This feature is part of my ongoing course in advanced adventure, encounter, and campaign design, True Scenario Designery. If you haven’t been following it from the beginning, there’s a course index you can use to catch up.

This lesson continues a long-ass section about scenario structure.

If you’d prefer me to scream this Feature in your earhole while stammering, stuttering, and tripping over my own words, check out The Structure All the Way Down Proofreadaloud.

Structure All the Way Down

Welcome back, aspiring designers — or as I call you, ass-igners — to True Scenario Designery. The topic due the jury today is scenario structure, and you should get used to that. It’s going to be the topic for a while.

Last week — or whenever — I belched forth a whole lot of words about what makes good structure good and what makes bad structure suck donkey balls. What I didn’t do, though, was tell you what structure actually is. I didn’t point and say, “Those bits, there? Those are the structure bits. Do you see them? Look! Look where I’m pointing! Why are you so stupid?” I just blathered on about shape and pacing and you all just looked at me the way dogs look at ceiling fans.

Today, I’m going to point at the structure and yell at you for being stupid. So, you know, we’re gonna have fun. Next time, I’m gonna do it some more. We might even draw pictures. Next time. Not today. Today you shut up and read words and feel stupid.

Doesn’t it feel good to have a plan?

Scenarios are Made of Scenarios

Structure’s all about how the parts of scenarios join up, right? So what are the parts of scenarios? Well, the parts of scenarios are also scenarios. Scenarios are recursive, fractally things. Sort of. They don’t spin down into infinity, nor do they spin up into infinity. Scenarios, thankfully, have limits. This ain’t calculus.

A while ago, I suggested that scenarios come in different sizes and scales and scopes and shit, right? You’ve got your giant ass scenarios called campaigns and your mid-sized, four-door adventure-type scenarios, and then you’ve got your little compact-size encounter scenarios. You’ve also got some off-size scenarios for weird body types too. Between campaigns and adventures, there are scenarios called arcs and between adventures and encounters, you’ve got scenes. At least, that’s what I’m calling them.

Yes, I know some of you disagree with that choice of phrasing. You’ve made that very clear and I very much still don’t give an actual crap.

The point is that the bigger scenarios — campaigns for e.g. — are made of smaller scenarios — like arcs — which are themselves made of even smaller scenarios — adventures, perhaps — and so on down to encounters. But note that this pattern ain’t true of all scenarios. For instance, one campaign might comprise several arcs that are each built out of adventures while another campaign might just be a bunch of adventures with nary an arc to be seen. Also for instance, an adventure might have multiple scenes, each full of encounters or it might just be a sequence of encounters with no intermediate scene structure at all.

At the heart of all this scenario scale shit is adventure-scale scenarios and I ain’t just saying that because adventures sit in the middle of the spectrum. Adventures are basically the baseline scale to which we tabletop roleplaying game scenario designers compare all other scenarios. If these were monster size categories in a roleplaying game bestiary, adventure size would be the equivalent of medium size. It’s the normal scale for most things and so it doesn’t get any mechanical modifiers. All size modifiers are figured relative to it.

But you know this already. At least, your gut knows it even if your brain doesn’t. Whenever I talk about scenario design, you hear adventure design. Moreover, I keep talking about adventure design in all these True Scenario Designery lessons. We’re all defaulting to adventure-sized scenarios in our heads. That’s what scenario design is and that’s because adventures are the purest, most complete, playable form of scenario. You could play an isolated encounter or a several-encounter scene, but the experience would feel incomplete. You can also stop playing when the adventure’s done. You don’t have to have a campaign. One adventure’s enough for you to get a really, truly complete roleplaying gameplay experience.

