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.

This lesson is also a bit of an informal one-off discussion. It’s not really necessary to follow the main series. If it ain’t for you, feel free to skip it. I’ll be covering several of these topics in a more formal way later on.

I’m Making a Terrible Mistake

As Hank Solo said to Mon Calamari that one time, “I have serious misgivings about the current situation…”

Or whatever.

There’s a good chance this interludey True Scenario Design digressiony discussion thing is going to be a disaster. I weighed the odds that it would work out against the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid, and, well, I wrote it anyway.

I told y’all a lie. A big lie. I built a lot of this series on a lie. Now, I’m coming clean. I don’t want to, though. I was planning to keep the lie going for a while. The problem is that some of y’all have been asking some uncomfortable questions in some open forums, and I can’t answer them without telling more lies.

It’s like when your kid stumbles out of bed late on Christmas Eve and catches you eating the cookies he left out for Santa while you stuff the tree. You could say, “Santa was running late, so he dropped off the presents and asked me to put them under the tree, and you just missed him,” but you know the jig is kinda up.

This really is a Santa Claus lie, too. It’s a lie that serves several good, useful purposes. It’s also a lie that, when it’s laid bare to someone mature enough to handle the truth, it fills the deceived child with love and gratitude. The truth makes the lie better. Unless the child is a little shit. Which most readers… I mean, most children are.

But it sounds good in theory.

Today, I’m going to own the lie. I’m going to explain why I lied. I’m going to show you that it was a lie of love and why the world is a better place because you believed the lie before you learned the truth. I’m going to teach you how to keep the spirit of the lie in your heart while carrying the truth in your head. Because, in the end, the lie wasn’t really a lie; it was just a truth of the heart and the soul instead of the head.

But some of you ain’t mature enough to get any of that kind of like how I wasn’t ready to catch my parents out in the Santa lie. Of course, I grew up eventually and now I’m an absolute paragon of humble, spiritual love and wisdom, unlike many of you dumbasses. You wish you could be like me, but the sad truth is that most of you never will be.

If you’re not ready to learn the truth yet, don’t worry. Eventually, you will be, and I’ll tell you the truth then. You can close this lesson down and wait a few days for the next Feature. That’s for the best. Believing the lie will do you a lot of good throughout the next few weeks of True Scenario Designery.

In fact, I’ve actually devised a little test. It’ll help you decide whether you’re ready to have the lie laid bare and can accept the spiritual truth in the lie. If you pass the test, you can read on. If you fail, you’ve got to stop reading. Fair? Good.

You Must Be This Wise to Ride

In a moment, I’m going to present you with a question. I’m going to give you a chance to come up with an answer in your head, and then I’m going to tell you the correct answer. I’m going to be very exact about the correct answer. There is no credit for getting close enough. Either you’re exactly right or you’re totally wrong. I am going to explain to you exactly why the correct answer is, in fact, the only objectively correct answer to the question I asked. Many of you aren’t going to like it. Many of you won’t agree.

The test isn’t about whether you get the correct answer or not. That doesn’t matter. Most people actually don’t get this question right. What matters is how you react to my explaining the correct answer. If you accept the correct answer, accept your mistake, and want to know how the hell that ties into True Scenario Design, Angry Hat Theory, the difference between published modules and scenario design, whether you can build an encounter without a challenge, and why you don’t need a special term for it if you do, then you get to keep reading. You’re ready. You’re wise enough and mature enough. Good for you.

If, however, you do not accept that the correct answer is, in fact, the only, objectively correct answer, you aren’t ready yet for this lesson. If you’re filled with a furious desire to disagree, to prove your answer correct, to argue, or to find the flaws in my explanation, I will allow you to post one — and only one — incorrect, screaming, dumbass comment — I won’t respond — and then you have to stop reading this discussion and go away. This lesson isn’t for you. You can’t handle it.

While you wait for my next Feature, why don’t you read Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather — one of the five actual, good Discworld novels — and write a 500-word essay on its central themes. It’ll do you some good.

Here’s the question…

Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?

Got an answer in your head? Good. Let’s see if you got it right…

The correct answer is that a tomato is a vegetable. Note, specifically, that the correct answer is a single, simple, declarative statement. A tomato is a vegetable. If you added any qualifiers of clarifications or in any way suggested that the answer was conditionally dependent on perspective or subject, you’re wrong. If you suggested that there might be multiple answers, but one was the most correct, you got it wrong.

A tomato is a vegetable. Full stop.

