They say that the wisest man is the man who knows he knows nothing. And in a small sense, that’s true. But in a much larger sense, that’s actually complete and utter bulls$&%. I mean, think about it. Wise people are people who possesses information – factual information – about the world. By definition, a wise person is one that knows true things, not one that believes false things. So, the wisest person in the world must necessarily know lots of true things and hold almost no false beliefs. Thus, it’d be ridiculous to say the wisest person is someone who knows NOTHING. So, if a person who knows lots of things knows that they know nothing, they possess at least one false belief. Now, consider two equally wise people, one of whom believes he knows nothing and one of whom knows exactly what he does and does not know. Which of the two is wiser? My point is, I’m a really smart guy and I know it. But that doesn’t mean I know EVERYTHING. I know lots of things and I know what I know, but sometimes I discover something that I’d never really thought about before.
Recently, I found myself in a conversation with two fellow game masters and I found myself explaining something that I’d never really given a whole lot of thought to before. But, as I started talking through it, I realized it’s actually a really useful and important concept for designing RPG adventures (and campaigns). So, I started rolling the whole thing around in my head. And THEN, as luck would have it, I started running an occasional game for some real life human beings who consider me a friend. The game was Robert J. Schwalb’s Shadow of the Demon Lord, a dark fantasy adventure game set somewhere between the fantasy and Victorian milieu with some interesting, but not overwhelming, horror elements. Honestly, it strikes me more than a little like Bloodborne the RPG. And I am currently super addicted to Bloodborne for the PS4. Holy f$&% do I love that game.
Anyway, Schwalb is one of the people who aren’t me that I really respect and admire. He’s a really great game designer and I was a huge fan of his blog before it kind of just went away. I think. I haven’t checked. But it sort of vanished now that he’s running his own game publishing company and supporting his flagship product and stuff. And Shadow of the Demon Lord is a pretty neat game even if it’s a little outside my normal genres of interest. But what’s most impressive about it is its section on game mastering. In fact, it reminds me a less sweary, less loquacious version of all of my adventure writing crap. I mean, the guy talks about the structure of RPG adventures using very similar terms to the ones I used. He calls the pyramid structure a well and he calls the obstacle course a gauntlet, but for someone who isn’t me, he’s really impressive. Long story short, I heartily recommend giving the whole game a read. It does a lot of neat things, and despite being hampered by a traditional RPG book structure, is an excellent resource for GMs.
And IT very briefly mentions the same thing that I happened to find myself explaining to two other GMs. And so, in a sense, I kind of learned something from someone who isn’t me. I mean, a little. Because Schwalb doesn’t go into a huge amount of detail. And I’m about to. Because I’ve never met a new idea I wasn’t willing to tie down and flog the motherloving f$&% out of. And so, enjoy a few thousand words about a thing I am choosing to call Plot Dynamics.
The Dynamics of Plot
I’ve spilled a lot of virtual ink describing the structure of role-playing adventures. I’ve talked about how every adventure is just a way of joining up a bunch of scenes and then providing a motivation to push the players and their characters to navigate the scenes until they reach a resolution. Right? That’s pretty much a barebones definition of an adventure. Motivation, structure, scenes, resolution.
I’ve also mentioned that GMs can plan scenes in advance, which include encounters and non-encounter scenes and those scenes can serve all sorts of different purposes and fill different needs within the adventure. And I’ve mentioned how the players will also sometimes create scenes of their very own by doing things the GM either didn’t think to plan for or didn’t bother planning for. And then, the GM will have to improvise a scene.
But something I just sort of took for granted was the Plot Dynamic.
Here’s the thing: lots of GMs who are very good at GMing just sort of do things by accident. They have an unconscious understanding of things like story structure and game mechanics and balance and all of that other crap. They run good games, and they can feel the difference between a good game and a bad game in their gut, but if you asked them to explain WHAT they were doing or WHY, they’d have trouble answering. Now, I pride myself on thinking long and hard through the things I do at the table so that I can write down thousands of words to help you understand all the crap that I – and other good GMs – have muddled through and stumbled upon over the years – but I occasionally fall into the same trap of taking s$&% for granted or not giving things conscious thought. It’s rare, but happens. And THAT’S what I came to understand from the conversation I alluded to in my Long and Rambling Intro™ and the concept that Schwalb touched on.
Basically, there are two different Dynamics that can drive any RPG adventure. And while most adventures switch back and forth between the two a little bit, they mostly focus on one or the other. But the thing is, different groups function better with different Plot Dynamics. And the Plot Dynamics created different engagements, so different players prefer different Dynamics. And different GMs also function better designing and running around different Dynamics. Long story short, if you understand the Plot Dynamic you’re trying to create in your adventure, and in each scene, you’ll understand what you need to create and plan and what you need to be ready to improvise.
