This Feature is part of my long-running series on advanced adventure and encounter design for tabletop roleplaying fantasy adventure games. You know the ones I mean. The series is called True Scenario Designery and there’s a handy index in the link so you can catch up.

This specific installment is one of several about planning adventures the players can play, win, and lose like actual frigging games. Crazy that a roleplaying game should actually be a game, right?

The Momentous and Inertial Adventure Building Proofreadaloud is there for those of you who prefer to listen to me stammer and stutter my way through reading this crap while I proofread it. I don’t get why anyone prefers that, but I don’t have to get it to provide it. Enjoy.

Momentous and Inertial Adventure Building

Welcome back to True Scenario Designery all you aspiring designers and designerettes.

I’ve been talking a big game about planning adventures around goals and challenges and, lately, around momentum and inertia. Remember those? In scenario design, momentum is a gameplay dynamic whereby the players’ successes compound on themselves. Each success in the game leaves the players more likely to win the adventure or campaign or whatever. Contrariwise and conversatively, inertia is a gameplay dynamic whereby the game resists the players’ efforts to win it. Inertia is what makes the struggle real for the players. The more and the longer they fight, the fiercer the game fights back.

What’s a gameplay dynamic? Look, I can’t review every frigging thing in every lesson. That’s what the course index is for. Use it, dumbass.

The point of all of this crap is to build a scenario — like an adventure or a campaign — that’s basically a tug-of-war between the players trying to win and the game trying to stop them from winning. How do you pull that off? That’s what I’m gonna show y’all today. That’s right, we’re putting the textbooks away and heading to the lab for some actual factual scenario design goodness.

Or, at the very least, some scenario pre-design goodness.

Well Pre-Designed is Half-Designed

Yes, you heard that right. I said pre-design. Do you numbnutses not do pre-design? What the frick is wrong with you?

I’m just kidding. Of course you don’t do pre-design. You’re Mere Adventure Builders. You just come up with an idea, whip out the graph paper — or open Dungeondraft — and start drawing. A few statblocks, some rolls on the random treasure table; done and done, right?

Except you’re not allowed to do that half-assed horseshit — I have no idea how a horse with half an ass shits; I expect with great difficulty — you’re not allowed to do that half-assed horseshit anymore.

Sorry.

Pre-design is where you take the scenario you’ve envisioned and you figure out, in broad strokes, how you’re going to actually pull it off. You lay out the parameters and the criteria and the constraints. You outline the scenario and you figure out its structure. You break it all down into scenes and acts and chapters, decide the settings, and figure out what bits and pieces — like maps and stat blocks and all that crap — you’re gonna need.

Every game and every movie goes through pre-production and, from now on, every one of your adventures does too. You don’t get to be a Mere Adventure Builder anymore. No more wiping your ass across a piece of graph paper and calling it an adventure. That’s the price of knowledge.

The best way to show you what this pre-design crap looks like is also the best way to show you how to use goals, challenges, inertia, and momentum to plan out a scenario. Can you guess what it is? Unless you’re a complete dumbass — which I haven’t ruled out — you probably can. I’m going to pre-design a scenario with you. At least, I’m gonna do enough pre-design to illustrate the points I wanna illustrate today. And who knows? Maybe I’ll come back to this when it’s time to talk about scenario structure and map shit out.

The Adventure Premise: It’s a Lame One

I love to use really simple, really cliched crap premises for all my examples — with very good reasons that I don’t intend to explain today — and this one’s no exception. Let’s give Angry’s Wheel of Boring-Ass Adventure Premise Cliches a spin and take it from there.

Come on! Big money! Big money! No Whammy! And… stop…

There are goblins in that cave; kill them.

Well, it ain’t a trip to Tahiti, but I’ll take it.

