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NODE-BASED SCENARIO DESIGN

PART 1: THE PLOTTED APPROACH

Most published adventures are designed around a structure that looks like this:


Your start at the beginning (Blue), proceed through a series of linear scenes (Yellow), and eventually reach the end (Red).

Occasionally you may see someone get fancy and throw a pseudo-option into things:


But you’re still looking at an essentially linear path. Although the exact form of this linear path may vary depending on the adventure in question, ultimately this form of design is the plotted approach: A happens, then B happens, and then C happens.

The primary advantage of the plotted approach is its simplicity. It’s both easy to understand and easy to control. On the one hand, when you’re preparing the adventure it’s like putting together a scheduled to-do list or laying out the plot for a short story. While you're running the adventure, on the other hand, you always know exactly where you are and exactly where you’re supposed to be going.

But the plotted approach has two major flaws:

First, it lacks flexibility. Every arrow on the plotted flow-chart is a chokepoint: If the players don’t follow that arrow (because they don’t want to or because they don’t realize they’re supposed to), then the adventure is going to grind to a painful halt.

The risk of this painful train wreck (or the necessity of railroading your players) can be mitigated by means of the Three Clue Rule. But when the Three Clue Rule is applied in a plotted structure, you run the risk of over-kill: Every yellow dot will contain three clues all pointing towards the next dot. If the players miss or misinterpret a couple of the clues, that’s fine. But if they find all of the clues in a smaller scene, they may feel as if you’re trying to spoon-feed them. (Which, ironically, may cause them to rebel against your best laid plans.)

Second, because it lacks flexibility, the plotted approach is inimical to meaningful player choice. In order for the plotted adventure to work, the PCs must follow the arrows. Choices which don’t follow the arrows will break the game.

This is why I say Don’t Prep Plots, Prep Situations.
 
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

Of course, it’s all well and good to say, “Prep Situations.” But one of the reasons people prefer the plotted approach is that it provides a meaningful structure: It tells you where you’re going and it gives you a way to get there.

Without that kind of structure, it’s really easy for a gaming session to derail. It’s certainly not impossible to simply turn the PCs loose, roll with the punches, and end up somewhere interesting. Similarly, it’s quite possible to jump in a car, drive aimlessly for a few hours, and have a really exciting time of it.

But it’s often useful to have a map of the territory.

This line of thought, however, often leads to a false dilemma. The logic goes something like this:

(1) I want my players to have meaningful choice.
(2) I need to have a structure for my adventure.
(3) Therefore, I need to prepare for each choice the players might make.

And the result is an exponentially expanding adventure path:

The problem with this design should be self-evident: You’re preparing 5 times as much material to supply the same amount of playing time. And most of the material you’re preparing will never be seen by the players.

In some ways, of course, this is an extreme example. You could simplify your task by collapsing some of these forks into each other:

But even here you’re designing eight steps worth of material in order to provide three steps of actual play. You’re still specifically designing material that you know will never be used.

And in other ways it’s actually not that extreme at all: The original example assumes that there are only two potential choices at any given point on the path. In reality, it’s quite possible for there to be three or four or even more – and each additional choice adds a whole new series of contingencies that you need to account for.

Ultimately, this sort of “Choose Your Own Adventure” prep is a dead end: No matter how much you try to predict ahead of time, your players will still find options you never considered -- forcing you back into the position of artificially constraining their choices to keep your prep intact and leaving you with the exact same problem you were trying to solve in the first place. And even if that wasn’t true, you’re still burdening yourself with an overwrought preparation process filled with unnecessary work.

The solution to this problem is node-based scenario design. And the root of that solution lies in the inversion of the Three Clue Rule.

GO TO PART 2

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