First of all, Plot is a narrative term. The Plot of a story is the sequence of events that happen in the story. For example, the plot of the Hobbit runs like this. First, Gandalf comes to visit Bilbo and invites him on an adventure. Then, Gandalf tricks Bilbo into hosting a dinner party for a bunch of cartoon dwarves who sing and dance about destroying his cutlery like it’s a f$&%ing Disney movie but without the charm. Then, Bilbo decides to go on the adventure. Then the bulls$&% happens with the stupid trolls. Then the f$&%ing rabbit sled and the wizard with bird crap on his head shows up. And then the police dragged me off the theater manager’s unconscious body because the a$&hole wouldn’t give me a refund. That’s the plot. It’s the things that happen in the story, one after the other.
Now, in The Hobbit: An Unexpectedly Awful Movie and also in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Cinema and in The Hobbit: I Can’t Think of Another Pun but this One Sucked Too, as in all movies and TV shows and other passive forms of entertainment, the author of the work basically decides everything about how the plot moves forward. And that’s what we mean when we say “Plot Dynamic.” How does the story move from one scene to the next? But, in an RPG, things get very weird because the protagonists have a mind of their own and the author is really more of a custodian and referee and moronic kitten wrangler. So Plot Dynamics are very complicated.
Well, not really, because we can basically put Plot Dynamics on a spectrum based on who is actually driving the plot. We can say that the plot is Player Driven or we can say the Plot is GM Driven. Now, Schwalb describes these as Proactive and Reactive Plots, but I like Player Driven vs. GM Driven because most plots are a push and pull between the GM and the Players, so when one is being proactive, the other is forced to be reactive.
Who’s Driving the Plot
The concept of Driving the Plot is actually a complicated one and we can get down into a lot of semantic garbage, especially if we assume that the idea is a binary rather than a spectrum. And it isn’t. It IS a spectrum. Like just about everything in RPGs. So, as we examine the endpoints, remember most RPG adventures have elements of both Player Driven plots and GM Driven plots.
In a purely GM Driven plot, the players have no control over the sequence of events in the adventure. As they move from scene to scene, they don’t have any freedom to choose which scenes to move to. The simplest example is the obstacle course or gauntlet adventure. The heroes in such an adventure simple deal with each obstacle in turn. Many event-based games are also GM Driven. In those adventures, certain things will happen at prescribed times or under prescribed conditions and the heroes have to deal with or prevent them.
That said, GM Driven plots aren’t automatically linear. And this is a really fine distinction, but an important one. Imagine, for example, a plot which branches based on whether the heroes kill the goblin chief or whether the goblin escapes in scene 31-A. The adventure will change based on the characters’ actions, it’ll changed based on their choices, but that doesn’t mean the players are driving the plot. The players are still taking a reactionary role to the events in the adventure.
Just because the players and their characters are changing the outcome, that doesn’t mean the players are driving the plot. If the players are basically just reacting to events and outcomes, the GM is driving the plot.
On the other hand, in a purely Player Driven plot, the players have complete control over the sequence of events. The simplest example is the heist adventure. The protagonists are trying to pull off some kind of caper, like infiltrating an enemy stronghold or assassinating someone or robbing a casino. They have a motivation and there is a resolution, but the players are free to gather information, plan the operation, and execute the plan however they see fit. In such an adventure, the sequence of events and the progression of scenes are determined purely by the players. They might decide to scout the site, kidnap the security guard for interrogation, hire the expert burglar, buy a getaway horse-and-carriage, buy black powder from the dwarf to blow open the wall, and so on.
Many Player Driven plots are thus exercises in creative problem solving and the players are free to investigate the problem, determine what resources they need, acquire those resources, and execute their plan.
What’s interesting though is that Player Driven plots are not necessarily any more open ended or branching than GM Driven plots. The distinction, again, is just that the GM is in a position of reacting to everything the players decide. The GM has no idea what’s going to happen from one scene to the next. The GM is stuck improvising. Well, sort of.
No Pure Dynamics
That said, it is almost impossible to create an adventure that is PURELY Player Driven or Purely GM Driven. By the very nature of RPGs, players can almost always seize control of the plot dynamic just by making a single unexpected choice. And most GMs understand that. Likewise, it’d be very difficult for most GMs to run a game without at least a light hand on the rudder of the plot. And so, most adventures involve a push and pull.
Further complicating this whole spectrum is the fact that an RPG has many different levels and each of those levels can have its own dynamic. For example, an individual scene can be GM Driven or Player Driven. When a group of orcs leap out of the underbrush and attempt to murder the PCs, that’s a GM Driven scene. The players really have no choice but to react. They are trying to stop the orcs from killing them. End of story. But if the PCs come upon a group of orcs and have the element of surprise, the scene is Player Driven. The players can decide to attack the orcs in combat, assassinate the orcs, sneak past the orcs, or avoid the orcs altogether.
A GM Driven plot – one that involves a sequence of obstacles or events to overcome – can involve a multitude of Player Driven scenes. And they often do.