Did you get it right? Well, it doesn’t matter. The test isn’t about whether you got it right. It’s about how you react to getting it wrong. So let me explain why the correct answer is necessarily just a single, simple, five-word declaration firmly stating that a tomato is in fact a vegetable and nothing else. Then I’ll give y’all time to pack up your stuff and leave for the day.

There are multiple ways to consider the fruitness of a tomato. Or the lack thereof. In a biology lab, for example, a tomato is a fruit. Biologically, a fruit is the ripened ovary of a flowering plant enclosing one or more seeds. Fruits are distended plant gonads with fetal plants inside. If it ain’t that, it ain’t a fruit. That’s biology.

In the kitchen, though, fruitness ain’t about biology. Fruitness is instead about the distinction between sweetness and savoryness. It’s about sugar content. It’s about which preparation techniques unlock and enhance the thing’s natural flavors and which processes just ruin the thing. It’s about what other things you can pair the thing with. Fruitness, in the kitchen, is a functional definition. It ain’t about classification, but about utility and purpose. That’s because, in the kitchen, we’re trying to cook a good meal, so we have to care about what makes meals good.

Y’all know that shit. More or less. That’s why we can laugh at dumbass memes about using the classification of tomatoes to define Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma and score some “smartest dude on the internet” points by bringing up salsa.

So how can I say, then, that the correct answer to my question is a simple, clear, concise statement that a tomato is a vegetable? How can I disqualify any answer that acknowledges multiple classifications for the humble tomato? It’s down to the part of the question you missed. The part everyone misses.

I told you precisely the setting in which I was asking the question. I left no ambiguity at all about whether I was standing in a biology lab or a kitchen when I asked the question. You cannot read the question I posed and think I’m talking about anything other than cooking definitions.

You see, in the biology lab, there’s no such thing as a vegetable. It’s not a biological category. Biologists don’t use the word vegetable unless they’re cooking. Scientifically speaking, there’s no such thing as a vegetable. It’s a classification that only exists in a kitchen.

Had I said, “Is a tomato a fruit?” it would have been correct to point out the ambiguity in the question and that there were different answers depending on context. But I didn’t do that. I presented two alternatives linked by a correlative conjunction, thereby establishing that the alternatives were mutually exclusive, but that both were potentially valid answers, even though only one could actually be correct. Because one of the alternatives only exists within a certain context, for the question itself to be valid, that context must be the one in which I posed the question. Basic communication protocols require an assumption of validity unless validity is demonstrably impossible, which is not the case with my question. Therefore, there is no ambiguity in the question and, consequently, there can be no ambiguity in the answer.

In other words, the only way that question can possibly be valid is if I’m standing in a kitchen, and the answer must then be the answer you would give in a kitchen.

How are you doing? You okay? You want to learn why this is something you need to grok as a True Scenario Designer? You want to learn why it’s good for True Scenario Designers to believe in Santa Claus in spirit even when they know he’s not actually real? Or are you already looking for the loophole? Are you formulating an incorrect response about how the word ‘or’ could also be a coordinating conjunction, or looking for a context outside of biology labs and kitchens where it might actually be necessary to discuss the classification of a tomato?

Those of you who are staying, just chill for a sec. Those of you who are leaving, scribble your nasty notes and leave them on my desk, and then get the hell out. I’ll see you next week.

Is Every Scenario Really a Scenario?

Do you remember when I told all y’all that every Scenario has a goal, a central challenge, outcomes, and context? Remember when I went on to say that every scenario has gameplay dynamics like momentum and inertia, and probably other dynamics I didn’t even talk about yet? Remember when I told you that scenarios have structures and shapes at every level of the scenario hierarchy? Now, do you remember when I said everything is a scenario? Remember when I said every Encounter and every Scene and every Adventure and every Arc is a Scenario?

Good. I’m glad you’ve been paying attention.

What’s the obvious conclusion of all that crap you just remembered? It’s that every thing you design as a Scenario Designer, every giant-ass non-goal-driven unplotted campaigns and every teensy tiny encounter haggling with some blacksmith over the price of a coif must contain a challenge and a bunch of outcomes and have momentum and inertia and must be drawn on a flowchart that can take one of six or four or seven or infinity shapes. Obviously.

That’s just logical, right? If everything I said above was true, then that must be how it is, right?

If everything I said above was actually true…

Of course I lied. You all know I lied. If you didn’t know I was lying, you’re a dumbass.

The question, though, is what was the lie? And what is the truth?

