Real talk time…

Don’t worry, this ain’t one of those crappy personal updates all about how my life is so hard and how it’s all absolutely wrecking my content release schedule and, boo hoo, I’m so sorry, seriously, guys.

Nope, this is real talk about real me as a real Game Master who talks a real big game about True Scenario Designery and True Game Mastery but who’s also constantly saying he doesn’t do half the crap he expects real you to really do. It’s real talk about the real me the real content creator who really told all y’all countless times that anything that’s good enough is actually pretty great — which inspired awesome Frienemy @NoxAeturnus to start publishing a fan magazine called Adequate Adventures in which he compiles community-contributed good enough adventures every month or so — but who’s also spent the last year telling you that great design is hard work and demands skill and craft and hours and hours and hours and you shouldn’t be happy with anything less because it means you suck.

You see, this conversation broke out in my supporter Discord community when another of my Frienemies, @French Rice Merman — a name I gave him because I didn’t like his real name for reasons that made sense to me at the time — when @French Rice Merman announced his intention to turn one of his homebrew ALIEN The Roleplaying Game adventures into a published module and asked for some help from his fellow Angricans.

The discussion turned to the fact that most of the homebrewer Angricans show up at the table with what they described as half-baked adventures. Basically, they show up with a bunch of half-finished doodled crap and fill in the rest while they run the game. Many of them seemed to think that was bad and wrong, and they felt bad about it. But then I admitted that my players are lucky if I show up with anything that’s even quarter-baked. Hell, most of the napkin scrawls I show up with haven’t been anywhere near an oven, and that’s when I have scrawls at all instead of just showing up thinking I’ll probably remember the important stuff when I need it.

That made me realize just how dirty I’ve done y’all by giving you an ideal to shoot for but not telling you how to reach it as a real, practical human being who can’t put a part-time job’s worth of work into preparing every four-hour weekly session of let’s get drunk and pretend to be elves and also by suggesting that Mere Adventure Building is a crime against gaming and also by not being clearer that writing down every damned thing doesn’t mean your homebrew adventure notes have to be publishable PDFs you could sell for five bucks in the Dungeon Masters Guild shop at DriveThruRPG.

June is over and we’re entering the back half of the year. I’ve hit a big turning point in True Scenario Designery. I’m also hoping I’ve managed a big shift in my professional life back toward actually being a reliable, steady content creator and game designer who actually publishes shit actually worth downloading. So today seems like the perfect day to tell you what it’s really like to be a real True Game Master and a real True Scenario Designer for real.

I Suck At This and So Do You

I don’t put enough work into my games. Not even close.

I’m human, first of all. I’m a sinner in a fallen world and I always do what I shouldn’t and I never do what I should. I don’t set aside enough time for game prep and design. Most of the time, I don’t set aside any time for my game at all. When I do set time aside, I always end up wasting it on YouTube or doomscrolling on social media or… You know what? The rest is between me and God.

The point is that, first of all, I’m human. Second of all, game prep and design are like one part engaging, rewarding fun to four parts tedious crap. I love coming up with ideas and figuring out how to make them work. I love browsing my Monster Manual for interesting creatures to use in unique ways. I love dreaming up set pieces and adventure sites and imagining how awesome they’ll be when I map them out. I’m passionate about that stuff. I’m also passionate about bringing my game to life for the delight and despair of my players.

But between the dreaming and designing and the delight and despair there’s a whole bunch of tedious writing and drawing and mathing and typing and typing and typing and there’s way too much of it and it sucks donkey balls. I became a Game Master to invent awesome games and torture players with them. I did not become a Game Master to do a bunch of paperwork.

So, first I’m human, and second design and prep is mostly a tedious slog. That brings me to third and third is that I’m human. Again. But different this time. As a human, I have ridiculously, ludicrously high standards for myself. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing perfect, and anything less than perfect is basically failure. So even though I constantly remind all y’all not to demand perfection of yourselves because no one is perfect — except that one guy — and because good enough is actually way better than you think, I, personally think I’m the exception to that rule. “No one is perfect,” says I, “but I should be.” Consequently, there is no way I could ever do enough prep because, by my standards, enough prep means devoting every moment of my life that I don’t spend meeting my biological needs or earning money to meet my biological needs either running my game or prepping for my next one.

