This article is bulls$&%. You know what that means. It’s going to be more rambly and less structury than usual. You’ve been warned. But there’s a twist. This bulls$%& article fits into an ongoing series. You can’t ignore it. Let me explain…

Not too long ago, I published this Amazing Adventure Building Checklist thing. Remember? And I asked everyone what I should do to follow that act. And two ideas were pretty much tied for votes. Not that it matters. This ain’t a f$&%ing democracy; I’m a GM.

Basically, half the respondents said they wanted me to use the checklist as an outline to build an adventure by way of practical example. And half wanted me to write about how to build adventures that had stakes and setbacks. Specifically, “failure states other than ‘everyone dies'” and “adventures where the party’s success or failure doesn’t hang in the balance of a single encounter or die roll.” And about one-third of respondents wanted me to do both.

It adds up. Read carefully.

Anyway, I decided to do both. Not at first, though. I was just going to do the adventure-building example thing and assume stakes and setbacks would come up at some point. But when I started outlining the example adventure, I realized I couldn’t wait to address some things. Particularly stakes. But less particularly, about how my adventure design philosophy is radically different from the default style in the DMG. Because the reason that people have so much trouble with stakes and setbacks and failure states and all that crap – I realized – is that all that s$&% just ain’t part of D&D’s adventure design philosophy. And they kind of never have been. In early editions, it was a matter of a lack of sophistication. Everything was rough back then. But later editions utterly failed to evolve along those lines. Hell, later editions devolved along those lines.

By the way, that realization and the resulting sudden change in what I was writing is why you’re reading this article today. Kind of late. And why the follow-up article will come in just two or three days. You know how it goes.

Anyway…

Because of how D&D is put together and because of the way D&D thinks adventures should work, you – the adventure designer – end up having to build a lot of systems and mechanics and rules and game elements if you want to make a more sophisticated adventure. D&D just lacks the tools you need to build anything other than the default style of D&D adventure.

And that’s what this article’s about. In the next few articles in this series, I’m going to teach you how to build adventures the Angry Way. But first, I have to explain what the Angry way is and how it differs from whatever you want to call the default D&D way. Let’s give it a simple name that’s easy to type so I can refer back to it. Let’s call it the Crap Way. That’s just a random name I picked out. It doesn’t mean anything at all.

Long, Rambling Introduction™ out of the way, let’s do some navel-gazing about the D&D adventure design philosophy and why mine is better!

Adventure Design for Dummies

This is a tale of two adventure design philosophies. I want to teach you how to design adventures. But I want to teach you how I design adventures. And my way is different from the way the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide describes. The DMG method – I’m going to call it the Crap Way just to differentiate it from the Angry Way – the Crap Way and the Angry Way are actually pretty similar. Most of the differences are very subtle. Though a few aren’t. The differences do have some pretty drastic consequences though. And the biggest consequence is that if you want to build an adventure the Angry Way, the DMG doesn’t provide you with all the tools you need. You have to learn how to jury-rig things from time to time. And how to pull some game elements out of your a$&%. But before we talk about that, let’s talk about what the Crap Way entails and how it evolved.

Now, look, I’m calling the default D&D adventure design model the Crap Way, but I don’t really MEAN that. Well, I do. But I mean it in the same way that I call a value meal from McDonald’s Crap Food. McDonald’s food is inexpensive, it’s easy to get ahold of, and it’s consistent. Walk into any McDonald’s anywhere and you know exactly what you’re going to get. Sure, it’s unhealthy. Extremely unhealthy. And it’s not an amazing culinary experience. It’s not top-quality food. But you don’t go to McDonald’s expecting a healthy meal of haute cuisine. At least, not if you’re smart. And if you get angry at McDonald’s for not providing fine, healthy dining, you’re the stupid one.

And that’s what the Crap Way of adventure design is all about. It’s quick, easy, and approachable. And it’s consistent. It gives perfectly fine, playable results every time. It produces fun games. But the games it produces ain’t nourishing – from a game-design perspective or a narrative perspective – and the games ain’t delicious. But they are good enough for most tables and most GMs. Kind of like how you can have a weekly get-together and order takeout crap food every week and be perfectly happy. One week, you get McDonald’s, one week you do Dominos, one week you do Taco Bell, and so on.