Maybe the truth is that every Scenario doesn’t actually have all the things that I said Scenarios must have. Maybe you can have incomplete Scenarios. Maybe you can have Scenarios that aren’t Scenarios at all. Maybe you can run a Campaign that really is just The Many Adventures of the Foolhardy Companions with no central challenge or overarching goal tying them together. Maybe you can have an Encounter that poses no challenge at all, but really is just dicking around with the blacksmith. Or an Encounter that’s just a meeting with the mayor so he can outline the quest and offer you a bag of gold. Maybe you can have a Scene that’s just a town you can stock up for your Adventure in.

Or maybe the truth is that I’m going to someday reveal some new gameplay element that’s for things that are like Scenarios, but without the trappings of a Scenario. I mean, once upon a time, I used the word ‘scene’ to describe an encounter-like thing that lacked a challenge or goals. For that matter, I did recently reveal that I use the word ‘interlude’ when I’m designing the little chunks of gameplay that bridge the gaps between Adventures. They’re not quite Adventures and don’t have the trappings of real Adventures, but they exist at the same hierarchical level and serve as transitional elements.

There was a recent discussion in my supporter Discord community about where things like exposition scenes fit into my whole Standard Model of True Scenario Designery. Note my use, by the way, of the small ‘s’ because a scene isn’t a Scene, though I also no longer use the word ‘scene’ to describe a scene either.

Actually, don’t worry about the difference. I know what I mean; that’s what matters.

Exposition scenes. Every adventure needs a scene in which the quest-giver tells the adventurers what the hell he’s hiring them to do, right? After all, if an adventure is an Adventure, it’s a Scenario, and Scenarios have goals, and goals are player-facing elements, so if you don’t hit the players in the face with the goal, you don’t have a Scenario and your Adventure is just an adventure. Except, of course, that you don’t have to do that with an exposition scene. You can do it with a notice on a board or a treasure map or a corpse with a clue and a reason to care who corpsed it. It’s all the same; it all gives the players a goal to chase and a reason to chase it.

So let’s say you decide to go with an exposition scene. So you script an encounter wherein the heroes meet the burgher in the back of the tavern, and he offers them a bag of gold and a story about foul, pillaging goblins in some cave behind a waterfall somewhere. You know the drill. Is that encounter an Encounter? Do you have to make it an Encounter? If not, then what is it? Where does it fit on the conspiracy board that comprises my plan for this course?

What about my Interludes? Those have a capital letter when I type them. What the hell are they? Are they Scenes? Are they Adventures? Do I make them Scenarios? Are they incomplete Scenarios? Is an Interlude a thing? Is there a note on my course outline to someday introduce Interludes? Are they just a part of my own private, personal lexicon? Will I make them part of the canonical lexicon of the Angrican Church? Is there even a difference between my personal lexicon and the Angrican Church canon? Are you a heretic for asking the question?

For that matter, where do I get off repeatedly yelling at y’all to accept and respect my terminology and officially changing the definition of the word ‘Scene’ and now throwing around casual mentions of small-s ‘scenes’ as if they’re a thing and they’re on the same level as an encounter? Or maybe even an Encounter?

Am I just fucking with you?

Well… a little. That’s what I do. Get over it.

Can you have a Scenario or a Scenario Element that isn’t a Scenario? Of course you can. You already knew that shit. Designing an adventure means designing a lot of shit that isn’t actually, technically adventure. When you map a town, do you name and label and populate every building? Of course you don’t. If you do, there’s something wrong with you. Stop it. Get some help. Every town map includes bunches of unlabeled little rectangles. Ask the cartographer about them and he’ll mutter, “I don’t know… houses, I guess.” They’re there because town maps need enough buildings on them to look like maps of towns, but only a very small number of those buildings have any useful gameplay purpose. Hell, even most of the named and labeled buildings are useless. I’ve drawn and named and labeled tons of shit on town maps I knew my players would never, ever visit or care about. Who the hell ever goes to the fisherman’s wharf? Or the city watch’s barracks?

Yes, I know sometimes some adventures do take you to places like that. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m saying. That tomato thing was supposed to get rid of you pedantic “smartest dude in the room” assholes.

Why name and label places you know will never come up in-game? There are lots of reasons to do that. Sometimes, they provide context or imply information about the town. Sometimes they make the town seem more like a real place. Sometimes, they’re just there because I felt like drawing a wharf.

