This feature is part of my ongoing True Scenario Designery series, which explores advanced adventure, encounter, and campaign design. If you’ve not been following it from the beginning, use The True Scenario Designery Course Index to catch up.

This lesson marks the start of a whole, new True Scenario Designery module about Scenario Structure. Settle in because it’s a big’un.

Struction: An Introduction to Structure

Today, we’re putting all that pre-design crap behind us and starting a whole, new, big-ass module in True Scenario Designery. For the next lots of lessons, I’m going to teach you about Scenario Structure. It’s a big topic with lots of ideas in it. You see, structure is where we jump from thinking to building. We’ll even break out the graph paper and start mapping, flowcharting, noding, or whatever. Or break out the paper paper for outlining.

But put away your crayons because we’re not there yet. See, any Mere Adventure Builder can structure. It’s easy. Draw a dungeon. Did you draw one? Great. You structured a scenario. True Scenario Design ain’t just about taking the time to make a structure, it’s about knowing what makes good structures good.

What Means Structure?

On the surface, structure is really simple. In fact, it’s so simple that it seems like it’s barely even a thing. Like, you know how a scenario — say an adventure — might be split into chapters or acts and those chapters might be full of events and encounters and challenges and shit and how sometimes those events and encounters come all in a row and sometimes they’re spread out across a dungeon for the players to wander through?

That’s structure. But structure isn’t technically what we True Scenario Designers actually care about. See, no matter what you do, an adventure or a campaign or a scene or an encounter is gonna have some kind of structure. Some stuff’s going to come before other stuff and after some other stuff and it’s going to be organized somehow into chunks because otherwise we mortal humans who are trapped in a series of successive single moments in time couldn’t play scenarios. We’re not Tralfamadorians or Bajoran wormhole entities or whatever.

What we care about — and what I’m talking about when I say structure — is building a deliberately, intentionally good structure. One that makes the scenario feel really satisfying to play through and one that emphasizes and enhances the scenario designer’s goals and aligns with their vision and all that crap that’s wrapped up in the subjective concept of a piece of fictional artistic entertainment being good.

Structure, then, is really about the relationship between all the elements being strung together however they’re strung together.

Technically, a dungeon map is a scenario structure. It’s basically just a flowchart that diagestiologically exists in the world or whatever. It’s an adventure structure the characters can walk around in. But the difference between a good dungeon map and a bad dungeon map is down to how the rooms are laid out in relation to each other and which things happen in what rooms in what order and how many different permutations exist to fully explore the space and shit like that. Get it?

This whole section of the course is about understanding how your structure decisions affect the quality of the scenario so you can make good decisions and, thereby, make good scenarios.

And that is what I’m calling — for simplicity’s sake — structure.

A Tale of Two Structures

The first thing you’ve got to understand about structure vis a vis tabletop roleplaying game scenarios is that tabletop roleplaying game scenarios have double the structure for double the fun and that’s the second time in a week of writing I’ve used a Doublemint Gum joke completely unintentional, so if you’ve ever doubted the power of advertising, especially involving twin buxom blondes, doubt no more.

But I digress…

Tabletop roleplaying game scenarios are unique because they’ve got two different underlying structures. By their nature, every tabletop roleplaying game scenario has a gameplay structure and a narrative structure.

Gameplay structure is all about how the gameplay elements fit together. It’s to do with how the players navigate the scenario and move from challenge and challenge and scene to scene and what they’re doing in each and how victories and defeats carry forward and all that shit.

Narrative structure is all about how the game’s events fit together into the story the players experience as they play the game. It’s to do with things like rising actions and climaxes and act structures and all that crap.

Let me be clear that, of the two, it’s the gameplay structure that has the most to say about how players feel about the game as they play it. Later on, the narrative structure plays a role in what the players think about the game when they’re done playing it, but the gameplay structure also has some influence there. But you can’t totally ignore narrative structure because, remember, Narrative is a gameplay aesthetic and many roleplaying game players are motivated by a desire to participate in a well-structured narrative and roleplaying games specifically promise that as one of their core engagements. Even players who don’t self-identify as filthy storygamers do feel the game’s narrative on an intrinsic level and thus many roleplaying gamers’ engagement is affected strongly by the narrative structure.

In point of fact, most of the obnoxious dumbasses who call themselves storygamers are wrong. They don’t really care about the narrative elements at all. Instead, they’re selfish performers who just want to show off the wacky antics of their crappy self-insert fanfic avatars for a crowd of clapping seals.

