I’ve made some executive decisions. Literally. You see, I am the chief executive here at Angry Games, Inc. Actually, I’m the only executive. But that means all my decisions are executive decisions. Every poop I plop out is an executive decision.

I’m such a professional, eh?

Anyway, I’m going to stop justifying myself. I’m going to stop explaining why I’m writing this and not that and how this fits the grand plan started by that and ending with some other thing later, maybe if it works out that way. None of you give a shit, and most of you have been here long enough to know that everything I write builds on everything else. It’s all a series.

I’ll still call out — and link — specific connections and tie series together if there really is a grand plan. But otherwise, I’m just going to explore ideas as and when I want to explore them. If we end up spending three articles over the span of two months talking about resting and adventure building, you’ll figure that shit out as it happens. Meanwhile, I promise to keep mixing up the topics so there’s a little something for all y’all. Which I promise to get better at. Especially for those of you who like actual rules, mechanics, systems, and hacks.

I’m also going to stop advocating for my approach. You’re here because you want to run and build the least worst roleplaying game adventures and campaigns you possibly can, and you read and support because you believe I can get you there. I don’t need to keep fighting with assholes who prefer to run shit games instead of making an effort, or fuckwits who bitch and moan about how their games aren’t working and then refuse to change anything because nothing can possibly work.

Here at TheAngryGM.com, we believe that the best roleplaying gaming experience is one that works as a series of gameplay challenges and as an unfolding narrative and as a visit to a simulated fantasy world and as a bunch of other stuff too. You and yours might like some of those flavors more than others, but they all need to work together to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. If any of those things are in conflict, we don’t pick one over the other, but instead we go back to the basics and try again.

Want to argue that those are bad assumptions or that I can’t get you there? No one gives a shit. Least of all me.

Anyway…

This ain’t part of my series on advanced adventure and encounter design called True Scenario Designery, but it totally could be. I’m listing it in the supplemental materials. If you’re reading that series, consider this a part of it.

This ain’t a direct continuation of my discussion about adventuring days and building adventures around resting, but that’s only because I ain’t doing things like that anymore. It’s just the next discussion I want to have about building adventures. I’ll eventually circle back to how to build around rests. Probably soon.

End of Long, Rambling Introduction™.

Order Matters: Guided Nonlinearity and Closed Openness

When it comes to games, order is important. I don’t mean lawfulness here, though that’s important too, but rather, I mean the order that things happen in.

Imagine you’re playing a fighter. You’re leading your party through a labyrinthine ruin. You take a few lefts, some rights, a couple of straights, and finally meet a weird-ass demon thing in some chamber somewhere. Or a devil thing. Who knows. It’s an emaciated, bony thing with a serrated tail, but it’s got four arms bearing four ugly-looking, serrated weapons. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. Seriously. The Game Master even says that, so you know your party’s knowledge skills have failed you. Worse still, you’re one of those despicable little shits who’ve read every Monster Cyclopedia. You know this is some custom, homebrew horseshit.

Whatever.

Somehow, you win initiative, so you brandish your trusty greataxe and charge. That’s how you solve your problems, and you haven’t met a problem yet that the Double-Bitted Bitch — you named her after an ex-girlfriend — can’t solve. You swing, roll, and hit, and the greataxe turns to dust. The Game Master gleefully says something about an aura of weaponal disintegralation or something. “You need to find a different way to deal with this thing,” he says. Weapons can’t help you.”

I know you’re pissed off. Not hypothetical fighter you, but actual reader you. Yeah, this situation is a screwjob. Remember it. I’ve got plans for it in some future article. Probably.

Putting aside how furious you are about permanently losing the specialty weapon at the heart of your build and into which you sunk all your upgrade points, you ask the GM how the actual hell you were supposed to know the demon devil thing would do that? “Oh,” explains the smug bastard, “There’s an adventurer’s journal in another room that would’ve warned you. If you had gone left instead of right at the third intersection, you’d have found it, and you would have known you needed a different strategy. You should have explored more before you fought the thing.”

