Roleplaying games are sometimes described as ‘collaborative story telling’.
I’ve seen two main ways this is implemented.
One is almost totally free form: PCs play adventures, have a time, and the events make a story. Okay.
The second is more structured: PCs play an adventure path, hitting planned events, and run through the story. Also okay, if you like that.
Neither of these is quite what I want, though. The structured approach feels like writing the story first, where I want to be ‘surprised’ by the outcome. And yet, I want to be able to lay groundwork that lets me provide foreshadow and provide hints of what is to come. Players cannot have agency unless they have enough knowledge to make meaningful decisions.
In my experience, the first tends to lack cohesion, it can feel like a series of vignettes. Old school campaigns tended to be made of disconnected adventures (modules or home brew). The PCs were the main connectors between them.
The second, if not quite railroad, were at least ‘highway’. There could be room to wander off the track, but you had to return to it to complete the ‘story’. If key events don’t happen they way they’re expected, the story can fall apart.
Of the two, the first comes closer to the pulp feel I’m looking for. Episodic, can shift the cast (party members) present, and don’t need or expect certain outcomes… but can feel disconnected. The second tends to have stronger continuity and connection between events, at the cost of expecting certain outcomes.
Can the two be brought together in a way that keeps aspects I like of both?
I think so.
Applying the concepts from Reframing Campaigns and Adventures should get me most of the way there.
I can devise potential stories and story arcs at a high level. I know major figures in the setting and their purpose (or I will). Within those purposes I can identify specific goals they want to achieve. From there, when it becomes relevant, I can flesh out individual scenarios to answer questions about how these goals can be met.
For example, in my Icons in the Sandbox series the Radiant Lady “seeks to bring light to all corners of the world”. This is a nice-sounding expression that really means “wants to conquer other lands and bring them into the Empire”. I know who she is and what she wants, and I can create background elements showing her working toward that. So far, this is largely at a high level with little detail, because I don’t need it yet.
If the PCs become interested in it, I can start building more detail. I can predict what will happen if the PCs don’t get involved. When and if they do get involved, I can prepare scenarios to ‘answer questions’ about what’s going on, and give them an opportunity to interfere with or change outcomes.
So far, this doesn’t really sound all that different from plotted adventures. The difference here lies in being able to adapt as circumstances need. If an action by the Radiant Lady would’ve given a certain outcome and the PCs prevented that, causing something else to happen, they made a difference! And the Radiant Lady will need to adapt to meet that, either trying another way to meet the same goal or change goals. She might even become personally interested in the PCs who foiled her plans.
What I’m thinking of, the approach I’m looking at, would probably lead to something like a sourcebook. The section regarding the Radiant Lady would outline her purpose, possible goals (and challenges), and resources available. I can imagine a section describing how to set up an adventure that aligns with those things, and what her involvement looks like. Once I have this, it should be fairly easy to build the individual scenarios as I need them.
Closing Comments
Yet again I have one of GreyKnight’s “Did everything work out as expected? No, and that’s awesome!” outcomes from The Post to End It.
I’d started off wanting to talk about how I can prepare adventures and scenarios that are connected and ultimately will tell a story, without knowing up front what that story will be. I think I still substantively got there, but I wandered off the original thoughts and realized something I didn’t recognize when I started.
My professional background is in software development. Adventure paths, indeed many published adventures, are similar to ‘waterfall methodology’. The developer tries to answer as many questions as possible up front, so they can (hopefully) build it right the first time.
This is a lovely aspiration, but the methodology tends to be brittle when previous unknowns are discovered and have inconvenient answers. Agile methodologies recognize this and plan for it by providing a framework to deal with changes in understanding or need as they happen.
What I’ve just devised is a Agile framework for RPG adventures. Decide the high-level elements, and enough about them to apply them appropriately. I know what the Radiant Lady wants and how she would go/is going about getting it. The same for the Hound, the Unthroned King, the Giant’s Daughter, and so on. I can do the same for lesser entities in the setting.
What I don’t have, and don’t need, is to know how things will play out. Because I can frame each scenario as a “what will happen?” or “how does this happen?” question, I can change tracks easily. I might have to pivot if something goes a way I didn’t expect, but that’s a feature. I want to be able to do that!
Okay. Okay, now I see why adventure paths are the way they are. To build something like this out in a ready to play format (as opposed to a ‘build your own adventure’ sourcebook) could require so many moving pieces, so many branches and options… I’m not even sure it could meaningfully be done!
But it’s worth exploring. I think I might see a way to do it. I don’t know that it would ever be a truly viable publishing model, just because of the work involved to build it all out. The sourcebook would be manageable, I believe. The stack of adventure modules and the overhead of publishing them… might not.
Still worth thinking about!