Who Drives the Dungeon
So, given that there are no purely Player Driven or GM Driven adventures, we’re almost always dealing with adventures that LEAN toward Player Driven or LEAN toward GM Driven. And the adventures themselves are hybrids. Take, for example, the classic site-based adventure, the dungeon crawl. The protagonists are exploring some sort of adventuring site made of hallways and rooms and whatnot. Assuming the players are merely exploring, you might be tempted to think of that as a Player Driven adventure. But really, it isn’t. The players are reacting to everything. They enter a room, deal with the obstacle or challenge of the room, and then they are presented with a limited choice of paths to pursue. Often, those paths have nothing to differentiate them. There’s no way to choose which direction is more likely to lead toward the resolution. And if the resolution really is just “explore the s$&% out of this place, kill everything, and take all the stuff,” it doesn’t matter anyway. That’s a very passive, reactive adventure. It’s just a branching obstacle course.
On the other hand, if the players have a specific task to accomplish in the dungeon and they are trying to come up with ways to accomplish that goal efficiently, the adventure veers toward being Player Driven. For example, imagine the heroes are attempting to find a lost group of adventures. They don’t want to explore every room of the dungeon. They want to get to the lost adventurers as quickly as possible and rescue them. The players might come up with a search pattern based on their research of the site, or they might try to track the adventurers through the dungeon, or they might use scrying magic. Depending on how many opportunities they have to meaningfully decide their path through the dungeon, that adventure is MORE Player Driven.
The point is, there are no purely Player Driven or GM Driven adventures; all adventures are hybrids. Every adventure does LEAN one way or the other, though. Some more strongly than others. And every adventure’s individual scenes will probably be a mix of Player and GM Driven. And in many cases, Player Driven and GM Driven adventures can look very, very similar. Especially if they lie toward the middle of the spectrum.
Who Gives a F$&%?
If every adventure is going to be a hybrid of GM Driven and Player Driven and individual scenes are going to be all over the place, why does any of this s$&% matter? Why, in short, should you give a F$&%. Well, let me tell you something, first of all, hypothetical reader: I don’t care for that tone. Second of all, you should give a s$&% for a very important reason: Player Driven and GM Driven adventures DO DIFFERENT THINGS. Thus, they are DESIGNED IN DIFFERENT WAYS. And different dynamics WORK BETTER FOR DIFFERENT PLAYER GROUPS. So, if you understand the dynamics, you can CHOOSE THE DYNAMICS THAT WORK BEST FOR YOUR GROUP and then DESIGN ADVENTURES TO THE DYNAMIC. How’s THAT for a reason? Now stop questioning me.
Growing into Player Driven Adventures
First of all, understand that Player Driven Adventures are very empowering, but they also put a lot of pressure on players. And not all players handle them well. If you’ve ever seen a group of players sitting gormlessly around the table, staring at one another, trying to figure out what they are supposed to do next, you have a group that can’t handle Driving the Plot. And there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THOSE PLAYERS. In point of fact, lots of people gravitate toward the player side of the table precisely because they prefer a reactive role to a proactive one. Many, many players like the simple challenge of overcoming obstacles in the pursuit of a goal.
Player Driven Adventures also put a lot of pressure on you – the GM. You have to be quick on your toes because, no matter how well you plan (and I’m going to give you some advice for planning later), you still have to improvise a lot. By definition, you’re adopting a reactive role. And, unlike players whose reactions are limited to what one specific character can reasonably do, you’ve got an entire goddamned world to react with. And it’s filled with gods and mysterious forces and NPCs and factions and nations and monsters and driven by weird rules that you have to apply consistently or else you’ll break the world. Essentially, when the players are in a reactionary role, they are playing a game of checkers. When the GM is in a reactionary role, it’s the equivalent of playing four-dimensional hyper chess. It’s easy to get overwhelmed because you have so many pieces and so many ways to move them and you can invent more pieces and more moves on the fly.
Long story short, Player Driven Stories put pressure on the players and the GM. They can be very hard to run. For that reason, I would advise new GMs to stick with GM Driven Adventures for a while until they feel confident. And then, start to give the players more control. Maybe, as part of an adventure, provide a very open-ended side quest that involves solving a problem with limited guidance. If the players respond well (and you handle it well), try to run more Player Driven Adventures.
Experienced gamers are generally better able to handle Player Driven Adventures because of the pressure levels. But, there are some other factors as well that will help you decide if Player Driven Adventures are for you. Some players like to have a level of control and empowerment. Free f$&%ing spirits and all that. If you notice that your players tend to wander pretty far afield and try to come up with odd, unusual, or surprising plans for even seemingly simple things, you might have the sort of dynamic expressive pains-in-the-a$&es that appreciate the open-endedness of Player Driven Adventures.
Another factor, though, and one that is easy to overlook, is a familiarity with the world. See, in order to drive the plot, the players need to know what’s possible and what’s not possible. They need to know what resources they can draw on and how to find them. If the players don’t know how they might do basic research in the world or whether magical services can be bought or how they might hire assistants or whatever, they will have trouble figuring out how to approach a goal. The stranger the world or the less familiar the players are with it, the more difficulty they will have driving the plot. If you’re running a crime drama in the modern world, or if you’re running Star Wars for a bunch of Star Wars fanatics who have all read Mr. Scotts Guide to the Enterprise and know all of the episodes of every spin-off series, including Caprica and Babylon 5 and know the first name of every incarnation Dr. Who, they are fine. But without that level of intimate familiarity, it can be hard for them to drive more complex plots.
