Note: This is a republication of an article published back in December. In the article, I encouraged everyone who had never played Chrono Trigger to stop reading and play it. I’ve republished the article to remind those of you who took my advice to heart that the article exists and you should read it. You’re welcome. 

For the rest of you, a real new article is coming in a few days.

I love video games. And not just because they provide me with fun, immersive gameplay experiences without five mouth-breathing morons on hand to f$&% up my fun. I also love video games because they make me a better GM. And if you want to be a great GM, there’s no better media to immerse yourself in than video games. Forget books, forget movies and streaming shows — especially movies and shows produced after 2010; those will make you a worse GM — just play video games. Any video games.

And I mean just play video games. Don’t play them critically or analytically. Don’t watch other people play them. Don’t play them and then discuss them. Don’t skip playing them and read plot summaries. Just play them. Yourself. It’ll make you a better GM.

I can prove these claims, but I don’t wanna and I’ve got better stuff to write.

You see, one thing I especially love to do is to play a video game critically and analytically — it’s okay when I do it and I never analyze a video game on my first date with it — and then isolate valuable lessons I can take to my TTRPG game sessions. Which is what I’m doing today.

Play the Chrono, Save the World

Chrono Trigger is one of the best roleplaying video games ever made. It was developed and published in 1995 by Square Co., Ltd. for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but that’s a misleading statement. Because the development team — nicknamed the Dream Team — comprised the biggest names in the Japanese roleplaying video game industry, not just Square Co. employees. There was Hironobu Sakaguchi — the Final Fantasy guy — and Yuji Hori — the Dragon Quest guy — and Akira Toriyama — the other Dragon Quest guy and also the Dragon Ball Z guy.

Save the World is a dumba$& name for a particular style of tabletop roleplaying game campaign. Why dumba$&? Because Save the World campaigns aren’t always about saving the world and they’re probably better called Heroic Quest campaigns.

An STW campaign focuses mainly — but not necessarily exclusively — on a single goal — usually, the resolution of a single, major conflict — and the stakes are usually really high. Take The Lord of the Rings series — the original books or the amazing Peter Jackson movies and absolutely no other f$&%ing thing bearing that name — take The Lord of the Rings, for example. There’s a single, major conflict — the Darklordosaurus wants the magical Macguffin and the heroes want to destroy it — and there are very high stakes — because if the Darklordosaurus obtains the magical MacGuffin he’ll conquer and enslave all the good and nice people of Middle Earth.

STW campaigns are a crapton of fun! I know people like to s$&% on them, but they’re awesome and popular and they’re part of the fantasy genre’s ancestral DNA. They’re a high-stakes outgrowth of the Odyssey. The Quest Story. And really, the stakes don’t even have to be that high. Saving a town, a region, or a few hundred people, that qualifies.

The big problem with STW campaigns — and the big reason people s$&% on them — is that they’re not as easy to put together and run as they seem. Sure, it seems like all you need is a world, something to save it from, and a series of step-by-step adventures that lead from humble beginnings to dead planet-eater, right?

Wrong. STW campaigns are great fun when done right. Done wrong? Well, if you’re lucky, you end up with an excuse plot tying a bunch of disconnected adventures together. If you’re unlucky, you get a dull, sloggy, disengaging mess that neither you nor your players will ever finish.

And the reason I started this off with all that fanboy squeeing about Chrono Trigger is that, in addition to being one of the greatest roleplaying videogame experiences on any platform ever, CT is also a near-perfect example of an STW campaign done right. A perfect example of an STW TTRPG campaign done right. Structurally and narratively, if you rip off Chrono Trigger for your TTRPG campaign, you’ll have a perfect Save the World campaign.

And I’m going to show you the five things Chrono Trigger gets right. The five things you need to steal — or copy — if you want to Save the World right.

Massive Spoilers Ahead

I literally can’t explain the five things Chrono Trigger does right without some massive spoilers. In fact, I have to start by summarizing something like the first third of the game and ruin a few late-game surprises too. And that sucks because one of the things Chrono Trigger gets right is how it reveals itself to its players. So, if you’ve never played it, you absolutely should before you read this.