Do those things count as Scenarios or Scenario Elements? Are unlabeled buildings on a town map the same as Scenario Elements without a goal? What do you think? Are there encounters that aren’t Encounters? Are there encounters without goals or challenges or gameplay dynamics? Of course there are. Why? Because sometimes you need to provide context or information, like, say, the goal of an Adventure. So you add an encounter with the burgher at the tavern. Sometimes you need to pace shit out, so you add an encounter with a harmless traveler by the side of the road. Sometimes you need to bring the world of the Adventure to life, so you add another encounter with another nobody. Sometimes, you just want to add a reference to Twin Peaks in your horror adventure to make yourself giggle, so you sneak in an encounter with a nothing of a character.

Those encounters ain’t any different from the unlabeled boxes on the town map. They’re also no different from the empty rooms in a dungeon. Think about that. How many times have you seen an empty room included in a dungeon? Lots, right? Dungeons need empty rooms. But how many of those rooms are actually empty? Do they really have nothing in them? Or is it just that what’s in them is insubstantial fluff? Flavorful? Maybe. Informative? Sometimes. But still just fluffy filler.

Actually, noodle this, kids…

The first room in a dungeon — the entrance room — is often empty. They may not be truly Empty, but they are usually pretty empty. They’re just the space on the other side of the yawning entrance with a few doorways leading deeper into the darkness. They’re there because dungeons need entrances and because thresholds are good for pacing. Isn’t that fluffy little meeting with the town burgher just an empty entrance hall in a dungeon? That burgher is just the personification of the door to the site and the promise of adventure beyond.

When I said every encounter is an Encounter, I didn’t think you’d all actually believe me. Not really. I thought you knew better. It was a spirit of Christmas kind of thing. Santa Claus isn’t really real, but as long as we keep love and generosity in our hearts, Santa Claus is inside every one of us. When I said every encounter is an Encounter, I assumed you knew that what I meant was that every encounter is an Encounter except for all the vacuous shit between the Encounters that are just encounters and make the Scenario work or bring it to life or pace it out or make the map look symmetrical enough to seem like a temple or to give me a space for a pop-culture reference I want to shove into my adventure.

Will I someday reveal that there’s a term for encounters that aren’t Encounters and scenes that aren’t Scenes and the Interludes between Adventures? Maybe. Probably not, though. We don’t really need terms for them. Actually, the dark, dirty secret is we don’t need even the terms I’ve already coined. We don’t need terms for anything. Which is good because terms are evil and ruin your ability to make good games. But don’t sweat that.

See, even if I did want to come up with a term for all the lowercase filler crap you have to add to make a Campaign or an Adventure or a Scene work, I couldn’t. I’d be trying to describe something so broad as to defy description. I’d basically be giving you a word for everything that isn’t a Scenario Element. It’d be like having a word for everything that isn’t a chair. It would communicate nothing. I can’t even give functional descriptions at each of the different hierarchical levels because there’s an infinity of functions and purposes for the filler crap at every level. Besides, it’s already possible to communicate about this shit. “I need to establish the goal of the adventure,” you can say, “So I added a meeting with the town burgher at the start of the adventure.” Or you can say, “The map needed a room here to look complete, so I added one, and then I added some statues so it wouldn’t look so empty.” Or something like, “I thought it would be funny to stick a South Park reference in my sewer dungeon so I put in an altar to the Spirit of Human Generosity and statted up a sentient, talking blob of poop the players can meet.”

Don’t pretend you’ve never done any dumbass thing like that. I know you.

You have to remember all this shit about Scenarios and Scenario Elements isn’t actually a total and complete picture of everything that makes up an adventure. Or an Adventure. Whatever. This shit’s all very specifically about the gameplay challenge parts of the adventure and the dynamics that make them work. There’s more to a Scenario than the scenario is what I’m saying. Hell, I already told you that adventures have both Scenario Structures and Narrative Structures. That means, necessarily, there are all sorts of non-Scenario components in every Scenario. Did any of you fuckers consider how the hell you can make a Scenario Element out of a Denouement? You literally can’t! By definition. A Denouement cannot have a goal or challenges.

But I could have explained all of that without wasting a thousand words rage-baiting you with a stupid example of how important context is in everything you do. So what the hell was with that tomato thing?

Module vs. Scenario

Do you remember a few months ago when I talked about Hat Theory? The idea that Game Masters, Scenario Designers, and Campaign Managers are totally different people with different priorities and different jobs even when they’re actually all just you switching between one job and another? If you don’t remember it, go back and reread my long-ass screed about it. It remains as important as it ever was and always will be.

