# Adventure Design 102 tags: #thoughts  Yeah, I know. I've been writing [[The Sunless Citadel - Continuing the Meta-Meta-Commentary|a lot of replies to CFs dungeon and now adventure analysis videos]]. You know, you've got to take your inspiration where you can find it. Sometimes it's a real challenge to dig around in your head and find inspiration to talk to other people about the things that you love. You'd often rather just be doing it or working on your own projects, and if part of what you do is telling other people about it, then it can be really hard to keep that motivation. Sometimes what you've got is a reply to other people. We're just going to go with that. What now? I think it's worth pointing out that I'm totally on board with the investigation versus tactical versus cinematic versus dramatic adventure design split, though I would point out that the investigatory loop is really more an approach to deciding how things are directed and really is of a slightly different class than tactical versus cinematic versus dramatic. I'd also point out that the war games that inspired the creators of **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]** originally certainly did have branching campaign systems dependent on the actions of the forces involved, particularly as to whether they succeeded or failed in particular battles. Those have been mechanics involved in a lot of strategic and campaign play, going back to old-school 18th-century **[[Kriegsspiel]]** and probably, arguably before. This isn't a new concept in war games, but seeing it instantiated at the man-to-man/skirmish level was where the innovation was. Compare/contrast the domain play at upper-level play of **D&D** with building up forces and pushing wars forward in other games. ## Character-Based Adventure That neatly out of the way, I wanted to go into something that I think was left by the wayside, in part because it's specifically talking about adventure design, even though what I'm about to discuss is most certainly a mechanism and philosophy for approaching designing adventures. That is, we've completely left aside character-driven adventure design. One of the common elements of all of the adventures that CF pointed out before is that they pre-exist the player's intentions. They are written as adventures for the generic adventurer. Nothing about them is inherently to do with what the players have intentions to pursue with their characters. Philosophically, they exist before and without the players, and despite all the emphasis on dynamism, if the players didn't come along, theoretically something else would happen to them. There is no natural flow of intent. > [!warning] > As a sidebar, this is one of the issues I have with the idea of pre-designed adventures at all. They have nothing to do with your table. They have nothing to do with your players. They have nothing to do with you. They are simply things that you can buy and put in front of other people. They are the warmed-up frozen TV dinner of adventure gaming. I know this is a spicy opinion, but here we are regardless. > > However, personally and particularly, I think this bit from Gary Gygax himself in **Keep on the Borderlands** is critically interesting in that early on it's established that the DM should specifically engage the players regarding the character, why they're there, and what they want out of being there. > > ![[Adventure Design 102 - Gygax on Character Identity.webp]] > > This is active and directly engaging role play in a meaningful sense. The problem with it is that it happens at entirely the wrong time. Figuring out why the characters are there should happen before they get there, rather than putting the players on the spot and expecting them to shift gears into something no context was established for. That seems unfair and unkind to the players. That may just be my own particular inclinations coming through. That the adventure exists wholly independent of the characters need not be the case. It's impossible to do so as a commercial enterprise, but it is most certainly possible to do at the table if you are the GM or are playing a GM-less game. First, you have a single requirement: you have to know what the characters want, who they are, and where they want to go. There's a reason that Session Zero has become such a term of art in tabletop RPGs, and it's because this is the point at which that understanding is communicated from player to GM or from player to the rest of the group. What do the characters want? Are they roving to and fro in the Earth to seek what coin they may devour? Do they have an ideological crusade? Are they driven explorers who just want to see new things, meet new people, and possibly kill them? Do they just want to keep their ship flying? Are they individually driven by personal history? Different players may have characters with different intents and different answers to these questions. Knowing the answers to the questions before you start lets you build adventures which are specific to their desires. If you know that your group is interested in being a bunch of mercenary bastards, selling their swords to the highest bidder, and taking on independent projects that look like they may turn a dime (like fully exploiting a dungeon no one else has cracked open before or hadn't managed to haul out the real goodies), then you know what you can start focusing on up front. If they are a group of friends who are dealing with a tangled bunch of emotional and relationship complexities, and they're generally operating within the same part of the city, and the conflicts are largely interpersonal, that's a good thing to know. Both of these answers can have adventures crafted for them, but you have to know that you need to before you start. This is what I would refer to in the context of this adventure analysis architecture as *"character-driven adventuring."