Am I alone in any of this? Abso-frigging-lutely not. That’s you, isn’t it, @NoxAeturnus? You too, @French Rice Merman nee @MermanRoy nee Richard Rummelmumble — remember, if I can’t actually spell or remember it, it doesn’t count as doxing — you too, @Frenchie, right? That’s all of you. Every last one of you. Because the only reason any of you are still here reading my overlong, overwrought, overidealized crap instead of at the Alexandrian or Sly Flourish or getting your advice on YouTube is that you care way too much about running truly great games.

So… yeah… I show up with quarter-baked crap. I fill in the blanks at the table, I improvise my way out of corners I never should have backed into, I make up encounters and entire maps on the fly, and I’ve even fudged entire encounters with no stats. Seriously, I’ve made a big show of doing math and saying, “That’s half it’s hit points! He’s sagging and you can see it! Great job, guys, keep up the momentum,” while, behind my screen, there’s nothing but a blank piece of paper with a scary face doodled on it.

But, unlike most Internet Game Masters, I’m actually willing to admit that that shit is bad for my game. I don’t do it because it’s good; I do it because I’m human and I suck but the game must go on.

Well, actually some of that shit is bad for my game. Some of it though, as I’m about to explain, is not only totally fine, but allows me to be totally, completely honest when I claim that I am a True Game Master and a True Scenario Designer.

Keeping It Real and Being True

Let me make this clear: nothing in my True Scenario Designery series is about unachievable ideals you strive for knowing you can’t ever reach. This ain’t a bunch of crap to get you to aim for the moon so you land among the stars when you fall short. True Scenario Designery is totally achievable and it’s the proper and correct way to design truly great games which is what your players deserve. It’s what you deserve.

The thing is, True Scenario Designery ain’t as demanding as you think. Which is good because there really are only so many hours in a week and this really is just a hobby and we really are just wasting time pretending to be elves for shits and giggles. The problem is that the same high standards that make us think we’re never doing enough also keep us from recognizing how much we actually do and how great it actually is. I’ve seen @NoxAeturnus’ modules, for example, and I know his idea of adequate is pretty damned good and hence I don’t trust him when he claims anything he does is half-baked.

Nor should you trust me when I say the same of my own work.

I have bad habits. I do things I shouldn’t do. Those things hurt my game. I absolutely cannot excuse making my players fight a blank stat block with googly eyes glued on it and arbitrarily deciding the fight is over because they’ve had enough. That shit is not a game and I know it’s not. It’s bullshit. It’s wrong. I forgive myself for doing it because I’m human and I fuck up, but I also don’t want to forget I did it so that I never do it again. My players deserve better and I need to honor my gifts as a Game Master by being better than that.

That said, many of the things I do are just done out of sheer, real, practical need. I can’t put all the hours into my game that I think I should because that would be utterly ridiculous so I have to use my time wisely and I have to use it well. And I do. I really mostly do.

Improvising an entire dungeon map based on a five-minute stick-and-line blockout with a few scribbled notes? That’s not only perfectly fine, but it’s also totally consistent with the principles of True Game Mastery and True Scenario Designery and Angry Hat Theory. So is cracking the Monster Manual open to bog-standard goblins and hastily scrawling a totally improvised dungeon room on the battlemap and making my players fight it out with three of the little bastards based solely on the word golbins [sic] scribbled in the margin next to one of the rooms on my map.

That’s totally Angry Hat Theory. It’s totally True Scenario Designery. It’s totally True Game Mastery. Let me explain…

Top Hat Down Scenario Designing Game Mastery

In my last True Scenario Design lesson, I introduced the idea of top-down design. In fact, I said it was the difference between True Scenario Designery and crapping on a piece of graph paper and calling it a game because I’m oh so colorful and creative in my analogies aren’t I?