That’s precisely why it’s best to learn scenario design by working at the adventure scale. I’ll eventually show you the kind of size modifiers you apply to work with campaigns, arcs, scenes, and encounters, but adventure design is basically the fetal pig dissection of scenario design. If you’re only going to dissect one living critter — in an anatomy class, perhaps, or in your garage for personal use — you dissect a fetal pig. They’re just the right size and with just the right complexity to feel manageable and they’re complete enough to have all the bits you need to see understand anatomy. Frogs also work well here and so do tiny humans, but there’s some hefty cultural taboos about dissecting tiny humans. Especially in your garage.

Plus tiny humans get really screamy.

But I digress… holy shit did I digress… I’m so sorry I digressed…

Anyway…

Here’s the point: scenarios are mostly made of scenarios. At least they are down to the encounter level. Campaigns are made of arcs, arcs are made of adventures, adventures are made of scenes, and scenes are made of encounters. Structure, meanwhile, is just about how you string your encounters into scenes and your scenes into adventures and so on and cetera and nauseum.

That’s why today’s lesson is the easiest one you’re going to get in this entire course.

You Don’t String Encounters Together

Occasionally, I’ll refer to stringing encounters into adventures or something like that, but you know I’m just talking casually, right? You know that True Scenario Designers don’t actually just string shit together, right? We do not pop encounters together like LEGO bricks and call it an adventure, right? True Scenario Designers follow a top-down design approach. We design our LEGO sets first and figure out what pieces we need and how they should fit together based on the needs of the model as a whole and then we start clicking them into place. You know that, right?
Right?

Okay then.

Skipping Scenario Scales

Above, I hinted that some scenario scales are kind of optional. It’s just a few paragraphs up, but I’ll forgive you if you missed it because it’s right before I started talking about fetal pigs and dissecting children. That was kind of distracting.

It’s like this: you can make a campaign out of arcs or you can skip the arcs and just string adventures together. You can make a multi-scene adventure with each scene comprising several encounters or you can just make an adventure out of encounters with no scene structure to speak of. But — and this is a big, important but — but, that only works for arcs and scenes. I would say that arcs and scenes are intermediate, organizational things rather than real scenarios, except I can’t say that because I never say wrong things. That’s why it’s so stupid that people are always disagreeing with me.

Arcs and scenes do occupy unique places in the whole scenario scale hierarchy thing. They are kind of a way to group things together and they are kind of incomplete on their own in ways that campaigns, adventures, and encounters aren’t, but that ain’t the whole story. They’re not merely containers to keep your scenarios organized and they do have a kind of structural completeness. They’re just not quite solid the way the other sizes are.

This, by the way, is another one of those things you know in your gut even if your dumbass brain can’t explain it. You know there’s something different about a campaign that comprises several arcs rather than a campaign that’s just a pile of adventures. You can feel there’s a fundamental difference between adventures that have a scene structure and adventures that don’t.

That intuitive knowledge perfectly encapsulates what all this structure shit is really about. Somehow, in some way, the way scenario designer you divides up your scenario and groups the parts and glues them together changes the scenario’s feel at the table. In the biz, we call that the playfeel or the gamefeel. Structure your scenario right and you improve the playfeel. Structure it wrong, and… well… just don’t do it wrong.

Are Paths Arcs?

Way back in 2003, when Paizo Publishing was just a third-party second banana to Wizards of the Coast, they were responsible for publishing the two official D&D magazines, Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine. In Dungeon #97 they published an adventure module called Life’s Bazaar. It was the first in an eleven-part series of modules in The Shackled City Adventure Path and that was the first time anyone had used the term adventure path.

After WotC fired Paizo from Dungeons & Dragons and Paizo stole some pens and a couple of computer monitors and all of Dungeons & Dragons v.3.5 on the way out of the office, Paizo made adventure paths a thing. They made it their thing. Publishing series of adventure modules that form a complete, coherent gameplay experience became a part of Paizo’s core strategy for supporting their own, totally original Sonic-character recolor of a game system. Do not steal.

That ain’t to say Paizo invented the concept of a multi-part series of modules tied together by a superplot. Gygax did that back in his G-series of modules and its follow-ups. Truth be told, though, if you want to credit anyone with refining the concept of adventure path into what they are today, credit Weis, Hickman, and their TSR team for their work on the DL-series of Dragonlance modules. But I ain’t here to correct the roleplaying gaming historical record.