Let’s imagine there’s this village, right? Nearby — maybe it’s in the forest a little ways up the river and behind a waterfall because waterfall caves are cool — nearby, there’s this cave. Recently, a tribe of goblins moved into the cave and now they’re doing all the things goblins do by their inherent and biological and irredeemable natures. They’re murdering loggers and hunters, they’re raiding farms, they’re killing the women and doing… things to sheep, and so on. The details don’t matter. What matters is that the villagers want them gone.

Enter the heroes.

Now, I want to do this whole goblin lair thing right. This ain’t a little five-cave dungeon with some guards, a big fight, and a boss goblin. I want this to be a serious infestation the heroes have to rip out root and stem. That’s how it’s supposed to be with goblins. It should take a few days and a few forays to get rid of them all and waterfall caves are supposed to be labyrinthine and twisty.

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.

End the Goblins: Building a Mere Adventure

Before I reveal the True Scenario Designery — or Pre-Designery — way, I want you to take a second to think about how you’d make this adventure yourself. How you’d do it if you were the Mere Adventure Builder you used to be. Don’t think too hard about it and don’t feel like you’ve got to share it in the comments or anything. I just want to make a compare and contrast kinda point here in a way that’ll hopefully completely rewire how you think about designing adventures and scenes and shit like that.

The easy, obvious way to do End the Goblins is just to map the waterfall caves — big enough that you’ve got room for fifteen to eighteen encounters — and then just plot encounters on the map. As the players clear them, they stay cleared. Once they’ve eliminated them all, they’ve won. Classic static encounter-based dungeon adventure. Totally adequate. Perfectly fine.

But maybe you’re a little too good for that kind of static crap. Or maybe you count yourself a world-builder. Fair enough. What might you do then? You’d still map the caves, of course, and leave yourself space to populate them, but then, you’d probably determine the total goblin population, right? You’d come up with a roster of goblins and their pets and allies. Something like…

• 1 Goblin Chieftain
• 1 Goblin Shaman
• 2 Goblin Apprentices
• 1 Ogre
• 6 Goblin Elite Warriors
• 8 Goblin Archers
• 12 Goblin Warriors
• 24 Goblin Skirmishers
• 6 Wolves

For simplicity’s sake, I’m gonna ignore the whole Goblin Ladies and Goblin Whelps and other Goblin Noncombattants thing, cool?

To prep for the first session, you’d populate the cave complex with encounters built from the roster. Maybe you’d hold some back for wandering encounters. Then, as the players cut through the goblins, you’d keep track of who they killed. After the players retreat to rest and prepare for their next sortie, you’d repopulate the map with whoever was left, probably with an eye toward the goblins shoring up their defenses a bit. You’d keep doing that until the players brought the goblins down to some population threshold and then assume the goblins retreat the next chance they get.

As approaches go, that ain’t bad. If you’re a homebrewer Game Master running this adventure yourself and you don’t mind repopulating the dungeon every week and if you’re sure you’ll never have to do that bookkeeping in the middle of a session or if you’re okay with ending a session early if the players have a bad run of luck and flee with their asses hanging out in the first hour of a session, it’s fine. It’s certainly a bit more dynamic than the classic static dungeon approach.

But…

As dynamic as that shit looks to you, the players are just fighting through the same basic encounters over and over. They’re just bailing out a boat as water keeps sloshing in until, suddenly, the water is gone. Apart from the growing body count, there’s no real sense of progress, and there’s no way for the players to measure that progress except by counting the increasingly large number of empty rooms. Counting empty rooms ain’t exciting. Worse yet, if you follow the standard encounter-building rules like a good little adventure builder, none of this shit’s going to feel any more or less difficult to the players. Each time they come back, there’s just more empty space and fewer encounters of roughly the same difficulty spread. That ain’t great.