Top-down design means you come up with the big-picture gameplay experience you want to create first and then build the pieces that’ll get you there and then you build the pieces that’ll get you those pieces and so on. You make every decision based on how it fits into your overall design vision. That gets you past building adventures as strings of encounters or nodes or whatever to survive through. Your adventures are more than the sum of their individual encounters and challenges are about more than just surviving all the challenges and you can win even if you lose some of the challenges along the way and you can lose without seeing a game over screen. Encounters put goals in conflict so that they don’t have to be races to zero hit points and even when it is just a race to zero hit points, the race is meaningful in the grander scheme of the adventure it’s part of.

When I take ten minutes to hastily sketch out a dungeon map and make notes about what challenges go where, as long as I’m making my crappy sketch intentionally and placing the challenges with an eye toward purpose and progression, I’m doing top-down design. I’m being a True Scenario Designer.

That’s called blockout by the way. The simple, flowchart-like map of your scenario? Making that’s called blocking out your scenario. I’ll teach you more about it later.

If my adventure involves a progression of goblin fights culminating in a boss fight, the actual makeups of the individual fights don’t matter except insofar as they feed the progression and the room layouts also don’t matter much. It’s not the fights themselves that matter — regular mook fights that aren’t anything special still fill an important role in most adventures — but how they’re built. So it doesn’t matter whether there are three goblins or four and what kind of battlefield they’re fighting on. From a Challenge Rating perspective, it’s easy to eyeball a fight to hit roughly the difficulty you want and it’s also pretty easy to throw a couple of elements onto a battlemap and have a reasonably engaging battlefield that’ll fill three to five rounds.

When I hand the Game Master — who is also me — a blockout map and tell him to put some easy goblins here and medium goblins there and hard goblins there and maybe a shortlist of pre-selected goblins ‘n’ friends statblocks to populate the encounters with, I’m not actually asking the Game Master to make any design decisions. He’s got the Monster Manual, he’s got a gridded map, he’s got a marker, he can shit out a mook fight. I know he can.

Would I do the same with a setpiece encounter or a boss fight? Hell no. Would I do the same if I didn’t know the system backwards, forwards, and upsideback? Hell no. I do it because I know the Game Master I’m writing for is smart enough to improvise a decent battlefield and always has three or four different configurations in his head for different kinds of fights and because he can eyeball the Challenge Ratings to within a manageable margin of safety when he’s running Dungeons & Dragons.

The point here is that I’m not asking the Game Master to make design decisions, I’m just asking him to bring the Scenario Designer’s design decisions to life. To make the design happen at the table. The specifics of the mook fight aren’t consequential and the Scenario Designer didn’t leave the consequential decisions unmade. I think if lots of you chowderheads who say, “I don’t really do the hat thing and I’m not a True Scenario Designer because I ask my Game Master to improvise too much,” really are doing the hat thing and you are doing the True Scenario Designer thing. I’d bet lots of you aren’t asking your Game Master — who is also you — to make substantial design decisions but rather just to make the design happen. You might be giving your Game Master sparse tools, but you’re not asking your Game Master to wear a hat they shouldn’t be.

Which is why it’s important to distinguish between design and prep.

Distinguishing Design and Prep… and Polish

I know I’m always screaming at all y’all to write shit down. On paper. With a pen. Or, if you absolutely must, on a keyboard and into a document. Writing stuff down is how you make shit real and how you carve it into your brain. It’s how you ensure continuity between work sessions that sometimes come weeks apart. Write down your design vision. Write it down. Even if it’s just an outline or bullet points or whatever. Write down your gameplay dynamics and your challenge elements. Write down a list of all the gameplay elements you want to use. Write down a map of your scenario.

But…

I’ve never told you to write down flavor text. I’ve never told you to write down skill checks the players can make and their DCs and the results. I’ve never told you to write out more than a few words or scribbled notes about nonplayer characters. All I’ve ever said is, “Write down whatever you absolutely have to remember and anything you can’t come up with at runtime.”