Really, I’m only bringing this up because I know some of y’all might be asking yourselves whether adventure paths as they are today are the sorts of things I’m talking about when I say, “arcs.” The answer is that they’re not. Adventure paths are campaigns. They’re complete, standalone, multipart gameplay experiences. You can string a couple of adventure paths into a supercampaign — provided you watch the intended play levels and all that crap — but they’re not designed to fit together that way. They’re designed to stand on their own.

And if there’s one thing I keep desperately trying to crowbar into all your craniums, it’s that design intent matters. Adventure paths aren’t made to be arcs so they aren’t arcs. Period. Exclamation point. Expletive.

A Scenario Is a Scenario Is a Scenario… Mostly

Watch closely, kids, because I’m about to show you where the real magic of True Scenario Designery happens…

Any idiot can cram a bunch of encounters into an adventure-shaped box and call it a game. Lots of idiots can even throw the encounters into one of those bantam boxes you get at the sushi place and call the little sections scenes. We call those idiots Mere Adventure Builders but we also remember that Mere Adventure Building is perfectly okay and we acknowledge we’re just having fun when we talk like that and we don’t mean to hurt any idiots’ feelings.

What makes an adventure a scenario is that the components of that adventure are themselves scenarios. The scenes and encounters have goals, outcomes, challenges, and play dynamics. Kind of. More or less. As I suggested above, there are size modifiers here. We’re just not worrying about them today.

If the idea of scenes and encounters as scenarios shocks you, you’re a dumbass. It really shouldn’t. You should already know that properly built encounters are scenarios in themselves and that every scene in an adventure has its own set of goals, conflicts, and outcomes. That said, if this idea doesn’t shock you, it’s only because you haven’t yet stopped to think through everything it means.

Consider first that all of this implies that arcs and scenes need things like goals, outcomes, and challenges. They really aren’t just ways to group encounters and adventures for convenience sake. Below, I’m gonna demonstrate exactly how scenes are scenarios.

Second, consider the implication that encounters have shapes and structures just like adventures and campaigns do. That’s one of those, “I’ll show you much later,” things, but consider the difference between a so-called combat encounter and an encounter the players can choose to either fight through or sneak past. You can describe the first as a linear scenario and the second as a branching scenario. Likewise, an encounter in which the players get to explore a room poking and prodding at things — or a crime scene they get to investigate — can be described as an open scenario. Most people don’t even think of those things as encounters, let alone consider that they’ve got shape, structures, goals, and outcomes.

Second-and-a-halfth — because this is part of the same idea — consider also what that means about x-factors. Remember x-factors? Encounters and scenes and arcs all have x-factors. That combat encounter is an extermination scenario and that crime scene encounter is an investigation scenario. What’ll really bake your noodle later is the idea that a combat encounter could be an investigation or exploration scenario. Because, yeah, it could be.

The possibilities abound when you start thinking like a True Scenario Designer at the encounter level.

Thirdth, do you remember all of those juicy macroscopic challenges and play dynamics I keep foaming at the mouth about? A lot of those arise just from how the outcomes of the different scenario parts — because they’re scenarios, they have outcomes — a lot of those of those arise just from how the different scenario parts’ outcomes feed into each other and the larger scenario. I’ll demonstrate this trick below too but I’ll also talk a lot about it in future lessons.

However, there’s a particular idea with regards to this outcome lead-in macroscopy thing I want to mention briefly right now, though I will have a lot more to say about it in the future. It’s one of those things that dumbass Game Masters on the internet have put out a lot of utter bullcrap about.