Of course, you could try to adjust your encounter building, but that leads you to a dilemma. Each time the players come back, do you concentrate the goblin’s resources into smaller numbers of more challenging encounters? Or do you instead disperse the goblins across larger numbers of weaker encounters? The first approach will make it seem like the goblins are digging in and shoring up their defenses, but with fewer encounters, the players can just unload more resources into each one — going nova, as the kids say — and there will be more and more boring dead space with every passing adventure day. The second approach, meanwhile, certainly makes it seem like the goblins’ resources are spread thinner and thinner, but the encounters will be easier and easier with each adventuring day, and that’s going to get pretty dull.

See how there’s none of that push-and-pull that I talked about in previous articles? You want the players to feel like they’re making progress with every victory while also feeling like the goblins are getting fiercer and more desperate at the same time. You want the last day of the adventure to be at least as exciting as the first day. You also want the players to feel like they’re fighting an overwhelming infestation. Until the goblins are actually, finally broken, it should always feel like there’s more. The players should be saying, “How the hell many goblins live here, anyway?” That’s what goblins feel like.

And that is why True Scenario Designery is worth it.

End the Goblins: A Truly Momentous, Inertial Scenario. Designed.

Now that I’ve explained how Mere Adventure Builders — like you, probably — would build a totally lame-ass adventure from this lame-ass premise, I can show you how I — sexy gaming genius and True Scenario Designer — would make a totally great gameplay experience out of it. I ain’t gonna design the whole adventure here — hell, I plan to tee up at least three important topics for future lessons I’d need to cover before I could finish it — but I’ll get you through my pre-design. Most of it, anyway. I’m going to skip a few steps — like outcomes — to keep it simple.

My adventure’s called End the Goblins. There’s a tribe of too many goblins living in a waterfall cave near a village doing terrible goblin things to the village. The players’ characters are tasked with doing enough violence to the goblins to drive them off. Or just murdering every last one of the things; the villagers don’t care. I want a few good sessions from this adventure. If the players play it well, they can win in three to four sessions and three adventuring days. If they eff it up, they should lose after four or five sessions and five adventuring days.

How can I pull that off? Moreover, how can I build both a sense of momentum and a sense of inertia? Well, I can’t answer that until I identify my adventure’s x-factor.

The X-Factor: What Your Adventure is Mostly All About

Do you remember a few lessons back when I was describing this adventure about the players fully exploring a dungeon and recovering as many treasures as possible? I told you that True Scenario Designers always try to keep their goals, major challenges, and outcomes in alignment. If the goal’s about exploring a dungeon and gathering treasure, the major challenge shouldn’t be about surviving all the fights with enough resources to beat a big honkin’ boss monster. Instead, the major challenge needs to be about navigating the space or finding all the little nooks and crannies.

That ain’t to say there can’t be incidental obstacles and hazards and challenges. There’s gonna be traps and fights. There might even be a particularly tough guardian protecting the best treasure. That’s just how fantasy worlds work. But the adventure’s central challenge — and the outcomes and any momentum and inertia dynamics — have to match the goal. You want all that big stuff to be about the same thing.

I call that thing that the adventure’s about the adventure’s x-factor. Or the scene’s x-factor. Or the encounter’s. Now, the name is actually very clever, but it’s a holdover from a time when my understanding of x-factors wasn’t as sophisticated and when I’d only identified — or stole — four of them. You can bet your ass I’ll be explaining x-factors in more detail later.

The x-factor broadly classifies the activity the adventure is mostly about. This adventure is what I used to call an Extermination adventure. Now, I just call it a Kill Something adventure. Yes, these terms derive from a sophisticated understanding of the intersection between quest-based game design and narrative structure. I shit you not.

My point today is not to explain this whole x-factor thing. Sorry. I can’t explain everything every day or else I’d never finish writing anything. I don’t need any help never finishing things. I’m already really good at that. My point is just to suggest that, if you want to be a True Scenario Designer, you want to define very early in your pre-design the one broad thing the players will mostly be doing in the adventure or scene or encounter. Will they be exploring, engaging, expropriating, or exterminating? Will they be exploring, understanding, progressing, or overcoming? Will they be going somewhere, interacting with something, acquiring something, or destroying something? Will they be traveling, wandering, investigating, interacting, acquiring, crafting, leveraging, overcoming, or killing? Use whatever terms you like.

