This Feature’s part of my long-running series on advanced adventure and encounter design in tabletop roleplaying games, True Scenario Designery. If you’ve not been following it from the start, use The True Scenario Designery Course Index to catch up.

This specific True Scenario Designery lesson is part of a module about designing and mapping roleplaying game scenarios that the players can actually win. Or that they can lose. Or both.

Gaming in Fits and Starts

Welcome back, Game Masters and Game Mistresses…

This is probably going to be a shorter, simpler lesson. Probably. I have no idea what the final word count’s actually going to be; I never do. It’ll likely feel shorter. Of course, the last two lessons felt short because I split a long-ass, heavy introduction into two small parts. But it ain’t the size of the Feature that matters. At least, that’s what I keep telling my potential… uhh… players…

The next several lessons in this course — which I’m collectively calling a module; think of it like a chapter in a textbook — are about planning tabletop roleplaying game Scenarios the way other game designers plan other kinds of games. It’s about using Goals, Outcomes, and Challenges to make Scenarios players can meaningfully Win and/or Lose.

Hopefully, I didn’t waste 7,000 words and hours of my life here. Hopefully, you grok now that Winning and Losing aren’t Outcomes, but rather, they’re qualitative labels players’ brains assign — unconsciously — to their gameplay experiences. I also hope you get how players’ brains do that shit whether the gameplay experience is over or whether it’s still going on.

That means that one of your jobs — as a Scenario Designer — is to design Scenarios that send players’ brains the right signals so they can determine whether they’re Winning or Losing and when they’ve Won or Lost. You must also build space into your Scenarios for the players’ brains to make those calls.

Am I Winning?

As noted, our brains are constantly assessing our standing in games. That’s vital to the gameplay experience. Those unconscious, intuitive, experiential assessments help us make good decisions. When we think we’re doing well, we keep doing what we’re doing. When we think we’re losing, we change it up. This ain’t just about skill development, it’s part of the basic decision-making process we follow every gameplay turn. Or whatever.

Those same I’m winning and I’m losing signals create feels. When we’re doing good, we might feel excited, hopeful, optimistic, driven, energized, ambitious, proud, or whatever. When we’re doing bad, we might feel tense, nervous, desperate, resolute, frightened, depressed, or whatever. This crap matters because every artist’s ultimate goal — Scenario Designers are artists; games are art — is to make people feel things.

Am I Getting Anywhere?

When we play games, we’re constantly evaluating our gameplay position to help us make decisions and we end up invested because those evaluations make us feel some kinda way. But separate from those is a need to feel like we’re making progress. Now, this is related to reward pathways and breaking tasks down and the difference between instant and long-term gratification and a bunch of other psychobabble bullshit that I — for reasons I’ll make clear in a moment — that I don’t want to get into right now. You just need to know that human brains don’t really handle long-term, incremental tasks with delayed payoffs very well. Our dumb monkey brains are driven by results.

Thus, to keep us engaged, we need to break long-term tasks — like perpetual, never-ending roleplaying game campaigns — into chunks so we can periodically celebrate victories and reflect on defeats. That helps us feel like we’re actually getting somewhere. As a True Scenario Designer, you want your players to feel like they’re getting somewhere. I hope that’s frigging obvious.

But Don’t Think Too Much About The Psychobabble

I’m including this psychobabble crap partly because it interests me and partly because I think it’ll interest some of you, but mostly, I’m including it to convince all y’all that this Winning and Losing shit actually matters. These concepts are vital if you want to create satisfying, long-term gameplay experiences, but they’re also invisible, unconscious, internal things. No one’s ever going to tell you they liked a game because “It clearly telegraphed my progress at regular intervals and gave me space to celebrate my incremental victories.” You don’t notice that shit, but players’ brains do.

That said, most game designers won’t even say crap like that. They might not even consciously know that’s why what they’re doing works. They just know what works through experience, education, practice, training, intuition, iterative design, and testing. I don’t want you thinking like a clinical psychologist or behavioral engineer either. This ain’t a math formula.

Everything above is the justification for my practical advice below. When I tell you how to structure games around Quests and Scenes and Acts and shit, I’m telling you how to use the psychobabble to your advantage. That’s what you should focus on. The rest is just fun facts.