Before you lose your mind in the comment section, let me assure you that, yes, this Game Master is being a dick. I know that. But that’s not the point. The point is that, had the players found the warning first, that encounter would have been a fair, interesting, and unique challenge. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a monster you can’t fight with weapons. Hell, that’s what gray oozes usually are. It presents a unique challenge to parties in general and to weapon-based characters specifically. You don’t want to do it all the time, but once in a while, it’s cool to ask fighters to deal with things they can’t fight, rogues to deal with things they can’t sneak, and wizards to deal with words they can’t spell.

It’s just that, without the information you needed to recognize the problem, it went from a tense and interesting challenge to a punishing screwjob.

Order is important. See?

A roleplaying game session, adventure, or campaign is just a bunch of stuff happening. But the things happen in some kind of order because time is a thing, and that order can change everything. It’s not always as drastic as above, and it’s not always about fairness, but it has an impact.

For example, imagine you run into some orcs with a nasty rock troll pet. You’ve never fought a rock troll before, and you quickly discover it has some unique attacks and tricky resistances. The fight’s tough, but you manage. You have fought orcs before, so you keep them at bay while you figure out the troll. It’s a demanding fight, and you take some heavy hits, but all your buddies come out alive, and everything else ends up dead. A winner is you; hail the conquering heroes.

Then, two rooms later, you run into a lone rock troll by his solitary self in an open cave. You know its attacks, you know how to get around its defenses, and without the orcs running around, you rip the thing rock from boulder. You don’t even break a sweat.

There’s nothing wrong with that sequence. In fact, it makes you feel pretty badass to destroy the rock troll so easily. It’s nice to feel badass. But imagine, for example, you hadn’t been as lucky in the first fight and your heavy losses included some dead allies because the rock troll’s attacks caught you totally by surprise. You can say, “Let the dice fall where they may,” but a monster suddenly breaking out an unusual attack you can’t possibly anticipate isn’t a challenge any more than, “Your sword falls apart because fuck you, that’s why.”

That’s why the Game Masters with actual brains in my readership are saying, “Those encounters came in the wrong order. The solitary troll should have come first so the players could see it in action without a bunch of extra problems to cope with. Then fighting one alongside the orcs is a fair escalation.”

That said, my point isn’t that one order is better than the other. There is a time and a place for, “You slaughtered the thing without breaking a sweat because you’re such badasses.” My point is just that the order in which things happen completely changes the play experience. And I ain’t just talking gamefeels here. In this case, the actual challenge balance is different depending on which fight comes first. If you fight the gang first, that might be the equivalent of a Very Hard challenge followed by a Very Easy challenge. If you fight the solo troll first, it might be the equivalent of a Moderate challenge followed by a Hard challenge.

If this were my advanced course on adventure design, True Scenario Designery, by the way, I’d talk now about gameplay psychology and Flow Theory and point out that, actually, the solo first setup is objectively better because of how games and brains work. But I’ll let that go right now because my point is just about how the order of things changes the game in real, tangible ways.

Speaking of psychology, there’s this adage in puzzle-based game design that goes…

Show the player the lock first, then give them the key; show the player the problem first, then give them the tool to solve it.

The reason game designers have been following that rule for something like thirty years now is because it works. The reason it works is because of how human brains are wired. If people find the key before the locked door or, say, the potion of flame avoidance before the Flamewracked Hall of Fire, many, many people just totally forget they have the key or the potion. They won’t even check their inventory lists because it doesn’t occur to them the key is in there. Hilariously, players can look right at the potion of flame avoidance listed in their backpack and not realize it can get them through the Flamewracked Hall of Fire. I shit you not.

The issue here ain’t intelligence or dumbassery, but rather, it’s to do with certain heuristics and shortcuts that are wired into that wet, wrinkled cauliflower between your ears. There are fancy terms like functional fixedness and causal closure and something called the Zeigarnik effect behind this all, but the details don’t matter. What matters is that the human brain has blind spots because of how it’s wired, and most of them come before intelligence and deductive reason get a say in things. Putting the solution to something in someone’s mental blind spot is like building an obstacle course that requires people to bend their knees backward or a video game that requires a person to press twelve keys on the keyboard simultaneously.

