Planning a Campaign as a Series of Decisions

Back in January of last year, I wrote what is rapidly becoming one of the most popular posts on my blog, The Basis of the Game is Making Decisions. One of the things I mentioned there was planning sessions and campaigns around reaching decisions instead of the referee pretending they were writing a novel's plot that the PCs imperfectly realised. I say a bit more about why one ought to do this in the anti-narrativism post I wrote years ago, but I also had a request to demonstrate the practice of planning this way.

As background, it would be helpful to read the Alexandrian's post Don't Prep Plots. I also believe in preparing situations (or problems) instead of plots and consider my decision-based method to be one way of doing so.

The method I'm going to describe is intentionally quite sparse when compared to other methods of preparing. I use it because it is "low prep" and undemanding.

You generate a handful of key decisions, assign elements from the campaign world and specific adventure to one of the possible branches of that decision, and spend most of the time between any two decisions playing out the consequences of the previous decision and setting up the next one.

When you start to get towards the end of the chain of decisions, you either extend the chain further, or conclude it and move to running downtime before setting up another. You can run multiple chains of decisions at once if you so please, so long as you make it clear to players which decisions are associated with which chains.

Here's an example:

You have four PCs: A, B, C, and D, playing in a Necrocarcerus campaign set in the Ooze Salient. The PCs are freebooters and camp followers hanging around the Association of Useful Citizens' military base. You want to run them through a scenario where they are hired to break into an abandoned incarnation temple in no-ooze's-land, steal a load of nepenthe (memory-juice) crystals, and then escape before either side can capture them.

The first step is to break this into a series of discrete decisions and graph out answers where you can:

Will they take the job? (Yes / No)
How will they get out of the military base and into no-ooze's-land? (Stealth / Talking their way out / Fighting / Magic)
How will they find the temple? (Guided by something / Searching the area)
How will they secure the nepenthe? (Not my problem)
How do they escape without getting caught? (Fleeing / Killing / Trickery / Magic)

The answers don't have to be complete lists, but it helps if you have a rough sense of the most obvious options PCs tend to employ. The important thing is really to get the questions rights rather than the possible answers, because the questions form prompts you can ask the players directly at the table.

I write these on index cards, but there are fancier technical ways to do it. I then line them up left to right, in order, from the first problem to the last problem.

The second step is to generate a bunch of elements that can feature in the adventure. You're going to want at least two for any given decision point, but more is better. I encourage you to recycle things, but since this is a mock example rather than an ongoing campaign, here are some ideas based on regular fantasy stuff:

Ooze-knights on motorbikes
A Cuban communist air-pirate + her air ship
Somebody's specific memory-juice in a reusable thermostat
A twelve-armed demon who is chief marketing officer of an "Uber for dental hygiene" start-up
Cyber-trolls that all started off as one troll
A dog with strong opinions
A cool magic tank that shoots lasers but not from its gun
The prophetic intestines of a guy named "Joseph Blankenwell"
A boiling cloud of acid with a New York accent and a heart of gold
A skeleton rights activist who is also a cleric of the Big Fire
A giant wolf-spider thing who works for an insurance company
A Jacobin golem with wheels
Thousands of obols
Cyberbullying
Schistosomiasis
A nuclear reactor on tank treads with a giant glowing crack
A 33-gallon fishtank with no top that's full of expired fireworks
Six ghost paladins on a holy quest that's kinda sketchy and low-key racist
An EDM dance party club
The colour "red"

I write these on post its or cards, one per post-it or card. At this point, if you're still jacked full of energy, you can pick a few of the cards and sort them under each problem like a curator. Or you can just shuffle them and stick few under each until you get a good combo.

The pile of cards are the relevant elements that you're going to introduce that can be used to solve the problem. The PCs can introduce their own elements of course, and you want to hold back a few cards so that if they come up with an idea that depends on them knowing something or dealing with someone, etc., you can whip out an element card to slot into that proposed solution.

If you want to get clever and run a "living world" you can also foreshadow elements under the next card or introduce them as Chekhov's gun type thing, and you can allow elements from previous problem cards that weren't used to recur (I just grab the unused ones that seem interesting and stuff them into upcoming piles). As elements are revealed, feel free to throw the cards onto the table for them to keep track of. You can write the name or location or use or whatever else they need to know on the other side of the index card. You can also write up new cards as you go.

For example, if the PCs want a guide to the incarnation temple and the dog with strong opinions is the thing they need, you could write "Imprisoned within the heart of a giant stone statue of well-known ethical philosopher Sabina Lovibond" so they remember that they have to break into the heart of the giant stone statue of well-known ethical philosopher Sabina Lovibond to free the dog so it can show them the way.

I suggest badgering the PCs with the questions periodically because they'll forget them and get off-track. If you let them get off-track frequently, you're running a "sandbox".

You can change specific questions ( and create more or remove others) as PCs progress through them and gain or lose interest in them, and move everything around - this isn't meant to be a rigidly mechanical system, but precisely the opposite - a way of condensing one's focus to only spend time on what one needs to in order to move things forward.

I hope this helps illustrate the idea that campaigns can just be series of decisions of varying scope via the demonstration of one technique of planning and implementing such a campaign.

Reusing and Recursing Random Tables

I'm surprised people don't simply roll on random tables multiple times and then combine all of the results together when they're planning out dungeons or other adventure sites. Or maybe they do and simply don't talk about it much. As a low-prep referee who's often short on time, I do this pretty frequently and I find that it's actually more useful than just rolling once. The main thing to doing it successfully and in a way that actually eases the amount of work you have to do is to figure out the relations between the different results. Fortunately, we have the ubiquitous reaction roll table to assist in this.

For example, say you're repopulating a dungeon using a random encounter table. You're rolling to find out what monsters have moved into the depopulated area, and you're rolling a couple of times for each room for whatever reason (possibly because I suggested doing so in the linked post). You end up with 1d4 orcs and 2d8 slimes or something. Want to get an idea of why they're both in the room? Make a reaction roll. If the result is hostile then they're fighting, if it's friendly then they're allied (perhaps the orcs have tamed the slimes), etc. If you use the kind of random encounter table that I do, where you end up with a bunch of non-monster results most of the time, you can still use the reaction roll to figure things out.

e.g. Say you roll up a room with orc spoor and slime traces, and a reaction roll of hostility. Clearly, the orcs and slimes fought in this room, with one or more dead, slime-covered orcs in the corner. Neutral reaction? Clearly the orcs and slimes are not running into one another all that often - perhaps the slimes are active in the day, while the orcs come out at night? Or perhaps the slimes are eating the spoor the orcs leave behind - a half-dissolved boot or a leg of chicken stripped bare covered in goo would be a neat piece of garbage to find (it certainly beats the usual "wooden flinders").

This generates not only the encounters, but some of the dungeon trappings too (the truly lazy referee will of course, pull out the AD&D 1e and randomly generate the traces and spoor etc. that any given monster leaves behind by rolling on the bric-a-brac and weird smells tables).

If you recursively iterate a simple process like this often enough and record the results, the results eventually resemble a complex and dense set of relations between all the various pieces, even though chance is doing most of the work for you. Usually, you only have to do 2-4 recursions before it gets more complicated than most people can easily hold in their heads, which is also about the point that it starts to seem like a "world in motion".

I think many players of older adventure games or retroclones of them are probably familiar with the idea of doing something similar to this for treasure, where you calculate the total value of a treasure hoard and then roll for the percentage chance of magic items and other special treasures for various subdivisions (i.e. "5% chance of a magic sword for every 1,000 gp in the treasure hoard's total value"). But that's just a simple iteration of a process without recursion, and the relationships between the various treasure items is straightforward ( simple addition of the items to the hoard, or the replacement of a subdivision of the treasure by the special item), rather than recursive. The recursion comes about through generating and defining the relationships between the results.

If you're looking for a random table of possible relationships, especially if you are as lazy-busy as I am and wish to automate even this process, here's a random table of possible recursive relationships between multiple results on random tables:

1d4 Ontological Relationships between Randomly Generated Entries for Lazy DMs
1) Palimpsestic - The previous result is effaced except for a few traces (the slimes have eaten the orcs, only orc bones and treasure remain)
2) Additive - The previous result remains and the new result is simply added onto it (the slimes and the orcs are hanging out)
3) Combined - The new result and the previous result are combined into a single entity (the slimes are orc-shaped, or the orcs are covered in intelligent slimes)
4) Conditional - One or more of the results must be brought into the shared fiction via some trigger (the slimes are in jars, and if you're sloppy when you fight the orcs you will break them and release them)

You can apply recursion in all sorts of situations, not just encounter tables. Location generation is another good place to use it, with each result working as an archaeological layer of the building. Roll 1d4 for the number of archaeological layers in each sub-area, and then 1d4 for the number of significant digits separating each layer (i.e. a result of 4 is thousands of years between one use and another). This should also give you an idea of the relative time of construction.