Outcome Gating

If scenario parts are scenarios themselves, whenever you make a scene or an encounter, you need to think about its outcomes the same way you’d think about an adventure’s outcomes. Makes sense, right? You think about what possible outcomes exist, how they map to winning and losing, how they relate to the scenario’s overarching goals, and so on. But, when you’re working at the adventure scale, you don’t usually sweat much what happens after the outcome comes out. That’s a problem for future scenario designer you to handle when you’re writing the next adventure. All you need to know is that there’s gonna be a next adventure. There always is — except in game over situations — so you can write it when you need it.

Well, Binky Betsy, I’m sorry to tell you that, when you’re working on scenes and encounters, that kind of thinking doesn’t cut the mustard or the cheese or whatever the hell people cut. When you’re building a scene as part of an adventure, you need to know how the adventure continues after each and every possible outcome comes out.

If the scenario can’t progress past a certain outcome in one it’s parts, that part becomes an outcome gate. The whole adventure’s — or scene’s or arc’s or campaign’s — outcome might turn on that one part.

Imagine, por exempelo — as the Italians say it — you’re writing an adventure which asks the players to recover the Yellow-Orange Sigil from the Lost Pickling Hut of Shrub Niggurath. In the adventure’s second scene, the players must locate the Lost Pickling Hut somewhere in the Forest of Major Neuroses. If one of those scenes outcomes is, “The dumbass players fail to locate the Lost Pickling Hut of Shrub Niggurath,” then that scene’s an outcome gate. If the players get that outcome, the adventure ends then and there.

Which — and I absolutely can’t emphasize this strongly enough — WHICH IS FINE. That is a perfectly valid design choice to make. I know some screamy asshat has already clicked on the comment box below and is furiously slamming his keyboard trying to make words happen without drooling all over himself, but you know what we say about screamy asshats here. That’s right, we say, “There’s only room for one screamy asshat on this website and I bought the domain first.”

Look, someone is going to tell you that outcome gating is terrible and you should never ever do it. But that’s completely irrational, illogical, impossible advice. If you have an adventure the players can fail or lose or whatever, at some point in that adventure, the outcome must be determined. There’s a place, a moment, where the players have done all they can do and victory is no longer an option. In a well-designed adventure, there’s usually several. If every adventure you build only allows the players to fail in the final, climactic encounter, you’re just writing single-encounter adventures with very long, mostly meaningless prologues.

Outcome gating succeeds or fails based on all the design decisions around it. Which, by the way, means it doesn’t boil down to unbreakable, hard rules like, “The adventure can’t fail until the last third,” or some bullshit like that. There’s actually only one hard and fast rule when it comes to outcome gating and it’s nothing like that. But that’s a story for another time.

Death Isn’t an Outcome

Speaking of outcomes and outcome gating, I want to remind y’all of something I’m pretty sure I remember trying desperately to make clear to you idiots at some point earlier in this course. But maybe I forgot or maybe I didn’t make it clear enough or maybe you didn’t get it. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m saying it now. Again. Probably.

Death is not an outcome. I mean, it technically can be, but not the way you’re thinking. Total party kills aren’t scenario outcomes, even when they totally end the adventure or campaign, which they often do. Death isn’t an outcome. That’s why I call it a game over.

One of the conceits of tabletop roleplaying games is that characters — and whole parties — can die at any time. Fantasy worlds of adventure are dangerous places. “Don’t die,” therefore, is kind of system-level goal. It transcends all adventures and encounters and competes with adventure and encounter goals. The players are always balancing, “Win the adventure,” and “Don’t die.” While True Scenario Designers can give guidance about what to do if death happens, they don’t treat it like an outcome they build into the adventure. It’s part of the engine and it’s not their problem.

That means, by the way, that, to a True Scenario Designer, a combat encounter that must be defeated to advance is actually a “can’t lose scenario.” I don’t mean the players can’t be allowed to lose it, I mean that, to a True Scenario Designer, that encounter is a guaranteed win. There’s no outcome in the scenario other than, “The enemies are dead, disabled, or routed.” The players are guaranteed a victory… unless they die.