Well, that’s not quite fair. Some people can and do see into their mental blind spots. Some people are double-jointed. Some people can make their hands do two different, complex tasks and actually play a piano. My point ain’t that you make puzzles impossible when you put things in the wrong order, but rather that you make them much harder for the average person for reasons that aren’t entirely about deductive reasoning. There’s nothing wrong with that if you want a particularly hard puzzle, but good puzzle design is about making the puzzle just the right level of hard.

If you’re gating ongoing progress in the entire adventure behind the Flamewracked Hall, you don’t want to make it so that only a quarter of all players are likely to spot the solution. But, if you’re blocking the passage to the totally optional and very rewarding infinity plus one sword, then, sure, make that a bitch to solve.

Again, the point is that the order of things is important. Key-first and lock-first are very different. Lots of puzzles and problems work that way. Because of brains.

But this goes beyond gameplay and challenges. Consider your game’s narrative.

Imagine I tell you a story about a total asshole who kicks puppies, steals baseballs from children, and plays videos on his phone speaker on public transportation. One day, the dude’s paralyzed in a meteor strike. People he treated like shit nonetheless help him through his rehabilitation. One of the puppies he kicked becomes his service dog. In the end, he becomes a better person.

Cool story, bro, right?

Now, imagine the guy starts off nice and then becomes bitter and resentful after a meteor paralyzes him. He whacks puppies with his cane, steals from kids, and makes everyone miserable with public cellphone calls on full speaker blast.

Or imagine he started out as an asshole, then became a better person on his own, then got hit by the meteor. Same events, different order, different story, different feelings. An asshole hit by a meteor before his redemption is karma. A dude hit by a meteor despite his redemption is a tragedy.

Order. Matters. The order in which events happen in a roleplaying game can drastically change the gameplay experience. Sometimes, it just changes engagement and fluffy gamefeel nonsense, but sometimes it can turn an engaging puzzle frustrating, and sometimes it can turn an exciting challenge into a total screwjob.

The Paradox of Open-Ended Gaming

Roleplaying games are open-ended games. That’s one of the promises of the medium. Players must be allowed to explore freely or, at least, to make meaningful decisions that affect how the game unfolds. If they can’t change the game with their choices, it ain’t a roleplaying game. It may not count as a game at all.

But if you let the players trip over things in the wrong order, which is exactly what players will do with any amount of freedom, because players are stupid, they can totally ruin the gameplay experience for themselves. If they go left instead of right, they might find a key before a lock or fight the hard encounter before the easy encounter, or get redeemed before they’ve earned it. That’s just how roleplaying games work, right?

No. Obviously. Or else I wouldn’t be writing this.

Let’s be reasonable here. Open-endedness is important. Player agency is important. You have to let the players make meaningful decisions that actually are meaningful and actually are decisions. That’s why you can’t just fix this shit with quantum ogres. But the players shouldn’t be able to ruin the gameplay experience or make it impossibly hard to win or whatever. Players deserve a satisfying and engaging gameplay experience. You want them to come back every week. That experience includes freedom and meaningful choices and all that horseshit, but those can’t be everything. All the freedom in the world won’t make a bunch of frustrating screwjobs feel satisfying.

The answer, then, is compromise. But what the hell does such a compromise look like? Well, fortunately, there are lots of answers in game design. In fact, video games have done a lot to solve this very issue.

I know it’s cool to hate on video games because they’re not as open-ended as roleplaying games, and they’re all mainstream and you don’t have to be able to read and do math to play them and all that crap. Spare me. There are lots of very well-constructed, very open-ended video games. Yes, they’re necessarily more constrained than tabletop roleplaying games because of the nature of the medium, but if you can get over your elitist attitude, you can find a lot of clever design solutions you can use to enhance your roleplaying gameplay experiences.

There are two solutions that video games have evolved that I think are really useful for Game Masters to understand in this case. They underlie most of my past, present, and likely future adventure-design discussions here on this site and inform a lot of my own homebrewing. Let’s call them Guided Nonlinearity — a commonly used term in the industry — and Slightly-Closed Open Worldness — a term I might have hallucinated.