Problem is, though, that D&D isn’t particularly honest about this. It doesn’t tell you that its adventure design philosophy is the equivalent of takeout food. Or rather – to change the metaphor while keeping the theme – it’s the equivalent of buying a tray of ready-made, frozen Salisbury steak, some instant rice, and a can of green beans and calling that a homemade meal. You can make a lot of meals with ready-made, canned, frozen, and instant crap from the convenience store. Those meals will be inexpensive, consistent, and easy, and you can get a decent amount of variety by mixing and matching different products. But you won’t make any amazing meals with that s$&% and you won’t become a better chef. And that s$&% is loaded with sodium and lots of empty calories.

The truth is, if you want to make a good, healthy meal, you can’t just work with ready-made frozen crap and warm it up. You have to do more work, you have to make some stuff from scratch with fresh ingredients, and you have to learn some new skills. And D&D doesn’t have anything for you there. It has some stuff. But mostly, it doesn’t. That’s why so many people struggle with how to add stakes and failure states to a D&D adventure. Those are things D&D doesn’t really worry about so there’s nothing in the system that’ll help you do it. And it’s hard to add something to an adventure without some system hooks to hang it off of.

To add a third analogy to this f$&%ing mess, it’s like D&D comes with a microwave oven, a toaster oven, a hot plate, some basic cutlery, and salt and pepper shakers. You can feed yourself with that s$&%. But if you ever want to make a meal that makes you proud, you’re going to need some new appliances and a bigger selection of spices.

Enough with the analogies. Let’s get specific. D&D’s default adventure design model is what I call the Encounter Model. A D&D adventure is a string of encounters. They don’t have to be combat encounters, mind you. D&D also tells you how to handle obstacles and traps and even basic social interactions. I’m not saying D&D is all about combat. But it is all about encounters.

D&D teaches you how to design encounters. And it teaches you how to design them in a very specific way. It teaches you how to build encounters that provide minimal challenge and will likely never, ever kill anyone. We can argue about whether that’s right or wrong some other time. This ain’t about right or wrong. I’m just telling you what D&D teaches you.

D&D also teaches you how to arrange those encounters in different ways. You don’t just have to string those encounters together into a linear gauntlet. You can arrange them as rooms in a dungeon the players can freely explore. Or you can arrange them as events on a timeline. Or as points of interest scattered around a hex map.

The way the default adventure plays out is like this: the players move from encounter to encounter. They overcome each one in turn and keep moving until they get to the encounter that wins the adventure. The adventure thus presents two challenges. First, the players have to navigate the structure of the encounters. Get through the maze or dungeon or hex map or whatever. Second, they have to overcome each encounter they come to so they can continue navigating.

Using that basic framework, you can do a lot. You can add branching paths and decision points and keys and locks and hidden paths and dead ends. You can get a lot of variety out of the Crap Way. I’m not saying you can’t. But what you can’t do is design a challenge that isn’t based on overcoming an encounter or navigating a flowchart. Not with just the tools D&D gives you anyway.

And there’s something else in D&D that imposes even more limitations.

Given that “survive all the encounters until you win” is basically the goal in every D&D adventure, the main challenge in every adventure is “can you manage your resources efficiently enough to be capable of surviving every encounter?” In other words, the goal of a D&D adventure is always “get through all the encounters before you run out of spells and hit points, and healing potions and s$&%.” That’s what we call the attrition model of challenge.

Early on, though, D&D’s designers saw a serious flaw in that model. Several serious flaws. The first is that if the players handle an early encounter really inefficiently, they might end up doomed without knowing they’re doomed until much later. The second is that the players never actually have any idea how many encounters are between them and the goal and they don’t always know when they will be able to recover their resources or gain new ones. So, they can’t really efficiently ration their resources. Thus, the optimal way of efficiently handling every encounter is to never use any resources ever. Hoard everything because you might need it later. And if you ever do use a resource, recover or replace it immediately if possible. The third is that, because efficiency is so important, it’s disadvantageous to explore side passages and take on optional challenges. Resource attrition being THE thing that will kill you, wasting resources on anything not required for victory is just blasting yourself in the leg with an elephant gun. And that keeps players from freely exploring.

To solve these problems, the designers have gradually tried to minimize the role attrition plays in the game. The designers wrote extensively about this when they were designing 4th Edition. And they took inspiration from both online role-playing games and from first-person shooters and other action games that were popular in the early and mid-2000s. That’s why 4E resources were either always available, available once per fight, or available once per day. And why healing surges could be used after pretty much every fight to get you back up to full – or nearly full – health. They were cribbing cooldown timers from World of Warcraft and regenerating health from Halo and Call of Duty. The goal was to make encounters more self-contained affairs and move away from attrition. The party would enter every encounter reasonably fresh and every encounter would, therefore, provide a consistent level of challenge.