There’s a difference between design and prep. There’s also a difference between those and polish as the heading of this section kinda spoiled. Design is decision making and planning and problem solving. You mostly do it in your head. I don’t tell you to write it down because design means writing shit down; I tell you to write it down because I know you trust your memory more than you should and because I know how the act of writing affects the design process. But writing isn’t designing. It’s recording design.

I’m running an Alternity game in the Dark*Matter setting as a short-term break from my regular campaign. That’s basically if The X-Files was a roleplaying game. It’s awesome. The players are playing a bunch of strangers that accidentally got drawn into a conflict between a Satanic cultist and a member of a clandestine research institute over a cursed relic at a truck stop — yes, they met at the modern equivalent of a roadside inn and tavern — and now they’re being recruited by that institute to investigate UAPs and hauntings and conspiracies and shit.

I ran into a problem, though, after the players resolved that first conflict. The game’s supposed to be a short-run mini-campaign kind of thing while I was working to get my real campaign back on track and to recharge my creative batteries but I also want to pace the game properly. That sort of game needs to feel like slowly peeling layers off an onion. Thus, I was struggling to transition from strangers accidentally dealing with the supernatural to agents of the Hoffmann Institute investigating cases like Mulder and Scully under a private contract. The best thing for all practical purposes would be to just do a time skip and say, “Six months later, you’ve been recruited and trained and here’s your first assignment,” but that’s tonally crappy and it cheats the players out of a big part of the whole sci-fi paranormal suspense genre.

One day last week, I find myself pooping — as I do once a day — and my brain suddenly became as unclogged as my… nevermind. The point is, that poop was technically design. I solved a problem and then sat for a few minutes working through a plan for implementing the solution. Writing everything down afterwards was just transcription.

Scenario Design is when you make decisions, formulate plans, and solve problems. Prep is when you put together the resources the Game Master needs to make that Scenario Design happen at the table. The form those resources take is entirely between the Scenario Designer — probably you — and the Game Master — also likely you. My Scenario Designer doesn’t hand my Game Master piles of flavor text because he — the first he, who is me — knows that he — the second he, also me — can do flavor text at the table. He — second he again, still me — can also draw maps on the fly and build encounters from the Monster Manual so he — first me, who is he — just hands me some rough notes for any fight that doesn’t need any substantial design. But he — one of me — also doesn’t ask the other me — he — to make a custom monster at the table or build a tentpole encounter instead we gives us the stat blocks and detailed maps of the encounter space for we — us — to use at the table.

I — whoever the hell I am — I also know that my Game Master and my Scenario Designer effectively have a telepathic connection because they — we — are actually the same person with the same brain. So I don’t have to write down the tone and themes of my adventure. At the table, I’ll remember that the players are supposed to feel like the only thing between them and a malevolent, chaotic force of evil nature are a few panes of commercial glass and some unlocked shop doors. Choosing that tone was Scenario Design. Constantly calling attention to the fact that the storm is raging just outside the windows and doors which are constantly straining to keep it out in the flavor text is Game Mastering. At the table, I’m just executing the design decisions.

Meanwhile, my players are like, “Holy crap, he did keep making it feel like the storm was literally clawing at the doors and the windows and every time a door opened, it didn’t let us out, it let storm burst in. I didn’t notice that, but my brain did.”

You’re welcome, guys.

There’s nothing wrong with relying on telepathy between Game Master you and Scenario Designer you. There’s nothing wrong with trusting Game Master you to act on Scenario Designer you’s intentions. At least, there’s nothing wrong with it if you know what you can trust Game Master you to do and that you don’t over-rely on your collective memory for anything that would ruin the adventure if forgotten. I don’t write flavor text and I don’t plan skill checks, but I sure as hell keep a list of the important facts the players absolutely must learn handy. I call it my Information Pool. I trust Game Master me to work that stuff in wherever it works and not lose track of it, but I don’t trust either of me to never forget a vital clue.