So every scenario has two structures you’ve got to worry about and they’re both important but one is kind of subservient to another but you can’t completely ruin one for the sake of another. If that sounds complicated, that’s because it is complicated! Why the hell do you think most adventures most people write are crap? True Scenario Designery is hard!

But let me try an analogy here to help you get the relationship…

Imagine you’re a cake baker — a caker — and some shrieking harridan hires you to make a birthday cake for her insipid brat’s Spongepants Pineapple-themed birthday party. She wants the cake to look like a Spongepants. Your success depends on your ability to make something that works both as a cake and as a decoration at a Spongepants Pineapple party. You have to do both. Otherwise, Karen’s going to talk to your manager.

Now, obviously, the cake has to look like Spongepants and it also has to be delicious. But, assuming you do a minimally good job — assuming you make an edible cake that doesn’t poison people and that it resembles Spongepants enough to satisfy a bunch of children with the attention span of goldfish and their bedraggled parents who don’t even know that Spongepants lives in a pineapple under the sea — the most important factor that’s going to push Karen to actually say something nice for once in her life is how the cake tastes. The proof of the cake is in the eating, as they say. If you give Karen a cake that looks just kind of okay, but then it turns out to taste amazing, everyone at the party is much more likely to talk about how good the cake is than if you give her a cake that looks amazing and then tastes bland and dull.

Gameplay structure is your game working as a cake. A birthday cake absolutely has to be a cake first. Narrative structure is your game working as a decoration at a theme party. A birthday cake has to be pleasing to the eye and fit the theme of the party second. Yes, the appearance is the first impression, but it’s also the thing you can get past if the cake is delicious. You can’t recover from the cake tasting like ass. Just ask the kids.

Now, fortunately, there are lots of overlapping elements between gameplay structure and narrative structure. They’re actually pretty similar in a lot of ways. Gameplay structures, for example, include goals, major challenges, and outcomes just like narrative structures include incitements, climaxes, and resolutions. That makes this two-design shit not so hard to deal with. In some ways, anyway, because there are also places where the two structures don’t play as nice. For example, one of the most effective narrative structures for quest-type stories is the good ole three-act structure, but the absolute most effective gameplay structure for most games — and especially for open-ended games — is a four-part progression. So you’ll often find yourself trying to build a game that comes in four parts — sort of — and a story that comes in three parts — but not really.

Does that sound complicated? Well, again, it is. This shit ain’t for Mere Adventure Builders. That’s what dungeon crawls and node-based adventures and “I just react to what the players do” and “I don’t build challenges; I build situations” are for. It’s for the losers who can’t hack it at real game design. But it’s also not as complicated as it sounds. Once you really understand this shit, you’ll understand first of all that the four-part progression doesn’t need all four parts every time and that you can build them into longer-term progressions throughout campaigns and that they also fit very neatly into the second act of a three-act narrative so the first and third acts become bookends to the gameplay. Second, you’ll understand that the three-act structure isn’t really about the acts and that there are three of them and that you can extract the essence of the three-act structure to make a four-act structure or a five-act structure or however many acts you want.

But those are problems for future you. Actually, those are problems for future me because I have to figure out how to teach you what all that shit means in a way you can understand. Today’s problem is just understanding that structure is about how the ingredients mix together and that a good scenario is like a birthday cake that looks like Spongepants Pineapple and that sometimes that’s easy to do and sometimes it’s hard to do.

The Elements of Gameplay Structure

Now, this lesson is just an introduction to the idea of structure, so I’m not going to explain too much today, but I do want to give you some idea of what True Scenario Designers are looking at when they’re evaluating structure and making structure decisions. In the next lesson, I’m going to show you the actual core structure of an adventure and show you how a True Scenario Designer like me evaluates it. But I do want to toss a couple of basic concepts at you just to put them in your head. Especially because I’m repurposing and inventing some terminology here to make shit as clear as possible.

When it comes to gameplay structure, we generally think in terms of the shape of the gameplay, its flow, and its progressions.

You can think of gameplay shape as a way of describing the map of the game. Consider, for example, a dungeon map. It can be fairly linear or it can be made of branching paths with lots of loops or it can be very open. Well, non-dungeons have a shape too. You present any adventure as a flowchart or a list or a timeline or whatever and that thing’s gonna have a shape, right? Different kinds of scenes and adventures and encounters benefit from different shapes and mixing shapes across an adventure and nesting them inside each other affects how the gameplay feels at different points.