I’ll also admit that I’m still holding out hope that I’m going to change the minds of people who are still saying shit like, “These aren’t mere games. These are collaborative storytelling experiences in simulated worlds and you shouldn’t create challenges that level with the players. You’re operating a holodeck. Just create situations. Argle bargle wargle waaaaaggghhh.” I know some of y’all are still reading.

Game Design, Game Design über alles;
Über alles in das Spiel!

Magic: The Gathering: An Object Lesson in Incremental Winning and Losing

It’s time for me to make this shit absolutely, utterly clear with an actual example. This is also where I prove to you that you already knew everything I taught you about Winning and Losing. Let’s talk about Magic: The Gathering.

Now, I’m gonna keep this simple. This is only the first of several times I’ll invoke Magic: The Gathering in this section of the course.

Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game created by Andrew Garfield — a game-design genius — and currently stewarded by Mark Rosewater — a decent game-design steward — and published by Wizards of the Coast — a company that exists.

There are several ways to play MtG, but the simplest way is as a duel between two wizards, each played by one of two competing players. Each player strives to deal enough damage to the other to eliminate them from the duel. There are other ways to win, too, but that’s the simplest and most common and good enough for us. The players take turns amassing magical resources, casting spells, and commanding summoned creatures and there’s a rigorous turn and timing structure to it all.

And that’s pretty much all you need to know for today.

Most of the action in an MtG turns centers around a player sending his summoned thralls to attack his opponents’ position. Again, there are other ways to play and win, but the Combat Phase is pretty central to the gameplay experience for most players. During the Combat Phase on your turn — assuming you’re a player — you command some or all of the creatures currently under your control to assault your opponent. Your opponent then chooses whether to use his own creatures to defend his position and which of his available creatures will oppose which attacking creatures. The skirmishes are resolved, creatures retreat, creatures die, and any of your creatures that penetrate your opponent’s defenses deal damage directly to your opponent.

So what’s all this got to do with Winning and Losing? And with breaking gameplay down into discrete chunks? Well, Magic: The Gathering is perfectly designed to do everything I said Scenario Designers must do with regard to players’ brains assessing winning and losing.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. You can Win or Lose a Magic: The Gathering match. Eliminate your opponent and you Win! Huzzah! Get eliminated yourself and you Lose! Crapity crap crap! If you want to know how you’re doing during the game, you can just check your and your opponent’s relative Hit Point totals. You can also look at your and your opponent’s field positions. How many resources do you have in play? How many resources does your opponent control? How many cards do you have in hand? Are they strong or weak? You can’t see what your opponent is holding in his hand, but you can see how many cards he’s got, and that can clue you into the strength of his position. See how this works?

Now let’s move on to the slightly less obvious. That Combat Phase is basically a tentpole for each players’ turn. It comes right in the middle of the turn by a strict reading of the rules, but it’s effectively more of a turn climax. Sure, there are turns that pass without a Combat Phase or with a very short Combat Phase, especially early in the game, but it’s still conceptually very significant. Especially once the players build up their play positions a bit.

Basically, every Combat Phase is a little game of its very own and the players can assess each Combat Phase as a Win or Loss. Thus, every turn in Magic: The Gathering centers on an incremental, temporal Win or Loss.

Now, let’s talk about the non-obvious crap.

Devoted Magic: The Gathering magicians — players who’ve seriously invested in the game — rarely play isolated matches against each other. When they do, traditionally, Winning a full game of Magic: The Gathering involves beating your opponent in two out of three matches. So now, Winning an individual duel is just another kind of incremental, temporal victory.

But most serious magicians play in either Leagues or Tournaments and there are all sorts of options there with different play formats and it all gets very complicated. I’m keeping this as simple as possible. In a League or Tournament, you’re periodically matched against other players and play duels — often best-of-three matches — and accumulate Wins and Losses to determine your standing. At the end of the League, standings are published and the highest-ranked players are Winners while the lower-ranked players Lose. In Tournaments, players who lose their matches might be eliminated — Losing — while players who win qualify for more matches until, ultimately, some number of players are declared Kings of the Magical Hill — Winning.

Designing Scenarios Like a Magic: The Gathering Tournament

Now, apart from that crap about the game turning around a Combat Phase tentpole and the various ways Magic: The Gathering players take cues to assess their gameplay position, nothing I said above should surprise any of you. It’s all normal, gameplay stuff. You assess how you’re doing, you Win, you Lose, you can play multiple matches, track standings, play in seasons, join leagues, play in tournaments, and so on, and cetera, and nauseum. That is what I was yammering about when I said you already knew, in your brain, that Winning and Losing were more than just final Outcomes.

