Quick Adventure Outlines

by Kalvin Lyle

For a short time before I left Vancouver I had the priveledge of teaching a class on pen and paper role-playing to some game design students at the vancouver film school.  It is usual in my experience that you learn just as much from your students and you teach them.  In this case, I learned some important lessons about campaign and adventure design.

I ran two bi-weekly classes for two tiers of players, basic for the new players and advanced for the students that had played before.  In the basic course I used some stand alone Paizo adventures that were all based in the same location, but didn’t share any plot between adventures.  In the advanced class I ran one of their campaign paths.  The content didn’t matter that much, the course was designed to teach the students to think like DM’s, so I would run a few games to teach them the rules of the players, then expose them to the rules for the DM’s.  Next I got them to run some encounters, then I got them to design encounters which I ran, then I got them to design encounters that they would run themselves.  That part worked very well.  Sat in the DM seat they made basic game design mistakes because they were still thinking like players, lusting after power and wanting control.  My choice to run different styles of campaigns was to expose the advanced players to deeper story across multiple adventures and I’m glad I did.

The lessons were a big success, but what was interesting was running the two kinds of adventures simultaneously for two different groups.  The basic group had a lot of fun, while the advanced group lost interest in the adventure path fairly quickly.  It was the differences between the two types of adventures that lead us to discussing some important high level aspects of adventure and campaign design.

Create Impactful Problems

Heroes are called to action when the game world has a problem that only they can solve (either because of skill, bravery or timing).  These problems lead to clear goals for the characters (and by extension the players).  Goals need to be well defined and established early in the story.  The inciting incident that sparks any plot in a movie is generally within the first 20 minutes of film.  This holds the viewers attention by giving them a question they need answered.  In games, this is made easier when you can offer the players tangible rewards to hold their interest (see below).

The players in the basic class had clearly defined goals because we used stand alone adventures, without any complex plot.  Something bad would happen in the first few paragraphs and the NPC’s would ask them to go to a specific location and defeat the threat or retrieve the item.  They would buy some supplies and go kill stuff.  In the advanced class the campaign was a complex story that unraveled itself over the course of the campaign (much the same way a mystery is revealed in a novel).  The classes were only 3 hours so five sessions into the campaign the players still hadn’t learned the reason behind the problems they were trying to solve and feeling like they hadn’t accomplished anything.  They said they felt like they could just walk away from the town (and the whole campaign!) and not feel a sense of loss.

This is something that I’ve experienced first hand as a player.  About a year into a different Paizo campaign path we hit a very difficult encounter involving a teleporting demon and a portal into another dimension.  Frustrated and laughing out loud one of the other players said, “why are we doing this again?”  We all laughed at first but when no one could answer the question it was suddenly unfunny.  The DM had to look though his notes and the campaign plot outline to walk us through a series of events that brought us to that specific adventure.  Upon realising that we’d been playing for a full year without any clear purpose to the campaign we all slowly lost interest in playing.  A couple months later that group disolved.

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Published April 19, 2010 at 7:56 pm

Tags: Creating Adventures, DIY Adventures, RPG Story Building