Guided Nonlinearity

Guided Nonlinearity underlies the sorts of video games that offer open, but constrained spaces to explore and challenge the player to achieve a single, final objective. Metroidvania games are the best examples, and the subgenre is named after some of the oldest examples of the model, Metroid and Castlevania. Apart from those examples, you’ve got the Hollow Knight games and the Ori games and the Shantae games and Ender’s Lillies and the Guacamole duology and a bunch of others.

I’m going to use Metroid: Dread as my example here.

Metroid: Dread is an entry in the long-running Metroid franchise. You play as the titular space marine, Metroid, who is trapped at the bottom of a labyrinthine Metroidvania game and has to find his way back to his spaceship to escape some invulnerable robots named Amy, a bird person, and space herpes. Unfortunately, Metroid has lost all of his space marine upgrades, and he needs to find them again to overcome the obstacles in his path.

So, you explore a bunch of lava caves and ice caves and underground sci-fi bases pretty much however you want, but you periodically encounter obstacles like, say, security doors guarded by scanner eyes, and you’re forced to turn back and go in another direction. Elsewhere, you find the alien that ate your space marine cloaking device and reclaim it. Then you can slip past the security scanner eyes.

The Ability-Gated Progression ain’t the important part. That, by the way, is what we in the biz call “finding the double jump so you can jump over the lava pit.” Rather, the important part is all the invisible, careful decisions the designers make when mapping out the world to give the player freedom to explore while also making sure most players find locks before they find keys and face easy challenges before harder challenges, and all that shit. It’s about carefully placing things on the map. It’s about how paths are presented. It’s really brilliant stuff.

The whole discipline of building an open-ended map such that it helps players have the best experience while exploring it freely is called Guided Nonlinearity. It helps the players stay on track without forcing their hand or taking away their freedom to explore, and it ensures that, when the players do go off track, they’re never so off track as to ruin the experience. Maybe shit gets harder, maybe players get a little lost, but never to the point of frustration or ruination.

On average. In general. No design discipline is perfect.

This ain’t just the purview, by the way, of Metroidvania games. Lots of games use these same principles in their world and dungeon design. Back when The Legend of Zelda actually had dungeons — real dungeons — they used the same principles. Lots of video roleplaying game quests and dungeons use these principles as well. Guided Nonlinearity leads to open-ended spaces that are intuitive and satisfying to explore. It’s a great compromise between total freedom and ordered design that gives the best of both play experiences when done right.

Slightly Closed Open Worlds

Guided Nonlinearity works best for constrained adventures and campaigns. It’s good for dungeon maps and adventures you can plot on a flowchart, like, say, mystery adventures. But once you open up the gameplay and invite the players to explore, say, a world or a city or whatever, things get different. This is where modern open-world and video roleplaying games show their chops. On the open-world side, you have games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring as the big, modern tentpoles, but the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series’ are still getting a lot of love. On the video roleplaying game side, you’ve got Baldur’s Gate and Divinity and Path of Exile and the latest Final Fantasy games that have abandoned the single-corridor that made entries like FFXIII such beloved entries in the franchise.

Now, the more roleplaying gamey ones use a mix of Slightly Closed Open Worldness and Guided Nonlinearity, and open-world video game design isn’t as refined, but Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring are masterworks of Slightly Closed Open Worldness.

Let’s take Breath of the Wild, which is pretty much the pinnacle of modern, freeform, open world exploration, which is only slightly hampered by the fact that literally every other aspect of its gameplay sucks balls. But man, that world though.

In Breath of the Wild, you’re an undead elf boy named Zelda. You wake up dead and have to kill an evil, angry cloud that stole all the kingdom’s robots and ate its princess. The evil cloud is currently chilling up the block in a castle you can see pretty much from your sepulcher, the moment you start the game. If you want to, you can just go kill him. You can try, anyway, and it is actually possible for you to succeed. But you’ll probably want to build your power up first because the years you spent dead have not been kind to you. There are plenty of ways to do that. The world spreads before you in every direction, and it hides quests and weapons and armor and upgrades and all sorts of shit like that. There’s even an uber-powerful sword of evil cloud killing you can claim by finding magic orbs hidden all around the giant, sprawling world map in these really shitty challenge rooms.