Anyhow, as I said, I'm sure people are already doing things like this, I just thought I'd lay it out for anyone who hadn't thought of it, and to solicit suggestions from people who have even better versions of this sort of process that they're using.

Abolishing Arguments

I like to play crunchy systems: Mythras, later D&D editions, Shadowrun, etc. I often play in groups where there are widely different levels of familarity and skill at using these systems. I also play in groups where individuals have widely different levels of trust and standards of politeness. Such is life as an adult roleplayer in high demand.

One of the things I try to avoid in games I run are rules arguments. One of the things I try to contain are rules disputes. A dispute is a polite, though perhaps passionate, disagreement over some factual or interpretive matter that strives for consensus or persuasion. "I thought this rule means...?" is the kind of statement you find in disputes. Arguments are the other sort of disagreement, the one where positions rapidly become intractable, where accusations fly between people, where sophistry doesn't so much creep in as kick down the door screaming, and where people are striving to explain why they are right and the other person is wrong and should be ashamed of ever having believed differently.

The lines between the two can be unclear at times, but a clear sign that one is in an argument instead of a dispute is that no one is asking questions that aren't rhetorical or sophistic. Another clear sign is the "gotcha" where the fact that someone is changing their position is treated as an indication of weakness rather than the goal of the interaction in the first place. These aren't exhaustive signs, there are a myriad of ways of indicating that you're acting in bad faith towards someone else (constant repetition of the same points but louder each time is another).

I'm sure we all try to avoid these and conduct ourselves as respectable adults fulfilling our ethical and epistemic obligations to others, but that doesn't actually mean they don't occur from time to time. Rules in particular can provoke these since they exist as an intersubjective reference that defines how things work in the shared narrative of the game, and losing a rules argument can feel like one has lost agency and some level of control over one's (fictional) life. I am certainly not a pedestal here, if anything I am particularly temperamentally prone to disputes and arguments and thus am particularly concerned with how to proactively manage and control them from dominating situations.

In games that I run, I often appoint a "rules coordinator" whose job is to resolve simple rules questions. I usually pick the player who has the most expertise with the rules, rather than simply the loudest opinion on what they should be. In games with individual experience, this person gains bonus XP whenever they resolve a rules question that another PC has. If no rule exists, I make one up, take the time to write it down on a sheet of paper we can all review, and then go forward using that, with any further review or revision taking place in between sessions based on conversations with players. These methods help nip most arguments and disputes in the bud. But not all of them, of course.

For disputes, I think the important thing is to contain the dispute and resolve it fairly and quickly, ideally with as little intervention or attention paid to it as possible. Voting by the players sometimes works, but can actually drag things out more as many people will want to share their opinion and position, or express support for someone else before you can actually tabulate the votes. As well, it can sometimes turn a dispute into an argument if one player believes everyone else is mistaken and picking on them. So a simple incentive I use instead is to hand out bonus XP to to whoever proposes a mutually agreeable solution, and if no one can, to whoever concedes first. Not a lot of bonus XP, but just enough to mollify the conceding side. In fact, I'll often start at a low number and bid it up slightly over time if both sides are being intractable. This method should not be kept secret from the players, and frequent reminders may be necessary during the early phases of implementation.

Arguments are a little trickier. If someone is a vexatious and repeated arguer, the easiest answer may be to boot them, but I find the severity and difficulty of this (as well as the frequent presence of interpersonal complications) actually produce a perverse incentive, where no specific incident can be pointed to as sufficiently severe on its own, and so actually booting the person never happens. I hear lots of people saying that they would do it, but little evidence that people actually do it all that often. So less severe, easier-to-implement, and hopefully more effective? methods seem like a good idea as a first step. I also tend to prefer giving people a chance to correct their behaviour, tho' that's a personal tendency that I don't claim anyone else need to value as much as I do.

Therefore, what I will do in a group which has one or more individuals prone to argument, is to simply offer bonus XP for each session in which no one argues. This starts as a low amount, and if people argue, it increases next session, until it reaches a level where no one argues or I dissolve the group in frustration. If anyone gets into an argument with anyone else, everyone forfeits the bonus XP. People don't have to avoid voicing their opinions or disagreeing with one another respectfully (that makes it a dispute, subject to the above resolution methods), but if the exchange is in bad faith, that XP is gone for everyone. I'll often give someone a reminder or warning if it looks like they're about to veer into an argument in these situations.

This introduces a certain shame factor into their conduct for the arguer, without operating directly through the very points and positions being debated in the argument. It won't stop people all the time, but it does provide a mild incentive that can be invoked, and that doesn't require them to "lose face" (it instead positions them as magnanimously setting aside their righteous blah blah for the good of everyone).

I mention rules arguments here because they're something that specifically comes to mind, but the same techniques are broadly applicable to disputes and arguments over the progression of the shared fiction itself outside of the rules, with perhaps a few others that are unique to the kinds of problems that occur there. Anyhow, if one has a particularly argumentative group for whatever reason, I suggest experimenting with these methods to see if they work for you.

Determining Magical Item Components

This one's a fairly simple solution to a fairly common problem. The problem is that some PC wants to create a magic item, and you need a list of components that they need to collect to use as the raw materials for the item, and are sorely lacking in inspiration. If this doesn't happen to you for the first magic item the PCs create, I'm sure it happens by the third or fourth, as the number of clever literary examples you can draw on from memory starts to be exhausted. Here's how I handle generating components:

First, I roll 1d6+1. If the item is particularly powerful, I'll roll 2d6+2. This is the number of components a PC has to collect. Next, to generate the components, I use one or both of the following processes.

1) Roll on your wandering monster table once for each component. This will generate a monster and some item to be collected from them. You may have to interpret things slightly, especially if you were boring in generating tracks or lair-types for each monster. If you roll monster, choose their most prominent or grossest feature for collection. Even abstract or transient things are fine. If they have to collect the roar of an ooze attack-squad's jetpacks, that's their problem, not yours. For variety, I recommend splitting the rolls across multiple wandering monster tables if you have them, since this will encourage the PCs to visit various areas to collect them all. You may also want to roll 1d10 for the # of each thing a PC needs to collect (i.e. 6 mummy hearts or whatever), but I find this often leads to a boring grinding feeling unless the PCs can reasonably expect to find a group of the right monster type at once (alternately: present them with a clear idea of where to find such a group).

2) I use this second method when I want to include rare metals, gems, etc. as components instead of just monster bits. I start by taking a treasure generator like Courtney Campbell's Treasure and just rolling as if the components needed for the item were part of hoard being generated. I recommend keeping the numbers, so if the generator spits out 32 fire badger pelts, then they need 32 fire badger pelts. I try to swap out as much coinage as possible for items and commodities, but if some is left, that's fine - I take that to mean that much raw metal of the appropriate type is required. If you're in a particularly lazy mood, you can even just pick components off a previously generated treasure hoard that the PCs picked up somewhere else. In practice, this often comes across as masterful planning and foreshadowing instead of laziness, and it encourages them to track down the people they sold their previous treasure to, in order to get the item back.

Usually, I'll combine these two, with about half the components being generated treasure stuff, and half being monsters you have to kill. I find this mix tends to maximise the fun vs. complexity factor. The PCs can discover the items on list in whatever way you think appropriate - legend lore spells, consulting sages, you telling them directly to save time, whatever you'd like. I favour this method because it repurposes existing material prepared for the game (wandering monster tables, treasure hoards), but also generates relatively straightforward leads and goals ("Where can we find a flawless sapphire worth 5,500 GP?"). I recommend you try it and see how it works in your game.

Considerations on Restocking Dungeons

I had a post-game discussion with Courtney the other day about restocking dungeons, and I thought I'd lay out some of the ideas we discussed for your consideration.

My basic principle, the one underlying everything else that I'm going to talk about, is that restocking a dungeon should be less complicated than simply coming up with an entirely new dungeon or dungeon zone. This seems obvious, but I've seen some fairly complicated systems out there that violate this principle, and I wonder how much they end up using the system in play, rather than just sort of presenting it as a thought exercise on a blog.

The first question I think people should ask themselves is whether they even need to restock the dungeon? I'd add the following consideration: Why restock instead of pushing PCs to new dungeons or new zones within the dungeon? Restocking encourages PCs to linger in zones nearer to the entrances to the dungeon, it slows down their progression through the dungeon, and it can make it seem like their efforts to clear out the dungeon are pointless.