Polish, meanwhile, is when you take your prep and beautify it. There are only two good, practical reasons to polish your prep. The first is to enhance the play experience by creating visual aids, props, maps, whatever. Labeled lines on graph paper are all you need to run a game. Beautiful, artistic maps are an indulgence to delight the players. Technically, they’re also information-rich rich so, even if the map’s not for the players, it might still be worth prettying up if that helps the Game Master describe the space more evocatively and depicts details that a simple map wouldn’t necessarily include.

That’s not an excuse to mapsturbate during prep time, though, and you know it.

The second reason to polish is that you’re playing Scenario Designer to someone else’s Game Master. If you’re designing a scenario for others to use, you’ve got to prep it much more completely and explicitly. Depending on who it is for and how many people are going to run it and whether you’re charging people for it, you’ve got to polish it up nice. The more people will see it and the more profit it’ll bring you, the more polish it needs.

But nothing I’ve said in True Scenario Designery was meant to imply that your homebrewed adventure notes should look like a published module instead of a pile of scribbles, scrawls, and thoughts in your head. It’s called True Scenario Designery you dumbass, not True Graphical Designery.

It Ain’t a Crime to Merely Build an Adventure

Throughout the True Scenario Designery course — series, whatever — I keep bringing up the difference between what I’m teaching you now and Mere Adventure Building. And I haven’t exactly been kind about Mere Adventure Building. That’s given some of you the idea that anything less than True Scenario Design might as well be Candyland.

Okay… that’s on me. Chalk it up to my bombastic, hyperbolic tone. I have tried to draw a clear line between the two approaches, but that’s only to point out that True Scenario Design is taking homebrewing to a whole different level. It’s not easy and it’s not for the faint of heart. But I’ve also pointed out more than once that Mere Adventure Building is actually totally fine. The whole point of True Scenario Design is to give Game Masters who truly want to elevate their craft the chance to do so. And even the folks who don’t want to put in that much work into pretending to elf might still find the True Scenario Design perspective helpful when they’re Merely Building Adventures.

Plus I find the art and craft of game design to be truly, deeply fascinating, and bringing it into the roleplaying game adventure-building space is a passion project. I’m doing this because I love doing it.

But I also still do a lot of Mere Adventure Building. Not every game I bring to my campaign is a Truly Designed Scenario. I mean, to some extent, I can’t help but bring some of my True Scenario Design chops into every Adventure I Merely Build, but that’s how it works. The more you practice drawing, the more it shows even in your crappy boredom doodles.

True Scenario Design takes a lot of time and care. If you’re running one or more weekly games and your players churn through content at even a modest pace, you probably can’t afford to make every adventure and every session a work of art. It’s kind of like the old practice of producing a television season. You only have so much time and money in the budget, so you produce a couple of high-budget episodes for the season premiere, the finale, and mid-season sweeps, then you do your workhorse episodes, and to stretch your budget, you might throw in a few bottle episodes.

That’s Campaign Management at work right there and we’re right back to Angry’s Hat Theory. I would love my every adventure to be a lovingly crafted work of art that took three hours to plan for every one hour of play but there is no way I can do that. So I mix in some adventures I know are good enough because good enough is better than I think and that buys me the time to get ready for the next big plot point.

Likewise, if I’m running a one-shot or a single-session game or an event or something, or if I’m running a campaign I’ve purposely designated as totally casual and low pressure, I tone it down a bit and stick with stuff I’d call Mere Adventure Building. There is nothing wrong with Mere Adventure Building.

That said, if you are the kind of homebrewer who really does want to run their best possible games, then it’s worth spending as much energy as you practically, reasonably, humanly can on True Scenario Design. It’s worth trying to make every adventure you run a Truly Designed Scenario. It’s worth starting every adventure build off with a written vision and to keep an eye on major challenges, play dynamics, and all the rest of that crap. That’s how you get good at it. That’s the only way to get good at it.

Once you’re good at it, you’ll find that even when you think you’re Merely Building Adventures, you’re actually Truly Designing Scenarios because you can’t actually shut off what you know about stringing together a great game.

Meanwhile, as long as you’re thinking like a designer and making the big decisions when you’re not running the game, your half-baked adventures are probably way more cooked than you think they are.