Seriously, if you give a single f$&% about your GMing skills, you owe it to yourself to play Chrono Trigger. Without spoilers.

Why are you still reading this s$%&? Go play Chrono Trigger. It’s on Steam, it’s on mobile, and emulation is a thing. For legal reasons, I have to say emulation is a terrible and illegal thing, but emulation is, in fact, a thing.

I’ll tell you what, I’ll buy you a Steam copy if it’ll get you to play it. Seriously. I feel so strongly about this, I’m giving away three Steam copies of Chrono Trigger. E-mail Patron.Support@Angry.Games with this solemn swear:

I, *your name here*, solemnly swear that I have never played through Chrono Trigger on any platform and if you givt me a copy of the game on Steam, I will not read your feature article, How Chrono Saves the World until I have played Chrono Trigger at least too the point in the game where I have recovered the seed for Doan and interacted with the computer in the Information Center, though, if I am hooked at that point, I will play through the entire game before I continue reading the feature.

Put “I Gotta Play Chrono Trigger” in the subject line. And don’t just cut and paste the text. Type it out so it has weight. I’ll know.

On December 8, 2022, I will choose three folks at random to receive free copies of Chrono Trigger on Steam. That’s how serious I am about this s$&%.

But that aside… spoiler alert. I’m about to ruin the whole game.

From Humble Beginnings…

Chrono Trigger is a party-based, turn-based, Japanese-style roleplaying video game about a bunch of friends who save the world from Cthulhu. But you wouldn’t know that from how the game starts. Because it starts with a teenaged blank-slate, audience-surrogate, silent protagonist named Crono visiting his kingdom’s Millennial Fair and meeting a girl.

See, the year is 1000 AD. The Kingdom of Guardia has survived a thousand years — despite a terrible war with the Monster Kingdom four hundred years prior — and now they’re having a big ole party. Crono attends the fair and meets a mysterious tomboy of a girl who totally isn’t the kingdom’s irresponsible, adventurous princess. Her name’s Marle. Crono and Marle enjoy the fair and then visit Crono’s other friend, Lucca, a scientific genius who has literally invented teleportation and is showing off at the fair.

An accident flings Marle back through time and space. While Lucca sciences the Time Portal, Crono must go through and find Marle. Crono finds himself in the Middle Ages and tracks Marle to the castle where she’s been mistaken for the Queen of Guardia, Leene. See, Marle is the modern kingdom’s princess and she looks just like her ancestors because that’s how it always works in time travel stories. Call it the Biff Tannen Law of Ancestral Resemblance.

Just as Crono tracks Marle to the castle, she ceases to exist. She just disintegrates. Weird, huh? Well, Lucca — having finished sciencing the Time Portal and following Crono — arrives to explain. The story is this: Queen Leene, historically, had been kidnapped by fiends from the Monster Kingdom during the Monster Kingdom War. Which is happening right now in the Middle Ages. The Queen had been rescued before the monsters killed her. But when Marle appeared out of nowhere, the search party brought her back to the castle — dismissing her odd behavior as head-injury-induced crazies or something — and called off the hunt for Queen Leene.

In other words, Marle’s presence has changed history. The Queen’s going to die now, which means Marle will never get born. Paradoxed!

So Lucca and Crono go rescue the Queen, restore Marle, and then Lucca sciences them back home. But Crono is arrested for kidnapping the princess. Oh no! Marle and Lucca team up to help break him out but the trio can only escape by using another Time Portal. This one takes them to the post-apocalypse.

It’s the future. It’s overrun by mutants and robots and the only humans are starving in fallout domes. Crono, Lucca, and Marle befriend the survivors and help them recover seeds from an old storage warehouse. But during their adventure, they find some computer records that reveal what happened to the world.

Apparently, in 1999 AD, a city-sized lava monster named Lavos burrowed out of the ground and destroyed the world with nuclear lasers or something. And the future world’s been dying for 1300 hundred years since.