Likewise, if the adventure requires some sort of specialized knowledge – say technical knowledge or knowledge of specific genre conventions – the players can run into trouble. Police procedurals, for example, have their own conventions, tools, tropes, and structure. So do superhero games. And Lovecraftian investigations. If the player aren’t familiar with the genre, they are going to struggle.
Now, if you have a bunch of expressive, self-driven experienced players in a game they are intimately familiar with, they will probably LOVE a Player Driven Adventure. If you can handle it, go to town. They ARE very empowering.
But, for the most part, Player Driven Adventures are something that most players grow into over the course of a long-running game. That is, many groups start out reacting to events and dealing with problems. As they become more familiar with the world (and depending on the players, more familiar with the game system and the genre), they become more capable of driving the plot. And, in many games with character advancement, the characters also gain lots of tools that allow them to take a more active role in the plot. So, long running campaigns tend to shift focus gradually from GM Driven games to Player Driven games.
And this actually works out very well because it follows the natural progression of character power. Young, inexperienced heroes deal with local problems and react to situations. Experienced, powerful characters deal with complex problems and take control of the events in the game world.
There is Nothing Wrong with GM Driven Adventures
By contrast, GM Driven Adventures are just easier. They are easy to run, they are easy to play, and they are easy to plan. And, as noted, many, many players enjoy them. As long as there are still ample opportunities for the players to affect the outcome of the adventure by choosing between limited paths and by having to deal with the consequences of their choices and actions, the players will not feel any major loss of agency. Seriously. A lot of GMs sneer and glare down their noses at GM Driven Plots as if it’s a thing for lesser gamers. Those GMs are a$&holes who don’t understand that different people play for different reasons. In fact, many of those GMs assume that players and GMs inherently have the same motivations and engagements.
Many, many campaigns I have personally run for some very experienced groups have never moved beyond mostly GM Driven Adventures. And no one was any sadder for it. Remember, this is just a f$&%ing game. It’s okay to take the easy way as long as the easy way is satisfying.
How to Play a Player Driven Adventure
And now comes the important part: how to design a Player Driven Adventure. I really don’t have to talk much about GM Driven Adventures because they are kind of the default state. In fact, most of my adventure design advice assumes a leaning toward GM Driven Adventures. And, honestly, you CAN design Player Driven Adventures mostly the same way. But if you do that, you have to accept you’ll be improvising a lot at the table and you’ll be throwing a lot of work away. And the reason is because of Angry’s Law of Plot Dynamics which is a neat law I made up right now to explain the difference in planning Player and GM Driven Adventures.
Angry’s Law of Plot Dynamics
GM Driven Adventures provide the players with scenes and events to react to. Player Driven Adventures provide the players with opportunities to plan and resources to use.
Basically, a GM Driven Adventure is the adventure that most GMs know how to write by default. That’s the adventure where you plan out a flowchart of scenes and encounters, design the encounters, and decide when and where those scenes and encounters will occur. It might be a dungeon map, a murder investigation, or a timeline of events that will happen as the party travels from A to B. Regardless, if you’re planning scenes and encounters and figuring out how they fit together, you – the GM – are driving the adventure.
Player Driven Adventure’s require the GM to be more reactive. And thus, if the GM tries to plan scenes and encounters, it’s a crap shoot as to how much of that planning will get used. Instead, what the GM really needs is as much background information as possible so that the GM can easily figure out how the game will react to the players or provide the players with any information they ask for.
For example, if the GM is planning a Player Driven heist adventure in which the PCs need to break into a cult’s temple and steal an idol, the GM will need to know the layout of the temple, the defenses, how the cult will respond to attack, the stats of the various cultists, where the idol is located, any particular weaknesses in the temples defenses, and so on. In a political intrigue adventure in which the PCs need to ensure a particular proposal gets through the senate, the GM needs to know everything about the supporters and opponents of the proposal. Dirty secrets, motivations and goals, hopes and fears, where they live, how they are protected, and so on. In such an adventure, the players might try to blackmail some opponents, bribe others, curry favor with others, and so on.
Long story slightly shorter – because I don’t do short – designing a Player Driven Adventure is more of an act of detailed world building than an act of adventure design. The more you, the GM, know about all the moving parts of the adventure, the more prepared you are to react to any crazy, stupid thing the dumba$& players do to the moving parts.
Now, I know this sounds like I’m going back on some of my advice. I once claimed that every adventure is a dungeon adventure because every adventure is a progression through a series of scenes, from motivation to resolution, but I’m not. What I’m saying is that, in a Player Driven Adventure, planning the scenes is a waste of time. Instead, you need to intimately know all of the game elements that you can include in any scene the players invent. Do that, and you can invent scenes on the fly and string them together into an adventure. In point of fact, running a Player Driven Adventure is like making up a dungeon as you go. You have a pile of monsters and NPCs and traps and all the other crap that goes into the adventure and, as the players explore, you have to throw that s$&% together into fun scenes.