If you don't have clear ideas about how manage these things so they don't kill the fun, I'd actually recommend against restocking. Instead, I'd recommend that you present clear diegetic signs to indicate that a dungeon or dungeon zone is empty / deactivated / cleared and should be traversed to get to new material instead of lingered in. These signs should be some combination of boring and dangerous, with the emphasis on boring instead of dangerous, since this is less likely to confuse them into thinking that there are still monsters and treasure to be found here.

Dungeons that do the best with being restocked are ones that allow or incorporate ways of overcoming the slow down in progression through them caused by restocking. This includes dungeons with short-cuts in them that have to be discovered or created during play (including multiple entrances or teleporters); dungeons with organised factions that you can negotiate with for safe passage; dungeons where you can change the overall organisation of the level (e.g. draining or flooding it) to reach new parts of it; and dungeons where you can temporarily delay or "turn off" the restocking (perhaps by shattering an evil altar or something that draws monsters to it).

Restocking at its best incorporates and recombines familiar elements of the dungeon or dungeon zone, but does so in a way that produces emergent and unpredictable results. One interesting (and perhaps unexpected) thing I've discovered over the years is that PCs tend to feel that their actions have had the most impact on a dungeon or dungeon zone when it shifts levels of organisation. That is, when they "clear" a dungeon that's filled with highly organised enemies and the next time it goes through, the enemies are comparatively disorganised, or when they clear a dungeon of a bunch of random monsters, and then the next time they come through, they find a highly organised set of foes has moved in to replace them. 

What Should Trigger Restocking?

I use four different triggers to determine when to restock via the method I'll describe below. I don't have a strong preference for one over the others, so I just rely on discretion and what I think will generate the most interesting results. These are ranked in rough priority.

1) After the PCs kill the two most powerful monsters or groups of monsters on the level
2) After the PCs have explored all non-hidden rooms on the level
3) Every 2d6 expeditions
4) When the PCs go into extended downtime away from the dungeon

I use these because I like exploration, and hate mop-up. I use the dice counter method mainly once they've cleared out an area entirely and keep on passing through it, and I use the downtime method as a backstop just in case they take an extended break from an area. If you do use a dice counter, I recommend using something that's guaranteed to give you at least a few sessions to restock, instead of trying to do it for every session.

The Actual Method

Here's the method I actually use for restocking, based on the above considerations. You will need:

1) A wandering monster table
2) A wandering trap table

3) A "theme" table of varying length (I usually use six to ten entries) whose creation I will describe below

All you do is roll on the theme table, then roll on the wandering monster table and wandering trap table for each room (in whatever order you please). Any entry on either table that's transient on the table leaves the room empty (from the perspective of a room's contents monsters, traps, treasure, etc.). If it's not a transient entry, then put it in the room. As you roll, apply the transformation rules from the theme table (more on that in a moment) to alter the results. Generate treasure for the lairs as appropriate. At that point, you're ready to go.

NB: I recommend you do this for every room in the area, even if the PCs didn't clear it out the first time.

The Theme Table

I call it a "theme table", but only because that's quicker and easier to write and say than "a table of rules of transformations". Each entry should be a few global rules that modify how you use the wandering monster and trap tables to create entries.

I usually start these off as a 1d6 table and expand them as I get good ideas to fill out more entries.

Here's a sample of one to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

1) Monsters from elsewhere have moved in and taken over. Use the wandering monster table from an adjacent zone (or the overland table if there are no adjacent zones) to populate the rooms.

2) The two most intelligent monsters generated are the leaders of factions that are at war with one another. Reroll on the wandering monster table for all rooms and corridors adjacent to the room each one is in (even if there are already monster results for these rooms). These are their allies and servants.

3) All monsters in this area are mind-controlled by the first monster you roll a lair result for. If no lairs are generated, then roll again for each room on the wandering monster table and add additional monsters until you get a lair result.

4) Monsters are using traps to drive intruders out. After the first monster is placed, all further monster results are actually rolls on the trap table (that is, roll twice for traps for each room).

5) Monsters are reworking the architecture of the area. Any two rooms with the same monster type in them will have a secret passage connecting them. If any monster type has a lair on this level, then there will be a secret passage connecting them to any other rooms containing the same monster type.

6) There is a power struggle going on for control of this area. After rolling for monsters for each room, reroll for each room a second time using a wandering monster table for the nearest adjacent zone. Monsters from different wandering monster tables are hostile to one another.

These are all fairly straightforward and rudimentary. You could easily expand this (I both do so in practice and encourage you to do so). In its current form, it's highly generic and could be used for any dungeon, and on any level of that dungeon. The table is meant to be used multiple times for the same area, and each time different "layers" of results build up.

If you really wanted to, you create a unique table for each zone of the dungeon. I recommend against this (based on the above-mentioned principle of keeping restocking simple), except if the level has a very strong theme (e.g. it's a rotating level, or a level that floods and drains or something else like that). In that case, I'd use a d4 table with four strong and interesting options customised for that level, and otherwise use the generic table for the rest of the dungeon.

My experience using various versions of this method is that it's easy to use, fairly fast to do, and the addition of the themes / transformations is more than enough to make it seem like complex and interesting changes are going on in the dungeon in response to PC actions, without having to get into a lot of political simulation, or relationship mapping or weird flowchart things or other overly complicated stuff.

Technical Plot Example

I'm going to lay out a simple technical plot as an example. This one will be science fiction.

Preventing a Supernova

For our first one, let's presume that our system is Stars Without Number, and the party is composed of four characters (a scientist, an engineer, a psion who's also the face and a soldier who's also the pilot) who are part of the scout service of a TL4 starfaring society. They're zipping around when they get a transmission from Scout Central telling them to head to System X and deal with the situation there.

The briefing they receive is where you, the referee, present the problem they're going to be dealing with. In this case, the problem is that a red giant star with some alien ruins on one of its orbiting planets is unexpectedly going to turn into a supernova much faster than expected. This was detected because some strange signals from above the plane of the ecliptic drew the attention of a stellar observatory at Scout Central. Scout Central wants the supernova stopped because the explosion endangers a neighbouring star system.

The elements of the problem are:

1) The red giant star
2) The alien ruins
3) The strange signals

The PCs drill over to System X, and are given the choice of which one of these they want to examine first. At this point in time, the effects of the red giant's incipient explosion are minimal, but they don't have much time before it blows. Maybe you provide a diegetic timeline (72 hours!), maybe you don't (it's looming but unpredictable), whichever suits your preferred style.

The PCs decide to investigate the star first. Investigating the star involves a few challenges. They need to get close enough that the heat of the star will affect them, and they'll expend some of their limited time jetting around the star.

The PCs successfully zip around the star scanning it while dodging solar flares. From this, they learn that the star is giving off more energy than it should for its mass, and is much more unstable than it should be. At the end of their examination, two things happen. First, the star's energy flares, making sensors and communications much more difficult (the first effect kicks in). Second, the PCs hold a meeting onboard their ship where they decide what to do based on what they know. The scientist and engineer roll their skills, and they discover that based on what they know and have available, their only option is to drill through the star using their FTL drive, and bleed the energy off into other dimensions as they do so.

This apparatus has some pretty obvious flaws:

1) The death of everyone aboard the spaceship even if it works properly
2) Need to get into the corona of the star in the first place to work
3) One chance to succeed

So the PCs decide not to do this, and instead examine some other element of the problem to see if they can get further insight and come up with a better solution. They decide they don't want to land the starship just yet, so they go to check out the strange signals. So they fly over to check it out.

The strange signals turn out to be coming from a giant space whale-type thing. It's hanging around above the star. The PCs have to get close without attracting the space whale's attention, because it's firing a giant beam periodically out of its eyes into the sun and slurping up helium. Because this is a technical plot, not a bug hunt, the PCs can get some readings that tell them that the space whale is basically a giant fusion reactor in space whale form and blowing it up would make a mininova.

So the PCs do some submariner-in-space silent-running maneuver, and get to observe the whale as it feeds. Since the apparatus they came up with last time sucked, they decide to use this opportunity to conceive a new one. Everyone gets together and rolls some skills. The outcome is that they think if they can get the space whale to reverse what it's doing, they'll be able to prevent the supernova. The apparatus they conceive of is to configure the spike drive so it lenses the psion's mind control powers, allowing them to get control of the space whale's brain.

The initial flaws are:

1) Neither their spike drive on its own, nor their psion, has enough power to give this a good chance of working.
2) What does "reverse what it's doing" even mean once they do get control?
3) This will draw the space whale's attention, and could provoke an attack.

In this case, because they've already examined the star, you're generous and you let them cross out flaw #2. The scientist and engineer can figure out what the whale's doing based on what it's done to the star, and can cobble together a crude approximation of what unzapping the sun means.