Well, Marle’s not having any of this s$&% and gives a rousing speech about how she doesn’t accept this future and that, with time travel, the heroes should be able to prevent this crap from ever happening. It’s a great moment and an effective speech. It’s part of Marle’s well-developed character arc where she goes from a spoiled, fun-loving tomboy who abdicates responsibility and duty to someone who takes personal responsibility for the entire world and for everyone she loves. And I mention that because I know this synopsis doesn’t make the game sound very special. But the half-dozen main characters are all amazingly well-written and have great plot arcs. Except for the blank-slate audience surrogate silent protagonist of course.

And that’s when the game becomes a Save the World campaign. Four hours in and maybe a fifth of the way through the game. Which is important, by the way.

I need to briefly describe what happens next. The party resolves to prevent Lavos from wrecking the world. They discover Lavos was created by the evil Fiendlord who ruled the Monster Kingdom back in the Middle Ages to destroy humanity, but something went wrong and Lavos apparently went dormant for 1300 years. So, the party goes back to the Middle Ages to confront the Fiendlord. That requires them to acquire the magical Masamune sword. But the sword’s broken and can only be repaired with a rare element that’s only found in abundance in the distant past. So, the heroes travel to Prehistory and befriend a cave lady and fight some dinosaurs. Then they fix the sword and fight the Fiendlord. Everything goes to s$&%, the Fiendlord loses control of Lavos, and Lavos’ dimension powers blast everyone through time and space to elsewhen.

Also, the Fiendlord reveals he didn’t create Lavos, he just woke it up. Lavos had been sleeping underground for thousands of years. Maybe more.

And so, the heroes continue their investigation into Lavos’ origins. They team up with the cave lady and a robot and a frog and a monster warlock, visit a magical Ice Age sky kingdom, make the dinosaurs extinct, and get an honest-to-goodness flying time ship. But you don’t need to know all that s$&%. That summary’s enough to talk about what Chrono Trigger gets exactly right.

Lesson One: Campaign Structure

Playing through Chrono Trigger’s story feels smooth. There’s a natural and unbroken progression from one event to the next. If you didn’t look very closely, you’d never know there was actually a very solid TTRPG adventure-arc-campaign structure underlying the whole game.

Unless you paid careful attention to the names on the save game files.

CT’s campaign comprises a series of major chapters or plot arcs, each of which is further divided into a series of isolated adventures. The first plot arc is an introduction. It shows you — the player — how time travel works and it introduces the mainest of the main characters and the world. At least, the three main ages of the world’s history: the Middle Ages, the Present, and the Future.

The first adventure is the Millenial Fair. Crono goes to the fair, meets Marle, meets Lucca, and then there’s the time travel disaster. The second adventure sees Crono searching the Kingdom of Guardia in the Middle Ages for the missing Marle and then traveling the dangerous road to the castle. The third adventure sees Crono and Lucca rescuing the missing queen. The fourth adventure is a short interlude where Marle and Crono travel together along the dangerous road to the castle in the Present. The fifth adventure is the jailbreak. The sixth adventure sees the heroes crossing the post-apocalyptic ruins. Then, in the seventh adventure, the heroes descend into the mutant-and-robot-overrun Warehouse and Information Center. And so on.

The arc-and-adventure structure is even more clear in the game’s second major arc. That’s when the party sets out to stop the Fiendlord from creating Lavos in the Middle Ages. There are adventures wherein they break a siege on a bridge, adventurers about hunting down and recovering the two broken halves of a magic sword, two adventures in prehistory, the journey to the Fiendlord’s castle, and then the climactic adventure in which the heroes confront the Fiendlord.

The structure’s masterful, but mostly invisible. Events flow naturally together on the player’s side of the screen, but the GM’s got everything broken down into arcs and adventures.

That said, there’s an aspect of the structure that is visible to the players.

Lesson Two: Nested and Shifting Goals

Goals keep players moving. Without goals, players sit around with their thumbs up their a$&es. But note the plural. One goal isn’t really enough to drive a game. And Chrono Trigger demonstrates this artfully.

As you play Chrono Trigger you always have three goals. At least three goals. Sometimes you have more. You always have a short-term goal — the thing you’re trying to accomplish right now — and a mid-term goal — the thing the short-term goal will help you accomplish — and a long-term goal — which is how you finish the game.