Then, along came 5th Edition. 5E kept some of that s$&%. Stuff like cantrips and class abilities that recover during a short rest and hit dice and suchlike. But 5E also added a new idea to the mix. The idea that encounters should be balanced almost exclusively against the characters’ non-expendable resources and that everything extra the characters could do was just gravy. An average encounter should be easily winnable by a party that uses nothing more than its basic attacks and cantrips. No magic items. No high-level spells. And 5E also kept the 4E model of rest and recovery. It’s pretty trivial to rest after every encounter and the DMG encourages GMs to design their adventures around regular rests and recoveries. That’s what that ‘adventuring day’ bulls%$& is about. And the DMG also discourages GMs from denying the players a rest whenever they need one.

By the way, if you go online and talk about how important it is to keep the players from resting too often, you’re going against the design philosophy of 5E. I know why you’re doing it. I understand the motive. And I’m actually with you one hundred percent. But we’re both wrong. That ain’t how D&D is designed. We just don’t like the design.

Now, the more cerebrally gifted among you can already see where this going. It’s the reason why, when I mentioned building stakes and failure states into adventures, people pricked up their ears. And it’s why lots of people specifically mentioned stakes “other than death” and failures that “don’t hinge on a single encounter or die roll.” But let me spell it out.

D&D only provides tools and instructions for building obstacle courses. The only challenges built into those obstacle courses are “navigate the maze of encounters” and “win every encounter.” Every encounter is basically a pass-fail proposition. And D&D evolved such that every encounter is an entirely self-contained challenge. This means the only way to lose an adventure is to lose an encounter in such a way that you can’t continue the adventure. Or to encounter a dead end in such a way that you can’t backtrack and try again. There’s only two fails states built into D&D: “dead” and “blocked forever.”

And THAT is what my readers – and many, MANY other GMs – are recognizing unconsciously when they struggle with stakes, loss conditions, bottlenecks, setbacks, and all that other crap.

But Angry, You CAN Do That in D&D…

And now’s the part where I get a crap-ton of comments from people who are less concerned with learning something than they are with defending D&D and the poor, little, vulnerable million-dollar company from the powerful, evil, privileged dude who has to beg people to pay him a couple of bucks a month each so he can maintain a f$&%ing blog. So, by all means, please jump into the comment section right now and explain how “you don’t have to do things that way” and “you can do anything in D&D because D&D gives you all the power.” I’m sure Jeremy and Chris will give you a pat on the head for your loyal service. Way to punch up there.

Look, I’m not saying you can’t make more sophisticated adventures. My whole f$&%ing point is that you can. What I’m saying, though, is that you can’t build adventures the way the DMG says and then just sprinkle in stakes and loss conditions and sophistication and stuff. You have to build adventures differently from the beginning and you have to be ready to use different tools. Or even make your own tools.

Look: the DMG basically tells you to come up with a story, then draw a map – or a timeline or a flowchart – and then fill that map with challenges built according to the special challenge-building tools and then watch the players have fun and then have some McDonald’s to celebrate. Yay! Build a dungeon, then populate it. Which is exactly what every edition before it said too.

But D&D adventures have grown more sophisticated in the last 50 years. You can actually pinpoint the exact date when most D&D GMs realized adventures were more sophisticated. It was November 1, 1983. That was the day most GMs found out D&D adventures had changed. Look it up.

But D&D hasn’t caught up to its own adventure design evolution. It says you should stop at “build a dungeon and populate it.” But you can’t stop there if you want any level of sophistication. And you’re going to have to figure out precisely what else you have to do on your own. D&D won’t help you with that. And D&D doesn’t have the tools to do it. And some of the bits of D&D are actually working against you. And, not only that, your players were probably raised on the Crap Way of making adventures and they’re going to have to learn – slowly and painfully – how to play a more sophisticated game.

For example, you can never count on players to try to escape a fight they can’t win. They’ve been trained to think they can win any encounter, no matter how bad things get. And they know the rules basically make it impossible to flee from anything that isn’t slower than their characters. Because everyone has to take turns in combat and because movement rates are so precise and unchanging, there’s just no way to run from anything. In early editions, there was a section in the Player’s Handbook called “Pursuit and Evasion” that told players that they COULD escape because the rules were different once they tried to get away. But that’s gone now.