There is actually a loose quest progression that the game makes you aware of. See, there are these four giant mech robots at the four corners of the kingdom, and trapped in each is the ghost of one of your four best friends from a hundred years ago. If you reclaim the mechs, your ghost friends will shoot lasers at the cloud for you when you try to fight it.

It’s all way better than it sounds, but considering the game sold literally a bazillion copies and came out eight years ago, I’m not sure who the hell needs me to sell them on it at this point.

What’s funny though is that even though you come back to life in pretty much the dead center of the world map and you can go anywhere you want and the game doesn’t even tell you about the mech robots until you do some other quests first, data gathered by Nintendo revealed that roughly pretty much every player played the game the same way the first time. They wandered northeast, they learned about the giant mech robots, they climbed a waterfall, they saved the ghost of a fish girl, and then they fixed a giant robot elephant.

It’s actually good that it worked out that way because that particular sequence provides a fantastic vertical slice of the entire gameplay experience. It teaches the player everything they need to know to play the entire game. It’s the campaign-level equivalent of making the players fight a rock troll on its own before you make them fight a gang of orcs with a rock troll pet.

Even though the game provided an open world, it was designed very subtly to make players want to play it the best way possible. It didn’t use invisible walls, and it was employing trickery or manipulation. It was just made so that most people just chose to play it the way that made it the most satisfying to play. The most attractive choices were the ones that led to the best gameplay experience.

That’s Slightly-Closed Open Worldness.

By the way, I could also have used Fallout: New Vegas as the example because it’s structured almost exactly the same way and does almost exactly the same things.

If All Else Fails, Just Make It Easiest To Play It Right

We could spend the next year analyzing the design of every game I mentioned above, and we still wouldn’t have a complete guide to everything that goes into Guided Nonlinearity and Slightly-Closed Open Worldness. There’s just so much to it, and it’s more an art than a list of tricks. It’s more important to understand the goal and the underlying principles than it is to make a list of tricks designers use.

That said, I have been trickling out these sorts of tricks — and the ideas behind them — for years, and I plan to keep doing so. What I want to reveal right now is the underlying principle. This is what you need to keep in your head as you make roleplaying game adventures and campaigns because it’s how you get to Guided Nonlinearity and Slightly-Closed Open Worldness. It’s how you compromise between giving the players freedom while also presenting things in good order. Because the best gameplay experience comes from both.

So remember this…

The path of least resistance should always lead to the best gameplay experience.

Most players will mostly take the path of least resistance most of the time. That said, identifying that path can be tricky. For example, sometimes players make a beeline for the goal, so anything that looks like a path to the goal is the path of least resistance. Other times, players want to explore every side tunnel and secret passage before they face the final challenge, so anything that looks like a path to the goal is like swimming upriver to your players. Knowing when the players operate in which mode — and how your design and presentation influence the mode they choose — is part and parcel of the whole game design gig. It’s part of the art.

And with that, we now face a branching path of our own.

Down one path, we explore a practical example of using the principles of Guided Nonlinearity to build an adventure around the Adventuring Day assumption and the characters’ need to rest at proper intervals to get the best gameplay experience.

Down another path, we dig deeper into the above concepts by talking about what the path of least resistance really means. What does it mean for a designer to expect something? How is that different from merely allowing something? And what about things the designer can’t foresee?

Down the third path, we go back to the True Scenario Designery classroom and keep talking about Scenario Structure. Specifically, we talk about how to build progressions of gameplay challenges and experiences. How do we know what order to put things in? Especially when the consideration goes beyond gameplay challenge and the answer ain’t as simple as, “Put the easy stuff first, then the harder stuff.”

There’s also this sidequest to do with traps and screwjobs, wherein we revisit the example of the weapon-eating demon from way above.

Fortunately — or unfortunately, depending on your attitude — your party leader — that’s me — is a completionist who defaults to exploration mode. He always explores every possible path before he confronts the final boss. So, before the year ends, he will be taking you down all those tunnels, and he’ll finish the side quest, too.

He just has no idea what order he’s going to do that shit in. He’s just going to exercise his agency as he goes.