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View Full Version : How does one write adventures? Because I can't.



Eldan
2013-08-21, 10:32 AM
What the title says. It's been something I've been wondering about for ages.

I've been a DM for, oh, ten years now. And in all those times, I've never written an adventure that worked.

Now, there's two possible cases when I run a campaign. The first case is that I find a pre-written adventure or adventure path that I like more or less. Usually, the first step is that I gut it, take out half the encounters, replace the rest, add more friendly or just quirky NPCs, rewrite parts of the story and often the ending, because there's almost never been an adventure that i liked all that uch. For some reason, these tend to be well-received by the players.

Second case? I try to write something myself, from the ground up. And it always ends the same. I have a basic idea ("Hey, how about if X happened!"). From there, I write an outline and usually a finale that hte players will arrive at and a first scene or hook to pull them in. So far, so good. But then?

Whenever I try to run self-written campaigns, the same thing happens. There's an interesting first scene, the players are engaged and then... the game stalls, crashes and burns. After two or three scenes with progressively less steam behind them, the characters just stand around, wondering what they are supposed to do now. People begin to lose interest and the game stops. So, how do you actually connect beginning to end? I don't have the slightest idea.

I've tried online tips. I've tried flowcharts, locations, maps, tables and every DMing tip I can find online. Nothing worked so far. So, DMs of hte playground. How do you write your campaigns?

Totally Guy
2013-08-21, 10:45 AM
What games do you have experience running? Have they all failed similarly?

ZeroNumerous
2013-08-21, 10:48 AM
I've tried online tips. I've tried flowcharts, locations, maps, tables and every DMing tip I can find online. Nothing worked so far. So, DMs of hte playground. How do you write your campaigns?

When all the subtle hints fail: Out-and-out tell your players where to go. Not personally, of course, but it's fairly easy to work in a wayward survivor from an ambush, scrying, a mystic receiving dark visions, whatever you'd like. If people are confused as to where to go, then give them a sign. If they ignore or miss the sign, then set the sign on fire and wave it under their noses.

Yora
2013-08-21, 11:03 AM
I think one thing that seems pretty promissing to me is to remember and embrace the fact that in an RPG the players can do unexpected things and do what they think the protagonists of the story should do, and do it in the way they want to.
This does not have to mean sandbox, but I think there's quite a lot to be learned from that style. What you need to write is the antagonists and their plan, as well as their resources, troops, and strongholds.

The crucial thing is probably that the players need to have a personal motivation to go after the antagonists. If you have a clearly laid out plot, players will of course ask at the end of a dungeon "where is the note that tells us to which dungeon to go next?". And if they don't find that note, they are clueless about what to do.
The players need to have a long term goal that is something other than "follow the clues until you reach the villain", or in other words "follow the rail tracks, because plot". And the antagonist has to do things other than sit in his throne room waiting for the heroes to arrive and kill him.

If the raiders are out there raiding villages, the PCs can try to set up an ambush or track them back to their base. In the normal linear adventure, there isn't really anything happening while the PCs are going from one dungeon to another. If things continue to happen, the players will want to do something to stop them. But if the villain just sits in his tower with the artifact he's stolen, there isn't really any incentive to go searching for him.

Morgarion
2013-08-21, 11:16 AM
It's been a while since I ran a campaign myself, but I understand that 'writing an adventure/campaign/story' is no longer in vogue. The preferred approach, as I understand, is now to construct situations. The difference seems to be that when you 'write' something out, you have either to be prepared for every contingency (which is impossible) or to railroad your players through your written material.

The trick, I think, is in selecting the right 'grain' for your focus. You have to know, at least in general terms, what's going to end up happening - the BBEG's plan, important NPCs, the overall shape of the campaign. But plan out fewer of the little things. Know the general vibe of the various countries, areas and cities. But don't worry about every temple priest, city guard and innkeeper in the world. Don't map out every city, don't populate every cavern and castle with monsters and traps and treasure. Your players might not take the path you expected. They won't pick up on the hints you dropped. If you open a door, they will go in through the window. Of the wrong house.

So let the big stuff be more fluid. Things happen. Characters die, stuff gets forgotten. The little stuff is more immediate, though. Depending on the size of the dungeon, the pace you play at and the length of your sessions, it probably wouldn't be a waste of time to have the next adventure or two adventures plotted, statted and mapped ahead of time. You ought to know what kinds of challenges are appropriate for them, what part of the world they'll be in and what tasks they feel are necessary.

And don't focus all your efforts on catching the BBEG or whatever the campaign revolves around. Have a copy of your players' characters' bios. This is always more important to me than having their stats. Know what's motivating them (if they're being played well) and who they know. Weave in characters from their pasts and presents for secondary adventures. Connect those to the main plot as you feel prudent. Employ 'sidequests', adventures that have no bearing to the main plot, or anything else, to break up the monotony and add some diversity.

Take the temperature of your players. Hopefully there a few things they'd really like to see. Add them. Not immediately upon request, but find ways to build their interests organically into the campaign at large. If you can.

As for actually sitting down and writing out an adventure, I guess there's a few ways to do it. Usually, when I'm writing, I start with a single conceit - a hook, an image, an idea. Carry it out to its logical conclusions. What is the dungeon? Who built it? Why? Is it maintained? By who? It's all systems and histories. Where things come from and the effects they have upon each other.

Eldan
2013-08-21, 12:17 PM
Hm. I think I didn't quite explain myself correctly. It's not that I don't tell my players where to go, it's that I don't know where they should go myself.

If I write an adventure, it's easy tocome up with an overall plot, a bad guy, with various characters, a beginning and a finale. As Yora put it, I write up the bad guy and all his resources and all the non-villainous bad guys.

But then comes the difficult part. What do the players do in all this?

It's not that the players don't follow the train tracks. It's that I don't even know how to lay those tracks.

I know the villain's plan. He will do X, then Y. The players notice Y. Then the villain prepares to do Z, his end goal, doing A, B and C on the way.

What do the players do while the villain does A, B and C? I have no idea.

I'm good at improvising. Once hte players encounter a situation or an NPC, I can act it out and it's enjoyable. Getting them to encounter stuff, though? that's hard.

Now, I've never really done dungeons. But they make a nice analogy. I have a dungeon entrace, I have a last room with a final boss, I know how to run combat and I know how to find a reason for the players to go into the dungeon in the first place. I don't know how to design all the rooms in between.


The problem is not the sandbox. I can, in all likelihood, make the sandbox. The problem is that I think of a plot, the players catch on to that plot and want to solve it, instead of just generally exploring the sandbox. That's good. What's bad is that I don't know how they could solve that plot.


It's happened a dozen times over various games. "Oh know! Villain X did villainous deed Y! How do we stop him?" and then everyone sits around sheepishly and doesn't know what to do.

Or as TPAM me put it: they don't go looking for the window. They think "We really need to find this door!" and then find out that there really isn't a door because I suck as an architect.

valadil
2013-08-21, 12:23 PM
My method is simple and vulgar. I throw a bunch of crap at the wall and see what sticks.

I drop all the plot hooks I can think of. I give the players all sorts of NPCs. I grab every last hook, character, regret, family member, and unresolved grudge from their backstories and put them in the game.

Then I let the PCs choose which of those are interesting. The rest are written off or cast aside and we let the PCs run with whatever they found interesting.

This means my intro sessions are usually bad. There's too much going on and the players don't know what they should be looking at. By the time the dust settles, they've found a plot that interests them. I scramble to shape what they like into a convincing story and we go from there.

Eldan
2013-08-21, 12:28 PM
And how do yo udo the scrambling to shape it into a story? Because that's the part where I fail, not the hooks.

Sebastrd
2013-08-21, 12:47 PM
As some folks in this thread have already alluded to, the term "adventure"as we DMs use it is a bit of a misnomer. An "adventure" is what results from the PC's actions in the game world. As DMs, it is our job to set up "situations". I suspect different personalities will want to approach things from different angles, but I'll at least give you my approach.

I'm a very character driven individual. I like to understand people and why they do the things they do, so the first thing I develop is the villain and his goals and motivations. It's especially effective if the villains primary motivation is a worthy cause take to an extreme. One of my favorite villains was a cleric of the goddess of life/plants. His motivation was preventing famine/starvation, but the method he used was generating pockets of negative energy and breeding undead (long story). The best part was he didn't even realize it. He had no idea he was the villain (though I ended up deciding he was so fanatical that he didn't care - the ends justified the means).Once you know what the villain wants, decide how he wants to achieve it. Plop the PCs down in a place where they're bound to be affected by the villains scheme, and let them go to town (perhaps literally). Bonus points if the villains scheme affects one or more PCs on a personal level, i.e., affecting their friends, families, religions, communities, etc.

Then, when you develop your dungeons, you have something to go on. You'll want to fully develop the villain's headquarters closest to the PCs - usually the starting dungeon - and at least an overview of other major loacations and the villain's "stronghold". (Keep in mind that the stronghold does not have to be and actual keep or fortress; it's simply the place he feels most secure and comfortable or spends the most time.) Since you know the villain and his personality, you can design his bases in a more cohesive and obvious way. For example, my cleric villain used a lot of temples and religious sites to carry out his plans.

Tying it all together, here's a quick, cliche example: Our villain has a dead/dying relative (most often a spouse/lover) and has turned to necromancy to preserve his beloved. - Right away the villain is sympathetic because his motivation is something to which we can all relate. His plan to preserve/ressurect his loved one hinges on an arcane ritual that requires undead participants engaging in some "unsavory" acts, blood sacrifice (not necessarily killing), and a LOT of expensive material components. Our villain is impatient (a personality quirk that can inform our roleplaying of the villain) and has decided to, almost literally, kill two birds with once stone. He begins murdering travellers who appear wealthy to a) rob them to fund the aquisition of material components and b) animate them to fill positions in the ritual ritual, guard his strongholds, etc. Now we have a hook for the PCs - a string of murders that includes a friend or relation of the PCs or occurs in their local area or both.

A good rule of thumb is the more powerful the villain, the more strongholds and influence he has. (This serves a dual purpose - to illustrate the villain's power and the magnitude of the threat he poses and to generate enough XP for the PCs to become a threat to him.) We'll say our villain is a mid-level threat. Since he's a necromancer, his strongholds can include wizards' towers, graveyards, mausoleums, a family estate (if he comes from a wealthy family), temples consecrated to a death/undeath deity, etc. (You can even have a bunch of low-level hitmen villains working for him to act as mini-bosses as the PCs work their way up the chain, each with motivations of their own (but keep their motivations basic and obvious - greed, plain old evil, etc.) The last tidbit I'd add is the ubiquitous "secret". For our villain, it's that his ritual will turn his loved one into a lich, but he doesn't realize it. With all of that to go on, it's much easier to adapt when the PCs inevitably head in a direction you weren't anticipating. Just consult the villain's dossier, tie it to the direction the PCs are heading, and viola, you've got an adventure. (It's probably a good idea to set a timeline for the villain's plans in case the PCs decide to tackle a different villain or pursue a different agenda. It makes the world seem more alive when events off screen affect the world in a tangible way - like a lich suddenly popping up in the local area.)

Morgarion
2013-08-21, 12:50 PM
Eldan,

Sorry for going overboard on my answer. You, at least, know what the problem is. That's going to make fixing it a lot easier.

Since you're comfortable thinking on your feet and improvising in response to their actions and the big hurdle is the question 'what do we do next?', I would guess that your players aren't coming up with many ideas of their own and that's what's bogging things down. It seems that perhaps you'd like them to take some more initiative and help you tell the story a little more. This might be a good opportunity for some honest communication about what everyone expects out of the game - see if they're willing to take more, bigger narrative risks.

Otherwise, some people just need to be led by the nose. It's hackneyed at this point, but you might have to fall back on the model of having an NPC assigning them missions to complete. Some people don't like this, but if your players are otherwise just going to sit on their hands waiting for something to happen, then they've no reason to complain.

valadil
2013-08-21, 12:56 PM
And how do yo udo the scrambling to shape it into a story? Because that's the part where I fail, not the hooks.

The trick for me is that I run all my plots at the same time. In each session I might advance each of five plots by an hour a piece. Even if I don't have a clear idea of where a plot is going yet, I can improv it for an hour before something else interrupts. (Hint. Multiple plots are great. If the players go in a direction you weren't ready for, have another plot interrupt them. (Hint 2: This is why urban games are great. If you stick your players in a hole full of monsters, plots can't interrupt. In a city all these plot elements are running around at the same time.))

As I think about each of those new plots, I try and merge common elements. For instance if the players go for the churchy plots, I'm going to pick up on that. Maybe all the church plots come from the same priest. Or maybe they're coming from different churchs. I don't feel like encouraging evil, so maybe the temples of Pelor and St. Cuthbert have a huge presence in the starting city and the main priests try to outdo each other's sermon's week after week. The rivalry has gotten bigger and instead of just outdoing sermons, they're trying to recruit adventures to do bigger and bolder things that the church can take credit for funding. The PCs are set to profit from this, but only if the churches never realize they're working for both sides. It's not the best idea in the world, but I pulled that one out of thin air given the idea of players being interested in more than one church plot.