For now, anyway.

What the Players Don’t Know

While I’m still stalling on the actual pre-design to talk about important concepts I totally intend to use if I ever get around to the pre-design part of this pre-design example, I want to expand on something I’ve said about a million times on this site. It’s gonna be important.

Nothing is true until the players know it and nothing is real until the players see it.

In the past, I’ve discussed that idea with regard to campaign and world details and plot elements, but it’s equally true of the game’s mechanical systems. Whatever the players see has to make sense, but the code that runs your holodeck is under no such constraints.

How many goblins live in the waterfall cave in this adventure? The answer is fnord. It’s undefined. It’s system error… rebooting.

The players will never, ever know how many goblins lived in that cave. They’ll kill lots of goblins — they might even keep count — but the remaining goblins will flee. Hell, some goblins probably flee after every sortie the players make. Some goblins are probably away hunting or raiding and will come home a week later to find their tribe has been routed and driven off. As long as the cave looks like it could support at least as many goblins as the players kill, they’ll never question whether the numbers of goblins even make sense.

Since the players will never, ever know how many goblins lived in the cave, there is no actual goblin population. The number does not exist.

Most Mere Game Supervisors and Mere Adventure Builders absolutely can’t handle this shit. The ones that self-identify as Worldbuilder Game Masters go into apoplectic fits over this. I have killed old-school grognards just by explaining this shit. The idea that there’s a fact about the world that is not only unknown but unknowable and therefore undefined and therefore nonexistent breaks lots of would-be True Scenario Designers’ brains.

You can’t let it break yours.

You make games, not worlds. There are as many goblins as you need to build to the challenge you’re building. If the challenge is to kill a certain number of goblins, that number is the number. If the challenge isn’t based on the number of goblins encountered, then the goblins are just like tokens in a board game’s supply. There’s always one more if you need one.

Scenario Structure: Pre-Mapping the Map

So I hinted above that I was going to hint below at some topics that I’d cover in future lessons. Well, this is below, so here’s the first hint. Technically the second. See, I can’t do this example properly without talking a bit about how I’d map this adventure’s dungeon. But mapping a dungeon ain’t really mapping a dungeon. In reality, mapping a dungeon is a way of planning your scenario’s structure.

Every adventure and every campaign and every scene has a structure. Some encounters are even complex enough to have structures too. A scenario’s structure just describes how its elements fit together and how the players move from one element to the next. A dungeon is just a scenario whose structure is also a physical map of a space that exists in the game world. Lots of mystery adventures have the same structures as dungeons, but instead of halls and locked doors, there are leads and clues that let the players move from encounter to encounter and scene to scene.

Structure is a big-ass deal. Once we’re done with this module about planning scenarios, I’ll probably spend a few lessons on structure and mapping and shit like that.

Anyway, with regards to structuring and mapping End the Goblins…

Dungeons & Dragons has this thing called the adventuring day. Roughly speaking, it’s the outside number of encounters a fresh party should be able to handle before they need their blankets and bottles and bedtimes. An adventuring day usually comprises four to six encounters.

As luck would probably not have it — for all the shit I give the WotC designers, they still know their design better than most people in the roleplaying game space — as luck would probably not have it, that aligns with the number of encounters a competent Game Master can run in a reasonably focused game session of reasonable length.

The players should be able to win End the Goblins in three adventuring days if they do everything right and that should take three to four sessions, right? That’s going to be important for planning my inertia and momentum dynamics, but it also tells me something about mapping the dungeon.

I ain’t going to go into too much detail right now — there are lots of ways to skin a structural cat — but I’m going to plan my dungeon as three paths. Each starts at or near the entrance, each comprises four or five encounters, and each one culminates in a major encounter. Thus, every time the players tackle the dungeon, they can pick and clear one path. Once they clear all three, they win. Kind of.