As the PCs are figuring this out, the space whale zaps the star once more, and suddenly the stellar surface starts roiling and shooting out waves of cosmic rays at levels so intense the PCs' starship has to retreat or else everyone will get radiation fried. This is the second effect, triggered by the PCs examining the space whale. In this case, not only does this mean that the PCs risk incineration by cosmic rays periodically, they also might not be able to get close enough to the whale to use the apparatus as it stands. Rather than treat this as a new flaw (though I guess you could), it seems simpler to just wrap this into flaw #1 - not enough juice - with the increased distance they need to do this from simply making that worse.

So, to put some distance between them and maybe figure out how to get rid of another flaw, they decide to check out the alien ruins on X Prime. They get down there, and a ton of weird stuff happens as they dungeoncrawl through a ruined alien city. Eventually, they discover the source of most of the weird stuff is that there's one ancient alien hermit who's the last survivor of his people and who's super psionic. He's holed up in the ancient space telescope that still works, and he's super lonely. He probably called the creature in the first place accidentally as he projected his mind out into the cosmos via the space telescope, but he can't stop the whale from destroying the star, and thus killing him.

The PCs talk it over with him, and make some skill rolls as they examine the ancient space telescope and talk to the gelatinous worm-swarm who's so lonely. They get some successes, and he agrees to help, teaming up with their psion, showing her how the space telescope works. The scientist and engineer rig it up to the starship for extra boost, and the end result of all of this is that flaw #1 goes away. Unfortunately, during the time they spend doing this, they also register the space whale continuing to fire. Now the very surface of the star is roiling, and sending deadly waves of cosmic radiation pulsing down onto the surface of the planet. The PCs are going to start taking damage every 1d4 rounds. They rush into their space suits and get the worm-swarm into a mylar blanket or whatever, to buy them a few extra rounds each time (you shift the damage interval to every 1d8 rounds).

So now, the PCs' main risk is that doing this is going to draw the space whale's attention, and it'll take a bit of time between turning the device on, aiming, using the power, and then getting the whale to fire. This is the activation phase of their apparatus. You run this as an action sequence, lots of tension. They can make multiple attempts, but maybe the whale starts firing after the first failure, and someone nearly gets burnt to death by cosmic rays but is saved when someone else does something risky, and like, the ancient space telescope building is crumbling and all that jazz. Eventually the PCs win, and get the whale to zap off enough helium (or whatever) that the star stabilises.

Mission accomplished. Number of bad dudes shot to solve this problem: 0. The PCs now have the last survivor of a gelatinous worm-swarm civilisation as their bud, and they take him off to land on the space whale, who he infests the intestines of, and they fly off into the black together, firing goodbye laser blasts of friendship.

I plotted this out over my lunch break today simply by taking the model and making sure I'd filled out each section of it. The amount of scientific research I had to do involved checking Wikipedia twice to make sure a supernova is what I thought it is (yes) and to make sure red giant stars still had helium (yes, mostly on their surface, vs. younger stars where it's more buried). Almost all other "science" in this adventure is pure technobabble, but it's meant to fit together to motivate decisions and actions by the PCs, rather than to provide a cohesive and accurate summary of stellar lifecycles. I came up with effects each time by knowing that I wanted the star stuff to get worse, and just picking which possible option based on what these (fake) PCs had done.

Anyhow, I hope this example provides a useful illustration of how to apply the model to actual games.

Running Technical Plots

The technical plot is the type of plot where the resolution of the problem relies on the characters' technical knowledge of futuristic science, or magical knowledge, or something of that ilk. A good way to determine if the story or problem you're thinking of can be resolved by defeating a specific person or creature. If so, it's probably not a technical plot. If it requires you to somehow dissipate or prevent the build up of magical (or weird science) energy, stop an environmental or ecological problem, or change some feature of the world using a level of knowledge that only your character possesses, it's probably a technical plot.

These sorts of plots are very common in science fiction media like Star Trek. The Enterprise or whatever discovers a strange phenomenon, the stakes are established, the main cast debates what to do, and then acts. The most high-profile one in a fantasy module that I can think of is Dreams of Ruin by Geoff Grabowski, where you're trying to deal with a fantastical ecology that's trying to invade your home plane. The villain responsible for setting up the ecology is long-dead, or at least missing, and defeating them won't actually stop the Dreams of Ruin from colonising your world anyhow.

Despite how common these sorts of plots are in the media that serves as inspirations for many games, I rarely find these sorts of plots set up or run well in published modules. The core challenge of a technical plot is how to maintain player agency in a plot that relies upon the characters' technical skills. Badly done, these sorts of plots turn into a railroaded series of skill rolls that are even more frustrating when characters don't have all the necessary technical skills.

I would therefore propose the following mental model of how to run technical plots in a way that maximises player agency.

First, there is a Problem with some Effects. The Problem must undergo an Examination. The Examination suggests one or more Apparatuses to resolve the problem. The Apparatus must be assembled / collected / stolen and then undergo an Activation. The Activation either resolves the problem, or the Effects grow worse.

Let's look at each of these in turn.

Problems

Problems should be simple enough to be stated in 1-3 sentences. Much more than that, and you start getting overly complicated. A problem should avoid vagueness and ambiguity. In fact, one extremely common mistake in technical plots is to make figuring out what exactly the problem is the main task of PCs.

For example, a few weeks ago I played in a game where the problem was "Our supercomputer predicts this world is going to blow up" without any further information about how or why (except for the location where this was likely to occur), and much of the actual playtime involved piecing together the clues about how and why. The actual problem was "The bad guys are beaming psionic energy from an entire city at a transdimensional object while causing a multiversally unique event. They hope to use this to blow open a portal in reality and escape." But the route to this was convoluted enough that no one actually figured it out until the debrief after the scenario (which we failed).

A clear concise statement of a problem should state a few (2-5) possible elements which suggest immediate lines of investigation or action. Using the above situation as an example, one might ask "Can we stop them from beaming the psionic energy? Can we destroy the object or prevent it from channeling the energy? Can we stop the multiverally unique event?" It can even be useful to write out the problem on a sheet of paper, underline each one of the elements of the problem, and hand it to the PCs. I prefer this method to the most common alternative I've experienced, which is to push them to make guesses about what's relevant, then skill rolls to determine if those guesses are correct.

Examinations

Examinations are one of the three main areas that I prefer play to focus on during a technical plot. An examination is where the PCs investigate some element of the problem, and determine whether they can deal with it, and how.

The challenges of an examination typically involve getting close enough to the problem's element to examine it (for example, sneaking past guards, or going on a long journey or flying your starship near enough to the phenomenon to suffer some of its effects, etc.), and getting enough time to study it (having to make hasty readings of your instruments while the alarm is blaring, or rip files from the server before ICE takes your avatar down).

Typically, this is where you bring in one or more of the effects of the problem, possibly even staging them so that each examination the PCs make is tied to the occurrence of another effect. This can be used to force PCs to prioritise which elements they want to examine, rather than being able to find out about all of them.

After completing the examination, the PCs should have some data or information about that element, and what's going on with it.

It's only really at the end of an examination that the PCs' skills come into play. The role of the skills is not for interpreting the data they got (just give the necessary conclusions to them), but rather for determining what kinds of solutions they can figure out to deal with this element of the problem. Let the players roll whatever skills they have to determine what apparatus they need to solve the problem. If they fail all the rolls, they have to examine another element of the problem to try again. Skills can be mainly technical, but it's useful to allow a few others - usually social skills - so that if the PCs don't have the right skill set, part of their solution to the problem can involve recruiting people with them (e.g. the problem is a build up of psionic energy, so they're going to need to recruit a bunch of psychics to help).

You can increase the scope of relevant technical skills or tighten it up as one way of controlling the genre-fidelity of the game - fewer skill possibilities tend to feel more like hard science fiction or low-magic settings, while being able to use your biology skill to figure out how to stop the black hole from consuming your home planet puts you firmly in science fantasy and epic fantasy.

Apparatuses

The apparatus is the combination of gear, resources, allies, and other stuff the PCs need to be able to stop the problem.

The apparatus the PCs need is generated from their skill rolls after the examination, and should fall within its domain. A bunch of physicists might try to solve the problem with a weird ray apparatus, a wizard might need to assemble a bunch of artifacts and cast a special ritual, etc. The challenge at this phase is to assemble the apparatus. It might be as simple as a few skill rolls (if you wanted to gloss over it and focus on other parts of play), it might be some fetch quests to grab the rare materials, it might be the case that someone has already built the necessary bits and you just have to steal it from them, or any other option you can think of.