Anyway, it's just stuff like that. Let the players point to interesting things, then riff off of those. When I run games I don't know what the main plot will be in advance. Usually I can predict it, but I've been wrong before.

BTW, if this sounds like something you'd like to do but you're drawing a blank, please post more specific examples of what your PCs are up to. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who likes coming up with this stuff.

Gamgee
2013-08-21, 01:03 PM
A loose outline, writing a whole adventure seems pointless. At least with how chaotic and off the walls my group can be.

Just have an idea of of some sorts of enemies that would be in the area. If you want a "big bad" make sure their minions can be fought and encountered at some level. So if you want the local crime boss to be harassing the group just have stats on hands for several types of enemies, or even have just one stat and have them show up while the PC's are doing other stuff.

Another example. So your in a city have stats for thieves, soldiers, mercenaries, and common npc's. Then just use these to your advantage when they become applicable to whats going on. Maybe throw in some city dwelling monsters like a low level undead that might be encountered somewhere. Perhaps created by some ritual, come up from the sewers, or just created by another of its kind.

So have a vague idea from there, and then wing it. If your good at improvising plots on the go.

Then do this on a large scale level for the whole campaign and its plot. It can be incredibly hard to do.

CarpeGuitarrem
2013-08-21, 01:17 PM
You might find Fate Core (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/114903/Fate-Core-System) to be of interest. It has a very strong, evocative approach to scenario prep. I got a scenario ready in less than an hour on the bus ride this morning, and I'm already pumped about running it. (Yes, I technically should've taken more time to let it simmer, but oh well.)

It has you start with the Issues of a setting, then combine those with the Aspects of your characters to create one or two problems for a session. In a previous session, I was running a 1930s supernatural-in-real-world game. One stated problem? A character's hat awakens and starts speaking to them.

You then spin "story questions" out of the problems. Each story question represents something that will be answered by a single scene. (So, you can fall back on the story questions if you have no idea how to set the next scene or drive it forward.) In my example, it was things like "Do they understand what the hat is saying?", "What does the hat want?", and "Will they be able to keep the hat a secret?" In gameplay, I answered each question over the course of its own scene.

Since there's only three players, I can afford to focus this tightly on one character as a session problem; you may prefer problems that affect more characters.

If you thought that sounded interesting, check out Fate Core; it explains the whole thing better than I can (in the GMing chapter).

Eldan
2013-08-21, 01:51 PM
I'll have a look at Fate Core, but I think I'm still not quite there with explaining my problem.

Let's take an incredibly simple and generic story that I probably wouldn't run even remotely like that.

The Villain is using The Artefact to Do Evil.

We have a location, say, a city. It's moderately fleshed out, there's some dozen NPCs with backstories and personality quirks and they all have something they can sell to the PCs or a problem they need help with or some specialized knowledge they could tell the PCs about.

We have a Hook. In the first scene, an NPC the players care about is attacked by the bad guy's minions. The players defeat them, but the NPC is wounded or killed. They decide to find out what this is about, possibly take revenge.

We know what the finale, ideally shoud look like, in this cliché scenario. the PCs burst into the ritual chamber at the last possible moment and stop the Villain from Doing Evil with the Artefact.


So, what happens in between? That's the part where I always have a total blank. We can't just have that first scene, then that finale. We need buildup. We need reasons for the players to interact with the NPCs. We need, perhaps, just padding, or the game is over in less than two hours. How do plan what happens in the middle? I could probably do the padding. If necessary, I could easily spin three hours of NPC conversation out of this, but that doesn't build any tension. It won't be interesting, in the long run.

TheStranger
2013-08-21, 02:00 PM
Given that your group has enjoyed (modified) adventure paths, I don't think there's anything wrong with a relatively linear adventure. You don't have to do a big, sandbox-style campaign unless that's what your group prefers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with underlying your campaign with railroad tracks if that's how everybody has fun.

That said, I have the same problem you do. Unfortunately, there's no easy solution, because it sounds like a creativity issue - you want to know how to come up with good ideas (or fill in the details on a big idea, which is basically the same thing). And it's really really hard for creative people to explain how they create things (and there's no universal answer anyway).

At the end of the day, the answer (as it often is) is "hard work and practice." Think about the last adventure path you bought, and how many man-hours must have gone into putting it together - my guess is it's a lot. Once you have your overarching campaign idea, you really just have to sit down and come up with the steps along the way - the NPCs, the settings, the encounters, etc. Preferably with a plot hook that makes the next dungeon the logical step for the PCs to take, but doesn't make it look like you're hitting them with the clue bat.

When you really think about it, the work that goes into designing a single adventure sequence (plot hook, encounters, dungeon, boss, etc.) is probably more than designing the overarching campaign in the first place. And you're going to do maybe dozens of those over the course of the campaign, tying them into each other to create some kind of cohesive adventure.

It sounds like what you're doing is coming up with a really good idea, a few plot hooks to start it, a big-picture sense of where it's going, and maybe the first adventure sequence, but then you're running out of creative steam because you're hoping to fill in the rest once things get going. That's not a criticism - like I said, I have the same problem. And I think the answer is to really sit down and work on it - very few people are blessed with the ability to come up with stories on the fly.

Lord Torath
2013-08-21, 02:25 PM
I think you need to come up with 'sub goals' for your big bad. Steps he has to take before he can "do evil" with his artifact:

Cliched examples:

Big Bad must first acquire artifact. he can snatch it right in front of the PCs, or he can have accomplished it already.

BB must collect resources (of whatever variety) to prepare the artifact. The PC's can find out about this before hand, and do the whole Race to the Gate bit, or they can notice the resources disappearing (BB needs pets specifically owned by 5-year-old girls) and react to that. They will probably be unable to stop all of BB's collection teams, so that they still must stop him from "doing evil". (Love that phrase, by the way!)

BB must eliminate or turn all members of Group X or his plan will be detected by the authorities.

BB must acquire/destroy the Anti-Do-Evilinator to prevent it from stopping his plans.

PCs must determine location of BB's Secret Hideout(TM).

You need to make it so that each of the solutions to the Interestingly-Fleshed-Out-NPCs' problems will slowly point the way to BB's sub goals or great big Do Evil ritual/Climactic Showdown.

These sub-goals could be optional for BB. If the PC's thwart him on sub-goal A, he could have Team B dispatched to accomplish back-up-goal A, so he can still Do Evil with his ritual. Or you can him getting more and more desperate as the PCs thwart each of his sub goals, resulting in a climactic battle for survival when the PCs finally beard him in his lair.

kyoryu
2013-08-21, 02:48 PM
Here's what I do.

As others have said, start with the other forces in the game. That doesn't just mean a single bad guy, or even a single bad guy and his minions. Who else is involved? Are there other bad guys at work, maybe in a weak alliance? Maybe the other bad guys are competing with the BBEG in some way? Maybe there's forces opposed to the BBEG in some way. Maybe there's other forces *besides* the BBEG that are opposed to the characters.

But just "BBEG and characters" is pretty linear and one-sided, by definition.

Okay. Next figure out what the BBEG wants. "To take over the world!" Yeah, okay, sure, but *why*? And to a certain extent, even this can be delayed til later.

Next, figure out why the characters care.

Next, figure out *one* thing that, in the early stages of the primary antagonist's plot, will impact the characters and something they care about. That's a great place to start the game. A good game will start with something that the players *can't* ignore. Something that drives them in some way. Not just something bad that happens, but a combination of a constantly bad situation (fascists running the town under martial law!) and/or an impending threat.

The NPC getting killed doesn't really qualify on its own. It's a Bad Thing, but doesn't itself hint at either Ongoing Badness or Worse To Come. And you need at least one of those things.

At this point, you can almost think of the BBEG and the characters (or other forces) taking turns. Players do something proactive, everyone else does something, either in response or to further their own agendas. The BBEG may have a general agenda, but it shouldn't be completely set in stone. Plans need to adjust.

Now what you need are "hand grenades". These are things that get the PCs moving in interesting ways, but don't necessarily mandate a *specific* response. Use these when the players stop moving.

And remember to keep up the Ongoing Badness and/or Worse To Come.

Also, there was a thread about maintaining a sense of peril or danger. I think what I wrote in there may be of use, especially in terms of coming up with Ongoing Badness and Worse To Come. They've gotta be things the players care about, not just things that you tell them to care about.

In a lot of ways, knowing what's going to happen isn't the key. The key is having ways to keep things moving.

Alejandro
2013-08-21, 03:00 PM
Don't try to write everything out. Just some things. The players will do the rest.

In the last Saga game I just recently GMed, the PCs made a Hutt boss very angry with them. So, he had their ships repo'd and taken to a junkyard for shredding and smashing.

It was up to the PCs what to do. They did the following:

1. Discover their ships were missing. Find a witness to what happened, and Intimidate an answer out of him as to where their ships went (he was mildly involved.)

2. Pay a speeder taxi driver a wad of cash to take them to the junkyard as fast as the speeder would go. I made up the driver's personality on the spot; if they ever return to that world, they'll meet him again and it will seem real.

3. Sneak into the Hutt owned junkyard, see them dumping their ships into a scaled up car shredder, and express their displeasure violently. During the battle, the Imperials showed up, as the Hutt tipped them off too. Players did all kinds of crazy things, like using a magnetic junkyard crane to snag the Imperials' equipment, or the owner of one of the ships actually jumping into the shredding machine and making Acrobatics checks to avoid being horribly mangled, to reach and get into his ship.

Yeah, it went well. But I only prepped a little of it. Like, one page. And I left out stuff from the description above.

valadil
2013-08-21, 03:18 PM
We have a location, say, a city. It's moderately fleshed out, there's some dozen NPCs with backstories and personality quirks and they all have something they can sell to the PCs or a problem they need help with or some specialized knowledge they could tell the PCs about.


Based on what you've listed here I'm going to take a guess at the problem. It sounds like your NPCs are reactive. They're going to wait in their store fronts until the PCs ask something of them. I suspect this is the case because you listed a number of things about the NPCs, but only "problem they need help with" ever asks the PCs to do anything.

Make your NPCs ambitious. Give them things they need to get done. If they bump into the PCs, they'll try to recruit the PCs. If not, they'll find some other sucker who needs to make a buck. The job of the NPCs is to make the PCs dance.

(I'm not saying all NPCs need to be ambitious go-getters. Just that you need a critical mass of ambituous go-getters to push the PCs around. The rest of the NPCs can be lazy.)

Back to the story... "The Villain is using The Artefact to Do Evil."

1. Who is the villain?
2. What is the artifact?
3. How do the players know the villain has the artifact?
4. What is the artifact capable of?
5. How do the players know evil is going to come out of it?
6. Why would villain want to make evil?

Giving us the premise you did skips past all of these questions. Probably a few more too. IMO, all these should involve some amount of investigation or be discovered naturally.

Let's start with the artifact. The basic trope here is to rescue the lost artifact from the hole in the ground. The hole is full of monsters. It's a cliche, but whatever. Using cliches can help reinforce that you're in a fantasy setting. It's also a nice light quest the player's can use to get their feet wet.

Then there's a twist. I see a couple options. One: The artifact isn't at the bottom of the dungeon. Someone else got there first. Two: The artifact is at the bottom of the dungeon, but that NPC who came along for the ride steals it and leaves the group. Now you've got a villain. And you've introduced this villain before introducing his villainy, so the players have some insight into his personality and may even consider him a friend.

I wouldn't actually plan past this part just yet. Let the players go that far and then see where things stand. But just for the sake of discussion...

I wouldn't prep anything for figuring out where the artifact went or what it can do yet. For now I'd let that be something the players can investigate if they choose to. If they want to go to the library or scry the artifact based on some dust they found or try some spell they pulled out of a new splatbook, let them. I'd only write in a way for them to do these things if they're failing to come up with anything on their own.

At this point I'd start on question five, but indirectly. The players really want to go do some investigation, but the cemetary is overrun with zombies. This is an immediate threat that must be dealt with. What's not apparent yet is that the artifact helps fuel necromancy. They don't realize that this distraction is happening because villain has artifact. It may come up later or it may not.

By now I'd also probably have some idea of why villain is doing what he's doing. Personally I don't like evil or power for its own sake. I prefer someone who does good, but goes a little too extreme with it. That's just my style though. The first thing that comes to mind is that he wants to use the undead as soldiers in a war. Not to conquer, just to defend his homeland. Give him the same homeland as the PCs and they might actually be in favor of this. How they figure all this out, I've got no idea. But a war is a pretty good backdrop for a campaign.

Mr.Bookworm
2013-08-21, 03:31 PM
I think a pre-written adventure more-or-less has six elements that should be examined. Kind of in order:

1) The set-up. Obviously, how does the adventure start? It needs to have a hook to get the PCs interested in it. Loot, power, revenge, whatever as long as there's a reason to care about it. You should tailor this to your group as best you can. It should also not rely on the PCs being morons (or PCs, if you want to be tautological). If your adventure relies on the PCs poking their noses into a police investigation, there's usually going to be one guy who points out that this is a horrible idea.