The gameplay flow is, well, it’s something that I would call pacing except I want to reserve that term for the narrative side of the equation. Besides, it really isn’t strictly analogous with pacing. Instead, it’s how the engagement changes from one event to the next. When the players find a mysterious shrine and fan out to gather information, the pace of that event is driven mostly by the players and it’s got an investigative and explorative feel. Then, when the cultists burst in and ambush the players, the pace is tight and constrained and things feel urgent and there’s a combatty feel because of the combat that is happening. A lot of this shit is about what I’ve called mode of play in the past, but it’s broader than just saying, “Now this is exploring and now this is interacting and now this is delving.” Those simple classifications are Mere Adventure Builder baby toys.

Gameplay progression is related to gameplay flow but it’s distinct enough that I want to talk about it separately. It’s all about how the gameplay builds on itself as the players play through it. In my module Fall of Silverpine Watch, for example, the players fight a group of four zombies in a divided arena that’s easy to control. Then they fight five zombies in a cluttered arena that’s harder to control. That’s a very simple challenge progression. Likewise, the zombies have a trait that gives them a coin-flip chance to come back to life with 1 HP if they’re not killed with fire or holy magic. Later, the undead blacksmith regenerates damage every turn if he’s not hit with fire or holy magic. Meanwhile, there’s an investigative scene with a corpse on the road that teaches the players how to ask questions about a scene by using their characters to interact with it. Later, there’s a scene with a desk from which they can surmise a bunch of clues and find some valuable treasures if they ask the right questions. Later still, there’s a scene with some bonus treasure if they very thoroughly search a room for hidden elements.

You might be tempted to think that gameplay progression is all about what I’ve called tutorializing in the past. You might think it’s all about how you teach the players what they need to know to play the game. Well, that’s part of it, but that’s not all of it. Gameplay progression is how the players gain skills and resources and how the game then escalates to demand the players use those skills and resources. In other words, it’s how the players and their characters git gud and how the game then gits gud to keep the pressure up.

And now I’m realizing I should have called that flow since it’s closely related to the gameplay concept of flow state but, fuck it, this is my course and I like progression.

The Elements of Narrative Structure

Feeling overwhelmed by all this crap? Well, don’t worry, because we’re almost done. The gameplay structure is really the big, tough stuff. I only have to briefly touch on the elements of narrative structure. That’s partly because most of y’all are already familiar with it and partly because a lot of it tends to fall into place pretty easily around the gameplay structure once you know what you’re doing despite my terrifying you with how complicated it is to make an adventure that works as a game and looks like a pineapple or whatever the hell I said above. I don’t remember, I was drinking pretty heavily when I wrote that bullshit.

Just as gameplay structure really just comes down to how the game’s challenges and events are grouped together and strung in sequence, narrative structure is about how the game’s plot is strung together. What events happen in what order and how they’re related to each other and how the elements in those events are related and how you can clump them together.

In point of fact, narrative structure kind of mirrors gameplay structures. At least if you stand back and squint. Narratives have progression — we call them plot arcs or character arcs — and they have shapes — like a three-act structure — and they have pacing — which we just call pacing because that’s what it is — which describes how tension builds and releases while trending upward through the course of a work until it’s finally, fully released in the climax.

Consequently, as long as you, a True Scenario Designer in training, are aware of the elements of narrative structure, you can mostly map them to the elements of gameplay structure. Plot points become scenes or encounters, a story arc plays out along the game’s critical path, a side quest contains a complete character arc for some non-player quest giver, the game’s final challenge is the story’s climax, and so on.

Which is why I said that, yeah, this shit is hard, but it’s not that hard. And, as with all things, it gets easier when you do it enough.

What Next?

Well, next is all the lessons about structure that I’ve set up. Obviously. Duh. But the very next thing I’m going to do is make this all a little more concrete by showing how you lay the core of a scenario’s structure. If you think of a scenario’s structure like the frame of a building, I’m going to show you the biggest, most important, girders or joists or yardarms or whatever the hell you call the first pieces of wood you weld together in a house shape when you’re making a house. I don’t know; I’m not a contructioner or whatever.

After that, we’ll dig into successively smaller, finer structural elements and, when we’re finally done with all this structure crap, you’ll be most of the way to designing pretty damned good scenarios like a True Designer.