Which, by the way, is also fine. Eventually, I’ll tell you why it’s fine. Until I do, remember my stance on saying wrong things: I don’t say wrong things. Therefore anyone who says otherwise is a screaming asshat and it’s safe to ignore them.

Moving on…

Let’s Have an Example: The Lost Pickling Hut of Shrub Niggurath

Let me wrap this up by showing you how to put all this bullshit together. I’m gonna show you how I’d plan and outline a Truly Designed Scenario as a collection of parts that are, themselves, scenarios. Broadly and briefly. I ain’t gonna write — or even outline — the whole frigging thing. I’m just gonna do enough to show you what I want to show you.

Given that I’ve already teed up an example and given how much I love typing long, silly names over and over again, let’s pretend I’m gonna build The Yellow-Orange Sigil adventure. We’ll also have to pretend I’ve given up all my standards for safeguarding my game’s tone and staying in my genre’s lane. Well, whatever. It’s just an example.

For some reason, the heroes are looking for the Yellow-Orange Sigil which they know is recorded in the Lost Pickling Hut of Shrub Niggurath somewhere in the Forest of Major Neuroses that lies just outside the town of Malarkhamy. Yep, it’s just a standard “go to the dungeon and get the thing” kind of delve, but True Scenario Design is about execution not inception and everyone loves a good delve and I’m sick of defending my premises to you losers anyway.

I’m gonna break this adventure down into three scenes because, if you’re going to impose a scene structure on a dungeon crawl, there’s a pretty standard way to do it and I have to impose a scene structure on it because that’s what I’m trying to demonstrate. It’d be pretty stupid if I ended this with an example that didn’t have the nested structure I talked about above wouldn’t it?

Anyway, scenes. Three of them. Eventually, I’ll teach you that scenes aren’t just chunks of scenarios, they also have some temporal and geographic considerations to consider, but that ain’t a today problem. My scenes are…

1. In the Town of Malarkhamy
2. Navigating the Forest of Major Neuroses
3. Exploring the Lost Pickling Hut of Shrub Niggurath

Initially, I’d describe that three-part scenario as having a linear structure. Yeah, yeah, I know, dungeon, but hear me out before you correct me. The elements of that scenario come in sequence. The heroes go from town to forest to dungeon. That’s what we in the business call a straight fucking line. The individual components might not be linear — they aren’t — and the party might end up falling back to rest or retreating to recover if someone gets killed or crazied or both, but the top-level structure is still a straight, linear sequence of scenes. Remember to stand back and squint.

Once you put the word lost in anything’s name, it kinda has to be hard to find. So, at some point, the party is going to have to, you know, find the Lost Pickling Hut of Shrub Niggurath. Besides, I’ve decided I’m doing cosmic horror bullshit today and that means there’s got to be an investigative feel to it somewhere along the way. If you’re not doing some research and investigation, are you even Cthulhuing? No.

I’m going to open the adventure with investigation. The players’ goal in the first scene — In the Town of Malarkhamy — is to locate the Lost Pickling Hut of Shrub Niggurath — and my typing fingers are really regretting my choice of examples now as I knew they would — the players’ goal is to locate the Lost Pickling Hut of Shrub Niggurath or, rather, to find some means of navigating to it.

Now, I don’t want this scene to be an outcome gate — it would be nice if the party got out of town before they failed — so this is a can’t lose kind of thing. It’s a sure bet that the party will find a way to reach the Lost Pickl… the site, but I still want to have some variable outcomes so that the party’s actions and choices matter. So, first, I’ll give them the opportunity to acquire helpful information and resources in town by interacting, researching, and overcoming some minor challenges. Second, I’ll let them choose between two different means of reaching the Lost P… dungeon, each with it’s own benefits and each with its own risks and costs. Hell, they can even pick both if they want to double up on risks and costs.

Thus, the different outcomes aren’t “win” and “lose.” Instead, it’s more like, “On a scale from zero to whatever, how well equipped are you to survive this really dangerous and idiotic expedition and what did are you risking or paying for the chance to undertake it.”