2) The buy-in. The actions the PCs have to take to continue the adventure, continuing throughout the entire thing in every single scene. Part of this is on the PCs and part of it is on the GM. The GM should, as mentioned, make these as easy as possible by having the hooks of the buy-in be something that the PCs would naturally want to do. The PCs, on the other hand, should not be obstructionist and refuse every hint and lead out of spite or sheer bull-headedness. Progression should never rely on a dice roll. If they need to find a clue to progress, just give them the damn clue.

3) The railroad. Every adventure is a railroad, there's no getting around it. The only thing you can do is branch the tracks and try to hide them as best you can, to produce the illusion of choice. This also relates to the buy-in. You should make every new track as natural as you can, so the PCs don't feel railroaded. If they need to do something, make sure it's emphasized above all else in whatever manner you can. Have as little contradictory information as possible and particularly don't place emphasis on something that has absolutely no relation to the adventure.

If there are multiple paths in the adventure, you're eventually going to need to bring them back together. If the PCs have a choice of going to House A or House B, and from there to Bar A, House A might include a certain set of clues that leads to Bar A, while House B might include a different set of clues that also leads them to Bar A.

4) The movement. Loitering tends to be pretty awful to pre-constructed adventures. You need to keep them moving along the railroad in a fairly speedy fashion. There should be a time constraint, a pressing urge, a bomb in their head, something that keeps them moving. Again, emphasize the details you want the PCs to follow up on, so they don't go off track.

5) The improvisation. Your PCs are going to **** it all up at one point or another. They're going to do something you never thought of and didn't plan for. I actually don't have much advice here, you just need to be good at winging it. Try to get them back on track as soon as you can. Or let them go off track, if you don't mind a lot of re-writing.

Also, there's absolutely no shame, if all else fails, in just flat-out telling the players what you were expecting them to do. It's better than floundering around.

6) The conclusion. The end of the adventure. It should wrap up most of the outstanding hooks and mysteries, villains should be defeated, loot should be had, and the PCs should feel like something was accomplished, instead of it all being a gigantic waste of time. It's possible for a great adventure to have a crappy ending, but I don't think I've ever seen a crappy adventure with a great ending.

Emmerask
2013-08-21, 03:34 PM
Hm players to me where always pretty easy to predict really, I mean yes in the details they sometimes do stuff you cant really predict but on the whole...

if they hear about something interesting in almost all cases they will want to investigate it.

So lets say for a medium level plot the bbeg has the plan to ritually murder people so that the places where the victims (1 murder / day or somesuch) are killed create the shape of a pentagram over the city.
The pcs hear of the first/second whatever murder in the Tavern where they stay... and they will investigate them...
Create a villain and why he wants to do the ritual, have some interesting npc witnesses and plan the locations. The adventure pretty much writes itself :smallwink:

If your group is really good/lucky/genre savvy they will realize the shape or even culprit beforehand and anticipate the next location... dont stop that, they will feel extremely proud if they manage to get "one up" on you ^^
If they cant stop the ritual well there will be an interesting boss fight with the bbeg and his new blood golem or whatever the ritual did :smallwink:

Magesmiley
2013-08-21, 04:32 PM
A few tricks that I use:

Look through the DMG and Monster Manual. Make a list of creatures, traps, obstacles, environments, and items that might be interesting to use. Keep an eye out towards ones that fit into your adventure. Some of them wil almost write themselves into your storyline.

Look through those modules that you've gutted. Are there interesting encounters that you ripped out and discarded? Some of them might be recyclable into your current adventure.

Borrow a scene from a movie or TV show. Or a book.

Is there something on the map of the area that suggests it would be an interesting place for an encounter? If so build an encounter around the location, populating it with whatever fits well there.

Ask yourself if there is anything that would need to be accomplished for the villain's goals (both major and minor) to be met. These can often point to other tasks and encounters with the villain's minions.

And don't forget helpful folks. Is there anyone who would oppose the villain? Not all encounters have to be with the opposition. Having some encounters where talking things through with friendlies can be a great boon for the players.

kyoryu
2013-08-21, 07:14 PM
3) The railroad. Every adventure is a railroad, there's no getting around it.

Ugh. You may be right for pre-written, published adventures, but I don't think this is a true statement in general. I don't think it's a helpful statement, frankly, as it suggests that the only way to have an adventure is to railroad, which is not true.

That's not saying that railroads are *bad*. But they're *one* way to write an adventure.


The only thing you can do is branch the tracks and try to hide them as best you can, to produce the illusion of choice. This also relates to the buy-in. You should make every new track as natural as you can, so the PCs don't feel railroaded.

I utterly disagree with this. Couldn't disagree more. If you're running a railroad, just be up-front about it. Illusionism is another word for *lying*, and players are quicker to pick up on it than people think. Really, if you tell me it's a railroad, I can accept that. If you tell me that I actually have agency in the game, and it turns out that I don't, I'm going to be upset.

Mr.Bookworm
2013-08-21, 08:25 PM
Ugh. You may be right for pre-written, published adventures, but I don't think this is a true statement in general. I don't think it's a helpful statement, frankly, as it suggests that the only way to have an adventure is to railroad, which is not true.

Maybe I'm using a loaded word with railroad, but it's entirely true.

Absent arbitrary numbers of monkeys with arbitrary numbers of typewriters, you cannot write every single possible thing the PCs will do and you cannot reasonably be expected to flesh out every route they could take. You need to pick a path and write with the assumption that the PCs will follow with the path, trimming off side-roads as you go.

So, railroad.

kyoryu
2013-08-21, 08:54 PM
Maybe I'm using a loaded word with railroad, but it's entirely true.

Absent arbitrary numbers of monkeys with arbitrary numbers of typewriters, you cannot write every single possible thing the PCs will do and you cannot reasonably be expected to flesh out every route they could take. You need to pick a path and write with the assumption that the PCs will follow with the path, trimming off side-roads as you go.

So, railroad.

Presuming pre-written adventures. As I said, if you're planning on publishing or the like, you don't have much choice, and a certain amount of "railroad" is likely (though the DFRPG published adventures aren't very railroad...). And many classic D&D modules aren't railroads in any way, shape, or form (Keep on the Borderlands, anyone?)

For an adventure for your group, though, there's less need to railroad. You just prepare differently. YOu *can* run/prep/write it as a linear railroad, but it's not *required*.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing (that's a group preference). But I think it's an error to say that it's inevitable.

Mr.Bookworm
2013-08-21, 09:18 PM
For an adventure for your group, though, there's less need to railroad. You just prepare differently. YOu *can* run/prep/write it as a linear railroad, but it's not *required*.

I feel like we're suffering a breakdown of communication here.

In the manner that I am using it, a railroad is an adventure with a clearly defined beginning, end, and sequences along the way that presuppose you follow them along to get to that end. Every single adventure does this, no matter if it's a published one or one you wrote yourself. Every single adventure requires that you do certain things to progress the plot.

You cannot write an adventure that is not a railroad in one fashion or another. You would be writing until the Sun expanded into a red giant and that would obviously burn up all of your notes.

Keep on the Borderlands is a good example. It assumes that you will go to a keep. It assumes you will go to the Caves of Chaos. It assumes you will buy into the adventure, in other words. Yes, there's some amount of wandering around you can do, but ultimately, back on the tracks.

In fact, KotB is kind of an egregious example, because there's something that might as well be an invisible wall preventing you from going outside of the predefined area of the adventure.

kyoryu
2013-08-21, 10:27 PM
I feel like we're suffering a breakdown of communication here.

In the manner that I am using it, a railroad is an adventure with a clearly defined beginning, end, and sequences along the way that presuppose you follow them along to get to that end. Every single adventure does this, no matter if it's a published one or one you wrote yourself. Every single adventure requires that you do certain things to progress the plot.

Whoa. Okay, KotB again. What's the plot? What sequences are there? What's the end? There aren't any of those things. There's no plot to advance. There's places you *can* go, but no "required events" or "planned sequences".

Yes, there's a keep. Yes, there's the Caves of Chaos. If you don't go there, you're not playing the module, you're doing something else. But there's nothing really preventing you from wandering off. You aren't forced to do anything in any particular order.

If you're calling KotB a railroad, then the only conclusion I can come up with is that if you prep *anything, ever*, it's a railroad, regardless of whether the players ever go there or not.


You cannot write an adventure that is not a railroad in one fashion or another. You would be writing until the Sun expanded into a red giant and that would obviously burn up all of your notes.

If you consider writing an adventure to be "writing out everything that may happen", then yes.

If you consider it to be "writing out the starting situation, and enough information that the GM can work with what the players do", then no. That requires the GM to actually think and run the game, rather than just recite from the book, though.

It's not a Choose Your Own Adventure. It's supposed to be a living, reactive situation.


Keep on the Borderlands is a good example. It assumes that you will go to a keep. It assumes you will go to the Caves of Chaos. It assumes you will buy into the adventure, in other words. Yes, there's some amount of wandering around you can do, but ultimately, back on the tracks.

But there's nothing forcing you. There's no sequences of events. There's no end. There's no plot. Without those things, how can you say there's tracks?


In fact, KotB is kind of an egregious example, because there's something that might as well be an invisible wall preventing you from going outside of the predefined area of the adventure.

Wha? Because it's not defined in the adventure? So any amount of preparation in the world is still a railroad, because hey, you can't go into space?

For these things to be true, you have to stretch the definition of "railroad" beyond any semblance of its normal meaning. I'm having a hard time taking this seriously as a discussion.

kyoryu
2013-08-22, 03:41 AM
You seem to believe that all prep is railroading. I believe you can do prep that isn't.

Let me give you a brief example of prep I've done for a game, and you can tell me if you consider it a "railroad" or not (by your definition). You can also tell me if you consider this to be prep or not. I'd find it hard to believe that this isn't prep.

The town of Newfallon sits astride a river. It is ruled by a merchant oligarchy, and is rather unique in that it is an independent city state surrounded by a more traditional kingdom. The head of the merchant oligarchy is Albertus, a middle-aged man with an eye for fashion. He has several children - a very snobby daughter, a son who wishes to join the clergy, and a son who wishes to follow in his father's footsteps.

The church in the town is the Church of the Storms, and acts as both clergy as well as the academy of magic - the use of magic is heavily tied into religious beliefs within this setting. The local head of the Church is Cardinal van Dyke, an ancient man who has a reputation for being very kindly. He is getting very old, though, and his health is starting to fade. Much of the actual Church work is done by various underlings. The Church is headquartered in a large, ornate cathedral surrounded by several outbuildings, on a tall hill opposite the hill that Albertus' manor sits on.

There is an assassin's guild in town that acts as the secret enforcement of Albertus. Albertus is attempting to use both the assassins as well as the normal police/guards to consolidate his grip of power in the town, and basically drive the church out. If he can use humiliation, he'll do that. If economics work, that's fine. If it takes murder and fear, then so be it.

There's a bar in town known as the Grimacing Hippogriff. The proprietor is a huge, gregarious man named Dylan. However, Dylan has his secrets, and is far more dangerous than he lets on...

Meanwhile, in the guard barracks, Officer Murphy tries his damnedest to keep the peace and work for the townsfolk, despite the constant bickering between the merchants and the Church, as well as the normal levels of crime.

The kicker in this is Cassadin. He's a member of the Assassin's Guild, and has recently had an encounter with a Caller of the Void - the heretical Fifth Storm . The result of this encounter is that he's been infected with a type of demon known as a "vigor worm". This demon gives him inhuman strength and speed, as well as an appetite for flesh.. preferably human. The vigor worm can give birth to more of its kind, which can then be used to infect others. Additionally, infected humans will excrete a spider-like being that can infect other humans and turn them into thralls of the infected human.

Cassadin has infected his old friend, Tashar, and Tashar's brother Garren. He hopes to get more people into his "group", and use that as a power bloc to rival the merchants, if not flat-out replace them. So far he's been undiscovered, but that's about to change...

When the game begins, the PCs are about to investigate the house where Tashar, Garren, and Cassadin's sister Alise (who is also Tashar's girlfriend) are staying and building a small army of thralls - the PCs have been informed of "bandits" in the area and hired to check it out. Tashar is about to infect Alise with a vigor worm against Cassadin's wishes.

What happens from here is up to the players. Chances are they don't win the initial encounter with the infected humans, but are driven off. However, now they know about the infected humans and the vigor worms, at least at some level.

All of the parties will attempt to use this knowledge to their benefit in some way if they can.

Cassadin will attempt to keep it a secret, and even possibly recruit the PCs to his side, arguing that the merchants are corrupt and need to be deposed. He's not entirely wrong. He'll work with the Church if he has to, but knows that his infection makes that a very dangerous proposition.

Alise, if she survives the initial encounter, will discover how horrible the vigor worms are, and will try to find a way to cure herself, her brother, and the rest of her friends. If she has to she'll run to the church, but is more likely to run to the PCs given a chance. She fears Cassadin's reaction if he finds out.

The two brothers mostly just want to keep building power, and mostly do what's ordered by Cassadin. He's keeping them mostly quiet, so if Cassadin is somehow taken out, they'll be off the leash and will likely start infecting more and more people indiscriminately, and using their thralls for banditry and flat-out raids on the town, if they get strong enough. They're unlikely to work with either the merchants *or* the Church.