Moreover, you always know how your short-term goal relates to your mid-term goal, but you rarely know exactly how the mid-term goal fits into the long-term goal. At least precisely. The mid-term and long-term goals are always related, but it’s often vague. Especially later in the game.

Barring the introductory chapter — whose long-term goal is really just deal with threats as they arise — the player is mostly always trying to prevent Lavos from destroying the world. That’s the long-term goal and it’s established once the player sees the computer record of the Day of Lavos and Marle gives her speech.

The mid-term goals define the different chapters of the game. Once the party returns from the future, their mid-term goal is to prevent the Fiendlord from creating Lavos in the Middle Ages. It’s kind of obvious how that plays into the long-term goal — if Lavos doesn’t exist, he can’t destroy the world — but things get muddier as the game goes on.

The short-term goals define individual adventures. And it’s always clear how they play into the mid-term goal. The party needs the Masamune to reach the Fiendlord’s castle. The Masamune is on the southern continent so the party must break the siege at Zenan Bridge to get there. The party needs Dreamstone to repair the Masamune, so they have to search Prehistory for it. Intelligent dinosaur people stole the Science Thing that controls Time Gates and the party can’t get back to the Present without it, so it must be recovered.

Each goal — the short ones, the mid-term ones, and the long ones — represent plot points. And, to some extent, major conflicts. They’re entries on the narrative’s outline. And the player knows what goal they’re pursuing right now — find the Masamune in the Denadaro Mountains — and how that fits into the next longer-term goal — because the Masamune will reveal the path to the Fiendlord’s castle. But how that fits into the higher-level goals is often fuzzy and indistinct. Not always, but often.

That combination ensures the players always know where they’re going and why, but without requiring they know everything. The game can keep an air of mystery without leaving the players totally lost. And that’s what allows Chrono Trigger to keep moving the goals. After hours of adventure, the heroes defeat the Fiendlord only to discover he didn’t create Lavos, he was just using the eldritch lava hedgehog for his own purposes. Later still, the player finds out there’s really no way to stop Lavos from existing or from eventually waking up and destroying the world. The only solution is to destroy Lavos when he does wake up.

But constantly moving the goals around is really risky. Done wrong, it can really f$%& with the players’ engagement and enjoyment. Unsurprisingly, Chrono Trigger does it right.

Lesson Three: Never Steal the Win

As I said, CT plays a little shell game with its long-term goals. Because Lavos has a shell! Get it?

Anyway…

Often, what you think is a long-term goal turns out to be a mid-term arc. Every time you think you’ve found a way to prevent Lavos from existing or waking up or whatever, it turns out there’s more to the story.

Put simply, that s$&% can get old. Players don’t like the GM yelling, “surprise, what you did was pointless because there’s another layer” every time they accomplish something big. That leaves the players feeling like they’re not getting anywhere. Progress — a periodic sense of meaningful accomplishment — is important to keep the players engaged.

Chrono Trigger’s got lots of twists and turns. There are a lot of surprises and revelations and goal changes, but every victory is still a victory. Okay, so the Fiendlord didn’t birth Lavos, but he was driving the Monster War in the Middle Ages and now that he’s dead, his forces crumble and the war is over. The kingdom is saved. The world is better. That’s something to feel good about.

Hell, one of Chrono Trigger’s central themes is doing what you can to make the world better, however small the action and however hopeless it seems because that’s what people are supposed to do.

No goal’s futile in Chrono Trigger. New villains don’t just fill in for previously defeated villains. Sure, new villains show up with new plans, and some new villains do take over for old villains, but never in a “that villain was a red herring, I’m the real villain and things are still bad” kind of way.” It’s more like, “that villain didn’t cause all the world’s woes, but he did cause a lot of them and those woes are over now so good job.”

Too many StW games with complex central mysteries fall into the trap of moving the goalposts whenever there’s a big reveal and thereby invalidating the good the party has accomplished so far. It’s a win-or-lose scenario. Until the heroes win the final battle, they can’t make the world better for anyone. When the party ticks off a goal, no matter what else happens, that goal should be a win. And the players have to know it.