* The characters exist first, and then the adventure is built to further their interests. That's not to say that within the context of the history of the world or the setting, as agreed upon, that the conditions of the adventure don't predate the characters and have nothing to do with them, but their interest is what brings it into being at the table. There are games that very specifically focus on this kind of adventure design play, and one of the best examples I can think of is **Blades in the Dark**. If you haven't read **[[Blades in the Dark]]**, I strongly suggest that you do. Session zero involves figuring out what your band of merry degenerates wants to do as a gang. When I say gang, I mean that in a literal sense, because all of the protagonists are criminals, and they are all starting their own gang. This does simplify coming up with things for them to do and helps keep them all together in the same sort of cognitive space. But moreover, **Blades in the Dark** has a very mission-oriented adventure architecture. The players look at their characters, and they figure out what kind of gang they are. Deciding what kind of gang they are (which has actual mechanical import) helps shape them deciding on what kind of scores they want to pull off. Scores in **Blades in the Dark** are the equivalent of what other people might think of as adventures, and on the smaller scale, as dungeons. They are activities which advance the interests of the gang that all of the players have a level of character investment in and which the players decide to engage with. Now, a smart GM is going to realize that this is a great opportunity for them to put deciding what the next score is in front of the players toward the end of any given session where they complete a previous score and are dealing with their downtime. They have a little bit of a yammer. They have a few ideas about what scores they want to do. They hash it out in character and out of character, and then they tell the GM, who can then be prepared for the next session with some notes and general ideas about where they're going and what they're doing and how it might shake out. This is character-driven adventure design. The GM can very well have ideas about how the rest of the city is changing and evolving in response to player action. There are mechanical impacts of player action on the city at large. None of it exists without character intent and player intent. We look where the players are looking, and the GM considers things happening off camera in response, but all of the activity, all the way that's going to fall out, is going to be in front of the camera where the players are looking. From my perspective, this is the ideal way to work. If you must have a prepared adventure, it should be critical to what the players want to do. You shouldn't be dragging them around by the nose and hoping they bite. You shouldn't be preparing reams of content that they will probably ignore in order to talk to the goblin at the bar, who you spent 30 seconds conceiving of his existence. You should be doing what the players want to do and not making the players do what you want to do.[^1] This does mean that you aren't going to be able to just buy off-the-shelf things and plop them down in front of your players and expect them to go chewing on it. This is both a positive and a negative. It means you will be spending more time prepping for what happens at the table, and this is why systems which drive a lot of these things via interpretation and player agency help a lot because they take a lot of the burden off the GM. On the positive side, you're not going to be wasting your time. You will be looking in the direction that the players want to look, and you'll be getting ahead of them just before they get there. The whole experience is going to reflect what they come to the table wanting to do. As a side effect, you're also not going to be just stringing together a series of unrelated incidents and expecting the through line to be just the characters showing up. NPCs that they interacted with and perhaps got on the wrong side of six sessions ago may be critical to dealing with the hot water they find themselves in with today's score. Continuity makes itself because the player characters are literally the protagonists of the story. This is not an imposed story from without. This is not the GM telling the players their story. It is the story that comes from the shared space of everyone at the table. There is a space in which character-driven adventuring overlaps with what CF refers to as investigatory adventuring. In the investigation, within the context of the pre-written adventure, the players have the freedom to pursue their personal interests and character interests as they see fit. While time pressure may exist and probably ought to, the characters are free to engage with any particular part and pursue it