Van Dyke wants to restore the place of the Church in the town. He's happy to coexist with the merchants, but will do what he needs to do in order to maintain the Church's presence and influence. His goal is not power for its own reason - rather, he believes that the Church is a necessary part of the life of people in the city. And this makes him potentially more dangerous - he's a True Believer, and will happily break some eggs to make an omelette. He's more likely to use the existence of the Vigor Worms as a tool of propaganda, and lead a holy crusade against the merchants if he can tie them together - such unholiness is exactly the kind of thing to remind people of why they need the Church. But, if he can't use them as propaganda, he *will* regretfully use them with his more trusted troops to give him an edge.

Assuming that the three infected from the beginning (Tashar, Garren, Alise) survive, Cassadin will almost certainly get at least a description of the PCs. Alise's desperate quest to get rid of the Vigor Worms will also start leaking information about them to the town.

So that's the situation. What happens next is up to the PCs. The moves that they make to try and take out the infected will almost certainly cause some of the interested parties to find out about their existence - especially since, at the minimum, the Church is the logical place to go about looking up information on them.

The PCs may try to work with various groups. They may choose to be infected by Vigor Worms. They may work against them, either with the Church or with the merchants. If they play their cards well and keep control of things, they may very well be able to stop things cold.

They may be able to find out enough about the Worms to find a way to banish them, ending the threat. Or, their actions in one way or another could cause the infection to spread, most likely if Cassadin is killed in some way.

The final results of this could be anywhere from a quest to get what's needed to banish the worms and a quiet resolution, to a mostly-peaceful coup of power, to open warfare, to something resembling a combined vampire/zombie apocalypse. And any of those things can lead to further things happening in the game after this scenario plays out - after all, *somebody* summoned the first Vigor Worm.

So, is this a railroad?

Need_A_Life
2013-08-22, 04:12 AM
The Hook: That tasty thing that gets the players interested. Occasionally optional, depending on gaming style (whether by the GM saying "you're on assignment X. Why?" or similar)
Example: You've agreed to track down a deserted soldier, who's rumoured to have sought the protection of one of the street gangs of a major city uncomfortably near the front lines, because he has some family connections within the gang. Why did Military Command decide to send you?

Beginning: First act.
Example: Well, you aren't welcome. While just a small-time gang, they still out-number your little band by 5-to-1, so taking them head-on is not going to go well. Locals are terrified, local law enforcement are too overworked to deal with a mere nuisance and the gang is recruiting, pointing out that it only takes a single lost battle at this point before civilians will need all the protection they can get and none of that will be coming from a collapsing government.
Perhaps that's your way in? Whether playing the role of cowed civilian, would-be-thug or just someone with useful connections or skills, it might get your head in the door for long enough to find your target, knock him out and get back for your payment.

Middle: Second act.
Example: You've gotten your way in. It's a matter of hours or days now until you get your shot at your target and then it won't be long until you collect your money. Wait a moment... why are the church bells clanging in the middle of the night? Oh f... the line has broken and within an hour, the streets will be filled with enemy soldiers and "burn and pillage" seems to be a popular post-battle celebration these days.
Your main priority is now to make it through the night. Between panicking civilians, various groups trying to raid the city before the others can, fire and collapsing buildings, you're in for a busy night.
You could leave the city, but really? Is it going to be any safer out there?

End (optionally: "The Hook 2.0"): Third act.
Example: Where do you stand now? Do you try to collect your money from a command that probably doesn't care at this point (or may not even exist any longer)? Does the life of a criminal suit you? You're in a city that's burnt and filled with corpses no one has the time to bury. So it doesn't take long before disease takes hold and you have to deal with scam artists selling miracle cures, people breaking whatever containment efforts a make-shift militia was able to establish and people start blaming each other for their misfortune of late.

The city that was only a few weeks ago a shining example of modern civilisation is now threatening to implode on itself.
So what do you do?

Lorsa
2013-08-22, 04:46 AM
Eldan, it seems to me your problem is really that you've planned the end of the story from the very beginning. In my experience, that's never a great way to go. What if the players run into the villain before his master ritual and stop him? What if they don't get there in time and he summons the doom of evil? Both of these are equally probable outcomes and one of them even leads to further adventure as now you have to stop the doom of evil.

Forget the end, it can not exist in your mind at the beginning of a story/adventure/campaign. The only thing you need to worry about is what happens to the PCs right here and right now and supply enough interesting things that they can do.

Take your scenario for instance. The players would like to know who killed their NPC friend. So naturally you need to leave some clues that doesn't necessarily lead to the villain, but leads to more investigating. Maybe one of them dropped a special weapon with a mark from a very prestigious blacksmith in town? Maybe someone saw people running down into the catacombs below the city? Perhaps there's a dead mook on the ground with a mark or tatoo that tells you where to go? Ideally all three should be there and then the players gets to choose where to go. Maybe the tatoo leads to a street gang that was hired to help (and if you like fighting, there could be fighting involved). Maybe the blacksmith doesn't want to talk and shoos them out of the smithy and later runs off to talk to the villain lieutenant or recruits some assassins to kill the PCs (because he was in on it). Maybe the catacomb is a dungeon filled with monsters and only if you can navigate it properly can you find your way?

When I ran a murder mystery in WoD I supplied the single player with 3 suspects right from the start (told by various people involved). None of them was guilty but at least it gave him things to investigate.

Basically all you need to do is place some "here are things you can do" in front of the players and then wait to see what they do. You don't need to know how it all fits together or leads to "the end" (that doesn't exist). All you need to do is to make sure there are things they can do.

I've ran start of scenarios such as the one you described, when someone they care about gets murdered. In some of these cases I haven't even known who was guilty from the start. The players will quite often figure it out for you.

cabbagesquirrel
2013-08-22, 05:15 AM
1hr planning adventure.

1: I pick three themes/ideas/tropes.

2: I make a list of relevent creatures of the correct level and that suit my above themes.

3: I list three relevent sites for combat.

4: I write 10 ideas for NPCS.


For idea 1 recently I just said Druids, Pirates, Ghosts. And I ran from there.

From there I envisaged a port town of scurvy knaves made from the flotsom and jetsom of ships and driftwood. On top I figured that the druids would be in control, they command wind and wave, so there's a relevent druidic heirachy in the area. Also lots of religious iconography, prayer flags all over. All that jazz.

Outside of the port town there is farmland, all very druid friendly, the forests come right to the fences and livestock roam free. But never should you go into the woods because of the ghosts and spirits. Think haunted creepy forest.

There, a setting, it's just the groundwork, and you can be a little relaxed, the players tend to fill in the story.


Step 2, well this was level one adventure, so I found some goblins, some kobolds and the like, converted them to the relevent races like human and halfling etc. This is with 3rd edition, so we ran with that. I find them in the MM and use some book marks.


Step 3, I chose dockside night time ambush, bar room brawl, haunted forest glade and ambush by possessed farmers. Combat generally writes itself as it is primarily player based. Just set the scene, remember your themes. So I had a night time ambush happening with barrels of old fish being used as a weapon. I would use any movie ideas I could. When I DM I promote tactics over smish and smash.


Step 4, Look in a DMG, heaps of NPC ideas. I generally have a list of names and I write two words, one physical descriptor, one emotional descriptor. And then their Job.

So Steve the depressed horse handler has a horseshoe scar on the left side of his face. Why is he depressed, why the scar, are they related? Who knows, now it's up to the PC's to ask.

Turned out he was afflicted with a spell because the Horse's shoes were made from the same metal that was once a witche's cauldron. The druids in charge in the area had broken her spells and undone all her metal wrought things.

Sebastrd
2013-08-22, 09:02 AM
1hr planning adventure.

1: I pick three themes/ideas/tropes.

2: I make a list of relevent creatures of the correct level and that suit my above themes.

3: I list three relevent sites for combat.

4: I write 10 ideas for NPCS.


For idea 1 recently I just said Druids, Pirates, Ghosts. And I ran from there.

From there I envisaged a port town of scurvy knaves made from the flotsom and jetsom of ships and driftwood. On top I figured that the druids would be in control, they command wind and wave, so there's a relevent druidic heirachy in the area. Also lots of religious iconography, prayer flags all over. All that jazz.

Outside of the port town there is farmland, all very druid friendly, the forests come right to the fences and livestock roam free. But never should you go into the woods because of the ghosts and spirits. Think haunted creepy forest.

There, a setting, it's just the groundwork, and you can be a little relaxed, the players tend to fill in the story.


Step 2, well this was level one adventure, so I found some goblins, some kobolds and the like, converted them to the relevent races like human and halfling etc. This is with 3rd edition, so we ran with that. I find them in the MM and use some book marks.


Step 3, I chose dockside night time ambush, bar room brawl, haunted forest glade and ambush by possessed farmers. Combat generally writes itself as it is primarily player based. Just set the scene, remember your themes. So I had a night time ambush happening with barrels of old fish being used as a weapon. I would use any movie ideas I could. When I DM I promote tactics over smish and smash.


Step 4, Look in a DMG, heaps of NPC ideas. I generally have a list of names and I write two words, one physical descriptor, one emotional descriptor. And then their Job.

So Steve the depressed horse handler has a horseshoe scar on the left side of his face. Why is he depressed, why the scar, are they related? Who knows, now it's up to the PC's to ask.

Turned out he was afflicted with a spell because the Horse's shoes were made from the same metal that was once a witche's cauldron. The druids in charge in the area had broken her spells and undone all her metal wrought things.

Good stuff, Cabbage.

Erasmas
2013-08-22, 11:45 AM
The way that I tend to write mine is to come up with things that I would like to play through as a player. Battles I have never fought, things from movies that I think would be a blast to "re-enact", interesting villains/NPCs to come across, etc... are usually a good source of this for me. I take those things and I flush them out enough to where I would be comfortable ad-libbing the rest of it at the table. This is what other people would call 'scenes' or 'beats' or what have you.

Now, I try and think of running a campaign almost like building a necklace. All of those things you created are beads (so you have Bead A, Bead B, Bead C, and so on) and I think of the player's actions between them as the string. They decide (more or less) what order those things fall into place by the hints, clues, hooks, nudges, leads, bribes, and whatever else you drop into the 'beads'. A point... it helps tremendously to know the psychology of your players - are they motivated by the promise of treasure? Do they bristle at the thought of the bad guy taking advantage of the meek? Are they apprehensive about going into the big dark woods? This tends to go a long ways, I have found.

Aside from this, just have what you feel like you need at hand to go-with-the-flow. A list of possible NPC names, town/tavern names, a percentile chart for appropriate (level and setting) random encounters, etc.

NichG
2013-08-22, 12:08 PM
I actually never bother with the ending until maybe 4-5 games out from it. Maybe thats the difference?

Theme: I start with a campaign theme. This is something broad like 'reality is a lie' or 'Fight against scarcity' or 'A new magic changes the world'. This is going to eventually inform the big meta-plot, but it helps to re-iterate it over and over to the players. The reason for doing this is that this will slowly give the players the ability to intuit things about the bigger plot, which helps with 'what do we do next?' issues. If the players know instinctively that the plot always has something to do with social changes introduced by new powers or abilities, then they may just decide to 'look for who the wizard is this time' if all else fails.

Episodic Driver: Next I generate a situation that naturally lends itself towards encouraging the completion of a certain kind of mini-plot or 'episode'. For example, the PCs are mercenaries and they get paid per-contract; the PCs are performers and are traveling from gig to gig; the PCs are all students at a magical academy and have to do their assignments. This provides the framework to prevent an overall stalling out of the campaign - if an individual story falls flat, there's always an obvious way for the players to say 'okay, next story' instead of 'I don't know what to do now'.

Mini-plot design: This is a situation designed to be started and resolved in a single session. It is usually fairly static - there's no enemy plotting in the background over the course of months or anything; all that has happened already by the time the PCs make contact with it, and they're basically riding the wave of 'this is going down now!'. There may still be investigation/etc phases, but there's no planned dead space.

Arc design: This is the multi-session meta-plot stuff that slowly progresses over the course of the campaign. The trick is, while the villain is doing A, B, and C in the background, the PCs are busy with the mini-plots. So what will happen is, the PCs may get some hint that 'B happened' during one of their mini-plots. Eventually this will become urgent enough that the PCs say 'no more mini-plots, we're resolving the Arc now'.

Failure-resistant Design: The problem with things like the 'bad guy wants an artifact to do evil things with!' is that every point along the plotline is a point of failure for the plot. If the PCs beat the BBEG to the artifact, it becomes very hard for the BBEG to progress his plans - the PCs have already won and there will be no climactic confrontation. If the PCs screw up, e.g. by not immediately destroying or hiding the artifact, then the plot can be revived, but you can't rely on PC error.

Instead, its best to not even introduce things whose interruption will stop the plot in its tracks. Don't let the PCs meet the BBEG or even know enough about him to hunt him down until right before the final battle. Instead, the PCs are coming into the plot-line along a tangent - while the BBEG is progressing his plans, the PCs are cleaning up the messes left in the wake of where the BBEG already finished his machinations. Or they're interacting with the fringe side-effects of those machinations.