I’ll come back to that.

Now, although this is an Extermination adventure and it’s consequently mostly about killing shit, Dungeons & Dragons is about dungeons as much as its about dragons, and End the Goblins is set in a waterfall cave. There should be more to it than three tunnels to clear. Thus, to hide the structure from the players, make it seem more organic, and add an element of exploration — and luck — to the whole thing, I’ll add some side rooms and cuts between the major paths. If the players pick all the right paths and push hard, they can clear one path at a time, but most groups will probably take four days, not three, due to wandering and sidetracking.

In the end, the dungeon will look something like this. The three major paths — we call those the critical paths — are in black and the side crap is in red.

Inertializing the Adventure: You Can Run, But It’ll Cost You

Now let’s talk about making End the Goblins an actual good adventure by adding some inertia and momentum to it all. Actually, let’s just talk about inertia here. It’s usually easier to build inertia and momentum each in isolation instead of trying to come up with one system that does both. That helps you achieve the much desired push-and-pull tug-of-war gamefeel.

Remember, you want the players to feel like the game is getting both easier and harder. The balance between the two determines if they’re winning or losing, but you want them to see both happening.

Hence, to set up inertia, I like to start by imagining how the adventure gets worse as the players play assuming they make absolutely zero progress at all. Now, I gotta warn y’all that this is going to lead us to some weird places. I tried to prime you for it with that undefined poulation thing, but this is still gonna break a few of you before it’s all over.

Let’s do this…

Inertia comes in two flavors. The first is an adventure that slides inexorably toward failure. The second is an adventure that gets harder to win the longer the adventurers adventure in it. That second flavor is a good fit for End the Goblins. Every time the players attack the goblins, the goblins should dig in harder and fight more fiercely and desperately. At first, the players’ attack will catch the goblins off guard. Once they have time to regroup, they’re going to shore up their defenses.

I’ve said repeatedly that the players should be able to win with three well-handled assaults, right? Remember that inertia is about tying escalation to the players’ actions. Or their failures. How can we tie escalation to the players’ actions and failures?

Well, lots of you are probably screaming the obvious solution at your screens already and, for once, this ain’t a fake out. The obvious answer is the right answer so y’all get a cookie. Yes, the best approach is just to increase the dungeon’s overall difficulty every time the players retreat to rest.

The players should need three to five assaults to win, right? And each assault should make the next harder so the adventure keeps escalating right up until it’s won, right? That’s inertia. So, I’m just going to take my map and my shortlist of monsters and populate the same dungeon five different, increasingly terrible ways. One for each visit.

• First Visit: I’ll use mostly easy encounters with random-seeming groups of monsters. They’re not on alert yet, so they’re just living their best goblin lives. Which are terrible. Because goblins are the worst.
• Second Visit: I’ll use easy and average encounters, but design the encounters more deliberately for defense. I’ll man guard posts, protect chokepoints, include patrols, and so on.
• Third Visit: I’ll use a normal mix of easy, average, and hard encounters built around deliberate defense. This will look the most like a normally designed, static goblin dungeon.
• Fourth Visit: I’ll only use average and hard encounters. Nothing’s easy anymore, but most are still average.
• Fifth and Subsequent Visits: I’ll skew the difficulty toward an even mix of average and hard encounters and even include one or two deadly encounters.

This is not the same, by the way, as what I suggested above about the Game Master repopulating the dungeon after every session. This is the Scenario Designer coming up with five different dungeon populations as part of designing the adventure. That must be made absolutely clear.

Above, I talked about how chewing through the goblins’ numbers doesn’t feel like goblins and doesn’t create the right push-and-pull of momentum and inertia, so I ain’t going to use depletion as a play dynamic. That means that every time the players return to the dungeon, they’ll find it fully stocked. To me — the Game Master — that’s going to look like there’s an infinite population of goblins or that they’re all coming back to life or whatever. But, to the players, it’s going to look like the goblins have a huge population in their warrens and keep moving up more resources to shore up their defenses.