in whatever order they like as the knowledge of the situation evolves as they see it. In a real sense, this is character-driven adventuring with a player-first focus, simply within an already extant framework presented by the GM. Seeing this, one might suggest that there are character-based adventure analogs for the other modes of adventure play. ## Modal Characters What would those other modes of character-driven adventure design look like? We've already talked about investigation. That one is the easiest because it's the most obvious, being simply a matter of scale. ### Tactical Adventures What about character-driven tactical adventuring? Theoretically, that one requires no change at all for a lot of what is currently referred to as "adventure wargames." **Five Leagues from the Borderlands** is a great example of the fantasy version of adventure wargaming, but **Warrior Heroes** goes back even further and still focuses on that mode of play. Part of this is because the core assumption is that the players intend to play a band of warriors. That is the intention and framing narrative of the game design itself. As such, they have already communicated part of their interest as characters. Tactics are going to be important because battles are important, and they are going to be the primary mechanism by which the players affect the world. That's not to say that the environment is entirely pre-decided. The setting is defined, but the situations are character-directed. Where do you go for your next fight? What threat is the most pressing? Is it time to pull back and switch out for some unwounded forces? Do you even have some? Can you? Does the situation allow for it? What engagement can you take to make the situation allow for it? This is parallel to the way that the investigatory adventure scene at the more granular scale is largely character-driven. The adventure wargame/tactical adventure does the same thing for player determination. ### Cinematic Adventures You would think that being a hardcore story gamer, I would be all over cinematic adventuring as it's defined here. And yet, the reality is somewhat different. In fact, I really hate this kind of adventure design for all of the reasons that were extremely well illuminated when talking about the **Serenity** adventure itself. None of the things that happen in that adventure have anything to do with the intention of the players. They don't choose what's going on. They have no input into what flashbacks are going to occur. Their decisions have very little in the way of persistence going forward if the GM doesn't explicitly allow for it in future scenarios of that kind that they run. I hate everything about it. I love the language of film used within the context of RPGs—scenes, sequences, arcs, etc.—but I hate static pre-existing situations which don't take the character protagonists into account. I don't actually think of cinematic adventure design as being this static, but instead on focusing very much on the authorial level rather than the character immersive level. The players, rather than trying to get inside the head of their characters, are instead creating the story in which those characters continue to function. Character immersion is not the end-all be-all of RPG design, nor should it be. It's a valid approach. Now, seen from an authorial architecture design when talking about cinematic adventuring, things now make more sense, and it becomes obvious how character-driven and character-based adventuring manifests. To put it succinctly, a fine line I like to quote is, "I know this character is going to hell, but I'm very pleased by the way he's suffering on the way down." Cinematic adventuring is predicated on the deliberate distinction between the player and the character and what they want as individuals. As presented, I'm not sure CF's example is a particularly clear representation of cinematic adventuring. Instead, by perhaps happenstance, he just managed to pull a great example of railroading off the shelf, which happens to be couched in cinematic adventuring terms. While Hickman and Weis might be well-respected writers of adventures and the genre, this is perhaps one of their worst pieces of work. ### Dramatic Adventures So we take up the third extant adventuring style, which is labeled "dramatic" in this discussion. This is probably, in my opinion, the best adventure as adventure in this entire list. As much for what it doesn't say within the context of what's covered as for what it does establish at the very beginning of the scenario. Every player knows that their character is a member of this Colonial Marine force. They know why they're there. They've already bought into the concept. Being even remotely familiar with the source material, they know what their job is. There's no need to get them on board with cohering the group with any particular reason to be together. There's no need to get them on board with knowing where they're going and what they need to accomplish. It's all done in what is effectively session zero of deciding to play this particular adventure. This takes 60% of the problems with the other adventure architectures out of the loop, in particular, investigatory adventures. Seen from a ruthless perspective, this is an investigatory adventure, even though it involves a good amount of combat and tactical acumen. Ultimately, it's about probing a