Regardless of how difficult the apparatus is to assemble and how complicated you want this part of the adventure to be, I do recommend that any apparatus contains at least 1-2 flaws. These don't necessarily prevent it from working, but they represent hindrances and risks associated with activating it. For example, a weird ray gun might be extremely short ranged, and require you to get dangerously close to zap the hole in space and time with it. Or the artifacts might only be one-use with a low chance of functioning.

To compensate for these flaws typically requires further examinations as above, but of different elements of the problem. Each time the PCs complete another examination, they can either try to create another apparatus (which will have different flaws, perhaps more easily ameliorated), or eradicate some of the flaws in their existing apparatus (adding more uses, a longer range, a better chance of working, etc.). As mentioned above, by increasing the effects of the problem with each examination, you can prevent the PCs from being able to completely trivialise solving the problem by examining things over and over until they have a flawless apparatus.

Activations

The activation is the part where the PCs go to use the apparatus and try to resolve the problem. Typically, you're trying to ameliorate or avoid the flaws of the apparatus, without being overwhelmed by the effects of the problem. You might be trying to get your spaceship close enough to the black hole to fire the graviton bomb without being torn apart, you might be trying to insert the virus into the command terminal, you might be trying to overcome the field of blight energy to get close enough to bless the unholy altar, etc. Enemies might be trying to stop you, but the referee and players should understand that defeating them is only a secondary goal (avoiding, bribing or otherwise neutralising them should be fine). Usually at this point, the effects of the problem are ramping up in severity. They may not climax (especially if the PCs are unsuccessful and need to try again with a different apparatus) but they should be enough to significantly affect almost any action characters are taking.

A successful activation resolves the problem. There might be consequences, but the problem will not get any worse from this point on.

Effects

You typically need multiple effects for a good technical problem (2-5). Effects should drive decision-making, and should start off mild, able to compensated for with minimal effort. As time goes on, the effects worsen, until much of the final activation's success is driven by how well you can deal with the conditions.

One common problem I've found in technical plots is to escalate too rapidly or slowly. In the first case, you go from everything being fine and normal, to the sudden, imminent, looming destruction, with very little in between (sometimes there's some atmospheric description, but mechanically, nothing changes). The second option often involves getting lost in book-keeping, with something like "You get a cumulative -1 to all stats per day" (or whatever) which then goes wonky the first time the referee fudges on time. I suggest designing your effects as clearly distinct phases which replace one another, rather than simply being cumulative. Cumulative stuff is harder to keep track of (for very little thematic pay off).

Not all phases should be fatal if you fail a roll (in fact, most shouldn't be) but instead should require the PCs to expend resources, whether in-game ones like oxygen, rare materials, spells, etc. or metagame ones like friendship points or whatever as the crisis takes a mental toll. One big non-fatal effect at a time lets you run a scene or two where the PCs notice and compensate for it, while clearly indicating the progression towards the final crisis, as phases gradually grow more severe.

Anyhow, this is just a mental model, but I find it's a useful one that has helped me run technical plots without missing essential details or focusing on the least fun parts of such plots.

Managing the Necrocarcerus Campaign

The current Necrocarcerus campaign is run online, which created some initial challenges for me. I needed a collaborative digital whiteboard, as well as a collaborative digital archive for the information the PCs collected. The archive was especially important because Necrocarcerus is a drop-in game - new people show up, familiar players sometimes skip or miss - and it would waste time having to constantly reintroduce leads, characters and locations for the players who weren't at the last session. It also helps having somewhere I can upload the Necrocarcerus rules document to minimise the number of links new players need to follow and the windows they have open. I played around with a few different options, and eventually settled on Realtimeboard (RTB) which I strongly recommend you check out. It has a free version available with about 100MB of storage, though I use the Premium version for the 3GB so I can use it as a dumping ground for pictures.

The Necrocarcerus Campaign

In the picture above, you can see almost the entire Necrocarcerus campaign. There are a few overland maps the PCs drew that haven't been uploaded, and the comment function doesn't show when you export images (each location on the hand-drawn map in the centre-right has comments detailing what the PCs did and when they did it), but this is the majority of it. Everything on this is player-facing (there's some information about the train journey that they're going to gather at the start of next session).

I maintain 6-8 handwritten pages of other notes, one deck of index cards detailing treasure items, and a folder of maps. The 6-8 pages are: 1) A list of adventure locations 2) A list of major NPCs and short descriptions of them 3) A timeline 4) A list of quest ideas and rewards 5) The relevant random encounter tables for the area they're in 6) A list of errata and possible rules updates for Necrocarcerus 7) A list of notes on whatever dungeon or area they're exploring 8) A relationship map of major NPCs.

Of these, the random encounter tables, the errata list, the list of notes and the timeline are updated most often. The timeline and errata list mainly undergo minor modifications - most of my work is creating & changing the random encounter tables and creating new dungeons / adventure locations. There is some overlap between the two, since I populate most of my dungeons outside of a few set-pieces using the random encounter tables. When I introduce a NPC or an adventure location or quest, I simply check it off on the list so I know the PCs have encountered it already and add information to the RTB about it. I numbered the entries so I could roll a d20 for each to see who / what comes up randomly when I didn't have a preference.

In hindsight, I think I could have been more aggressive with the commenting function to add and track treasure & XP from each session, or specifically, I should have requested the players do this on the RTB. I also should have added a calendar to it, especially since the passage of time is so important in Necrocarcerus (I interrupted writing this blog post to add the calendar). If I could find good pictures for some of the weirder monsters of Necrocarcerus, I think it might also be fun to maintain a living bestiary.

End-of-the-World and Surrounds

This map details the overland area around End-of-the-World, as well as the major NPCs, a treasure map (top) of the High Asmarch's palace, and the larger Necrocarcerus campaign map. Purple stickies detail NPCs, orange stickies are quests they have on offer, while pink stickies are leads for PCs to follow up on their own. Green stickies cover information or facts the PCs have discovered, some of which are relevant to quests. Yellow stickies are locations and pathways. Using the linking system RTB makes available, I can draw connections between the various stickies, points on the map, pictures, and any other information I upload to it, allowing the PCs to identify which quests come from which NPCs, where they go, and what they know about them. Once again, comments don't show in these pictures, but the map is speckled with little comment bubbles that are colour coded. Yellow means there might be a reason to go back to a place, green means it's all cleared out or the quest that took them there is completed. I haven't decided what to use the red comment bubbles for yet.

Dungeon Maps

These are dungeon maps. RTB has three levels of nested grid that are fully zoomable (the grid does not show up in the pictures when you image-cap them). The PCs preferred to upload PDFs of graph paper and draw on them. At the top are maps connected to the Half-Buried Megagolem and the Rocket Fields of the Transhegiromantics, while below on the graph paper is Taddlecreek Mine, where they encountered the Cult of the White Worm and recovered several thousand pounds of dragonbone. These maps can be edited by any of the PCs, as well as myself, in real-time, which allows me to leave them to map most of it, but sketch out sections that are difficult to describe clearly. I'm using Gridmapper to create most of my dungeon maps, screencapping them off of it, and then dumping them into a folder on my computer. The rest I get by downloading dungeon maps I find on G+. I tend to prefer gridded maps over ungridded ones because they're easier to translate onto the grid on RTB.

The statue in the bottom left is of a nude woman; beware before enlarging this picture

Here I'm using RTB to plan the PCs upcoming train journey. A map of the first section of the train (the part they've explored) is at the top, along with some NPCs and a seating plan. The colours of the stickies are a bit wonky (I've corrected them since taking this image) but this shows the pathway the PCs will take (since it's a regular route run by the train company). Along the way, there are numerous quests and locations to explore, and the pictures communicate rumours about each area that they can discover from their fellow passengers with minimal effort. This is the first major journey out of End-of-the-World the PCs are taking. This also helps me plan - I know I need Old Hua Danth, the Pinion of the Flame Tyrant, the Spider Tombs and the Autarchy of Mfele Outpost all written up.

My general experience so far has been that the more I dump on RTB, the easier the rest of my note-taking becomes. Like many referees, my experience of note-taking has been that it is both tedious and crucial, and I have struggled in the past to discover ways to simplify it (avoiding long-form writing is one critical discovery I made and have never gone back on). 

The Long Narrative: Being Totally Unfair About Rewards

One set of questions I feel referees ought to explicitly ask players about their characters is "Does this person want to be an adventurer? Why do they want to go on or not want to go on adventures?"

Having an explicit answer for each PC is surprisingly useful. I've played in many games where there is a lot of confusion about whether or not a given character actually wants to be an adventurer. The wrong assumption by a referee has led to them offering the wrong kinds of incentives for participation in the campaign to PCs, and frustration when they are uninterested in the incentives being offered.

