Not games. And, funnily enough, most people actually set goals for their hobbies, diversions, and pastimes too. Because people need goals. And, yes, that may mean that for the GM, RPGs are more like RPHs – role-playing hobbies – because they don’t necessarily provide and don’t have to provide a satisfying gameplay experience. But that’s a whole other discussion.

ANYWAY…

Point is, a game is a thing you can win or lose. That “win or lose” quality is centered around the goal and it’s what adds the tension to the game and makes it exciting to play. It’s what makes the game unpredictable and it’s what makes the choices and strategies and decisions and everything matter. And this is another one of those arguments I’ve had a thousand times time. Most players are attracted to games – included RPGs – because they can win or lose. Players don’t like to lose. But players also feel like winning is meaningless if they can’t lose. And they are right.

Now, you might know a player who isn’t like that. They exist. You might even be one of those players. But, guess what, those players are in the small minority. If you have one of those players at your table, you might have to adjust your design accordingly. Or just dump that player, which is what I’d do, because they ruin the fun for everyone else. But they aren’t the people you should be designing for. And I also don’t want to hear about it.

Long story short: the following are facts: an RPG is a game, a game must have a goal for the players, and a satisfying game is one that can be won or lost based, AT LEAST partially, on the skills and choices of the players. If you don’t agree with those facts, don’t read the rest of the article. You won’t agree with the conclusions. And don’t comment. Because I can’t be bothered to convince people that basic facts are true anymore.

By the way, kids, this is called spelling out your assumptions so you can define the scope of the argument you’re making. It’s what big boys and big girls do when they present arguments. And since the Internet is full of intellectual, screaming, braying toddlers, you very rarely see it done.

But there’s also this question about where the game actually IS in a role-playing game. After all, an RPG session consists of a string of encounters. Every encounter has some kind of goal that the players are trying to accomplish. But the encounters all get strung into an adventure. And the adventure has a goal that provides a through-line and gives all of the encounters some context. And adventures can be strung together into multi-part adventures, adventure paths, or campaigns. And those may or may not have goals too. Which one of those things is actually the game?

This isn’t a trivial, semantical, philosophical bullshit sort of question either. It’s actually very important. Because as a GM – especially an encounter building, adventure designing, campaign planning GM – you have to bring a bunch of stuff to the table to complete the game. Remember, RPGs aren’t actually games. They are systems game designers use to build and run games. You have to complete the design process. And there are things every game must have to make it a good game.

Now, I said that it is the adventure – a string of encounters between the motivation and the goal – that is the actual game. And it’s that thing that needs all the stuff that a game must have to be a game. And some took issue with that. Some said every encounter is a game in-and-of-itself. And others said it’s the string of adventures – the campaign – that functions as a game.

Well, it’s easy enough to prove the campaign isn’t the game. First, you can have a satisfying play experience without running a whole campaign. A one-shot adventure is a perfectly fine and enjoyable way to play an RPG. Lots of people do it that way. And remember, a one-shot adventure can span two, three, or more sessions. Hell, those huge-ass books WotC keeps crapping out like Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annhilation are basically just very long adventures. The game can be complete even if it’s not a campaign. A campaign is a string of separate games.

Second, you can have a campaign without a goal or resolution. A campaign can just be a string of “adventures of the week” starring mostly the same characters or with some other element providing a thin continuity. I’ve played in campaigns that were just years of separate adventures that were fine experiences. And we stopped when the campaign finally drifted apart. If the campaign can be satisfying without a goal, it’s not really a game by itself. Hence, the campaign must be a string of games.

But what about encounters? In theory, you could consider each encounter to be a separate game. But then, it turns out you’re playing a lot of very incomplete games. See, while an encounter can include everything a game needs to be a complete game, most encounters get by with substantially less. Many of the smallest, simplest encounters are just obstacles in the story and carry no more narrative weight than that. And while some grand encounters work as complete games, they are the rare exception. Most of the ones that are bigger than simple obstacles are, effectively just plot points. They serve as reversals in a big story.