situation, finding out the limits of what you know, expanding the limits of what you know, and then bringing what you know to bear to solve the problem that the group is in. It just so happens that they're in an interesting problem and that their problem is also deeply affected by their relationships with people that they meet along the way. Is it possible to build a dramatic adventure which is character-based? Obviously, yes. But you have to ask yourself something very important at the very beginning, and you have to be open with the table about it: what is the drama that the players are looking for? After all, in this particular example, we already have complete buy-in from the players that they are Colonial Marines. We know upfront that any drama that they are looking for is going to come from two major questions: how do I accomplish my mission, and how do I survive this engagement? If you're willing and able to ask those sorts of questions of the characters in your session zero, then you can put together dramatic adventures without too much trouble. It goes back to essentially knowing the three most important questions about any character: what do they want, why can't they have it, and what are they going to do about it? Then focus on a mixture of techniques in order to heighten the dramatic questions. That is all you have to do. By "all you have to do," I mean that it's actually a serious challenge, because doing anything well is hard. Dramatic adventures are the definitional bit of this suggested taxonomy that I'm not sure actually exists. I'm willing to accept it for the sake of argument, but when we get down into the meat of dissection, does it really have a differentiation from investigatory adventuring? Drama, after all, typically comes from an exploration of the limits of your knowledge and deciding how to deal with those revelations. ## Internal vs External Exploration Perhaps it would be a better mechanism to wonder about whether the investigation is largely internal or external. The classic D&D exploration scenario is entirely external. It has nothing to do with the feelings of the characters. They react emotionally to the situations they find themselves in, but their feelings have no impact and, in fact, are irrelevant to any measure of success. Adventures don't have to be architected that way. The adventure can exist to explore how the characters themselves change in response to the exposure of new knowledge.[^2] Of course, to do that well, the adventure really does need to be geared in particular response to the underlying nature of the protagonists. Otherwise, it's difficult to provide them situations which are charged enough for the revelation of new understanding to meaningfully change them. ## Exunt Approaching these issues is always going to be something that I do as an outsider. Over the last many decades, I have come to the conclusion that one of the things I don't like about classic RPG design is this reliance on the concept of the adventure as a thing external to the characters, which just continues to impose itself on them. Instead of the next one being a response to the previous one, it's just a standalone situation. A lot of campaigns can be just summed up as, "just one damned thing after another." That's really why I hated being a GM for so long—the expectation that you were going to be bringing the story to them, instead of the characters themselves generating the story. The technology of RPGs had to catch up with how I wanted to play games. So in the absence of adventures, what can you sell if you want to actually make a living creating things for players and GMs? There is something really important to be mined from the very classic scenario designs. It's that the interesting thing is not necessarily the map or the specific locations, but the fact that it provides a series of situations that the characters can discover and decide how they want to approach—or whether they want to at all. I've always thought that the books that talk about locations, territories, political situations, duchies, counties, rulers, factions—all of that stuff is way more interesting than a particular adventure. Show me how things are stacked up, and I can take players through and let them knock them down in perfectly reasonable ways, and then proceed to react. That's a lot more useful to me than a prepackaged adventure. It's also a lot harder to write than a prepackaged adventure. Start by asking: what do the players want? What do their characters want? And then write to that. Think about the ways that you can present the stuff they're interested in, by all means. Think about whether you're providing a tactical exploration or something focused on investigating a situation, or whether the intention is to experience a cinematic presentation where everyone is involved in crafting scenes. Is it about external exploration or internal exploration? Do that and you're going to have a good time at the table. That is what everybody wants. [^1]: Yes, I have considerably stronger feelings about this sort of thing than other people. I make no apologies. [^2]: A particularly expansive theorist might wonder whether or not the **D&D** XP system is not actually a mechanism for reflecting internal change in response to external knowledge acquisition, and there's probably a fruitful discussion to be had there. We're just not going to have it here.