The point isn't to force the PCs to be ineffectual - in fact, if the PCs are pretty on top of it, you don't need as many cleanup jobs - you can focus on mini-plot sessions instead. The point of the bad-stuff is that each time it happens is an additional clue, something that renews the chase to find the BBEG. Every time they have to deal with BBEG-fallout, the reward should get them one step closer to being able to be proactive in their fight. Basically, whenever the PCs are stuck, a town gets attacked, and there's a new clue in that town that gets them unstuck.

Once they can be proactive, the plot arc is basically over within the next 2-3 sessions, though you can always sow the seeds of a new arc.

Autolykos
2013-08-22, 01:09 PM
I think you're too focused on when the grand finale will happen. In my experience that entirely depends on how good the players are at finding out who the bad guy is and where to find him.
To get them there, I'll line out all steps in the BBEG's plan that have some interaction with the players (maybe mooks trying to rob a caravan the PCs are hired to protect, the villain paying the thieves' guild (or someone else) to acquire a specific item, who will then hire the PCs for the job or part of it, etc...). Then, I make sure each of those has some information hidden in them on the BBEG and his whereabouts, with the hints getting more and more obvious towards the end. If they find that information too quickly for your taste, you can put other things in their way, like requiring the PCs to find some McGuffin to enter the Fortress of Doom and stop the Evil Ritual, finding a way to blackmail a henchman into smuggling them in, or locating the architect who can tell them about a secret entrance that connects the Fortress of Doom to a forgotten cavern system. In those cases, you should be open to creative solutions and drop "your" approach if the players come up with another plausible one. Bonus points if you can find a way to "recycle" unused NPCs and locations from the first phase in the second one (It's usually not that hard to do, since the "attack routes" can often be pretty good hints by themselves - if you find the secret door leading to the lair, you know where to go...).

nedz
2013-08-22, 08:21 PM
Are your players up for a sandbox ?

What your players probably need is direction. There are a number of methods, you should mix and match between them.

You could try the Patron method whereby someone hires the party to do a job, but the best patrons don't hire people for money (see below).

I quite like unreliable patrons myself, this is where they have their own agenda and they see the PCs as their pawns. The more cynical these are the better.

I've run several successful campaigns but my method seems different to most.

I rarely use BBEGs, instead I create a political conflict between different organisations. These will do stuff which impacts the world, and the changes this causes will impact the PCs. The PCs should be able to contact these organisations, or at least their fronts, which generates a set of possible patrons/antagonists.

Now you could rail-road this where all roads lead to patron X, or you can let the players decide who to work for. IMHO They should be free to change sides at any point.

If your conflict is Good v Evil then the parties choice is predictable, either way. I prefer more nuanced conflicts.

I'm currently working on a campaign with 40+ factions, in 10 (possibly fluid) alliances of which about 6 will be initially involved. I think that this should lead to a xanatos pile up, but I have no idea how it's going to pan out beyond their initial moves. I have no notion of how the PCs will fit into this, but we haven't got to Char gen as yet.

Also, when things bog down: throw a random encounter at them. It doesn't have to be a monster, it could just be a shoe shine boy, whatever. Keep things moving — ACTION !!!

Frozen_Feet
2013-08-24, 03:05 PM
@Eldan: Your problem is simply that you worry too much about the ending. You might be best served by taking a step or two away from plot-based adventure planning.

Ever heard the old writer's adage: "When you're stuck, have a man with a gun burst through the door?" This same advice applies to RPGs. And it even has a time-tested rules format:

Random encounters.

I know what you are thinking. "But random encounters are boring! They're just filler between plotpoints!" But it is the very idea of "plot" that actively precludes random encounters for being interesting.

You see, "random" is not the same as "meaningless". The original vision of random encounters was to add an element of surprise to the game - to provide content even when the GM might not have strictly planned it. In short, random encounters are content creation tools, and it seems your problem is mostly about lacking content after the start.

To get the most out of random encounters, abandon notion of specific "plot" or "finale". If the players show no signs of pursuing your plot, then you don't have it.

Intead, you roll 1d8, and on 8 a dragon swoops down and destroys the town the characters are in. :smallbiggrin:

This may immediately place all other planning you've done into peril, but that's the point! Something potentially game-changing is happening, and the players must react to it.

But this brings us to the other issue: player interest. It quite simply doesn't matter a **** no matter how much work and planning you do, if your players are unwilling or incapable of taking any iniative themselves. You should occasionally just ask them "so, what are your characters going to do now?", without giving them specific hints as to what to do. If they really can't come up with anything, you can provide them with options, but the real point is making them decide for themselves. This may or may not advance your vision of "the plot", but roll with it regardless.

If you have no preplanned content for whatever they decide to do, either improvize, or once again, use random encounters. The important thing is that whatever the players choose to do, it leads to something, and is allowed to have real consequences. There are many good premade adventures that develop random encounters to something beyond just a list of monsters - see Lamentations of the Flame Princess product line for ideas, Better than Any Man comes to mind, and it's also free.

shadow_archmagi
2013-08-24, 03:18 PM
A few tips:

1. There's a video out there somewhere of a famous stand-up comedian (Cosby?) who said that on his first night, he had ten jokes written down, and he used all of them, and one worked, so he kept that one and wrote ten more for the next night, and then one of THOSE worked, so now he had two good jokes, and so on.

DMing is much the same way. Keep introducing new NPCs and new plot-elements, and then pay attention to which ones your players seem interested in, and do more with those. Generally speaking, if a plot hook gets forgotten, it was forgettable, and can be safely discarded (That said, every once in awhile, bring back something that everyone forgot a long time ago, just for that BY THE NINE DIVINES I FORGOT ALL ABOUT THAT!!!! look on the faces of your players. I remember one time the players killed a necromancer, causing all his undead to go beserk, and then they had the time of their lives fighting their way out. A year later ingame and out of game, they returned to find the whole region overrun with ghouls descended from the original specimens in the tower. He he he.)

2. Don't make every road lead to the same place, just make the same place everywhere. What that means is, if you've just written up the Swamp Dungeon of the Far South, but your players want to go the northern mountains, go ahead and do a Find and Replace and have your Swamp Dungeon be a Mountain Dungeon. They don't know what you had planned.

3. Feel free to change plans based on what the players think. If they become super fixated on a throwaway NPC, write more stuff for him. If they say something like "Why was this crate of weapons so cheap? Unless they only sold them to us as a trap!? Maybe there's a tracking device!" go ahead and add a tracking device while silently thanking them for doing your job for you.

Frozen_Feet
2013-08-24, 03:54 PM
2. Don't make every road lead to the same place, just make the same place everywhere. What that means is, if you've just written up the Swamp Dungeon of the Far South, but your players want to go the northern mountains, go ahead and do a Find and Replace and have your Swamp Dungeon be a Mountain Dungeon. They don't know what you had planned.


I used to do this, but it felt like cheating, so I stopped it. Nowadays, if I prepare locations and put them on the map, they stay right where they are. If my players don't look like they're going there, I just quickly make more dungeons in the other direction, or rely on random encounters.

In general, it might be worth it to place a little something in every direction the players might go to. Then, if they seem bored, you can whip out a map and start drawing little red circles on it. "Hey, I heard there's something nice there. And there. And there too..."

kidnicky
2013-08-24, 06:46 PM
Here's what I do:
"You're sitting in the tavern, discussing your last adventure, when X comes in and tells you that Y came and Zed all the Q so can you go to X's lair and kill/stop him or her (or rescue Q if Q js a person).

Now you come up with like 6 or 7 rooms for a dungeon. How many of what enemy and how much treasure if any. Decide which rooms are connected by hallway. I use the official Dungeon Tiles set so all the terrain and scenery is taken care of for me.

The final room contains the guy they have to kill /rescue/arrest.

The end!!!
You can make this up in 20 minutes with a sheet of paper. The fun is in playing. Just adlib X's accent and mannerisms, and describe the moldy smell in the dungeon,etc. The bad guy can be like "Silence you fools!"

I generally don't aim for Shakespeare, I'm more Masters of the Universe.

Ghost Nappa
2013-08-24, 07:53 PM
If OotS, Harry Potter, Last Airbender and a lot of other stories I've been reading/watching/etc. are anything to go by, one of the most important elements is not in the initial writing. It's in the middle and the end part of the story. You have the set-up. You have the character motivations. But in order for things to have meaningful consequences, you need to have continuity. That is to say, previous actions by your characters need to have an impact.

Somebody prior in the thread mentioned a scenario where killing a necromancer but not dealing with his undead army wound up destroying the area and later when the PCs returned, they find it. That's an example of continuity. Notice that you don't always have to react to what the Players do, but can react to what they don't do.

Maybe your players reluctantly give an super-rare-expensive item to a museum. Have them some time later need to return to the museum only for the curator to tell them all the information in the world they need to deal with some new threat.

Maybe your players wind up destroying a small town. Send someone to attack them in the night crying for vengeance a week later. Or a group of thugs. Or both.

Or you can make people who were previously totally unrelated for the players, the same person.

Let's say that while tensions are high between two countries A and B, your players make friends with the prince of A and then later while they're in B they hear about a masked figure who is a wanted criminal in B, but not in A. They accidentally find and capture the figure, and express interest want to get the bounty (which is quite large) only to find out - gasp - it's their prince friend (bonus points if they don't investigate the double identity and diplomatically screw themselves over later). They can turn him in themselves, make friends in B, piss off A, and get gold; they can set him free, strengthen their ties to A, and potentially piss off B. Sometime after they make their choice, tell them whatever McGuffin or information they want today is in the country they pissed off (or that one's in A and one's in B).

KillianHawkeye
2013-08-24, 07:54 PM
I agree with the ones saying to stop writing the ending first. Just come up with the villain and have X things he needs to do to succeed and Y things the players can do to stop him and see where it takes them. Remember that failure is always an option. The villain can actually win sometimes if the players fail to stop him. (Try to avoid all-or-nothing plots where the world is at stake, though.)

As the old saying goes, the journey is more important than the destination.

Kaervaslol
2013-08-24, 08:09 PM
From my experience adventures are written after being played, not the other way around.

SassyQuatch
2013-08-24, 08:12 PM
I see the problem. Mostly you need to plat more clues, paths, and roadblocks.

Sure, their new NPC buddy has kicked it. They ask "OK, we need to stop the baddy. Now what?"

Spot check. One or more of them automatically pass and they see a scrap of parchment explaining that the NPC found X way to stop the ritual, etc. Plan is set in motion to find item Y to stop baddy. Encounters along the way, set piece in random village, add sidequest to get item to trade for item you want, etc.

or

City guard show up and blame you for murders. You are outnumbered and overpowered. Options are to fight (get knocked out and captured) or surrender. Once in jail they encounter an inmate who tries to convince them that he is innocent but about to be executed. He says if the party help him escape he can also provide evidence that they didn't commit their crime as well. Or they go to trial, or escape themselves, or they are contacted by a benefactor who will get the party freedom if they help him out.

or

Party wanders up to the baddy's tower when a NPC says that they will not be able to get past the mystical traps and elite guards. Offers to help them sneak in through a back way.

Etc.

The problem is that you have too few hooks. You can't have just one big hook and hope that the party fills in the rest. You need clues to follow, NPCs to offer plans, and roadblocks along the way like mini-bosses or side quests, missing McGuffins, and random encounters.

Just busting into the castle and stopping the baddy could be an adventure in itself however, but it would need to be a short adventure, possibly time sensitive. Bypass the gates, sneak past some guards, fight some other guards, encounter the random pet creature or the castle armsman, or golems before reaching the ritual chamber. Bust through magical barriers and then finally fight the bad guy for an epic showdown. Won't be a campaign, but it could be the first couple of games and lead into a new set of adventures.

Pentagon
2013-08-24, 08:34 PM
Hey hey,

When I write an adventure I think about it as a set of encounters and different from a story. I tend to ponder on themes that I like and match to a lvl range. So flicking through the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide I saw a couple of lines that said "a typical Red Wizard Team would be a lvl 7 mage with bodyguards and support."

So I pondered and thought well that would be a good antagonist / boss for a set of good aligned heroes. I write the adventure to be 10-15 encounters long, roughly a level or double for a double level story. Then I thought what plots can I have which will make interesting encounters. Then I join the dots up and reverse engineer the clues to link the chain for the players.

Then I edit the whole thing going over and trying to improve the story, descriptive text etc. to try and improve on the overall quality of the piece.

My 5 cents,
Pentagon

Eulalios
2013-08-25, 08:02 AM
Then I edit the whole thing going over and trying to improve the story, descriptive text etc. to try and improve on the overall quality of the piece.

About how long does it take for you to edit each plot point?

CombatOwl
2013-08-25, 10:55 AM
Honestly, groups that make it easy to write adventures are hard to come across.

Type A: If you're going to railroad the plot, lay the tracks the whole way. Effective railroading requires that you be well accustomed to the interests of your group in particular--so you can intersperse things of interest to all players, not just one or two. You need more than a strong start and strong end; traditional techniques work best here. Build up to a climax and then follow to an inevitable conclusion. Really that's important here. If you do it right, people will want to bring the adventure to an end (hopefully not because they're getting sick of it). End things when they need ending, let things continue when they ought to continue. Keep pacing appropriate--not every encounter ought to test the full strength of the party, but a few ought to be tough enough to wake them up.