The biggest problem though is that most encounters have no motivation of their own and if an encounter was removed from the context of the adventure, it loses all of its motivation. See, adventures don’t just provide a goal, they also provide a reason to want that goal. A motivation. While most encounters also have a goal, the motivation is usually “so that you can continue toward the goal of the adventure.” The heroes have no reason to kill the goblins in the cave unless they need to pass through the cave on the way to the treasure they are seeking. And they have some reason for wanting that treasure.

The point is, the adventure is the game. Encounters ARE mini-games, sure. They function a lot like smaller games strung together in the pursuit of a larger goal, but they don’t have to have everything that makes a game a game to work. Because they can inherit some of the crap they don’t have from the adventure. The campaign is not the game because it’s entirely optional and can be satisfying even if it’s nothing more than a string of games. But it can also function as a macro-game. But the adventure? The adventure has to have everything a game needs to make it a good game.

Now, let’s talk about the problem of losing.

Win, Lose, or Die

Now, remember, it is a FACT that a satisfying game has a goal and the players can win or lose the game by accomplishing their goal or by…

By what? Did you think I was going to say, “by not accomplishing their goal?” Well, that’s where we run into a huge-ass problem. Because losing is a lot more complicated than that.

Now, I’m generally a big fan of video games. And I constantly point out that GMs and RPG designers should be taking more cues from video game design because video games and role-playing games have a lot in common but video games have evolved a lot more in many more directions that TTRPGs have despite the fact that both have been around for about the same length of time. But this is one area where video games teach us the wrong lesson.

See, most single-player and cooperative video games don’t teach us very good lessons about losing. Because the general conceit of most video games is that “if at first you don’t succeed, die and try again.” A video game is a string of challenges. The players overcome one after the other until, finally, they overcome the last challenge and win. And if they fail to overcome a challenge, they respawn and try again. Or go back to their last save and try again. Or whatever.

Now, the funny thing is that that looks A LOT like an RPG adventure. An RPG adventure is generally just a string of life-or-death challenges. Kill these goblins. Now kill these goblins. Now circumvent this trap. Now kill these goblins and wolves. Now kill the goblin boss. Now you win. Good job. That’s an adventure, right?

Well, there’s a problem if you want losing – or at least the possibility of losing – to actually be a part of that. How does the party lose? And what happens when they do? The only way they can lose is to die. And, unlike a video game, there ain’t no respawning. Death is a HUGE pain in the ass. No one likes it. It disrupts the whole game. And it’s very hard to recover from.

Important Note: This is in no way suggesting that death shouldn’t be a part of the game. Death SHOULD be a possibility. A terrible possibility. And it should be hugely inconvenient and terribly disruptive. The Angry GM does not endorse removing the possibility of death from the game.

The basic D&D adventure is structured like an obstacle course. The players overcome one challenge after another. If they overcome all the challenges in their way, they win. Otherwise, they lose. And the only way to lose most challenges is to die. And even if there is a challenge that won’t kill a party of losers, one that merely sends them along a different path, most adventures allow the players to just keep trying different ways until they succeed. Didn’t talk your way past the guard? Try sneaking past him. Oops, he noticed you. Guess you have to kill him. He’s dead now. You get to continue on your way.

That’s a really, really terrible structure when you get down to it. It means that the only way to actually lose at an adventure is to die along the way. 99% of the time, winning the adventure is inevitable. It’s a matter of mere persistence. Just keep throwing yourself at the challenges until you succeed. 1% of the time, someone – or everyone – dies. And no matter how unlikely the possibility of death is, if you spin that Russian Roulette wheel enough times, eventually death is going to happen. So the whole campaign – if you’re playing one – becomes a matter of surviving and winning every adventure and getting to the end before the odds catch up to you and someone – or everyone – dies.

D&D doesn’t handle loss well. It never has. It doesn’t know what to do if the players retreat. It doesn’t know what to do if the players have to drop back ten yards and punt. It doesn’t know what to do if the players lose encounter after encounter. The only thing it knows how to do is high five the victors with XP or kill the losers. And killing the losers feels so bad and the game designers are such utter pussies that they’ve made death more and more unlikely. Which means most adventures are just inevitable victories until someone gets hit with enough critical hits to die.