And inevitably, for all of your planning and world-building, you’re eventually going to find yourself ill-equipped for a particular scene. The players will start a fight with the one NPC you didn’t stat up because he’s a good-aligned pacifist monk who no one in their right mind would attack. Or they will visit a location that has nothing to do with anything because one of them has a tinfoil hat crackpot theory that the owner of the local puppy orphanage is actually financing the construction of the mercenary stronghold the PCs are trying to sabotage. But the more you DO know, the better prepared you are to make up whatever s$&% you don’t know.
And after you muddle your way through that bulls$&%, you can go back to nice, simple GM Driven Adventures in nice, simple dungeons. Because it’s just f$&%ing easier.
An interesting and positive read angry. You make many strong points worth working towards.
“They say that the wisest man is the man who knows he knows nothing.”
I know you weren’t being totally serious when you talked about that in the intro, Angry. I just love that story and feel like sharing it:
While what you relayed is the correct phrasing, I feel like a more clear phrasing is “I am the wisest, for I know WHEN I know nothing.” Socrates never pretended to have an informed opinion on anything he didn’t know much about. If it became apparent that someone was an expert in a field, he would defer to their knowledge (though perhaps not their logic, being that logic is a universal field) completely.
When he was first called the wisest man, he set out to meet with wise people to see if it was true, and why. And while he found that many of them were indeed extremely intelligent and knew their fields very well, he found that they frequently tried to claim expertise in many fields they knew nothing about, making fools of themselves. Socrates eventually decided that this is what set him apart. If he didn’t know something, he did not pretend that he did.
That said, the fact that Socrates basically made it his day job to go around to the head of every field he could find and make an absolute fool out of them is why he was eventually put on trial for nonsense crimes, and the fact that he doubled down at his trial and continued calling them all fools is why he was convicted. Funny guy.
I bet Socrats was the AngryGM of the philospher’s community
Oh gosh, and actual informed person. You know what the problems with actual informed people are? It’s mostly that they don’t know what I think about it all! (Hi, pleased to meet you.)
I’ve been watching Bones, and I see what you’re doing, Angry. You’re lining up wise people and grading their wisdom. Obviously, this is the most important part of your article: where would we be without the introduction? The problem with grading wisdom, is that wisdom is all about systems — models, environments, mechanics.
I argue a wise man is a man who has built connections and patterns amongst the chaos. And that wisdom is all about the predictive insight those systems bring into their holders’ minds. Since models perform differently under different circumstances, whose models are wisest? The man with the most models? The man with the most predictions? The man with predictions of the nearest at hand?
So let’s say we have lined up all the wisest men, and we want to grade them. And they’re all genii, manifested with the family’s patriarch, who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of knowledge and insight, and full up to the top full of facts and strange theories. Facts and theories on every topic they had time to learn, but each chooses a focus to talk about.
The first man is a physicist and chooses of all things to describe statistical mechanics and its bearing on all things; he speaks of emergence and quantification of chaos. The second is a historian who brings to bear an analysis of wisdoms past.
The third is a master of words and eloquently disects each elocution thus executed, sparking in you recollections of countless barely remembered stories — with each word his insights seem truer — insight into nature of debate and discourse.
And the fourth (because I’m tired of coming up with wise men) says a few things about perception and reality until he’s convinced the audience accepts him as a peer, and then discusses the nature of wisdom, and tells you that wisdom is a model, and that all models are true sometimes, and most models are false sometimes. And that really, no amount of brilliance and devotion can make you the wisest man, because you can at best be wise sometimes. And, if your knowledge is incomplete for the situation, what use is your model now? One is wise who knows they know nothing — or actually knows nothing — and analyzes each assumption and model.
RIGHT? And now let’s assume each of these men has absorbed at least one false fact at some point in their life — something unseen that guides them, an assumption never set straight. And the fourth guy, his false fact is … “I literally don’t know anything at all”. … (Maybe he defines KNOW funny, who knows.) Who’s the wisest? Hoos the wisest? Hoo? Hoo?
Also, very cool Socrates story.
What the actual hell is wrong with people?
Came here for that specific response ; wasn’t disappointed! Hahaha. That said ; great insight on world building and knowing roughly how much you need to be prepared to run a PC driven adventure.
Keep it up man 🙂
Great advise, as ever. One thing that I never liked in published adventures was how much background information they give to the GM, like you needed to know ALL about the world just to run a game that, by design, was mostly GM driven anyway. But now I understand that this information empowers GMs that want to expand the boundaries of their games, so more power to them, I guess.
Also, I had a great experience with this concept as I was planning my current adventure. The plot involved the players gathering information in a city, and eventualy been called to bust an underground slave Market. At first, I was trying to make a flowchart with all the eventos that could happen, But I was not happy with the result. So I started thinking about how the players could get the info they needed, created a few redundances (so the players did not missed vital clues, even if they missed a few optional scenes), and created NPCs, places and relaciona between those. In short, I created a background for the players to drive the game, and find the “doors” to the dungeon. When they finally made it through one, the game became more GM driven, sinceramente I had mapped and planned the underground city in a more traditional fashion (as a branching adventure. Again, thanks for expanding my GMing vocabulary).
Reading this article had made me feel more confident that I’m grasping the Angry way of adventure design. Please keep it up with the awesome work!