Type B: You don't want to railroad the party, so let things happen as they will. This is really extremely disorganized and hard to pull off if you don't have two or three players who are capable of driving the party themselves. If you do have such a group of players, talk to them in advance and try to convince them to build a core party with a common objective. Other players who aren't the sort who can drive an adventure shouldn't be ignored--they should have side stories and such--but if you try to tell everyone's story you'll just end up going in too many directions.

Remember: good adventure design is about following things to their logical conclusions. Events should usually have some kind of "plot inertia" that carry consequences forward. Scenery matters, and so does dungeon layout. Villains need to have internally consistent motives (not necessarily logical, but consistent), and a confrontation between them and the heroes need to become increasingly unavoidable.

From a practical standpoint, the less you (as the DM) need to talk, the more likely it will be for the players to stay interested. If you have to launch into lengthy explanations of anything, you're probably boring your group. Reveal information with handouts (of drawings, in-character letters, etc), not speeches. Pre-generate some treasure handouts so you don't have to repeat a treasure list a dozen times. If it's appropriate, let the treasurer have a copy of a defeated NPC's stat block so he can copy combat gear without having to distract everyone for 10-15 minutes. Also, keep pacing quick. You should know when the group expects breaks--plan for that.

One of the things D&D does very badly is handling scene details. It rests entirely upon you to define a scene and inevitably you don't feel like describing every little detail. Unfortunately, players have different expectations. There are really only two good ways I've seen to deal with this. The classic method is to break players of a need to examine every slight detail for minute advantages in a fight. This is accomplished in large part my changing the focus of the story from crunchy mechanical elements (like combat encounters, enslavement to the CR formula, fishing for failures on routine skill checks, etc) and towards narrative elements. One of the very easiest ways to do this is to follow the classic 3e DMG's advice about the CR system--most encounters ought to be easy encounters, CR wise. If players feel confident that they can handle encounters without fishing for exploitable advantages, they seem to be a lot less intent on inquiring about the least details. And, as a consequence, you spend less time detailing scenery and more time keeping the story pacing sprightly. You absolutely want to break them of the habit of the 15-minute adventuring day, where the party rests after every encounter. Nothing kills dramatic tension like the idea that you can rest for 8 hours before or after every danger.

The other way is what Fate and some other narrative-focused games do--let the players help define the scene.

Along those same lines, keep track of the time a party takes. If you're up to it, plan out a few different ways that encounters can go down depending on how long the players take to reach certain points. Let the party fail sometimes if they take too long. Let the party gain an advantage if they reach a certain point faster than you expect. You should very rarely make further progress in the campaign dependent on the success of a mission in a particular way.

On a side note, when you write up scenery in advance, write up a general description and then a secondary description of some hidden stuff in advance. That hidden stuff could just be some minor treasures (some scattered loose change, as opposed to mysterious hidden compartments in every room), or some minor additional details that don't actually pertain to what you're doing. Provide the stuff so people can fish for it, pre-generate it so you don't waste a lot of time on it, and keep to a trend regarding the utility of such hidden information. Personally I make most of that sort of stuff kind of useless, but that's my style. Sometimes I reveal useful information that way, but it's infrequent enough that the people in my games don't bother unless they're stumped or desperate for gear.

Another practical tip: invest in a printer and ban electronics at the table. If possible, bring the printer and a laptop with you. Let people print out their character sheets and notes and such, but tell them to close the laptop and turn the phone on silent/vibrate while the game's going on. It's all a huge distraction, and honestly it cuts everyone's interest in half when the folks on the other side of the table are playing candy crush in the middle of the fight. Resolve rules disputes immediately through Rule 0 (the DM's ruling supersedes the book's rules) and let people argue their case during the next break. If people take too long to finish their turn, declare that their character is too busy thinking to act and move on to the next person (a round is only 6 seconds, after all, and if you can't figure it out while other people are acting, your character probably can't come up with something better in 6 seconds). If you want to seem more fair about it, use a minute-glass. Initiative is sometimes problematic as well. If you have a large group (more than 5 players), it usually better to use some other method of handling initiative other than what's written in the book. Cards work great (give people with initiative bonuses extra draws), or just do around the table initiative (starting with the highest rolled initiative). Honestly around the table initiative works best because it gives people a very clear idea of how long they have until they need to go, giving them more of a reason to pay attention.

As a final note; exposition is really a bad way to reveal anything. The process of discovery can itself be a useful avenue for roleplaying. You miss out on a lot of opportunities when you just let characters make random knowledge checks on a whim and when you unleash a barrel of exposition on them without any effort on their part. I guess you could say that good adventure design is really as much an exercise in good game management than anything else. The adventure is really just a plan for the DM, not the players. If something helps you to run the game, do it. If it makes it harder for you to run the game, skip it.

AKA_Bait
2013-08-25, 11:57 AM
Forget the end, it can not exist in your mind at the beginning of a story/adventure/campaign. The only thing you need to worry about is what happens to the PCs right here and right now and supply enough interesting things that they can do.

QFT

Several other posters have already hit on this, but I'll add my coppers. I have pretty much always found that the players get most involved when I work backwards. In terms of initial planning this requires: (1) finding out from the players what characters they want to play, (2) figuring out the rough shape of the world they will be in (this is second because the world should fit them, not vice versa), (3) figuring out who the other major players in the world are (BBEGs, NPCs) and what their goals and resources look like.

Then, for me, it's almost like clicking "run simulation forward". Play the NPCs in either the foreground or background as you would if they were your PC, with specific goals they are pursuing and, importantly in my view, with emotions.

Dr. Yes
2013-08-25, 09:25 PM
I'll have a look at Fate Core, but I think I'm still not quite there with explaining my problem.

Let's take an incredibly simple and generic story that I probably wouldn't run even remotely like that.

The Villain is using The Artefact to Do Evil.

We have a location, say, a city. It's moderately fleshed out, there's some dozen NPCs with backstories and personality quirks and they all have something they can sell to the PCs or a problem they need help with or some specialized knowledge they could tell the PCs about.

We have a Hook. In the first scene, an NPC the players care about is attacked by the bad guy's minions. The players defeat them, but the NPC is wounded or killed. They decide to find out what this is about, possibly take revenge.

We know what the finale, ideally shoud look like, in this cliché scenario. the PCs burst into the ritual chamber at the last possible moment and stop the Villain from Doing Evil with the Artefact.


So, what happens in between? That's the part where I always have a total blank. We can't just have that first scene, then that finale. We need buildup. We need reasons for the players to interact with the NPCs. We need, perhaps, just padding, or the game is over in less than two hours. How do plan what happens in the middle? I could probably do the padding. If necessary, I could easily spin three hours of NPC conversation out of this, but that doesn't build any tension. It won't be interesting, in the long run.

Ideally your BBEG's actions will have consequences, and if he's a bad enough guy those consequences will be felt throughout the world in ways that are only tangentially related to your characters' lives. What sort of evil has the villain been doing lately in service of his goals? What towns have become a worse place for his passing, and in what ways? Maybe, for instance, the players' NPC buddy was killed by soldiers in the employ of the recently-installed local governor who is a puppet of the BBEG sent to pacify the area. Maybe they're bandits driven into neighboring lands by the new Evil Overlord's iron grasp on his own holdings. If the bad guy is powerful enough to make a campaign capstone of, there are two adventure drivers you can safely rely on:

1. A lot of people will be picking up the pieces in his wake, and many of them will need help doing so.
2. His power base will need to be eroded before the PCs can challenge him directly.

On the other hand, if you're still at a loss, not everything has to be the BBEG's fault. Bandits still rob people and ghosts still haunt inconvenient places, whether the world is being threatened or not. If you need a breather to think about where things are going in the main plot, Ye Olde Quest Boarde can definitely be your friend.

EDIT:
Just realized that I didn't actually answer the question. Lately I have been running a combat- and quest-heavy campaign with a lot of intrigue happening in the background; my players don't know this, but they're basically setting up the invasion of a neighboring country. Some examples of how this is tying in:

They retrieved an artifact that converted any old wooden item to darkwood, gutting the exotic lumber trade through the capital city of the target's strongest ally.

They escorted some craftsmen to a friendly city. Those craftsmen, as it happens, were on their way to spread priceless trade secrets from the target country's masons' guild to their biggest competitors.

Soon, they'll be helping freedom fighters—good guys doing Good things, mind you—to gain their independence from a tyrannical regime. The target country, strong allies of said regime, will have no choice but to send troops to help put down the rebellion. That is when the invaders will strike.

Basically the way I have been planning is to first think of something relatively straightforward for the adventurers to do—retrieve a MacGuffin, rescue some folks, slay a dragon or what have you—and then think of why their patrons might want that thing done. From there it becomes easy to flesh out what exactly the MacGuffin is, or who it is that needs rescuing. The details fill themselves in.

charcoalninja
2013-08-26, 11:14 AM
I like considering my adventures based on a timeline. So I have my villainous crews of villany and an idea of what they want to get done, and roughly some steps they may need to do to accomplish it.

For example I ran a city based campaign where a cabal of Rakshasa wanted to take it over. In order to do this they needed minions and an army. So the Rakshasa used their power and abilities to recruit most of the organized crime in the city. From there we now have them building their resources.

So the PCs enter the picture with organized crime becoming more and more of a problem and needs a severe commando style crackdown. So the PCs bust up crime, gather evidence of the who's who in the crime zoo, all completely unrelated to the Rakshasa.

So now we've had the set up, Rakshasa arrive, need money, set up their minions.

Now for the progression of the adventure. After each session I look at what the PCs have done, who they've impacted and what the effects of their actions will be. If they succeed in jailing a lot of the crime bosses, that hurts the Rakshasa's bottom line and their military machine so they'll take more drastic actions against them. If they only disrupt a couple of them, rival lords will act to take over, while allies of the Rak's will get more aggressive against the PCs themselves.

In my case, it was both. The PCs had to deal with active efforts on the part of the crimelords moving against them, and the Rakshasa's decided that they needed to take the game to the next level and so unleashed a plague of lycanthropy on the city. The city was shut down and quarentined forcing the PCs to deal with the werewolves while the crimelords goged the city for supplies and resources needed to last the quarentine.

Basically construct your adventures based on action and reaction.

What does my villain want? How will that impact the PCs? What did the PCs do about it? And how will my villain react?

Repeat this after every little plot element, doesn't matter how small.

For example:
The PCs save some milkmaid from muggers or colateral magical damage, they now get fresh milk and muffins delivered to their inn rooms by a greatfull girl or her family, who in turn can now be exploited by the villains as hostages, and works to personally invest the characters in the setting.

The PCs kick the crap out of the villain's hired help, he starts getting more desperate and starts summoning/calling supernatural help to accomplish his goals.

Just a little something I've found worked fantastic, as it allows your adventure to grow organically, include real consequences from player action while still telling the story you initially had hoped to tell.


For example after my players had dealt with the werewolf problem enough and went back to disrupting more notable crimelords used by the Rakshasa, they advanced their timeline, staged a prison break and expended their resources on hiring a mercenary Viking Pirate army and waged open war on the city itself.

Morgarion
2013-08-26, 01:38 PM
I have to disagree with a lot of the sentiment that has recently appeared here. I don't think that there is anything inherently wrong or deleterious about starting with the end. I find it hard, if not impossible, to avoid considering it when I work on a project. I do think, though, that we have to remain flexible enough (whether we're writing a novel or planning a campaign) to allow room for development and growth over the course of the story.

There are advantages and disadvantages to proceeding along either course of action. You have a great deal of freedom if you have no ordained ending to be think about. You also don't necessarily have much guidance about what needs/should/ought/might/can/cannot happen. I usually know, in general terms, what happens at the end, but writing the middle is the exciting, daunting, challenging part. As I work on it, I make decisions that affect the ending and force me to go back and reconsider elements to the conclusion. Sometimes I feel boxed in and it's aggravating to try to decide whether to scratch the ending or to retool enough stuff that the ending still makes sense.

As far as railroading goes, it also seems like we don't really have a common definition for what it means. And clearly, no one is going to be able to provide a single, standard, dictionary definition. I hold the unfortunate honor of being the first person in this thread to have mentioned railroading. I guess I see it as action intended to negate player choice. Backing up a second, I think it's okay to have rails, but not to railroad. So you can have a course of action you want your players to follow and clues that should encourage them to follow it. What you ought not to do, however, is to force them into that course of action.

So, if you want them to investigate the haunted manor on the hill overlooking the town, and you have a series of related encounters designed to pique their interest in the manor and encourage them to visit it, I think that's fine. If there's an NPC who hangs out at a tavern they would normally need to speak to to learn about it and they don't go to the tavern, maybe the NPC bumps into them outside of a magistrate's chamber in the town hall. Or maybe it's a different NPC altogther, or maybe another NPC refers the players to the first one.

We, as GMs, are usually solely responsible for populating the world and playing the part of everything that isn't the PCs: animals, the weather, the economy, geography, monsters, traps, NPCs, whatever. The players are responsible for how their characters behave in and react to the world. Railroading, in my mind, is any action that denies the players the freedom to make this choice as they want. It's not even giving them a chance to try. It's that stupid, snide little line we all hear about (or hear, or perhaps say): 'You can't'. It's not allowing their attempts to succeed because it's not how you wanted them to succeed.