Trust me, it’ll play great. If you don’t believe me, stat it up yourself and try it.

This, by the by, is why I decided on that three paths approach. Yes, the dungeon’s always going to have fifteen to eighteen encounters or whatever in it, but the players are only ever expected to get through one-third of the dungeon at a time to get to… to get to…

To…

To get to what? To do what? If the dungeon keeps restocking itself and if every restock makes the dungeon harder, how do the players win? And how do their successes make future victories more likely?

Building Momentum: Win by Killing

End the Goblins is a series of assaults and retreats. The players are going to attack, push a ways into the dungeon, then fall back and recover when they’re spent. Then, they’ll come back and they’ll attack again, only to find they’ve made nary a dent in the goblins’ seemingly endless numbers and the goblins are fighting back harder.

How the hell can the players ever win?

If not for my speech about how Mere Adventure Builders would fuck this all up, you’d probably suggest a mechanic whereby cleared rooms stay cleared or else you’d do that population depletion thing, but you know better now. You can’t just empty the dungeon out. The dungeon has to be as interesting to assault on day five as it is on day one.

Meanwhile, I don’t know about y’all, but I hate doing a lot of prep work before every session and I hate tracking shit. I sure as hell don’t want to spend my time between sessions repopulating an entire dungeon. Especially if I paid for a published adventure. That’s why, by the way, I went with the relatively easy approach of five sets of keyed encounters. Those are just lists of monsters. That’s easy as hell. I can fit each visit’s entire encounter list on one page.

Remember, True Scenario Designers always try to minimize the work for their Game Masters. Even when they’re their own Game Masters.

I really don’t want to do anything more than cross some shit off as the players accomplish things. I can cross encounters off lists — that’s fine — but I’ve already established that gradually clearing the dungeon ain’t the way. Oh, sure, if the players kill a specific, named, unique goblin or clear a special room, that’s fine, but they are not just going to empty the dungeon.

What if, instead of crossing out rooms or encounters, I instead crossed out specific elements? What if the players could do something to remove certain elements from all the encounters in the dungeon. Say, for example, the goblins have wolves but if the players do something, I cross out all the wolves. All the wolves are gone.

Just hold that in your head…

Remember what I said about x-factors? Identify the thing that your adventure is most about — the thing the players should be doing the most to win — and build your most important gameplay elements around that? End the Goblins is about murder. Good, old-fashioned, classic, wholesome murder. Killing is how the players win. The more they kill, the more likely they are to win.

So we’ve got progress by killing and remove elements from encounters and three paths each culminating in a major encounter… is there some way we can put all that shit together into a momentum dynamic?

Of course, there is. I set this shit up purposely so there would be. That’s how writing major examples works.

Clearly, there are three important goblin figures in the goblin hierarchy. Three bosses or minibosses or whatever. Kraid, Ridley, and Draygon or whatever. Each is at the end of their own path and when the players end all three, the goblins break and abandon their lair. Moreover, killing each does something to change all the adventure’s encounters going forward in a way that isn’t just clearing them or depleting the resource pool from which they’re built.

I mentioned wolves, right? What if there’s a goblin kennelmaster. That’ll make for a fun boss fight. But he’s abusive and cruel and once he’s dead, the wolves go berserk. The goblins have to put some down and the rest flee into the wild. Once he’s dead, all of the wolves are removed from all the encounters forever after.

Goblins gotta have a warchief, right? Once the players put him in the ground, there’s a power vacuum and chaos and a bit of infighting. When the players return, they discover the goblins succumbed to some factional infighting. The most powerful goblin in every encounter is crossed off. They got killed in the fighting.