I suspect the specific site of cleavage here is amongst players more than characters, games, frames, etc., though all of these play a part. Some players are risk-averse, and some are not. In my experience, risk-averse players tend to run their characters in risk-averse ways, unless they are consciously playing against type. Risk-averse characters can make good adventurers, but they require external compulsion to push them into adventuring. Rewards are accumulated with the eventual goal of being able to stop adventuring and take up some much less risky career. One must constantly deprive them of the social bonds and material wealth that would allow them to stop adventuring or to employ someone else to take the risk in their stead. This is not to criticise these players or characters - the finest roleplayer I have ever gamed with is a risk-averse person who plays characters who adventure only reluctantly. One can often play on their sense of morality and duty or their foresightedness or fellow-spiritedness, though these are almost always short term means to the end of getting them to go on adventures. One can also push them to adventure by presenting a greater risk caused by not adventuring, though this threat will retain its effectiveness as an incentive only insofar as it remains immediate, dangerous, and close at hand. When one does reward them, one ought to give them only enough to continue adventuring, or rewards that are only useful for adventuring, or by averting some threat (to themselves or others).

I suspect that referees who are risk-averse themselves predict that the PCs will act in a similarly risk-averse way, and deliver the kinds of compulsions that would spur them into action. This is fine when dealing with risk-averse players, but can be intensely frustrating for venturesome players, as one is constantly being pushed into action rather than freely choosing to participate in it.

Venturesome players (of which I am one) tend to play their characters in venturesome ways. Specifically, the characters have strong internal motivations to go on adventures, stick their noses into other people's business and just generally interfere in situations they come across. Venturesome players require frequent small rewards to enable them to keep adventuring, but the main thing one ought to avoid doing is using the same strong external compulsions one uses for risk-averse players, as this limits the choices, options and freedoms they find rewarding. These players seek to accumulate agency, and rather than limiting agency by denying it to them, one ought to complicate this accumulation with responsibility. Whereas a risk-averse player will think "Now that my character has a child, they ought to settle down", a venturesome player will say "Now that my character has a child, how can they continue going on adventures?" Money, etc. are not reasons to stop adventuring, but rather ways to enable the irresponsibility necessary for it. Threats and perils should be presented as challenges to be overcome, but as ones that require a serious investment of energy and effort, and the rewards for overcoming them should restore a character's autonomy and freedom.

Venturesome referees will often offer PCs incentives that increase their agency and ability to make choices, which can lead to frustration with risk-averse players who will take the gold and start running an inn, or take their newly-awarded noble title as an excuse to retire from active play. Players will wonder why the referee isn't driving them towards the drama and struggle they want.

While these are presented categorically, I suspect that most people contain both tendencies, and which one predominates depends on the player's mood, the character concept, the group dynamics, the campaign concept, the setting and the system being used. For example, I play a lot of 2nd edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and I tend to overwhelm the scenarios a bit because I am a venturesome player and the default assumption of WFRP modules (I am currently playing in the Liber Fanatica team's Thousand Thrones rewrite, for example) seems to be that the PCs are mostly reluctant adventurers and highly risk-averse. There are plenty of times where I am running ahead of the plot, throwing myself into trouble willingly, in a way the campaign can compensate for but does not necessarily anticipate.

Most groups probably have mixes of risk-averse and venturesome players (and this mix may change over time without the membership of the group changing), so one has to attain the right balance of different kinds and strengths of incentives. I propose that if one has not experimented with doing so, ought to try being totally unfair about rewards and compulsions, tailoring the rewards and compulsions to each PC. Give the venturesome player a barony while his reluctant companion is hunted by the same king's men. Of course, you aren't actually being unfair here, but rather offering each player the type of incentive that they require to want to go on an adventure.

The Long Narrative: Anti-narrativism

MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research goes far beyond the typical Forge nonsense used in theoretical discussion to get into a really useful model for games. It's worth reading, since it bears pretty directly on why I consider myself an "anti-narrative" referee, and what that means.

I want to pull this part out from the beginning: "Fundamental to this framework is the idea that games are more like artifacts than media. By this we mean that the content of a game is its behavior not the media that streams out of it towards the player."

By "anti-narrative", I mean that my primary focus as a referee is not on "telling a story", moving PCs from rising action to rising action until an emotionally cathartic climax is attained, but on presenting interesting and meaningful choices with escalating consequences, and pushing the PCs to decide which option to take. The peaks and troughs on a plot graph for me represent varying levels of PC agency over time. Sometimes they are potent enough to layout all the alternatives and choose freely amongst them, and sometimes they're scrambling to react to a loss of control, and that oscillation takes over from the oscillations of inner character that drive a dramatic plot. The transition between acts tends align between the two models, as an act in a traditional drama is opened or closed by a choice that cannot be undone, whereas under this model, an act is opened or closed by a choice that the PCs must make but cannot exert any agency to layout the options of ("You must either go to war with the Baron or surrender to him. Which will you do?").

I chose this kind of substructure to my games because I find it simplifies the planning for what otherwise appear as traditional story-driven, plot-heavy games. By focusing less on specific events that must happen, and by instead aiming at specific choices that must be made, the substructure is freed from dependence on particular configurations of characters, material, etc. If a single NPC is killed or not, if the PCs steal a specific item, these no longer "sink" a story like they would in a more rigidly-crafted tale. A choice is a virtual entity that can be realised through many possible configurations of characters, material, external events, etc.

In play, this means fewer "cutscenes", fewer invincible NPC badasses, and of course, more meaningful choices (both in quantity and intensity). This method is not "illusionism" - the consequences of PC choice, as the core stake, must be respected, and developed appropriately to the decisions they make. Nor does it have much to do with "narrativism" in the sense of the word used in indie RPGs, which tend to set defined limits on the agency involved rather than varying the agency of the PCs over time (or which vary in only a single, progressive manner encoded in the system itself). "Narrativist" RPGs operate at the level of "mechanics" under MDA, whereas I am talking about doing this on the level of "dynamics" and "aesthetics".

Variance in this kind of substructure is across several factors. First, there is the variance in the stakes of the consequences - some choices are more meaningful, some are less meaningful. I favour being relatively upfront with PCs about which are which in situations where they have more control, and being a bit more opaque in situations where I have more control. Second, there is variance in who has more control, me or the PCs. This is usually obvious - if I'm laying out the options and saying "You have to pick A, B, or C", then I have control. If they're saying "What if we do this? What about this?" then they do. Information, urgency, and resources all serve as subfactors which can be manipulated to adjust their agency.

In any given situation, one structural subgoal should be to vary the level of control and the importance of the consequences across the situation. That is, few situations should start with the PCs at a given level of agency and with a certain set of stakes, and then end at the same level. Either or both factors can increase or decrease, but the change is what produces "dramatic" variety in this kind of structure. The referee is partially responsible for this, but the players are as well. Good play should be capable of minimising the importance of certain stakes (e.g. because you packed plenty of rope, you don't have to worry about falling to your death as you climb the castle walls; because studied the weaknesses of the big bad, the fight is much less risky than it would be otherwise).

Sudden transitions in agency and importance are where surprise comes back in. In traditional dramatic narratives, surprise tends to be driven by misinformation or lack of information, either between characters or to the audience. This is true here as well, but the important thing to bear in mind is that the information in question should relate less to character motivations, plans and plots, and more about the expectations of PCs about how they can deal with these things.

For example, concealing that the big bad is planning to overthrow the kingdom is usually a waste of time. If the PCs don't know what the villain's overarching goal is, they will rarely be invested enough to care about preventing it. Under this model, the surprise is played not in revealing the plan, but in confounding player expectations about what they can do about it. An appropriate scene for this kind of "revelation" would be something like when the players go to the king and tell him about the plot, expecting him to crush the big bad (who is say, an evil minister). Instead, the king refuses to believe them, and insists they stop harassing him with these wild tales unless they have solid proof.

Many times, the kind of story that emerges from this method will be similar to the ones people hope to attain by writing out intricate novelistic plots, but the process itself simplifies and eases attaining these kinds of outcomes while preserving the play experience for PCs. That is, by thinking about the structure of the game in a way that is fundamentally different from being directly concerned with the movements of the narrative, we can incidentally achieve a complex and interesting narrative.

Edit: Courtney and I are on the same page, it looks like. I just saw his recent post on the same topic.

The Long Narrative: Better Notes Part 3

My proposal is that referees ought to keep a calendar of time passed in game, preferably in a day planner, and use this instead of a traditional timeline or long form notes.

The value of a calendar is in keeping track of when things happened so that you, the referee, don't have to. When it comes time for the dying cultist to shout it "Our vengeance will come in X days", you can simply look up what X actually is, instead of having to retcon things two sessions later when it turns out X was supposed to be three instead of four. It also avoids all the little hassles of rectifying time, which are extremely common when the party splits up for any reason.