Chrono Trigger also spaces out its victories really well. Its model suggests that every two or three gameplay sessions, the party should win in the short term. Every dozen or so sessions, they should win the mid-term. And while twists and turns and surprises are great, they should never keep the players from feeling like they’re getting somewhere.

That said, even as the party ticks off legitimate wins, the tension’s still got to climb.

Lesson 4: Raise the Stakes; Expand the Scope

Let’s talk about narrative tension. Tension measures the amount of uncertainty about and emotional investment in a story’s outcome. And in good stories, tension wobbles up and down but generally trends upward until it peaks at the story’s climax.

The story’s climax, by the way, the point of highest tension, is the event in which the story’s biggest, baddest, centralist conflict gets resolved once and for all.

That’s why, in most stories, the stakes rise as the story goes on.

Stakes, by the way, are what’s at risk. What’ll be lost if the story doesn’t come to a happy ending.

The obvious problem with Save the World campaigns is that, when the entire f$%&ing world is already at risk, there’s no way to raise the stakes. But stories need rising stakes. And that is why Chrono Trigger doesn’t lead with the whole world-saving thing. Nope, it starts with a little princess rescue and then a timeline restoration and some personal survival and finally a plot about feeding the hungry. So there’s plenty of room to raise the stakes.

But Chrono Trigger does manage to keep pushing the stakes. At first, Lavos is just one mad wizard’s attempt to destroy all the humans. Then, it’s an ancient horror exploited by the mad wizard. As more and more of Lavos’ true nature gets revealed, the stakes just keep going up. Eventually, it’s revealed that Lavos has been living underground throughout history and that he’s woken up and wiped out civilization before. Lavos ain’t a one-time cataclysm, it’s an endless cycle of destruction humanity can’t escape.

As if that ain’t enough, it turns out Lavos is consuming the world. Eventually, it won’t recover from Lavos’ destruction. And that’s when Lavos will launch bouncing baby lava clams into space to start the cycle all over again on other planets.

So, Chrono Trigger starts very small and gradually reveals what’s really at stake. Most Save the World stories don’t handle this s$&% so artfully.

But as a story’s stakes rise, so too does its scope expand. Scope refers to the size of the story. How much world there is to interact with. In CT’s first plot arc, the player only sees three time periods, the Middle Ages, the Present, and the Future. The second arc introduces Prehistory. The third introduces the Ice Age. And each location is more exotic than the last. Yeah, I know an Ice Age doesn’t seem more exotic than a post-apocalyptic Mad Max hellscape or a dinosaur world, but don’t forget the — totally historically accurate — advanced magical kingdom built on floating earthbergs in the sky. Later still, the party gets a flying time machine so they’re no longer reliant on fixed time tunnels and so they can travel to previously inaccessible corners of the world map in every time period.

The expanded scope makes room for the rising stakes. Expanding the scope makes the world feel bigger so the world-ending cataclysm will, consequently, destroy even more cool s$%&. Expanding the scope also maintains the players’ engagement, excitement, and curiosity. And it contributes to a sense of progress.

Note, however, that Chrono Trigger manages its scope and its stakes. Each plot arc starts with a major revelation that raises the stakes and adds one new time period to explore. The players need time to process each raise and to settle into their newly expanded world. To get to know it. It’s a balancing act.

But even if you manage the scope and stakes well, you can’t make your players care about an entire f$&%ing world. Worlds are too damned big to care about.

Lesson Five: Everything is Personal

I said Chrono Trigger starts small to leave room for rising stakes and an expanded scope. And that’s true. But only partly true. The real reason CT starts small is to give the player time to care.

The truth is that a world-ending cataclysm is just too damned big for the human mind to give a s$&% about. It’s abstract. The human mind can’t get emotional about it. Especially in a TTRPG campaign where the end of the world doesn’t actually matter.

Why do I say that? I know it’s weird to think like this, but a TTRPG campaign — like a video game — is going to end someday. Regardless of how it ends, the world and the characters are going away. Whether they go away to live happily after or they go away because Galactus ate them is kind of an academic question.

It’s for that reason that disaster movies spend a lot of time introducing characters and showing their lives and personal struggles before any kind of disaster even starts happening. People can’t care about cities or kingdoms or countries or planets or worlds or cosmosi. People care about people.