And it’s your job as the adventure designer to do better.

Losing Is Okay If You Earn It

Now, because D&D doesn’t handle loss well and most GMs don’t know how to handle loss and are also giant pussies who never want their players to feel bad, most GMs have a pretty screwed up view of loss. As soon as you bring up the possibility of losing, internet GMs start wailing and gnashing their teeth about things like bottlenecks and how it never feels good to lose because of just one roll. And they start screaming stupid, contrived examples about how the party can do everything right in an adventure and then hit the one locked door between them and their goal that they can’t open and then lose the whole adventure and that proves losing is terrible.

It doesn’t, though. It just proves that those GMs are losers at game design.

Let’s consider that example though. Because it’s actually highly instructive about loss. And good losses. So, imagine this adventure: the heroes have to retrieve the Orb of MacGuffin from the Dungeon of Plot Contrivance. The Orb is locked in a vault in the middle of the dungeon. There’s a complex puzzle lock on the door. The party overcomes a bunch of challenges along the way. They kill all sorts of Guardian Monsters™ and overcome Terrible Traps™ and solve Complex Puzzles™. All the crap adventurers are always doing. And then they get to the vault in the middle.

First, they try to solve the puzzle lock. But they can’t do it. It just doesn’t make sense to them. So, the rogue tries to sabotage the puzzle lock and open the door. He flubs the roll and can’t circumvent the mechanism. Finally, the barbarian flies into a rage, batters at the door, and fails to knock it down. And… that’s it. There’s no other way in. The party can’t break down the door, they can’t pick the lock, and they can’t solve the puzzle. Game over. Party loses.

And that loss DOES suck. Even the screaming Internet morons get it right once in a while. But the reasons why it sucks are important.

The first reason why it sucks is that the loss is completely unearned. Apart from not being smart enough to solve the puzzle, the party didn’t do anything wrong. In fact, once they realized they couldn’t solve the puzzle lock, they were smart enough to try some alternatives. Like picking the lock or breaking down the door. And those came down to die rolls. Nothing about the loss had anything to do with the choices the players made. And when they walk away from that loss, they won’t be looking at all of the things they could have done differently because there’s not much they could have done differently. Maybe they could have used more Aid actions or some additional buff spells to pump their die rolls. But those are small things. Nudges. They aren’t choices. Mostly, the party just feels stupid and cheated.

The second reason why it sucks is related to the first. Notice how that defeat doesn’t build on anything else that happened in the adventure. That challenge was completely isolated. It doesn’t matter how many Guardian Monsters™ the party defeated or how many Terrible Traps™ they evaded or failed to evade. The entire adventure hinged on getting through that one door. They could have skipped every encounter in the dungeon and still had the same result.

Honestly, that second reason is why boss fights and epic combats are actually GOOD final challenges. Because D&D is a game of resource attrition. Which means that every fight – to some extent – builds on the ones before it. If you overspend your resources in the first encounter of the day, all of the other encounters become more challenging. And if you lose a late day encounter, you can look back and say “man, if I hadn’t used up all my spell slots in the first fight against those goblins, I’d have had the resources to win.” It’s just a shame that D&D has moved away from persistent negative effects living on after the fight and has made it so easy to recover from just about anything except death. Resource attrition is really the ONLY thing that persists from encounter to encounter.

The third reason is a little more subtle and it leads to a problem I like to call “the adventure that just won’t freaking end.” Imagine you’re running the adventure I just described. Imagine the players have totally blown it in every way and can’t get through the door at all. They’ve failed. They need to call this adventure a loss, go home, and find a new quest to redeem themselves. Is that the way the players do?

No. Of course not. The players will keep banging their heads against that door. They will keep trying more and more outlandish solutions to get through that door. They will search the entire dungeon for clues to the puzzle. Or secret doors. Or some other way into the vault. They won’t admit defeat and go home as long as they can imagine any possibility of success. Which means that it falls to you as the GM to say “try as you might, you can’t get into the vault. It’s over. You lost. Go home.” And if you’re not willing to say that – and most GMs aren’t – you’re going to have to accept that this adventure is your life now. The players are never going to let it go.