Given that the players will never accept that they can lose a fight and don’t believe they can escape from a fight alive anyway, you tell me how the motherloving f$&% they could ever LOSE a fight in a way that doesn’t end with them all unconscious or dead.

If you want to design a sophisticated adventure, you have to add stuff to the game. You have to move beyond building encounters and stringing them together. You have to add mechanics. You have to add game elements. You have to fight the system sometimes. And you have to tell your players – sometimes explicitly – how things have changed and how to play a proper, Angry adventure instead of a Crap adventure.

Now, when I say you have to add mechanics and game elements, understand they don’t have to be huge, complex things. Hell, they should always be as small as possible. Even simple, mostly narrative things are mechanics and game elements. A ticking clock on an adventure is a game mechanic you have to invent. D&D is pretty vague on how to even track time even though everything has a very precise, specific duration on it. Moreover, there’s nothing in D&D that will tell you how to set the clock. How many days is the right number of days given the challenges involved? Notice how so many people extoll the virtues of the ticking clock as something every GM should just ‘do’ in every adventure, but never talk about any specifics of how to track it and how to set the clock based on how many challenges are standing between the players and victory.

My point is that even simple s$%& like ticking clocks are game elements and mechanics. They can be big and complicated, like crafting systems and tension pools. Or they can be small and limited, like giving everyone in the party a +2 bonus on Charisma checks while they’re in town because they saved the town’s beloved foo dog puppy mascot. They can even be non-mechanical, like providing a clue about the dragon’s secret weakness that smart players can take advantage of if the party takes the time to read a certain book.

I guess, what I’m trying to say is that you need to be willing to break the rules or invent new rules whenever the rules seem to go against what you’re trying to accomplish with your adventure. And, while I’ll do my best to give you advice on how and when to do that, that’s all I can give you. Advice. I can’t give you creativity or talent or skill. That s$&% comes with time. And hard work. And it isn’t always fun work. There ain’t a lot of fun to be found in hitting an adventure design logjam because you can’t figure out a mechanical way to handle the chariot race in Scene 4, Encounter 2a. That s$&% gets frustrating. Especially if all you really want is just to design creative encounters and string them together into cool adventures.

It’s okay not to want to be a game designer. Even if you want to design your own adventures.

Given that, if you just want to draw a map and fill it with monsters, crack open the DMG and follow the steps. You don’t need me to tell you how to do that. Except insofar as you need me to explain their utterly arcane, mathematical mess of an encounter building system. Which I’ve already done. If you want to build adventures the Crap Way, I’ll never tell you you’re wrong. You can have fun for years on Crap Adventures. And I like Taco Bell and frozen Salisbury steak and unsophisticated dungeon crawls as much as anyone else.

But if you want something more, I’ll help you learn how to do things MY way. Just be warned it’ll take time and effort and we’ll be breaking some rules and inventing some new ones. You just have to start small and grow. And you’re going to have to figure some s$&% out for yourself. Good luck.

What Does The Angry Way Mean?

I’m going to end this whole thing with a very brief attempt to spell out what I might describe as my core adventure design principles. Except I know it’s going to be a partial description. And I know it’s going to be all over the place. Because this is s$&% I know in my gut, not s$&% I’ve ever tried to write down. It’ll hopefully provide some insight, but it’ll also be less useful than just watching me work throughout the next few articles.

First, understand that adventure designers and game masters are different people. They have different goals. When you’re designing an adventure, you are doing one thing. And when you’re running a game, you’re doing something different. Game masters make s$&% adventure designers and designers make crappy GMs. I know that’s weird, but if you can’t separate that s$&% in your head, you can’t build adventures the Angry way.

When you’re designing an adventure, your job is to build a complete adventure that provides both a good narrative experience and fun gameplay experience. Because that’s what an adventure is. You’re going to want to take a top-down approach. That means you want to plan the big picture first and then break it down into parts and fill in the details. You’re also going to want to know how you see the adventure playing out assuming everything goes perfectly so that you can establish proper gameplay and story beats, a good pacing curve, and a good difficulty curve.

When you’re running an adventure, your job is to be flexible. You present the situations to the players and respond to their actions. Whatever game they actually end up playing is the one you run. You’re not trying to design or redesign anything. You’re just trying to keep the game moving and keep up with the players. If the players f$&% up the pacing curve or do things out of order or wreck the climax of the encounter with one clever action, so be it. Let that s$&% happen. And if the players get into serious trouble, don’t redesign the adventure to save their a$&es. Let that s$&% happen too.