There are too many (or not enough, depending on your perspective) stories about GMs who screw their parties over and basically are just childish about what their parties can and cannot do. The party thinks of a really clever, effective way to use their environment or a previously useless object to their advantage and the GM says 'You can't', with or without elaboration. Then there are the GMs who don't think they are railroading because they let players attempt to do whatever they will, even succeeding often, only they are always ready with a mechanism that negates the success.

Dr. Yes
2013-08-26, 02:31 PM
I have to disagree with a lot of the sentiment that has recently appeared here. I don't think that there is anything inherently wrong or deleterious about starting with the end. I find it hard, if not impossible, to avoid considering it when I work on a project. I do think, though, that we have to remain flexible enough (whether we're writing a novel or planning a campaign) to allow room for development and growth over the course of the story.

There are advantages and disadvantages to proceeding along either course of action. You have a great deal of freedom if you have no ordained ending to be think about. You also don't necessarily have much guidance about what needs/should/ought/might/can/cannot happen. I usually know, in general terms, what happens at the end, but writing the middle is the exciting, daunting, challenging part. As I work on it, I make decisions that affect the ending and force me to go back and reconsider elements to the conclusion. Sometimes I feel boxed in and it's aggravating to try to decide whether to scratch the ending or to retool enough stuff that the ending still makes sense.

As far as railroading goes, it also seems like we don't really have a common definition for what it means. And clearly, no one is going to be able to provide a single, standard, dictionary definition. I hold the unfortunate honor of being the first person in this thread to have mentioned railroading. I guess I see it as action intended to negate player choice. Backing up a second, I think it's okay to have rails, but not to railroad. So you can have a course of action you want your players to follow and clues that should encourage them to follow it. What you ought not to do, however, is to force them into that course of action.

So, if you want them to investigate the haunted manor on the hill overlooking the town, and you have a series of related encounters designed to pique their interest in the manor and encourage them to visit it, I think that's fine. If there's an NPC who hangs out at a tavern they would normally need to speak to to learn about it and they don't go to the tavern, maybe the NPC bumps into them outside of a magistrate's chamber in the town hall. Or maybe it's a different NPC altogther, or maybe another NPC refers the players to the first one.

We, as GMs, are usually solely responsible for populating the world and playing the part of everything that isn't the PCs: animals, the weather, the economy, geography, monsters, traps, NPCs, whatever. The players are responsible for how their characters behave in and react to the world. Railroading, in my mind, is any action that denies the players the freedom to make this choice as they want. It's not even giving them a chance to try. It's that stupid, snide little line we all hear about (or hear, or perhaps say): 'You can't'. It's not allowing their attempts to succeed because it's not how you wanted them to succeed.

There are too many (or not enough, depending on your perspective) stories about GMs who screw their parties over and basically are just childish about what their parties can and cannot do. The party thinks of a really clever, effective way to use their environment or a previously useless object to their advantage and the GM says 'You can't', with or without elaboration. Then there are the GMs who don't think they are railroading because they let players attempt to do whatever they will, even succeeding often, only they are always ready with a mechanism that negates the success.

I definitely agree with you about starting at the end. If you don't consider the resolution and just "let things happen", there is a strong chance that you'll end up with a meaningless or clichéd ending to what may have been an otherwise fun and interesting campaign. People remember the beginning and ending of things most clearly; you want both to be strong points of your story.

As far as railroading, I think the actual problem that people are describing when they use that word is the GM's breaking of verisimilitude. Part of your job as a GM is to give the campaign direction, otherwise your players are just aimless thugs doing random things in a procedurally-generated world. The trick is to make it seem like the world is big and open and full of choices, and feel as if the choices are meaningful when in reality they may only be filling in the details on a pre-determined outcome. If you as a GM have to say, "But thou must", it instantly breaks the illusion of player agency and reminds everyone around the table that they really aren't acting on a big and dynamic world, they're actually just walking through a story one of their friends thought up.

As far as practical advice, injecting clear-cut choices—follow this guy to port or that guy to the mountain pass, petition one of these three factions for help—allows you to create agency in a way that's easy to plan around and account for ahead of time. If your players do something genuinely unexpected, let them run with it as long as it doesn't screw up the overall direction of the campaign. If you must redirect them, try to do it by making other options look more attractive instead of just saying "No".

CarpeGuitarrem
2013-08-26, 02:58 PM
I agree with the ones saying to stop writing the ending first. Just come up with the villain and have X things he needs to do to succeed and Y things the players can do to stop him and see where it takes them. Remember that failure is always an option. The villain can actually win sometimes if the players fail to stop him. (Try to avoid all-or-nothing plots where the world is at stake, though.)

As the old saying goes, the journey is more important than the destination.
I'm gonna piggyback on this, because it illustrates a thought I had very well.

Adventure design is about creating vectors which point at one another. The end happens when the vectors all meet at last. So you can have an idea of what the ending will involve, but you can't know the details of how it will play out, or resolve. If you try and set your ending in stone, you're setting yourself up to railroad the players and make their choices meaningless, so that you can get to the ending that you pre-wrote.

Vectors are different. If you're not familiar with the term, a "vector" is a force pointed in a specific direction. A warlord amassing forces for the purpose of destroying a neighboring town is a vector. A realm-spanning conspiracy that's trying to put one of their own on the throne is a vector. A nest of monsters in a mountain that's proving to be a breeding ground for vicious evils that threaten to overwhelm the countryside is a vector.

If the vectors point away from one another (the neighboring town is in the west, the throne is in the north, the mountain is in the south) and don't somehow link up, the campaign is unfocused, and will probably die down. If the vectors point towards one another (the town is one of those which supplies the royal city, which is in the shadow of the mountain), then the game gains focus, and becomes interesting, because the vectors close in on one another, and start to crash. That tumult generates drama and sources for adventure, and it also generates unpredictability--and a chance for PCs to jump in and make the difference.

The final trick is that the PCs are also a vector (or multiple vectors, depending on how unified they are). You need to give them some guidance to ensure that they're moving in a direction that'll crash into the other vectors.

And when they all come together, that's when you make the ending. Shake things up, let things fall down and burn and destroy, and give the PCs a chance to make a difference.

Remember that drama comes when there's someone trying to achieve something, and something else is in the way. The drama gets better if that something else is dynamic--something which can push back when the first person overcomes them. The conspiracy's immediate obstacle is that there's already a king on the throne; when they eliminate the obstacle by killing the king, they are set upon by canny members of the royal court who have sworn their lives in service of the realm. Now they have to respond to that complication.

Morgarion
2013-08-26, 03:19 PM
As far as railroading, I think the actual problem that people are describing when they use that word is the GM's breaking of verisimilitude. Part of your job as a GM is to give the campaign direction, otherwise your players are just aimless thugs doing random things in a procedurally-generated world. The trick is to make it seem like the world is big and open and full of choices, and feel as if the choices are meaningful when in reality they may only be filling in the details on a pre-determined outcome. If you as a GM have to say, "But thou must", it instantly breaks the illusion of player agency and reminds everyone around the table that they really aren't acting on a big and dynamic world, they're actually just walking through a story one of their friends thought up.

I pretty much agree, but I think a good GM can accommodate outcomes no one would have thought to determine ahead of time. One time, as a player, my party defeated a group of pirates at sea and we captured their ship. The rest of the party wanted to sell it, but I wanted to keep it, even though we already had a ship. So, I bought it from the rest of the party and started my own shipping company. It wasn't something the GM had expected any of us to attempt, but he let me do it. He didn't - strangely enough, considering how he was generally a pretty awful GM - spitefully crash it on the way back to port or send pirates to take it back.

As long as you're sufficiently clever and you've got the imagination and a decent GM who wants to cooperate, for you to succeed and have fun, the world really can be as open as it seems. So, yeah, make an enticing story that the players want to participate in and don't punish them for ignoring it if they want to play around and do their own thing for a little bit.

My ship did eventually crash or get captured or just disappear or something. I was sending it on more and more dangerous runs for bigger payouts because my overhead was growing too fast and my business wasn't profitable anymore, so it ended up being alright.

Morgarion
2013-08-26, 03:35 PM
There are some other advantages to knowing your ending that I forgot to mention. One is foreshadowing. You can't give any hints about what's to come if you don't even know. Now, you could say 'but I don't want my audience to know what's coming!' and certainly they shouldn't know everything, but they should get a good head's up about some of the dramatic action to come. It's really dissatisfying for the audience if they have no opportunity to even guess. Imagine watching a crime show (like Monk or Psych or CSI or something) and they figure out the killer's identity based on a clue that hasn't been made known to you, the viewer, throughout the entire episode. It sounds infuriating to me.

Another problem with not having the end thought out is that you don't know where the end begins and the middle stops. Dramatic pacing, if you pay attention to it (I have the bad habit of letting the story pace itself, for better or worse), might be very difficult to maintain.

Dr. Yes
2013-08-26, 03:47 PM
Vectors are different. If you're not familiar with the term, a "vector" is a force pointed in a specific direction. A warlord amassing forces for the purpose of destroying a neighboring town is a vector. A realm-spanning conspiracy that's trying to put one of their own on the throne is a vector. A nest of monsters in a mountain that's proving to be a breeding ground for vicious evils that threaten to overwhelm the countryside is a vector.

If the vectors point away from one another (the neighboring town is in the west, the throne is in the north, the mountain is in the south) and don't somehow link up, the campaign is unfocused, and will probably die down. If the vectors point towards one another (the town is one of those which supplies the royal city, which is in the shadow of the mountain), then the game gains focus, and becomes interesting, because the vectors close in on one another, and start to crash. That tumult generates drama and sources for adventure, and it also generates unpredictability--and a chance for PCs to jump in and make the difference.

The final trick is that the PCs are also a vector (or multiple vectors, depending on how unified they are). You need to give them some guidance to ensure that they're moving in a direction that'll crash into the other vectors.

That's a really cool way to visualize story planning. Nicely done.

kyoryu
2013-08-26, 06:11 PM
I have to disagree with a lot of the sentiment that has recently appeared here. I don't think that there is anything inherently wrong or deleterious about starting with the end. I find it hard, if not impossible, to avoid considering it when I work on a project. I do think, though, that we have to remain flexible enough (whether we're writing a novel or planning a campaign) to allow room for development and growth over the course of the story.

Well, depends. The problem lies in how you define "end". If you mean that your antagonists have some agenda, and they want to accomplish something, I think that's a great thing to establish.

If you mean an actual scene - "The PCs have found the eight Macs of Guffin, and enter into the BBEG's throne room for a final confrontation, where he reveals his dastardly plot and how the PCs have been helping him all along!" - then you're definitely going down the road of limiting player agency, as a good amount of effort will be spent getting the PCs to that final, planned encounter. Unless you're willing to give it up, but then the planning involved should be minimal.


There are advantages and disadvantages to proceeding along either course of action. You have a great deal of freedom if you have no ordained ending to be think about. You also don't necessarily have much guidance about what needs/should/ought/might/can/cannot happen.

I disagree with this. You should know what your antagonists are doing, and be able to have them dynamically react to the world. You have just as much guidance as if you made all of those decisions up front.

The difference, perhaps, is that you focus on a different area. Instead of figuring out what the PCs do, you instead work on what the antagonists or other parties involved are doing.


I usually know, in general terms, what happens at the end, but writing the middle is the exciting, daunting, challenging part. As I work on it, I make decisions that affect the ending and force me to go back and reconsider elements to the conclusion. Sometimes I feel boxed in and it's aggravating to try to decide whether to scratch the ending or to retool enough stuff that the ending still makes sense.

So don't write the middle. Let it happen as a result of playing the game.


As far as railroading goes, it also seems like we don't really have a common definition for what it means.

Eh, forcing can be a strong word. In general, "railroading" is about lack of player agency in determining the events of the game, and what the characters do. It's about whether players get to make decisions that actually impact the world/plot, or whether that "plot" is predetermined and static.

I don't know that that's a strong dictionary-level definition, but I think it's pretty close. There may be grey areas involved, but that's to be expected.


Backing up a second, I think it's okay to have rails, but not to railroad. So you can have a course of action you want your players to follow and clues that should encourage them to follow it. What you ought not to do, however, is to force them into that course of action.

I think railroads can be fine. I think it's just better if you get the players to agree that you're all going to do a linear thing for a bit. The player agency is happening at a different level, but it's still there.

If not, if they haven't agreed to it, but will still end up "on the rails", I do think it's railroading.


So, if you want them to investigate the haunted manor on the hill overlooking the town, and you have a series of related encounters designed to pique their interest in the manor and encourage them to visit it, I think that's fine. If there's an NPC who hangs out at a tavern they would normally need to speak to to learn about it and they don't go to the tavern, maybe the NPC bumps into them outside of a magistrate's chamber in the town hall. Or maybe it's a different NPC altogther, or maybe another NPC refers the players to the first one.

If you really want your players to go to the haunted house, I'd suggest you just tell them before the game "Hey, I've got this haunted house scenario, I think it would be fun. How about it?" Alternately, asking them if they're interested *before* you prep it up is even better. Arguably, asking the players what they're interested and then prepping for that is even better than that.