I think this is what I had trouble understanding the logic of when you said not to go overboard with side details. I suppose I’m more disposed to make a player driven adventure, as that’s the sort of adventure that I would like to play. I feel that it is logical to prepare extra details about the world and such, as I was happy for my players to change the story and encounter different things than what I had planned.
Wait, did you say not to go overboard with details? Maybe that was someone else. Either way, this makes sense. Sounds cool.
“we can get down into a lot of semantic garbage”
Are you being antisemantic Angry?
The original article was too long to post, so it was decided that eliminating words was the final solution.
The core engagements of this particular group I’m running for tend to be very different per player as well as per night, so I tend to have a few avenues ready for them, should they feel the need for one type of engagement or plot dynamic over another.
Having hooks ready is a great way of pulling players into the game on a night where they have little direction themselves, and need a little bit of GM-driven fun. That coupled with player knowledge that I have a standing dungeoncrawl ready should the players choose helps, too.
Knowing what core engagements drive your players will very much help you know what kind of prep to do. I find both detailed world building AND writing if-then scenarios fun, so i have the world ready, and also a few adventures to get the party exploring the world. The ebb and flow of where the dynamics lie tends to go over well as long as the party drives the spectrum of player/GM-driven plot dynamics.
I’ve tried shoehorning them a few times early on in the campaign, when the world wasn’t fleshed out enough for them to go too far out of the starting town, and they weren’t having it. Good thing my improvisation skills were on in those instances, as it actually helped me build the world as i went. Which is terrible advice, don’t intentionally do that unless you thrive on that kind of pressure. And if you do, you’d better have a notepad ready and have the ability to write things down while still facilitating a game.
Concerning core engagements, I highly suggest that anyone who hasn’t already read “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research” do so now. There’s also a (much more detailed and specific) article somewhere called “8 kinds of fun” that another angry person who runs games wrote. Probably not the same person, although I have never seen the two of them post at the same time…
Anyways,glad to see another great article, Angry! You always help me define and hone the things I learn from experience, Even when I don’t learn them before reading an article of yours.
This is actually an underlooked thing in RPGs. I certainly never thought about it. I do think every GM should strive towards a player driven plot, if only to challenge themselves. I think a lot of players are really used to the GM driven plot, and as such don’t know any better. Personally, as I grew as a GM, I cultivated the same setting and expectations and eventually got a really cool, player driven group going, and it was far more rewarding than anything I’d done before.
I disagree. Not every Gm need to try to have “player-driven” adventures, nor does an adventure that gravitates towards that spectrum is more fun or engaging than a GM driven one. In fact, a bad player-driven game will almost aways be worst than a Gm driven one, because of pacing issues.
That said, I do believe that learning new GMing skills is aways valid, and any GM should try to play with this concepts. You write a linear, GM-driven (GMD) adventure, then you write a GMD branching adventure, next you try to put some content to allow Player-Driven (PLD) exploration, and so on.
Anyway, the thing is, I do not believe that PLD games are a “superior” for of game that every GM should aspire for. But I do belive in self improvement, and in finding new ways to write adventures. In a way, is like a player leveling up their character, or making a new one. Angry gives us GMs tools to play while writing and running adventures, and that is great!
I think this has enlightened me on why I was always so nervous about being a DM, and why I always thought I’d be terrible at it.
Because for some reason I had this expectation that a good DM was measured by how player-driven their plots are, and unfortunately my improvisational skills are poor at best.
I always worried that my players would get themselves into a situation I hadn’t planned for and I would just freeze up and not be able to think of anything to respond with. Basically, I worry that I’ll get stage fright.
But after finally plucking up the courage and running an old 2e starter set (mostly for nostalgic reasons but also because I had studied every word of that book when I was a child as I dreamed about one day DMing for real), and it went surprisingly well, I finally feel like I can run not-terrible games, thanks in very large part to your angry-yet-incredibly-helpful advice. 🙂
Word of Advice:
Very few players will chew you out for calling a short break to figure out what happens next. Even calling a session early to spend a week pondering is acceptable.
Excellent article. I have two points that I’d like to add regarding player driven adventures.
One is when dealing with 3rd-party settings, I think what is important is not necessarily that the players are very well versed with the source material and are in sync with Tolkien, Roddenberry, Lovecraft, or whoever, but that the players’ understandings are in sync with the GM’s understanding of that setting and with each of the other players. They could all be off-base from how the rest of the world interprets that setting, but as long as everyone at the table is pretty much in sync, it’s good.
Second, I think it’s important to reinforce that the advice you’ve given in the past about the GM being very clear about resolution and motivation is even more critical when the players are selecting motivation and resolution. That is, the players need to agree on and clearly communicate what they are trying to accomplish, and how and why. That way the GM can intelligently provide any clarifications needed and better improvise available resources and challenges.
For a player driven plot there still needs to be something in opposition to them so there needs to be either one BBEG for them to take out or a sequence as they grow in XP. So I’m not sure how a DM deals with that in these kinds of games? I guess it’s like Dungeon World fronts?
I belive the best option is to use bottlenecks, as in, scenes that the players MUST play in order to advance in the game. They could be time or location based, but they enable you to have some control at the pacing of the adventure.
