Random Adventure Structures

Any

I'm reading through the Covetous Poet's Adventure Creator (that's not the full name, but it will do), and they're strongly influenced by story structures, so the point where when creating a pre-written adventure, he divides it up into overall, act 1, act 2, and act 3.

In one way, this resonates with me because I've also absorbed so much of those articles about structure (without fully believing them: those structures are not the only way to write a story, and there's a lovely article in the Guardian, I think, exposing the lifework of the late Blake Snyder, the author of Save The Cat...I'll try to find the link again and append it. Edit: here it is, someplace else: less a scholarly article and more of a rant.)

So recognizing that these structures are not the only way to write a story and it shouldn't be a straitjacket, Covertous Poet organizes things so you have an overarching idea (who's my villain? What's he or she or it trying to do? What theme am I using as a lodestone when I have ideas?), a set of events in the first act, and a set of problems or challenges in the second act. In the third act, you try and bring it all together, and I haven't yet run across much guidance on that.

Caveat: As I've gotten older, it is much more difficult for me to absorb information from PDFs and that's the only way I have Adventure Creator. PDFs are far superior if I'm searching for a specific bit of information...they have a search function, with all the good and bad that entails...but for initially absorbing it, not so good. Soon I will provide a review of PGC 1: The Blood Saga, an adventure the author asked me to review years ago and I couldn't get into it because it was PDF. It took me literally years to realize I could print it out and read it. Apologies to the author.

Anyway, CP has broken it down into three acts: beginning, middle, end. But one of the things I've noticed with random roll adventures is that they can go on forever: in Mythic GME for instance you might not roll the scene setup that says "Close a thread" and you keep adding stuff and adding stuff, and you've got this unwieldy mess.

Here's the four parts as devised by Syd Field, I think, and modified by others, such as Larry Brooks:

1. We get involved. This is the part where we see what “normal” is and have some kind of event that sucks the characters in. In a movie or a book, this can be quite protracted, but for other things, like TV shows where we know what normal is, it can be quite short. Also, stories that are mostly about people meddling in the affairs of others (cop shows, doctor shows, superhero series) can get by with a brief description in a scene: “He was fine this morning, doc, and then this afternoon he complained of some vague pain in his abdomen and fell over!” In these schemes, this usually ends when your hero is committed to helping.
2. We react or investigate. The heroes flail around, discovering that everything they know is wrong. Well, maybe not everything, but this is the “Yes, but” stage of improv: If they do something right, it gets them in bigger trouble. This part typically ends when they figure out what they're up against and are correct, and traditionally it's a bigger problem than they thought.
3. We give it our best shot and fail Well, now they know what to do, but something stops them, either in fiction because they haven't resolved some inner problem or in adventures because they aren't in the right place or haven't collected enough plot coupons or something. This ends when they lose catastrophically, about three-quarters of the way through the adventure. This is the last place where you can introduce new characters.
4. We resolve the problem and win. The obstacle is removed and the heroes achieve victory. Nothing new gets introduced here; it's all re-incorporation and re-interpretation. Because there was a mention back in part 2 that Super Secret Spy Agency is interested, it's okay to discover that the hero's sweetie is actually a spy operating under deep cover, but if you don't have that mention, it's iffy. A new device? Did you mention that somebody was working on it in an earlier part?

(My summary is snarky, but this works. I just want to emphasize that it's not the only way that works. Still, if what you want (as most roleplaying adventures want) is something that feels complete, this is a good model. Heck, it's in one of the Star Trek narrator guides, though I don't remember which one.)

So let's say you add a roll to see if you're ending the first half. Is this the end of the half? You don't start rolling for this until after your heroes have become involved; you put some target value that gets more and more achievable as you go on. And the point of the scene becomes reveal the actual problem. You might do the other things your solo system requests, but you definitely do that.

Once you've done that, you've established the length of your last three parts: all of them will be roughly the same as this part. (The first part might vary a lot.)

In fact, if you could do something similar with all three of the closing parts: This is the thing that ends the quarter; is this the scene where I introduce it?

I'll have to play with it and see if it works.