This is also one reason why I like the day planner, since it's broken down by hour or watch, so you can determine that between 9 and 10am on Tuesday May 31st, the villain will destroy the world. You may find that this level of precision actually helps you to effortlessly  fill in details that otherwise weren't worth the work. It also helps provide colour - my experience is that most long campaigns take place over several years of game time. It can be tremendous fun to pull out the previous year's day planner and say "It was one year ago today you were impaled through the gut by your arch-enemy" or "The one year anniversary of your tower's construction is coming up". Birthdays, important events, festivals, upcoming plot points and world events, these can all go into the day planner, be totally forgotten by you, and simply referred to as the PCs progress through time.

Another advantage of the day planner is that the limitations on space discourage you from veering into long form note territory. The need to fit notes into the space pushes one to concise summaries, rather than verbose wastes of time.

The Long Narrative: Better Notes Part 2

One of the most common problems referees have is coming up with names for NPCs on the fly. These days, many people use name generators to create names beforehand, but they typically only create a small number of names ahead of time, and then find themselves floundering in play, or coming up with some random agglomeration of syllables. 

My suggestion is that one ought to take a name generator or name list appropriate to the feel one wishes, and create a huge list of names, many more than one immediately needs, and then print this list off in single columns on two pages (I recommend both sides of a single sheet). Repetition is fine, so long as bynames, last names or nicknames can be used to distinguish individuals. I also recommend that one side be male names and one be female names. You can make more as you exhaust any given page.

The use of this list in play is that whenever one needs a name, one can simply glance at the list, and pick the next unused name off. I mark names that have already been used with a check mark and include a short description (only a few words), so that an entry that has been used will look something like "Tom Flatnose - Only priest in Norchester". I start at the top of the column and work my way down so that it's faster to reference, instead of hunting for names. I also make sure that I group people with the same last name, or who are otherwise related together, and I'll sometimes draw a bracket on the lefthand side of the column to make that clear. It also makes it easier to jump them if they're not appropriate for the scene going on.

What you may find this encourages you to do is fill out crowd scenes and other situations where there are large numbers of people with named individuals rather than a faceless horde of peasants, courtiers, etc. I find this is extremely effective at bringing crowd scenes to life. Saying "All the village folk have surrounded the tavern where the exciseman is staying. The crowd is waving pitchforks and torches. You can see Margaret of Cardin with Charles Vourner and James Vourner, the Vourner Brothers, in the front looking furious, and at the back screaming for blood are Tom Coxcomb and Lara Willwright," brings the scene to life in an effective way, even if the players don't actually know who any of these people are. It encourages PCs to ask questions, and seek out what knowledge they do possess about these people, which will give them and you ideas about how they can react to what is going on.

The Long Narrative: Better Notes Part 1

Notes are essential aides for memory over the course of a long narrative. They help one plan sequences of events, track what has happened, and who is involved in the story. However, many DMs use the least efficient and least useful form of notes possible - long-form descriptions of events, sometimes even session by session. These notes are hard to refer to in play, difficult to index, and rarely have all the relevant information required. They also encourage book-flipping, which is perhaps the single slowest and most agonising common activity at a roleplaying table. Long-form notes encourage railroading and rigid plotting, perhaps not intentionally, but simply because they cause one to think that one is writing a story, or at least the outline of a story. Finally, they take forever to make, both in preparation for a session and after the fact, which contributes to referee burnout.

My suggestion is to change the way you make and use notes. Different notation styles will allow one to spend less time prepping and recording, less time flipping through them for relevant information, and allow one to improvise deviations from them more easily than long form notes allow.

This entry, the first in a series, will focus on improving the notes one takes for monsters and antagonists. While not the most absolute and dire problem here, this is a simple, easily remedied source of slowdown at the game. I'm always surprised to see how many referees just pull out the Monster Manual or equivalent and flip between the various entries relevant to the fight, often without even using an impromptu bookmark. Then, having found the monster, further flipping is often required to look up what its abilities / feats do, and how they modify a given roll.

I have several recommendations here:

Get ahold of monster stats in electronic form whenever possible, or create electronic copies of these stats when possible, and print them out. I tend to use the same kinds of monsters multiple times, especially common ones like thugs, skeletons, etc. At the start of a campaign, if there aren't stats for the most common kinds of opponents, I will whip them up, print them off, and use the same sheet over and over. If the monsters use weapons, I will calculate the two or three most common kinds they use, including one ranged weapon, and write them on the sheet so that I never have to flip over to the weapon tables. I organise these sheets with paper clips into encounters, so that I have everything at hand for any given situation, ready to go.

If the monsters have special abilities or situational bonuses, I write out what these do in point form, especially if there's a calculation or trigger that needs to be remembered. If it will come up a lot, I precalculate what the bonus or roll will be, so that I have it on hand, easy to remember. If the monsters have two abilities which combo with one another, I will write the combo down: "1st: save vs. paralysis 60ft 1 target 2nd: Laser shot +4 100 yards 1 target 1d10+3" so that I don't have to hunt across the sheet to find stuff. I make a little list of these on the bottom or side of the sheet, wherever I have room.

Finally, spells. Spells, especially in D&D, take up the most room and require the most hassle. I suggest drawing up one electronic master spell list (two if the game has an arcane / divine split). This spell list should be the spell list of a master wizard (a 20th level wizard if you're playing D&D) with good stats (so bonus spells added already), and have a good selection of spells, avoiding most of the highly situational spells.

Then, whenever you have a spellcaster, you print a copy off, take a black marker, and just scratch lines through all the spells the monster does not have for whatever reason. In most versions of D&D, there are only a handful of spells a smart character will take unless they expect something unusual anyhow, so it makes sense for monsters to be using the most common and effective spells. Most PCs never catch on to this, and even if they do, I've never really found one who cares.

The Long Narrative: Crappy Plotting

Twists are complicating factors introduced to a narrative to create dramatic tension by delaying the resolution of a situation the characters have found themselves in. They derive either from unexpected changes in the relationships between characters (Vader is Luke's Father), or from unexpected changes in the environment around the characters (the walls of the trash compactor start to crush together). Twists undermine characters' control of a situation. My experience has been that many referees plan twists for their sessions, but then in play often have trouble bringing them to fruition. The management of twists and complications is considered to one of the high arts of refereeing an adventure game, and from what I've seen and experienced, it is one of the most mentally demanding parts of prep.

My suggestion is that you should experiment occasionally with challenges that do not require twists to be interesting. Not just minor challenges of the sort that recur repeatedly during a session, but big ones that form the centrepiece of a session or series of sessions as well. In real life we encounter these situations reasonably frequently and find them challenging and interesting in and of themselves. For example, skiing down a hill is a pleasurable, challenging activity that allows one to have extremely good, if not perfect information, about the challenges one will face (through selecting the particular trail and then surveying it before one begins skiing).

A situation does not require to be twists to be interesting for the purposes of gaming if:

1) It does not have an obvious solution.

2) It requires several sub-processes to all or mostly be completed successfully for its accomplishment.

3) Gathering the information in order to overcome the situation is a significant part of the challenge.

I use all three of these reasonably frequently. They allow me to plan a situation or idea, and not have to worry about fitting a whole bunch of moving pieces together. It's one of the reasons that reconnaissance is such an important part of my games - if you can come up with a plan of action and gather the information you need, the actual solution is often a denouement. 

Based on reading things on rpg.net and elsewhere over the years, I think there is a tendency to deprecate planning and to reduce the amount of time it takes, in order to get to the action of the scene. Planning is not everyone's cup of tea, but I do think that there are a large number of people who would enjoy planning more if it was handled in a more structured and fruitful way. It's the lack of progression and the inability to arrive at a decisive conclusion that gets to them and turns them off from it, rather than anything inherent to the activity of sitting around talking about what might happen if they did this or that. It may also be, with more experienced roleplayers, the depressing feeling that no matter what they plan, the referee is going to throw a bunch of twists that will cause the time spent planning to be entirely wasted.

So, give it a try by designing situations that are complex and multi-faceted, but all the information is there from the get go and the challenge is figuring out how to incorporate it all into a workable plan.

The Long Narrative: Low Concept Campaigns

I am of the belief that the "higher" the concept, the shorter the campaign will be. Therefore, if one wants to run a long campaign, a "low" concept is necessary. A "high" or "tight" concept is one that contains a lot of information about what the campaign will be like, while a "low" or "loose" concept does not. There is not a stiff border between the two, but here are some criteria that I use to judge whether a concept is "high" or not:

1) Does the pitch contain a reference to a specific television show or movie which the DM is trying to imitate?

2) Does it look like we will have to spend a long time between character creation and play sorting out what each person is and how they relate to one another so that the premise won't collapse in play?