Many of y’all are probably already drawing comparisons to tabletop roleplaying gaming Scenarios. You’re saying shit like, “So, the Combat Phase is basically an Encounter and a Match is an Adventure and Tournaments are Adventure Paths and Seasons are basically Campaigns” or something like that, aren’t you. Well, great work, Captain Genius, you spotted the utterly and completely obvious — and least useful — part of that whole example.

Yes, that’s true. Kind of. But it’s Mere Adventure Builder shit. Sorry.

Here’s the deal: I’m about to list a bunch of terms I intend to use throughout this course to label different chunks of roleplaying game Scenarios and I’m absolutely frigging terrified to do it. Lots of you are going to totally miss the point and I’m gonna end up in a bunch of definitional fights. That’s how it always goes.

I’m going to keep my definitions short, sweet, vague, and a little confusing. Why? Because they don’t matter. I’ll explain why they don’t matter below, but I know some of you aren’t gonna make it that far. It’s gonna be a big thing and then I’m going to make fun of you for making it a thing and you’re gonna get all butthurt even though that’s literally how I’ve been operating for fifteen frigging years.

Here we go…

Angry’s Completely Unimportant and Nearly Useless Roleplaying Game Scenario Design Hierarchy

Throughout the rest of this course, I’ll be breaking Scenarios down into the following gameplay chunks for the purposes described above.

Encounters

Encounters are the smallest unit of actual Scenario design. Encounters normally occur when the player-characters encounter something during gameplay that they have to overcome, defeat, circumvent, or avoid. That’s not a definition, though. It’s just a pattern. Encounters are Encounters. That’s the definition.

Scenes

Scenes are chunks of Scenario design comprising several Encounters and usually a bunch of non-Encounter gameplay stuff. Scenes are normally bounded by time, geography, and mode of gameplay, but they might not be. Examples of Scenes include Delving into Xaxxon’s Tomb, The Tower of Vushta: Floor 2, Exploring Townsburgsville, Crossing the Plains of Lightning, Aboard the S.S. Saucy Strumpet, and other things similar, dissimilar, and completely different.

Adventures

Adventures are the smallest Scenarios that are truly complete Scenarios. Adventures are also the largest Scenario chunks that people work on at one time. As such, they’re the defining unit of Scenario Design. When someone says, “I’m designing a Scenario,” they mean they’re making an Adventure. So Adventures are Scenarios and, conversely, Scenarios are Adventures. Except Scenarios can also be other things. That makes sense, right?

Acts

Acts are Scenarios that are bigger than Adventures and therefore comprise multiple Adventures provided those multiple Adventures actually constitute a Scenario when strung together. If all you’ve got is a bunch of Adventures in sequence, you don’t have an Act, you just have a bunch of Adventures. Which is fine.

Campaign

A Campaign — because Campaigns are singular — a Campaign is all the Adventures that, together, comprise a single, ongoing tabletop roleplaying gameplay experience from beginning to planned and intended conclusion. Unless it doesn’t get that far. That said, Campaigns aren’t Campaigns if they’re not Scenarios and they don’t have to be. A string of Adventures that goes until it stops is not a Campaign, it’s just a campaign. Is that confusing? Well, tough nuggets. I like the word Campaign too much to stop using it just because you can also run a string of adventures without making a Scenario of it.

Sidequests

Sidequests — note the lack of spaces or hyphens — Sidequests are chunks of gameplay that fit inside other chunks of gameplay of pretty much any size and are typically non-continuous and while that might seem confusing, I’m hoping that, if you really think about it, you’ll realize how brilliant a description it actually is. I’m really proud of this one.

Why Must It Be Like This?

After reading those definitions, I know lots of you are thinking, “Why is it always this shit with you, Angry?” I’m really, desperately hoping that one of you — just one — sees what’s really going on here.