The truth is, loss SHOULD be a part of the game. It adds to the tension. It adds to the joy of winning. And it adds weight to the choices the players make. If their characters are never really risking their lives, for example, then it doesn’t matter whether they choose to fight or sneak or negotiate or run away. And if they can’t lose, no matter what they do, it doesn’t matter what they actually do. They just have to try every solution they can imagine. Eventually, one will work. That’s not role-playing.

But loss has to be carefully designed. More carefully designed than victory. Because the wrong types of losses just suck. And if you don’t consider losing at all when you’re writing an adventure, then you’re just left with “keep trying until you die and hope you win before the odds catch up to you.”

Macrostructures and Bright Lines

If you want to know what good losses look like, you need to look at another interactive form of cooperative gameplay. Look at board games. Co-op board games. Games like Pandemic and Legendary and Arkham Horror and Harry Frigging Potter Hogwarts Battle or whatever that last one is called. Those games do two things that RPG adventures and most video games don’t. First, they set a loss condition that’s more than just “fail to win.” Second, there’s something pushing the game toward the loss condition to counteract the players trying to win.

And in adventure terms, we can call those things Macrostructures and Bright Lines, which are pretentious, pedantic ways of describing the things I’m talking about.

In an RPG adventure, a Macrostructure is any game mechanic that sits above the whole adventure and allows the GM to track progress toward success and failure states. Sort of. Because a Macrostructure can really be anything. And it’s limited only to your imagination. The important thing about the Macrostructure is that it lives outside of the encounters. And the choices the party makes in encounters can affect it.

Now, I’ve talked about structures before. Those are little mechanical thingies the GM uses to track whatever they need to keep track of during an encounter. During a chase scene, the GM can use a structure to track the relative positions of the pursuers and the pursuees. During a social interaction encounter, the GM can use a structure to track incentives and objections and mood. During combat, the GM uses hit points to track when creatures die and might use a timer to track when the reinforcements show up or when the geysers explode and spread hot water and steam everywhere.

A Macrostructure is one of those, but for the whole adventure. During an adventure in which the party has to evade a pursuing squad and get information to the rebel base, the GM uses a macrostructure to keep track of where the squad is. During an adventure about securing enough votes in the town council to oppose the villain’s plan, a macrostructure can track how many councilors are voting which way. During an adventure in which the princess is going to be sacrificed at midnight, a macrostructure keeps track of the passage of time.

But the Macrostructure is only useful if the party can actually affect the outcome beyond winning or losing the encounters in their path. For example, in that adventure where the players need to get the information to the rebel base, simple decisions like how fast they travel and what route they take and whether they cover their tracks will affect when the army catches up to them. If at all. And winning and losing encounters will also affect it. And their actions in the Macrostructure will also affect the encounters. So, if they are moving very fast, then they are more likely to be surprised by random encounters because they are less alert. And if an encounter goes bad and delays them for hours while they nurse their wounds, it’ll slow them down. And leaving a trail of corpses across the landscape – or a trail of survivors – can make them easier to track.

The Macrostructure gives the GM a dial to fiddle with based on what happens inside and outside encounters. Which is why the best Macrostructures are simple and easy to fiddle with and fudge. If the party does something surprising and clever to hide their path, then, obviously, the GM needs to take that into account with whatever Macrostructure they are using.

I can’t take credit for inventing the term Bright Lines, but I will take credit for applying it to failure states in table-top role-playing games. A Bright Line is basically an unmistakable and obvious loss condition. Something that everyone can – or at least should – recognize as a “game over.” Obviously, a TPK is a Bright Line. If the whole party is dead, the game is over. But beyond that, few GMs think in terms of Bright Lines and loss conditions.

Most adventures don’t have Bright Line loss conditions. The only loss condition is “until you give up or die trying.” The players won’t give up unless you tell them they have to. And you don’t want “die trying” to be the only loss condition.