Subtle pushing like that done consistently can certainly be taken as railroading. Given how common railroading *is*, persistent pushing like that will often make players presume that there *is* a railroad, and just give up and jump on the tracks. In many cases, it really is a soft type of railroading - the GM has prepped certain content, and wants the players to experience it. He makes the path to that content very easy, with frequent reminders of it, while simultaneously making other options harder to achieve.

An example from a real game was an encounter with an "evil, savage" druid type that was sitting on an obvious Evil In A Can. Given that this person was willing to let us go, and forgive us the deaths of her siblings and tribesmen if we would just walk away, my character started going "Gee, maybe they're not so evil after all. Maybe this really is something bad like she's trying to say." She spoke our language, but only broken bits and pieces.

Any question that was asked where she could give an answer that would lead us to attacking her and opening the Can was understood, and we received a reasonably clear answer (or, at least one that could easily be interpreted as "kill her!"). Any question where the answer could have led us to think "Gee, maybe she's not so bad" was met with confusion and an inability to communicate.

Sure, we *could* have walked away. And the GM involved felt that it wasn't railroaded, because we *could* have walked away. But, realistically, there was a desired outcome, and we were pushed to engage with the encounter in the designed manner.


Railroading, in my mind, is any action that denies the players the freedom to make this choice as they want. It's not even giving them a chance to try. It's that stupid, snide little line we all hear about (or hear, or perhaps say): 'You can't'. It's not allowing their attempts to succeed because it's not how you wanted them to succeed.

Exactly. There's one acceptable outcome, and you'll get there by hell or high water. That's the real railroading.

Whether you give them a chance to "try" or not is irrelevant. If you give them a chance to try that you won't even allow to succeed, you're railroading just as much as if you don't give them the chance.

That doesn't mean that some things just won't work, of course. But if there's really only one valid choice (or even several choices that all have exactly the same outcome), you're railroading.


The party thinks of a really clever, effective way to use their environment or a previously useless object to their advantage and the GM says 'You can't', with or without elaboration. Then there are the GMs who don't think they are railroading because they let players attempt to do whatever they will, even succeeding often, only they are always ready with a mechanism that negates the success.

Yup. And even outside the scope of the encounter, there's how tightly planned the next n events in the game are, and whether the PCs have any real impact on what those events are.



Remember that drama comes when there's someone trying to achieve something, and something else is in the way. The drama gets better if that something else is dynamic--something which can push back when the first person overcomes them. The conspiracy's immediate obstacle is that there's already a king on the throne; when they eliminate the obstacle by killing the king, they are set upon by canny members of the royal court who have sworn their lives in service of the realm. Now they have to respond to that complication.

This is pretty important, and why my previous example had about five different 'sides', all the better for conflict.

One trick that I find for dynamic conflict is to view the "higher order" story as almost a separate game. Each "player" in the game gets a turn, during which they try to do something - directly attack the other guys, get rid of something that's helping the other guys, make some strategic move that bolsters their later chances, go after some goal, etc.

Depending on what the 'other parties' do, this could be behind the scenes, or it could play out into some encounter that the PCs are part of. The PCs may find out about this later, but it's generally better to have them find out about it relatively quickly, even if they aren't a part of it - the fact that their adversaries are gaining ground should add to the tension that the PCs feel.

I generally think about this as a Fate Conflict at a high level, and use that as kind of a structuring device, even if I don't necessarily mechanically follow it.

Morgarion
2013-08-26, 08:07 PM
Well, depends. The problem lies in how you define "end". If you mean that your antagonists have some agenda, and they want to accomplish something, I think that's a great thing to establish.

If you mean an actual scene - "The PCs have found the eight Macs of Guffin, and enter into the BBEG's throne room for a final confrontation, where he reveals his dastardly plot and how the PCs have been helping him all along!" - then you're definitely going down the road of limiting player agency, as a good amount of effort will be spent getting the PCs to that final, planned encounter. Unless you're willing to give it up, but then the planning involved should be minimal.

I guess I meant something in between. If I know what my antagonists are trying to do and what it takes to stop them, I should have an idea about what the end will look like. But if the players figure out a way to stop them earlier than I'd expected, and it ought to work, then that scene is out or different.


So don't write the middle. Let it happen as a result of playing the game.

Agreed. I was actually thinking primarily of [i[writing[/i] writing, so there's a slightly different set of challenges when you are all the players as well as the GM.


If not, if they haven't agreed to it, but will still end up "on the rails", I do think it's railroading.

I'm on the same page with you there. Maybe the players won't know it if their agency is only an illusion, but it doesn't change what you've done.


If you really want your players to go to the haunted house, I'd suggest you just tell them before the game "Hey, I've got this haunted house scenario, I think it would be fun. How about it?" Alternately, asking them if they're interested *before* you prep it up is even better. Arguably, asking the players what they're interested and then prepping for that is even better than that.

Subtle pushing like that done consistently can certainly be taken as railroading. Given how common railroading *is*, persistent pushing like that will often make players presume that there *is* a railroad, and just give up and jump on the tracks. In many cases, it really is a soft type of railroading - the GM has prepped certain content, and wants the players to experience it. He makes the path to that content very easy, with frequent reminders of it, while simultaneously making other options harder to achieve.

There's probably as many ways to handle it as there are GMs. I think the gold standard is something along the lines as the Elder Scrolls games - you've got the main quest from the get go, but you're constantly surrounded by opportunities to blow it off and take a different path. Of course, we don't have the manhours that Bethesda gets for prepping, so it helps if you're comfortable running a game off the cuff for this style.

Communicating with your players and being ready to hear their feedback is never a bad idea, either, like you mention. Incorporating their interests is a great way to keep them happy. Ignoring them can lead to sorrow. Treating GMing as a competitive activity, rather than a cooperative one seems to be the best way to get generate a 'bad GM story'.


That doesn't mean that some things just won't work, of course. But if there's really only one valid choice (or even several choices that all have exactly the same outcome), you're railroading.

That is actually a really important point. As foregone as it seems, yeah, some things don't work, nor should they. You can't flap your arms real hard and achieve flight, or climb up empty air.

Well, I can't but maybe you can.

danatblair
2013-08-26, 08:34 PM
There are a few things I do, and it sounds like many others have said similar things.

First, I like to give them a world to play in.

Second, I like to have several plates spinning. At the very least, make it feel like the players have got choices to make. Unless the payers put something off for a ridiculously long time I will rarely punish them for dealing with other plates first. Whenever they arrive at a location it was often the right time, and something is going down for them to interact with. However, this rules should be broken occasionally. When there are consequences for being late, or not going one way, it creates choices.

third. Give them meaningful choices to make. That is not to say that they always get to choose between 2 good outcomes. Sometimes they will simply try to have to weigh several "least bad" options and try to come out as far ahead as possible. Mix it up. too many bleak choices in a row is demoralizing, but don't let them face a world of gumdrops and kittens. Do they rescue some former townfolk and friends from being slaves or stop an assassin? If they stop the assassin, can the slaves still be freed but with more work? Or will the lot have already been sold?

Fourth, let the players actions and choices have consequences. Once a campaign is rolling, a lot of the time the simple act of trying to keep all plates spinning will generate enough tension to keep people interested. If the players free some slaves, maybe they get help from the former captives. Maybe they need to help some of the people again. Or, maybe they just bump into them in the street and share a knowing glance. If they rescue someone from an assassin, how grateful is the person? If a favor is offered, maybe help tracking down slavers could be secured.

fifth, plan for several contingencies. Plan for going after the slavers first. Plan for going after the assassin first. Plan for them splitting up. Plan for them going after neither. You don't have to fully map out every path, but have an idea of what to do if they go in a given direction.

as old campaign details can be boring, i am going to put them in a spoiler box to be skipped unless someone wants to actually read my examples.

If I am running star wars, I will usually set it in some random sector far away from galactic affairs (during classic era, if that is what I am running) and then let the players come up with their own plan for freeing a sector.

The last one I ran the players were a bunch or traders and mercenaries. They did a lot of exploration and scouting. When they stumbled on an ancient spaceport that had fallen into ruin they refurbished it and turned it into a casino - and hired many rebellion members from the local cell. They even put a guy from the rebellion in charge when they were gone, and implied that if some money were embezzled by some miscreant into the rebellions funds the investigation into the matter would be less than thorough (provided the funds needed to run the casino were never touched).

They built a swoop chase track when they decided they wanted to expand their business.

The local rebel cell was originally small and unorganized. In fact, the imperials thought there was no rebel presence. So, the players helped the rebels have good cover stories and shift blame to criminals. By the time the imperials, in the admittedly unimportant, poorly managed, and far flung sector realized what had happened the campaign was mostly over.

They convinced a sympathetic Admiral to act as a mole, and his ship aided them on a few occasions. they had a habit of both sides never informing the other of the bits that might offend the other party.

the intervened when a splinter colony of a long thought extinct species was found and evaluated by the Imperials as a slave race. In a twist, the players (with the help of the aliens) decided it was best to play along for a while and accept slave species status as it would give them a few rights. If they were not recognized as a slave species, the planet would have been declared uninhabited and open for development to all parties (with the locals having no protection or say.)

Basically, they had to help the Aliens figure out if it was better to reject any type of legal status and fight a very possibly losing guerrilla war for their planet or accept imperial rule for the moment. It would take a while for the the bureaucracy to forge treaties and quotas for the exportation of the locals to other worlds. Until then, the imperials would be forced to spend resources to defend the planet from criminals. And it was hoped that getting them to spread their resources thinner for a while, all the while buying time for the local population to train and organize, would be a tactical gamble that would pay off - but it was a tactical gamble that involved the freedom of an entire planet. And the players did not forget this.

However, they were so pissed off that they had any hand in the enslavement of a species that they got their revenge on the next visit. During what was to be a ribbon cutting ceremony announcing the Empires formal recognition of the species into it's ranks, they dropped a building on the governor responsible for the affair. Literally.

(did you know that the description of Victory class star destroyers in D6 mentions that it can deploy ready made imperial garrison buildings from orbit? It does.)

They moved the landing beacon for one of the deploy able garrisons to under the podium. They put a large supermagnet under it, and gave the governor special boots for the occasion. They discretely evaced the area of non-imperials, and then the building landed. It was a very wizard of oz inspired death.


they tried to lay as low as possible when not operating above board. they usually blamed their activities on known criminals.

They framed hutts for some of their criminals activities, which hilariously bit them in the ass briefly until stranded the hutt on an unknown planet. That planet actually became colonized by all the people they defeated, and couldn't let run around reporting them to the authorities. Eventually it was settled by criminals, imperials, slavers etc. The planet was informally dubbed Australia, cause it was originally just used as a place for them to place bad people. And this planet was a plot point a few times.

They were faced with the morale dilemma of what to do with some innocent (though Imperial) scouts who found the planet, and were shocked to find that someone in the sector had been consolidating a power base in the business and criminal world without going noticed.

They also panicked when on a routine fly by they picked up a weak radio signal on Australia. They had accidentally marooned a cargo of slaves on the planet when disposing of the aformentioned hutts criminal empire. The slaves were stuck on a world full of imperials, slavers, and crimelords fighting for survival. They had repaired a radio using parts from some of their escape pods and were trying to set up some sort of communications or rescue beacon. Yet, if the slaves were allowed to leave the planet, it would be possible someone might find out about Australia (Which would have brought the heat down on the sector).

They cut business deals to supply ships to the rebellion. They made allies on dozens of worlds by helping them out. They stopped a major slaver ring, with most of the supplies and freed individuals ending up with the rebellion. They were privateers who captured Imperial supply lines (adding crews to Australia, often so that no one would know that they had managed to steal some imperial ships that could pose as a wolf in sheeps clothing)

When it was time to wrap up the campaign, they were alerted to a massive incoming imperial fleet. The empire had been defeating and was in the process of splintering into fifedoms. If they didn't act quick, the system would have become one of those.

So they called in all their favors. Rounded up all their friends. Every world that they had helped contributed. All the ships they had captured had been handed to the rebellion and refurbished. And they had a massive battle, ensured the freedom of the sector, and (best of all) had a healthy economic empire of their own.

Know how much of that I had planned: they were independent traders, who had a ship. that was it. Just sorta snowballed from there.

Lorsa
2013-08-27, 02:32 AM
Agreed. I was actually thinking primarily of [i[writing[/i] writing, so there's a slightly different set of challenges when you are all the players as well as the GM.

Writing stories is an entirely different school than writing roleplaying adventures. Don't confuse Eldan (and the thread) unnecessarily. In fact, one of the largest issues with some GMs is that they secretly want to write novels, not roleplaying campaigns. It's not comparable.

Eldan
2013-08-27, 02:47 AM
Heh. I have the opposite problem. Whenever I try writing a story, every one starts acting like an RPG character.

And thanks to everyone who replied.

Lorsa
2013-08-27, 03:36 AM
Heh. I have the opposite problem. Whenever I try writing a story, every one starts acting like an RPG character.

And thanks to everyone who replied.

Did you get any help with your problem?

And that's certainly interesting. My problem with writing stories these days (I used to be better) is that I have no idea what the characters will do. They just aren't reactive enough, it seems I have to tell them what to do myself!