Since I know you’re all gonna ask me how I’d set up the two different options, maybe… maybe there was this hunter in town who accidentally stumbled on the L… place and maybe it broke his brain and he came back to town all naked and scratched up and crazy and he can lead the party back there and maybe he’s even really excited to which should be some kind of warning and maybe he’s actually really useful to have in the forest except he’s twitchy and crazy and trigger happy with his crossbow so he’s kind of risky to team up with. Maybe there’s also an adventurer’s corpse in a crypt in town that explored the site and is buried with his journal and the journal will lead the party to… there and it might even warn them that it’s all Blighttowny and to be prepared to deal with poison but robbing the adventurer’s grave means laboring under a curse through the adventure and also reading too much of the journal might have side effects or something. So maybe the party has to pick between an unstable but capable guide who can help them in the forest but might also accidentally shoot quarrels into someone or might turn on them once they reach the temple or a journal that will prepare them for the delve but will also leave them cursed for a while and maybe make someone a little bonkers to boot. Maybe. Maybe something like that.

Anyway…

Shape-wise, I’d say the town scene has an open structure. The players can pretty much go anywhere at any time, though some specific encounters might be inaccessible without special knowledge or without overcoming a challenge. The scene is like a sea with the encounters dotted like islands around it. At least, it is if you stand back and squint.

Obviously, I’d play the same game for the Forest of Major Neuroses. I’d probably make it a linear gauntlet of hazards to survive. Again the party can’t really fail, but every setback chews up resources so, by the time they reach the Lost Pickling Hut of Shrub Niggurath, they might be pretty bedraggled. If the hunter’s with them, he’ll make some of the forest challenges easier, but he might also bring some risks of his own.

For the final scene, Exploring the Lost Pickling Hut of Shrub Niggurath, I’d use a branching or labyrinthine shape as befits a dungeon and I’d focus heavily on hazards, puzzles, poisons, and plant monsters, obviously. The Yellow-Orange Sigil might be hidden within the Inner Canning Chamber and accessing it might require the party to solve a navigational puzzle or put together the clues on the three tablets to determine the proper invocation or some shit like that. Failure’s an option now, so the whole time the party is exploring the place, it’s seeping into their heads. If they take too long to access the Inner Canning Chamber, cut to them waking up naked and scratched up and maybe with some permanent mental or physical scars just outside of Malarkhamy. They have no memory of what happened or how they got back. If they ignore the dread sense of foreboding and the growing headaches and nosebleeds, they can retrace their path back to the Lost Pickling Hut of Shrub Niggurath, except it’s a collapsed ruin now and the Yellow-Orange Sigil is lost forever. Basic time-limited adventure with a cosmic horror flair. Dull and pedestrian I know, but I’m just spitballing for example’s sake here. Cut me some slack.

With that outline outlined, if I now stand back and squint at the whole adventure, I’d call its overall shape labyrinthine. Even though it’s macroscopic scenario structure is totally linear as hell, the dungeon itself will fill most of the game time and it’ll occupy most of the players’ memory space afterwards, so it’ll dominate the structure of the whole adventure. Everything before the dungeon is just buildup.

Likewise, the adventure will probably end up with a mystery, investigation, and exploration x-factor, even though most of the investigation is over in the first scene and even if the second and third scenes lean pretty heavily into hazards and fights. Finding a way to reach the temple, even though that’s a can’t lose proposition in a low-stakes town scene, feels like a major milestone and the two options each flavor the entire adventure in their own way. Meanwhile, the final, climactic challenge involves solving a puzzle by exploring or putting clues together. Again, when the players look back on the whole experience, they’re not going to remember fighting plant monsters, they’re going to remember the crazed hunter, the cursed journal, and trying to solve a logic puzzle while their character’s senses started to lie about what was real and what wasn’t.

And that is how adventure structure works and how you analyze it.

It’s just that easy.