The whole Encounter-Scene-Adventure-Act-Campaign-Sidequest Hierarchy describes how most people design adventures and campaigns and all the shit in between pretty well. Oh, sure, some of you might quibble over the terms I chose — yes, I know y’all hate the way I use the word Scene and I don’t frigging care — but the actual, conceptual hierarchy thing is one pretty much every homebrewer Game Mastery intuitively follows. The truth is, if I made an effort to be clear and concise, I could totally come up with nice, firm, solid definitions for every one of those terms. You probably could too.

And we’d be wrong to do it.

The point ain’t the chunks or how you define them. Honestly, apart from Adventures and Encounters, none of those chunks matter. Adventures are just Scenarios and Encounters are just the individual, self-contained Challenges that comprise Scenarios. Those are basic currency; they’re the gold and silver pieces.

The problem is, that shit just doesn’t work. It works if you’re a Mere Adventure Builder and you’re happy with attrition-based dungeon slogs or reactive, and-then-style FAFO campaigns. But if you want to be a True Scenario Designer, it’s way more complicated. It’s vaguer, squishier, and fuzzier.

True Scenario Designers, for example, build major Challenges into their Adventures separate from the Encounters that comprise them, right? We already talked about that. Hell, you don’t even need all the Encounters to add up to the major Challenge. Zelda-style dungeons and mystery adventures aren’t actually just the sum of the individual Challenges.

True Scenario Designers also need periodic Wins and Losses, right? I’ve been hammering that home for the last 10,000 words. That means you’ve got to be able to work Scenarios into your Scenarios to break up or extend the gameplay. Like, if your Adventure is too long, you need to break up the gameplay a bit with some incremental victories that are bigger than Encounters but aren’t the final victory of the Adventure. If you then want to turn your string of Adventures into a two-year Scenario about saving the cosmos or whatever, you’re going to need some periodic moments of Win or Loss along the way that are bigger than the individual Adventures.

It’s useful to have a nice, defined structure called a Scene because it helps you to design good Scenes, but it also doesn’t matter how you break up your Adventure into chunks. It only matters that you do. If your Adventure doesn’t lend itself to Scenes that are bounded by time, geography, and gameplay mode, then define the Scenes however you want. All that matters is you’re breaking up the action.

The Quest Structure

In those hierarchical definitions, I was purposely, facetiously vague to the point of confusion. I kept using terms like chunks of gameplay and units of Scenario. Those terms don’t actually mean anything and I was using them mostly to amuse myself and to confuse the hell out of all of you who bust my ass about precise definitions and then piss and moan when I push back on you.

I’m going to end this lesson by clarifying what I actually mean by chunk of Scenario or whatever. Even though I’ve already done exactly that too.

Remember that Quest Structure thing I suddenly rambled vaguely about and then never mentioned again? Remember when I said you need to think about roleplaying game scenarios in terms of individual segments of gameplay with a Goal, a Challenge, Outcomes, and Context? That’s the secret sauce that makes a chunk a chunk.

An Adventure has a Goal, a Challenge, Outcomes, and Context. If you’re missing any of those, you don’t have an Adventure. The same goes for Encounters. Every Encounter has a Goal, a Challenge, Outcomes, and Context.

Guess what actually defines a Scene? Yes, it’s a segment of an Adventure defined by a Goal, a Challenge, Outcomes, and Context. Without those things, you can still call something a scene, but it won’t work the same for Scenario Design purposes. Acts in a Campaign don’t become Acts until there’s a Goal, a Challenge, Outcomes, and Context tying the Adventures in the Act together. Campaigns are just campaigns if there’s no overarching Goal, no Challenge, no Outcomes, and no Context.

As for Sidequests, well, you can spread a bunch of gameplay out across multiple Encounters in different Scenes or even in whole different Adventures, but if they’re connected to the same Goal, Challenge, Outcomes, and Context, it’s all part of one, single chunk of gameplay.

That’s the Quest Structure. The presence of a Goal, a Challenge, Outcomes, and Context are what turns chunks of gameplay into Quests. Of course, that’s just a fancy way of saying it counts as a real, legit Scenario; Scenarios are designed to be Scenarios. And that is just a fancy way of saying, “This string of gameplay whatever impacts the human brain the way human brains expect games to impact them.”

But — and this is a big-ass but — that doesn’t mean any of this shit should be visible in any way to the players. That’s the topic for the next lesson: the huge-ass gap between how Scenario Designers see Scenarios and what players actually see when they’re playing them.

So come back for that in December. Which is tomorrow. Shit.