By the way, note that I’m using the word ‘theory’ in the scientific sense here. Hat Theory isn’t just this idea I have that I think might be true, but rather, it’s as close to true as anything can be that isn’t actually made of math. Hat Theory is Hat Fact. Accept it.

Roleplaying gaming has a language, right? There are words that are totally unique to the hobby. At least, there are terms that have unique meanings to roleplaying gaming hobbyists. The word ‘campaign’, for example, has a specific meaning to a gamer that it doesn’t have anywhere else.

Like all jargons, roleplaying gamespeak emerged organically and haphazardly, and it’s evolved over time. There’s no published dictionary or glossary, and you can’t take Roleplaying Gamespeak 101 in college. Instead, you’ve got to learn it through use, experience, and context. Most of the words in roleplaying gamespeak can’t be precisely defined, but we know what they mean when we see them. That’s why we have so many stupid-ass fights about what the word ‘encounter’ really, technically means, by the way. It’s also why that’s such a stupid-ass thing to fight about.

Yes, I know I’ve stupid-assedly fought in more than a few of those stupid-ass fights myself. There’s a lot of dumbass terminology stances in my archive I wish I could erase, but I can’t, because there’s actually valuable analysis and ideas in every one because I’m such a sexy gaming genius. By the way, my terminology stance in this course isn’t the same. I ain’t pretending I’m revealing the true and correct definitions of terms here — except as a joke — but rather admit fully that I’m coining terms as and when I need them to communicate specific ideas to a specific audience for specific reasons. That’s why I actually might someday decide to give small ‘e’ encounters a special name of their own. Today, though, I don’t think they need a name.

Why don’t I think they need a name? Don’t worry about why. Instead, worry about the two very particular problems all this jargon shit causes me and, by extension, causes all of you.

First, the crappy, haphazard, unsophisticated jargon of roleplaying gamespeak isn’t sufficient for most of the ideas I’m trying to convey. That’s mainly because I’m trying to cram some very sophisticated esoterica from another, much more well-developed field with an equally haphazard and crappy jargon. But I am a roleplaying gamer and so are all of my crazy-ass readers. We know roleplaying gamespeak. When I refer to a small ‘e’ encounter, y’all know I’m discussing mostly self-contained nuggets of gameplay that form the basic units of roleplaying gameplay and pacing in which the players interact through the medium of their characters with people, places, and things in the gameworld before moving on to the next self-contained nugget of gameplay. You might not describe it as such, but you know what I’m talking about.

I need to use the jargon of roleplaying gamespeak to talk to roleplaying gamers, but every term comes saddled with a bunch of extra meaning, or else it’s too vague and broad and general to fit the rigorous game design ideas I need to add. Hence, I end up saying, “Okay, when I refer to a big ‘E’ Encounter, I’m talking in the Scenario Design context and I’m referring to small ‘e’ encounters that also meet the criteria for a basic unit of Scenario Design because they include a goal, a central challenge, and one or more prescribed outcomes.”

That brings me to the second problem. That whole big ‘E’ Encounter designation? It’s meaningless outside the context of Scenario Design. It’s like the word ‘vegetable’ in a biology lab. Saying it means nothing to a biologist except that you don’t belong in a biology lab. When you’re not being a Scenario Designer and when I’m not talking to Scenario Designers, it doesn’t matter whether an encounter is an Encounter or whether it’s just an encounter. Game Masters run encounters as they’re written. If it’s an Encounter with goals and a challenge, it’ll tell the Game Master how to resolve the challenge and decide when the goal’s achieved. If it’s just an encounter, it’ll tell the Game Master how to run the interaction and how to tell when the interaction is over.

There’s a huge difference between how True Scenario Designers look at Adventures and Encounters and how they’re presented to Game Masters. Look at any published module. Even good published modules don’t talk about Scenario Design. My module, The Fall of Silverpine Watch, is full of primordial True Scenario Design principles. Probably more than you know. But it’s written for Game Masters, not Scenario Designers. It’s not split into scenes; it’s split into parts. Two of its four parts are basically narrative elements — an Incitement and a Denoument — while the other two are a scene and a Scene. The parts are divided into encounters. Some are Encounters, but others are just encounters, and they’re presented as either events on a timeline or locations on a dungeon map. There is a Scenario Outline in the module — an especially carefully designed one in the third part, I might add — but it’s like the frame of a house. It’s covered over with floors and drywall and ceilings, and it’s carpeted and painted over, and there’s furniture everywhere. You need a stud finder to find the framing now that it’s finished.