Chrono Trigger gives you a lot of people to care about. Lots of NPCs exist just to put a face on the disaster and CT takes the time to humanize them. Kino the Cave Boy isn’t just the face of human prehistoric civilization — the seed of our species — he’s also insecure and out to prove himself. To come of age. Doan the Survivor isn’t just the face of human misery in the post-apocalypse, he’s lost all hope and given in to despair. The NPCs are the faces of the world, but they’re also human faces.

Each of the main characters also has a personal investment in the main story. One that goes beyond “if the world ends, where will I keep all my stuff?” Marle’s story is the strongest by far. I’d call her the main character of the game. She’s struggling to reconcile her need for personal freedom against the duties and responsibilities of nobility that she never asked for. When she is part of a group that’s in a position to save the world, she accepts that responsibility without reserve even though it won’t affect her personality, just because it’s the right thing to do. And later, she and her father, King Guardia, meet in the middle of her conflict. Because each character has a chance to resolve their character arc through a sidequest near the game’s end.

The sidequests ain’t just disconnected things either. It’s not just a way to curry the character’s favor to earn a sex scene or friendship points or whatever. Each arc is connected to the main story in a deeply personal way, each empowers the character, each allows the character to grow, and each explores one of the game’s main themes in a personal, human way.

Also, you get cool equipment for doing those sidequests like a laser gun that shoots solar plasma or a rainbow katana. I s$&% you not.

Rainbow katanas aside, I can’t stress this s$&% enough. This is the key to running an engaging Save the World game. The players can’t care about the world so the world must have things in it to care about. And they can’t just Save the World, they’ve got to Create a Better World.

There’s no formula for this. No checklist. No manual. No mechanics. This thing — the most important thing — rests entirely on the GM’s ability to present a world the players can care about. And that ability is an intuitive art.

And that is why it’s so important for you — as a GM — to immerse yourself in s$&% that makes you care. That’s how you train your unconscious, emotional, artistic brain to present a world people can give a s$&% about it.

In other words, go play Chrono Trigger.

Bonus Lesson: Selling the Game Without Giving Everything Away

I’ve got a few extra minutes and some space in the word count, so you get a bonus lesson. This one’s about pitching campaigns and managing expectations.

Above, I said you’d have no idea Chrono Trigger was a Save the World game given its start. I praised it for that. But I admitted the game’s manual — back in the day — did give that s$&% away. And it did. Kind of.

The manual’s actually really vague about Chrono Trigger’s story. Inaccurate even. It says Crono is a chosen kid of destiny who has to travel back and forth through time to stop the evil Lavos’ plan to destroy the world. The spirit of the game’s there. It’s a heroic quest with a time-travel mechanic and a big bad named Lavos. And… that’s all that’s there. And, while the game does kick off with some time-traveling heroics, Lavos is nowhere to be seen. And even when Lavos does show up, it’s a mindless cataclysm monster. It doesn’t have a plan. And you sure as hell don’t foil it.

As a GM, you’ve got to sell players on your campaign, right? But you can’t do that and also do the trick where you keep the stakes and scope small so they have room to grow. You can’t pitch a Save the World game without revealing that there’s high-stakes, big-scope s$&% coming.

The Chrono Trigger manual demonstrates the perfect level of detail for a Save the World campaign pitch. And the dialed-down opening gives the pitch a chance to sort of fall out of the player’s head. And because CT is fun and engaging right off the bat, the player doesn’t even notice they’re not playing the game they were promised until, suddenly, they are.

The point is, it’s totally fine to sell your campaign with a pitch like this…

You’re a group of unlikely heroes who discover a world-endangering plot involving ancient magic and primordials and stuff and you’re the only ones in a position to foil it. Do you want to play that game?

And then launch with…

The peace of your idyllic village is shattered one morning when someone discovers the mill is overrun with dire rats! Go kill those dire rats!

Provided you run a really fun adventure with engaging characters.

And if anyone asks about all the big s&%$ you promised, just say, “it’s a long game; who knows where it’ll go from here! Oh no, more dire rats. Roll initiative!”