Time limits are one of the most obvious Bright Lines and they lend themselves to very obvious Macrostructures. If the sacrifice is going to happen at midnight, the party loses the adventure as soon as the clock hits 12:01 AM. If the army is going to invade Happytown in one week, the invasion plans are only useful if they get to the rebel base in Happytown before the invading army does. That stuff is obvious. But coming up with other types of Bright Lines can be challenging.

It all hinges on asking yourself what losing looks like. And if losing just looks “not winning,” you need to reject that and come up with a better answer. Sometimes, it’s easy. Whatever the party is doing sometimes lends itself to an obvious Bright Line failure state. If the party is transporting a valuable treasure or protecting an important NPC, it’s pretty obvious they fail if the treasure gets destroyed or stolen or the NPC gets killed or runs away. But sometimes, it’s not so obvious. And then you have to be creative. Patrons might get fed up if the PCs cause too much chaos or if they take too long or cause too many problems. The town might turn against the PCs and exile them if they upset too many people. Someone else might beat the party to the goal. The plague might spread too far to be contained if the party can’t discover a cure quickly enough. Or the party themselves might be infected. The curse might become irreversible at a certain point.

Once you have a Bright Line failure state, you have to make sure that the party knows about it. Or that they can discover it. They may not know all the details. But they should have some sense that there is a failure state and they should be able to come up with some ideas for how to slow the slide toward failure. And they should be able to assess the adventure’s progress toward that goal. For example, if they are trying to prepare the town to fight the invading army, they should be able to discover quickly that there’s a group in town that wants to just surrender rather than fight in the hopes they will be spared. And as the party handles different encounters, the overall morale of the town will be obvious in the way people treat the PCs. The party won’t actually know how morale is being tracked and they won’t know what will happen if it gets too low, but they know there’s an inertia toward failure and it won’t catch them by surprise when the majority of the townspeople show up to run the PCs out of town or keep them in jail while a delegation approaches the invading army to negotiate a surrender. Or perhaps they even capture the PCs and turn them over to the invaders.

Does Every Adventure Need to Fail?

Now, even given all of the inarguable FACTS that I started this article with which will not be discussed in the comments, I have to admit this: everything I just said doesn’t have to apply to every adventure you write and run. I don’t have Macrostructures and a Bright Line failure state in every adventure I run. Some adventures – especially dungeon adventures – really are just a maze filled with obstacles and a prize at the end. If the party lives long enough, they get the prize. Easy as that.

Those are okay adventures. With the emphasis on okay. They are fine, traditional, casual adventures like D&D has been doing for years and years. And they really are “keep trying until you die.” And I’m okay with that. Once in a while.

The thing is that, if you’re going to stretch beyond that sort of dungeon-crawly, video-gamey, beer-and-pretzels gameplay, one thing you have to learn to cope with is loss. If you’re going to run a story-driven adventure or a campaign that has any weight beyond “now explore this dungeon, now this dungeon, now visit this dungeon,” you’ve got to handle loss better. And if you don’t want the pall of death hanging over your game as the only sort of failure, especially if you’re afraid to kill your PCs, you need to write better failures into your game.

It has to be a choice though. That’s the point. You have to consciously sit down and say, “this adventure is just a string of deadly encounters that the party has to survive in order to win and the only way to lose is to die.” And the thing is, once you say that to yourself often enough, you start to realize its kind of a dull and sucky way to run every adventure. And you start to yearn for more.

Needless to say, I’m not done with this topic. When we get around to talking about resolutions, structures, pacing, and encounters, we will be revisiting the topic of loss and failure. And we’ll be revisiting it with an eye toward building good Macrostructures and Bright Lines so that our adventures have meaningful, satisfying, failures that the party can actually earn.

Moreover, I’m going to throw out a little supplementary article to this one in a couple of weeks because I’m currently in the middle of running an excellent adventure that demonstrates exactly what I’m talking about. The problem is, my players haven’t finished the adventure yet and I can’t risk them stumbling on it. I don’t want to ruin any surprises if they lose. And trust me, there’s a good chance they will. Because players are no good at everything.