The Scenario Design parts of True Scenario Designery — all this shit about hierarchies and structures and shapes and shit — are like the frame of a house. They define the shape and the structure, and they carry the load, but the house ain’t done until you hang drywall and install doors and windows and run wiring and paint and finish the floors and install the fixtures and move some furniture in. Once the house is finished, then someone — some Game Master — moves in and lives in the house. They don’t have to care about the framing or the wiring or anything. They just need to know that the light switches and the faucets work and where to find the bathroom.

Unless they start renovating, of course, but that’s when they put on their Scenario Designer hat and break out their stud finders and marking pencils and figure out which breaker controls what and which one is the plumbing wall.

I will eventually teach you how to finish the house. We’ll talk about all the crap you do to finish a Scenario. To make it livable. Playable. Whatever. Right now, though, you’re assuming that because I’m teaching you about framing, I’m saying there’s no such thing as drywall.

I suppose it’s kind of my fault, though. I shouldn’t have called this course True Scenario Designery because that does imply I’m gonna stop at architecture. I needed a term that was distinct from ‘adventure building,’ and so I lifted ‘scenario design’ from the field of video game design. I could have called it ‘level building’ or ‘world building,’ but those would have been confusing, and ‘game design’ would have implied I was going to talk about building game mechanics.

But Why Lie?

So now you know I lied. You also know the truth and why the truth is the truth. Hopefully, you’re prepared to accept that we’re all prisoners of context, whether we like it or not, so it’s best to learn how to play nice with it. Or at least learn how to compromise with it. Fighting context never works. But that leaves one question still unanswered…

Why did I lie?

Why did I purposely, deliberately convince you that everything is a Scenario with a goal and a challenge and all that crap? Couldn’t I just have said that some encounters are actually Encounters and then showed you that scenes can be Scenes and arcs can be Arcs and all the rest? Why did I so emphatically insist, over and over, that you see Scenarios in everything when I knew full well that lots of Scenarios are just scenarios?

First, like I said, I didn’t think you’d really believe that I meant ‘all’ when I said all. I kinda thought you’d recognize that what I was saying wasn’t totally, completely possible. I didn’t think you’d decide that everything else I ever taught you that actually worked was suddenly invalid.

Second, I did actually, gradually intend to reveal the truth. I’ve already started doing so. Last lesson, I started sneaking in a new phrase, ‘Scenario Element,’ so I could stop referring to hierarchical constructs so much. I used it several times in this long-ass discussion. I also started muddying up my own definitions and introducing the idea of context. In my shape discussion, I talked about how some shapes could totally be drawn as other shapes, remember? Hub-and-Spoke Elements are just Open Elements with a central meetup instead of a fuzzy cloud, and Open Elements are just highly interconnected Labyrinth Elements without all the lines drawn. I even tried to get you thinking about that shit with my discussion question for yourselves. Remember?

But if I was planning to fuzzy up and undo the lesson, why did I teach it in the first place? Why was I so damned insistent that you see Scenarios in everything if I was just going to come along and say, “Actually, Scenarios aren’t really everywhere; I lied?”

It’s because I needed you to believe in magic.

We’re all so used to the idea that challenges are these little nuggets of self-contained gameplay that live at the encounter level while goals float around at the adventure level. Before I started this course, did you ever think of building a Scene in town like it’s an Encounter, but bigger? Like it’s an encapsulated game with goals and challenges? Did you ever consider how you could use the same language you use to outline an Adventure to make a much richer Encounter or use the same game design you use to build a good Encounter to make an entire Campaign Arc that works as a self-contained game within a larger game full of smaller games? Would you have ever thought about diagramming the shape of an encounter as a separate thing from the map of the room it took place in?

Once you start seeing that there are lots of levels of gameplay and once you learn how to build gameplay outside the basic mechanics of action and encounter resolution, you see space for gameplay everywhere. Where once you might have spent half a session on an interlude in town, now you look at that interlude and ask yourself whether there’s a way to make it an actual part of the gameplay? Can the players start winning the adventure — or losing it — before they even leave home?

I needed you to believe in Santa Claus because, if you don’t learn to believe in big pretend magic when you’re little, you can’t see little real magic when you’re big. Worse yet, you can’t recognize your own power to create real magic all around you. And when that happens, the sun stops rising.

At least, in pretend elf games. I don’t do life lessons.