3) Do I expect that this is the kind of game in which someone will say at some point "But that's not the kind of thing that happens in [the source that inspired the game]"?

4) Is the pitch longer than one short paragraph?

5) How tightly is the premise going to determine what happens in game?

The basic problem with a high concept is that it contains too much. I have seen pitches or explanations of games that contain within in them the characters' origins, their relationships, and the specific kinds of challenges they will overcome. I find these pitches become less interesting the more detailed they are, as they close off more and more possibilities to engage with the story or world with each word and sentence.

A narrative that is closed, that has a finite universe of possibilities and options which can be fully explored and then exhausted, is obviously one which should end, as it has been completed. The fewer options and possibilities PCs have, the faster the narrative is exhausted. This can be useful if one wants to run a one-shot, or a short game, but trying to drag a game out once this has happened is a recipe for boredom.

In contrast to this, a long campaign relies on underdetermination. Underdetermination is the use of ambiguity, polysemy, surprise, ambivalence and mystery to provide PCs with just enough information to make meaningful choices in their situation while avoiding or obscuring a total comprehension of everything that is going on. You need the occasional intrusion of the unexpected, unexplained, unknown, and unrelated to refresh and expand the narrative.

Underdetermination also pushes PC agency to the forefront. If they don't want to be Power Rangers defending the earth from alien invasion, then they don't have to be Power Rangers defending the earth from alien invasion. Underdetermination means that how the PCs engage with the world is not determined for them, but something that emerges organically in play, and that is subject to revision and change through their choices.

A low concept campaign works especially well when you have a detailed world with lots of possible origins for PCs, places for them to go, NPCs to interact with, and challenges to overcome. You have to avoid having a world so detailed that engagement with it requires the PCs to know a ton of information beforehand, which basically just replicates the same problems as a high concept game through a different means. Or a metaplot that crowds out the PCs and turns the setting into a bunch of high level NPCs jockeying for control.

While I have a lot of respect for Glorantha, I have very little interest in playing in it, since most of the modern adventure concepts I hear people pitch are just a mish-mash of references to canon that convey an attitude of "Let's enact the timeline!" This is something I try to avoid when I write for the Dawnlands, not always successfully, but I want to leave it open enough that individual referees feel that they can "own" it and alter it as they please while still feeling like they are running a "Dawnlands" game.

The Long Narrative: Bottle Sessions

Long-running narratives rarely tell a single story without interruptions and distractions. In television, one of the most common kinds of interruptions is a "bottle episode", which features the main cast in a constrained environment primarily interacting with one another rather than with external forces. Each character should have an agenda or goal which is being frustrated by circumstances or the other characters. The purpose of the episode to push the characters to a conflict with each other, which escalates and escalates until happenstance, collective effort or exhaustion resolves it. Bottle episodes exist to conserve the budget and shooting schedule of a television program, while clarifying and deepening the characters' relationships with one another.

Sessions of campaigns can't exactly follow this model, but because of its limited scope I think this kind of "episode" can be more easily transferred to campaigns than other structures. You take the PCs, give them conflicting incentives or highlight their differences, and then impose a constraint such that no one can be satisfied until all are, and let them get at one another. The main thing to watch out for here in a roleplaying game is setting up a constraint that isn't actually a constraint, like putting the PCs at the bottom of a giant pit when someone has levitate, or thinking that a bunch of NPC guards preventing them from exiting through a doorway will keep the PCs in a room. You can amplify an otherwise crappy constraint by offering incentives that lead some of the PCs to want to reinforce it themselves. The constraint doesn't have to be a static location per se, though if it involves wandering, the PCs should not be able to simply wander out of the constraint. The constraint or situation should also not be so intense or demanding that it becomes an external goal that unifies the party in confronting it.

Once the constraint is in place, the other critical element is the set of divergent goals. The minimum number is two, but I recommend at least three, so that you avoid simple factionalism and popularity contests. A simple set you can use is to incentivise confronting the situation, escaping from the situation, and a lack of concern or investment in the situation entirely. If you recall what I wrote on a previous occasion about offering goals that only matter to a subset of the party, this is the same thing on a smaller scale. Escaping and a lack of concern work best as goals in this scenario if each goal would require the total effort of the party, or at least the part of it with the least commitment to its success, without benefiting them directly. 

A wizard talking everyone else into pressing on further into the dungeon so that he can recover the lost spellbook of an arch-wizard, for which he requires the thief character's assistance to deal with the traps along the way would be an example of this. Meanwhile, the thief can't bail on the dungeon without the wizard's help, because he needs the wizard to cast a spell to unlock the way back out. The fighter, meanwhile, may not care about the spellbook per se, but about helping the thief and the wizard, his friends, whatever they decide.

One thing to bear in mind when designing these kinds of goals is the sunk cost fallacy. If the thief is already in the dungeon, he's already committed at least somewhat to getting the damn spellbook, and the cost of the effort he's put into this already is likely to push him to "complete the quest". Therefore, incentives to flight or disinvestment should normally be stronger in the context of a bottle session than the would be otherwise. However, they too should not provide a clear and present danger. Nebulous, ill-defined threats work best here.

The point of all of this is to get people arguing with one another. There should come a point at which it's clear that the argument is either about to resolve or about to start going round in circles. If it resolves, then great, the PC's collective effort should carry the day, with a reward for their efforts, until the next adventure or at least the next session. If they start going around in circles, then an accidental or unexpected change in the situation should happen and ease the way to one of the goals. You might be surprised at how little justification these sorts of things actually require, as television, movies and novels have acquainted people with this trope such that most find it "natural." Someone leans on a wall and activates a secret door, an external personality finally enters the picture to help them or unify them in opposition to him, the valuable item everyone was arguing over the ownership of is broken in the struggle, etc. The PCs choose how they wish to react to this, and then go on their way, situation resolved.

The Long Narrative: Boring NPCs

Boring NPCs are a highly under-rated tool. By "boring" I mean they are irrelevant to the main plot, often ordinary people, without a captivating hook or dark secret or exciting dramatic conflict waiting for the PCs to stumble across. I don't mean "poorly played" or "vaguely defined" or "without motives".

The value of a boring NPC is that they don't eat up a lot of attention whenever they're in a scene, nor do they provoke the players to deal with them definitively, by for example killing them or enchanting them or whatever. This allows them to recur, and to become familiar persons to the party whose existence, however pedestrian, fleshes out the world and gives a concrete shape to incidental scenes that would otherwise be dull. It also pushes PCs to interact with people other than by threatening them, killing them, enchanting them, etc. Their very normality helps contrast with the more exciting components of the game and creates a change of pace and a sense of novelty with very little investment required on the part of the DM. Boring NPCs may be slightly antagonistic, but it should be the antagonism of a store clerk in a sour mood, not even the antagonism of a spurned lover or embittered rival, let alone a nemesis or dark lord.

Boring NPCs are particularly useful in locations that recur in a game. This is because they probably won't provoke the NPCs to do something illegal or drastic that then disincentivises them from returning to that location, or forces drastic changes to the location. They can also be extremely useful in dampening conflict from getting out of hand, or forcing nonviolent resolutions, which encourages roleplaying, and allows character conflict to avoid being resolved immediately by violence.

Boring NPCs also allow communication and information to flow. One of the more useful boring NPCs I have in my Emern game is a guy named "Pauly". Pauly is an innkeeper who knows everyone in Heshtown, and who gossips with everyone. Pauly's job in the campaign is just to be the CNN of Heshtown. He doesn't have a dark secret, he isn't secretly working against the PCs, or entangled in a rivalry with local gangs that will come up at a later point, Pauly is just there to be a familiar face the PCs can come back to when they return to Heshtown from an adventure. He's somewhat wise to their schemes, but he isn't invested in them, or in anyone else's, and he serves as a friendly but ultimately neutral point of information exchange. 

Despite that description, Pauly is one of the most popular NPCs in the game, so much so that when the PCs returned from being knighted and give ownership of Jamaica, they invited him to a feast they threw in the front yard of their house. One of the reasons I think Pauly is popular is simply that the PCs confront horrific individuals trying to kill them and duplicitious bastards trying to chisel them frequently on their adventures, and Pauly is never one of them. Pauly is just an ordinary likable guy, the sort of person you could see yourself getting along with in real life, and this makes it easier for the PCs to get along with him, and because they get along with him, he draws out and enriches what could otherwise be dull scenes (like a celebratory feast).

Anyhow, give it a try. Insert at least one perfectly ordinary, non-adventuring person who interacts with the PCs on a regular basis (between adventures, or maybe at the start or end of adventures) but who isn't connected to the main plot and see how the party deals with them. You might want to make them a little useful (as Pauly's gossip is), to provide an initial incentive.