Finally — because there are three — the goblins probably have a shaman. But what if, instead of eliminating elements from the various encounters, the shaman’s death imposes a debuff on all the goblins because they’re demoralized or they’ve lost the protection of their nasty little goblin god or whatever. I can just apply a debuff… shit… that sounds like a pain in the ass and I just remembered I’m lazy.

What if every goblin’s stat block includes a trait that reflects the protection of their nasty little goblin god? After the shaman is killed, I cross that trait off. All the goblins lose it forever. That sounds easy.

Notice how this all sets up that ideal push-and-pull thing. The momentum and inertia dynamics are separate from each other. The players can see the impacts of both, but the net result determines whether they’re winning or losing. That’s exactly what you want.

Optional Extra Inertia and Momentum: Design Begets Design

You know you’re doing this shit right when one of your solutions gives you more ideas. For example, when I hit on the idea of the players’ actions changing the encounters — and especially the idea of buffs and debuffs — I immediately thought, “You know what would be cool? What if the players had the opportunity to drug the goblin’s supply of bloodwine so their senses would be dulled or their initiatives would be penalized for the next single visit?”

You never, ever want to overdesign or overcomplicate your adventure. Simple is better. Notice that neither the systems that drive the inertia dynamic nor the ones driving the momentum dynamic are particularly complicated. I didn’t have to design any complex mechanics and, to run the adventure, I don’t have to track any more than “how many times have the players attacked the goblins” and “cross off thing.” That said, you do want to add a couple of optional, clever elements the players can take advantage of if they’re smart enough. Like, say, putting a poison mushroom room near the bloodwine cellar.

The red bubbles on my pre-map are perfect places to add little optional elements like that. Maybe in addition to the poison mushroom room and the bloodwine cellar, one of those bubbles has a prisoner the players can team up with. Or who can provide useful information. Maybe there’s a secret side entrance to the dungeon in one the players can use to bypass the rooms at the start of the dungeon on future visions.

I didn’t talk too much about outcomes, but I should have. They’re important. Well, the momentum and inertia dynamics also give me some help there. Maybe, while the players are assaulting the goblin lair, goblin raiding parties are taking it on the villagers. Each day the adventure drags on, the villagers suffer for it. After five days of increasingly vicious assaults, the villagers tell the adventurers, “Do what you want but we’re leaving,” and they abandon the village.

Often, in pre-design, you end up bouncing around a bit. Ideas beget ideas. Once you get good at this shit, the hardest part becomes trimming down the ideas to keep everything nice and simple. But that’s a problem for another day and it’s a good problem to have.

End the Goblins is Ready for Design

At this point, End the Goblins is ready. That is, it’s done being envisioned and pre-designed and it’s ready to be built. Mostly. I could give some attention to outcomes, sure, but honestly, I’d feel fine just mapping and statting and doing all the other stuff that makes up the actual adventure-building part of scenario design. The important parts — the ones I wanted you to see — are done. I’ve figured out how to build the adventure so that it’ll have good inertia and momentum dynamics based on systems that won’t be a pain in the ass to run at the table, and that play against each other, follow from the players’ actions, and tie directly into the adventure’s goal and major challenge element and x-factor.

In other words, my work here is done.

Except…

There’s an oliphant hiding on this battlefield. You may not have noticed it yet, but you will. It’s actually something I’ve been skirting coyly around for several lessons and even explicitly raised once in a different context and in the title of a previous lesson. I want to save you the fridge moment by getting an issue out in the open right now and then promising to answer it in the next True Scenario Designery lesson.

All this shit — momentum and inertia and goals and challenges and everything — all this shit is about how the adventure feels in play. Or, more importantly, how interacting with it feels to the players. Gamefeel is everything, right? So none of this effort counts for dick if the players don’t know it or notice it or feel it or intuit it or whatever.

How do you decide what they have to know and what you can leave up to them to intuit? How do you make them feel any of it? In short, how the hell do you manage gamefeel?