If you can’t separate adventure-designer-you from game-designer-you, and trust each of you to do your jobs, and trust your players to live with the consequences of their choices, you can’t design or run adventures the Angry Way. Sorry. Go back to the DMG and start filling in your dungeon du jour.

I say all of that so that you understand where I come from when I tell adventure designers how to plan their adventures around sessions and plot points and scene structures and s$&%. I know I’m telling the adventure designer to build an ideal adventure and that the adventure likely won’t play out that way once it comes into contact with the players. I’m trusting the GM running the adventure to do their job the way they’re supposed to. To handle it.

Anyway…

An adventure is the smallest unit of role-playing game that is a complete role-playing game experience. An adventure can vary in length from one session up to however many sessions you want, but if an adventure is designed to go on for more than six sessions, it should be broken up into parts. I call such things adventure paths. A campaign is just a series of two or more adventures or adventure paths or whatever. With or without an overarching story. I’m just spelling this s$&% out, by the way, to make sure we’re all using the same terminology. And if you’re interested, the big WotC hardbacks are closest to adventure paths in my mind. But WotC isn’t really good at structuring things so you really can’t compare the s$&% they churn out to the Angry Way.

An RPG adventure is both a game and a narrative experience. It has to be fun to play and it must provide a satisfying story. Those don’t have to be on equal footing, but they both have to exist. An amazing game with a barebones story is okay. So is an amazing story with limited gameplay. But there’s a limit. You can’t focus entirely on one, neglect the other, and slap a coat of paint on it in the end. None of that ‘excuse plot’ bulls%&$. And none of that “I ran a whole session of D&D and never rolled a single die because it was all story” bulls$&% either. If you want to write a game about rescuing a princess, you also have to tell a story about rescuing a princess. And the story and the gameplay have to work together. Abstract crap can’t happen just because it makes a good game and story developments that have no mechanical impact are weak-a$& bulls$&%.

As an adventure designer, you have to provide everything necessary to make a complete game and a complete narrative. Which means you have to fill in anything that’s missing from the system one way or the other. And that also means you have to be both a good game designer and a good writer.

When the needs of the narrative and the needs of the game come into conflict, you’ve got to resolve that conflict and decide which side wins. There’s no universal rule to apply. Neither is inherently more valuable than the other. Every conflict has to be considered and resolved on its own merits. Gradually, you’ll establish patterns and habits as you resolve these sorts of conflicts. And as you make other tradeoffs. That’s called ‘your style’.

The more you prepare, the better your adventure will be and the more smoothly it will play out, even if everything goes wrong. Your job as an adventure designer is to prepare the GM as fully as possible to run the game and resolve any problems that arise on the way. The GM will figure out how to actually make the game happen.

If the adventure designer and the game master share the same brain, then preparation that’s entirely in your head or in the form of scrawled, shorthand notes are totally fine. But remember that you forget more things than you think you do. You just can’t remember what they were.

Designing an adventure is not the same as preparing an adventure. Everyone’s notes and prep work look different. I’m teaching you how to design adventures. Not how to keep notes and prepare adventures.

It is okay to leave blanks for the GM to fill in when they’re running the game. But do it sparingly. GMs make terrible game designers. Even if they are the same person.

While you need to make sure the GM running the adventure has the big picture and knows what’s going on throughout the whole adventure, you only need to provide the GM with enough actual gameplay to fill the next session. Just stay one session ahead of the players and you’re fine.

Speaking of that, the adventure is going to be played in a series of sessions. Be smart. Structure your adventure so that it plays best as a series of sessions. In fact, use the session structure to design a good pacing curve. Just understand that the GM probably won’t be able to line everything up perfectly. That’s okay.

It’s okay for the players to fail. It’s okay for players to lose. It’s okay for characters to die. If those things aren’t possible, you haven’t designed a complete gameplay experience. People can lose games.

If you don’t design for the possibility of loss and failure and consciously decide what’s on the line and what the cost of failure is, the players are going to find ways to lose the game in ways that ruin the experience and the GM won’t know what to do about it.

The best adventures are the ones where victory and defeat are the sum results of a thousand small decisions. The worst adventures are the ones where victory means you won the last encounter and defeat means you lost any encounter at all.

And remember, everything I’ve said above has exceptions.