Also, the bottleneck does not need to be static. Imagine that you are running a game where the party is trying to overthrow a Gang leader. The gang leader has a Right hand, and you want the players to face him as the epic climax of the 4th level tier. So you write a few possibilities:
If the players discover the information about the storehouse that the Hand oversees before they reach 3rd level, they fight the hand, and if he wins, he will imprision the players, and now they have to escape.
If they are at 3rd or 4th level, and have busted the Minion Leader operation, he will not have them as backup. If they did not, or if the Minion Leader escaped, the remains of his forces are here as well.
If the party reaches 4th level without discovering the Hand location, they have probabily caused to much trouble, and the Hand wants to resolve that conflict. He makes an ambush for the players, and feeds them information about his location. As the players walk in to the storehouse, the Hand’s forces are ready to respond the attack.
That way, you have a bottleneck (the party fights the Hand), but you have a dynamic one, and you can tweak and fondle (to use Angry’s words) to make it suit your group.
It should be noted that there seem to be two different assumptions out in the world of what a player-driven game looks like. One is like you describe (and, frankly, like I want), wherein the GM is simply making up scenes based on player actions and existing assumptions about IC reality. The other is a game wherein reality warps around the PCs without limit. I’m not just talking about curtains suddenly existing where there were none and there’s no reason for there not to be any, I mean that every tinfoil hat theory the players come up with becomes true without even so much as spending meta-currency to force it so. Why? Proponents seem to think good pacing means never suffering a setback and that PCs are only awesome enough if they’re 100% right all the time, as near as I can tell.
It’s the difference between creation and discovery. Discovering the secrets of a world that exists is far more satisfying to me than collaboratively constructing a world, and for others it’s the other way around.
The flip side on a different axis is where new opposition arises from nowhere whenever PCs are clever or lucky enough to bypass challenges. The game is most fun when challenges are appropriate, but if all challenges are of equal difficulty independent of how well the PCs approach them, then what’s the point?
Oh man, don’t remind me. I groan whenever we bypass a fight and the GM says, “Well, today has to have a third fight SOMEwhere…”
We don’t talk about those second kind of moro… I mean people.
Out of all that gold, I retained one thing:
Long and Rambling Intro™
I absolutely love that you trademarked it. It means nothing, and yet everything.
Otherwise, excellent read and good point. I try to run Player driven plots often and fail. I now have a pretty solid understanding of why.
“But, in an RPG, things get very weird because the protagonists have a mind of their own and the author is really more”
Actually, the reason you’re having a problem because you’re trying to cast something in terms of story that inherently isn’t story. RPGs ‘get very weird’ because they are the exact opposite of a story. Just like real life, they are a bunch of people making decisions based on goals, resulting in events. And just like in real life, when you assume narrative, shit gets very weird because inherently this is anti-narrative.
Of course, you can do the same thing that journalists and book writers do in the real world, and rearrange things after the fact to build a narrative from selected portions of events. You can turn the events of a game session retro-actively into a story, with plot. But trying to cast things in terms of plot or narrative, instead of goals and events, either before or while the session unfolds results in having to do a brain twister thinking on “who is driving”. Instead of just realizing that there are a bunch of unique people living false in-character lives in an interactive world, in the form of the DM.
Once you stop casting it in the wrong terms, it becomes simple.
You really have NO IDEA how introductions and segues work, do you. I guess you were tripping over yourself so much to present yourself as smarter than me that you went and made yourself look dumb. Wah wah waaaah.
lol fair enough. In my eyes, the fact that you think that RPG gaming or adventures are stories or a narrative makes YOU look dumb to me. I have no problem with that making me look dumb to you in return.
Did it really take you a month and a half to come up with that reply?
Wouldn’t be more precise to call it player or GM driven scenes, instead of adventures? An adventure can have some Player driven scenes and some GM driven scenes, I guess.
It would, if I were talking about scenes. But you’ll notice, I’m talking about adventures. That is, who drives the action from scene to scene. Who chooses which scenes will happen and when and where and why.
So, I as a GM would love to do more Player Driven type adventures, but most of my players seem almost completely uninterested in such things. Anyone have an idea of how to cultivate/encourage that sort of thing? or should I just get new players/new expectations?
I find it handy sometimes to create a annoying nemesis to badger the PCs with… Not overly powerful or particularly important to the core adventure, but someone who will show up to piss them off a bit and they dissapear for a few sessions… I find that they REALLY start wanting to meet this person and deal with them, even to the point of planning and buying items to deal with them hah. Another great trick is to drop mysteriously powerful items into the PCs path, ones that they can’t use without scholarly help… But don’t actually tell them how they work, ever. Make them look into it themselves, and then wrap some minor side plot around it when they take the bait. They start to learn that their choices are driving the action and I think it’s a little addictive. Not to mention that it starts to create amazing little stories you had never thought of. (Note, I play od&d, thus most magic items carry mystery. I understand that 5th editions magic-item-attunement-rules can destroy this mystery, just a thought tho).
