As I've probably said at boring length, I've been reading the draft of Ben Riggs' book on Encounter Theory. I'll recap the theory very quickly and then I'll talk about a thought I had today.
Skip this recap if you want
Encounter theory states that the important part of a roleplaying adventure is the encounter. That's where the character events actually happen. The players can do anything in the encounter. If it doesn't lead to interacting with an NPC (like a monster) or some facet of the setting, the GM can make it up.
And forget all that story stuff: RPG adventures are different and a lot of story stuff just doesn't apply, because the story doesn't exist until you add players.
Uh, Great Adventures?
Nominate one. I have never played any of the ones I hear about ("Ravenloft"; "Masks of Nyarlathotep"; maybe "Dracula Dossier") and my group was alway into brew-your-own-environment so I have no standards regarding published adventures.
Back to the point
So the idea is to present a reason to adventure, right at the beginning, some kind of modivation.
Then there are a series of encounters. Each encounter leads to one or more other encounters.
At the end, there's a climactic encounter that provides some sense of resolution.
There's a reason that it looks like a dungeon map: because it is. Sometimes the doors aren't literal, but that's what it is. (Somebody—Jonathan Tweet, maybe? John Tynes? Kenneth Hite?—pointed this out, possibly in D20 Call of Cthulhu.)
End of the Recap
Now, I'll buy that story, such as it is, is constructed after the fact in the minds of the participants. The arc of the antagonist is constructed by the GM as a result of player actions, but it can be heavily influenced by the adventure writer.
But Here's the Thing
One aspect of story is implicit in the design of Dungeons & Drangons: Change.
Change is important in most types of stories, even stories involving iconic characters who themselves don't seem to change. The world is tilted at a Dutch angle every time a client walks into 221B Baker Street, and it is Sherlock's mission to set the floor horizontal again.
That's not character change, but it is change. (I don't think that character change is essential in all kinds of stories.) Character change is simulated in D&D by having the character go up in levels.
It can be further simulated by a recurrence of the villain: if the big bad guy wipes the floor with Our Heroes early or even midway through the adventure and then is defeated by them at the end, the players feel like they grew. If someone dies and has to be replaced during the adventure, the players feel like there has been change.
When the Antaeus Gang defeats Batman at the beginning of the story but loses at the end because he has discovered that all of their powers are negated if they are in the air, that's a kind of change.
And on my incomplete reading, Encounter Theory doesn't address this at all. (It may: incomplete reading, remember?)
How to Make Change
At this point, I'm just talking about creating the markers of change, so that players can impose their own meaning on it. Going up in levels doesn't mean that your character has suddenly Learned To Be A Better Elf, it means your character is better at hitting things or casting spells. But it's enough for players to hang change on.
In a game where there is character change (whether it's just leveling up or there's some kind of Aspect mechanism where the Aspects change over time), then the answer is to have the adventure take long enough for that quality of the characters to change...and have the new abilities important to the climax.
In a dungeon, there's usually some kind of change with levels: level 6 is tougher than level 1 was; level 15 has the Lich King. There's a kind of progression.
From a roleplaying point of view, I think it's important to tie these changes to the player actions. Yeah, it's great that the villain finds Jesus and decides to give up crime while the heroes are busy with that little problem in MegaDecaLopolis, but it just feels imposed from without. We're trying to create the illusion of change caused by or with the players.
One of the easiest ways to create change is to change the world. That is, the player characters don't have to change, but the world around them does. The PC actions cause the downfall of the kingdom.
You can change the way the PCs see the world. Batman isn't any different than he was at the beginning, but he can change the world by setting up some trap that separates the Anteus Gang from the ground.
In a similar way, you can change the people in the world. This normally happens organically as a result of the players doing things. The girl becomes an orphan, dresses as a man, and joins the army; the hard-headed reporter is inspired to don cape and cowl herself; the four-armed alien who fought the PCs at the beginning decides to dedicate its life to peace.
The last thing you can do is change the quality of the opposition. It could be as simple as the level of the opposition: you're going to go from your skeletons to your Greater Shadow to your Mummy Lord in terms of the quality of the opposition.
Sandbox games with timelines have external change of all of these. Act too soon, and you're not prepared; act too late, and they're over-prepared.
This part is still hazy for me, but it seems to me that a lot of a story or what feels like a story hinges on how the main character reacts to the opposition. Because we've posited that you can't dictate PC change, you have to change the opposition.
One of the ways is the level of opposition, as we mentioned. But another way might be to emulate the dynamic of a story by changing what the bad guys want as well as switching up the level.
This is time-based. It forces you to have a beginning, middle, and an end...it's strongly implied by your encounter structure that there are floors to this metaphorical dungeon. Sure, if they find the stairwell, they can descend very far, very fast but the outcome is likely to be disastrous.
Now To Do Exactly What You Should Not Do
...which is think about roleplaying adventures in terms of story structure.
I'm trying to limit myself. I'm trying to be restrictive. I'm trying to keep this with the floors-of-the-dungeon metaphor.
Well, okay, I'm not. I'm going to stick with Batman and the Antaeus Gang. But I am going to restrain myself from inventing something with all four elements as lieutenants and then Gaea as the big bad. No; we'll strive hard to stick with the Antaeus Gang and their minimal superpowers for now.
Let's divide the adventure into four parts, in homage to Larry Brooks and Steve Kenson both: either Set up/Response/Attack/Resolution or Threat/Investigation/Challenge/Comeback.
- For the first part of the adventure, maybe only the first fight, the Antaeus Gang wants the money at the bank or the item at the museum.
- For the second part of the adventure, the Antaeus gang is responding to Batman, maybe thinking they can get rid of him and the rest of the Bat-family will soon fall! In this stage, they specifically target Batman and Robin.
- The challenge phase is where the PCs attack but the odds are probably still overwhelming. During this stage, the heroes learn the new way to look at the world, or the secret that will make hash of the bad guys.
- Now, against the toughest odds (the entire gang! While Batman and Robin, drawn by Dick Sprang, are held in go-go birdcages in a vast warehouse, the gang tries to, I dunno, summon Gaea but Batman and Robin get free and fight them, winning this time because they have done something clever.
Harder to implement? You bet. But if you, say, have a list of these four different approaches and keep them in mind, things can still happen in any order...you just have to be ready to improvise NPC actions and motivations that are appropriate to what has gone before.
But weren't you anyways?
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