My players are… starting to realize that the different factions they are fighting tend to have common themes and trends. This can be a faction that is heavy on ranged attacks, heavy on specific types of damage, heavy on status effects, or any other thing that encourages the party to prepare specific defenses for going into a dungeon owned by that faction.
I’m anxiously waiting for the day they realize that they can use this information to their advantage by preparing for it in advance, either by simply preparing the correct spells for the encounter, or by (proactively) attempting to acquire items/spells/abilities that will counter the attacks.
I’m not holding my breath here… they’ve been hoarding gold for 2 years now, and haven’t picked up on ‘the local town is too small to carry magic potions in any quantity. Perhaps a bigger town might have some, though’ as a *hint*, despite the fact that they regularly ask if the tiny town they like to visit has gotten any healing potions yet.
Hmm they DO seem stubborn ! Well perhaps a bigger town would do the trick… Could always burn their town down in some event haha. That always forces some player decision… Well good luck I hope you can motivate them!
Have you thought about just blatantly telling your players? If they don’t understand your hints, it’s not necessarily their fault. Remember, stuff that’s pieced together in your head and makes sense in your head might not always transfer to the players when you speak. IMO, there’s no shame in just saying information they’re missing out on if after multiple attempts they still don’t understand.
I put hints in quotes because I explicitly said, ‘You’ll have to go to a bigger town, like Waterdeep to find that sort of thing’
Wonderful article angry, loved it. As you said, these things have a certain flow that starts to come naturally. Having just seen my PCs through an extended wilderness adventure, I was really caught up in the more GM-driven style of play: planning days, rests, encounters and whatnot. Now, last session they arrived in a walled city, and I threw a bunch of setting info and news at them (they’re actually returning to the city after spending the entire summer traveling). The session ended in such a way that the PCs can pretty much do anything next session (after dealing with the fallout from a knee-jerk reaction to somthing anyway )… So suddenly, after many sessions in the wilderness, I have to be prepared for anything this weekend… I tried writing scenes or planning encounters and it occurred to me that I was building on a foundation of sand. I scrapped my micro-work and took a macro approach: I’ve mapped every important building in the city, as well as made several web-diagrams relating to power structures and pseudo-alliances between different guilds and factions in the city… I also timelined out the schedules and actions of major characters in the city over the next day in game… Now, with all of this before me I feel more ready than I ever have, even tho I don’t have a single actual encounter prepared. I was still feeling a little apprehensive until I read this. You’ve convinced me to believe in my instincts and instilled that last bit of confidence I needed to run a stellar game this Saturday. As always, thanks for the words and wisdom.
I like the mention of a GM-Driven Story slowly morphing into a PC-Driven Story as the PCs amass enough resources & allies to start making changes to the world themselves.
One of my current campaigns has been a GM-Driven Story for the past 2 years, with us saving various towns and organizations from an unknown Big Bad. We’ve just hit the turning point in the campaign where we’ve learned the Big Bad is the head of the empire’s spy network, who has decided to eliminate every group or ally of the empire he’s deemed “more trouble than they’re worth”. The forces against us are too big for us to handle on our own…
Cue the players going over EVERYONE they’ve ever helped in the past (along with a few new potential allies) and deciding who to call on for assistance against the Crazed Spymaster. The players are now taking the initiative to start a revolution against the largest empire in the world, and it’s glorious.
What you are talking about is railroad vs sandbox-style adventures, and DMs have been aware of it and talking about it for decades.
Anyone who has read anything about being a DM knows that “railroad” adventures drive PCs from scene to scene without letting them affect the course of the game. “Sandbox” adventures let players decide what problems to tackle and how to tackle them, ie they define what the next scene is.
I do not see any new insights in this article.
There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom.
Ooh, I wonder if the discussion Angry refers to at the beginning is the one I started on the Giant in the Playground forums (“player-led vs GM-led adventures”) and if so I wonder what Angry calls himself on there.
Anyway, lots of good advice here, I think. What it doesn’t say but seems to suggest is that, since all games are partly GM-driven and partly player-driven, all the GM’s planning should consist partly of planning out scenes and encounters and partly of world-building.
I somehow doubt this is the discussion he refers to, as he states “conversation between two fellow GMs”. Your thread involves a lot of conversation between many people, especially between everyone else and a certain individual.
This article was an epiphany for me. It helped me understand what the heck I was doing all that time writing immense amounts of lore that will likely never ever get shared with the players. I was trying to set the stage for multiple scenes in a player-driven adventure, or at least have a backdrop or two ready in my mind.
What I’ve realized now is, unless I plan to write a bunch of fantasy novels, I’m playing (D&D) with myself. And that’s fine sometimes, but I’d rather do D&D with a group.
My advice is to anyone commercially minded or who thinks of this as a hobby is to stick to writing damn good DM driven adventures and be prepared for players to break out of the script from time to time. Most won’t.
My takeaway to myself is work on my improv of scenes, creating NPCs seen and unseen, and stop trying to write pages and pages of detailed background. Angry has written a lot of good advice on scenes, pacing, and NPCs. To succeed in a player driven adventure, I need to rapidly paint the world within visible range of the players, and have some ideas about what’s just beyond.