Something I’ve spent literally years struggling with as a GM is transitioning from one scenario structure to another within a dungeoncrawl.

Let me see if I can clarify that:

I find it really easy to switch scenario structures at the same time that the venue of action is being switched: If the PCs enter the dungeon, we swap to dungeoncrawling. If they seek out a specific character in a tavern we roleplay that conversation; if they exit the tavern and then start hitting the streets looking for information we handle that a different way.

After a few false starts as a neophyte GM, I also eventually found it relatively easy to switch scenario structures within most venues: Renting rooms at a local tavern is handled at one level of abstraction, but when they wake up in the middle of the night to find the tavern haunted by ghosts we switch to a different structure.

These days, this sort of thing is pretty much automatic for me. But swapping structures in the dungeon still routinely thwarts me.

The type of structure I’m talking about is mainly the one found in adventures like Night Below or Thunderspire Labyrinth: A large, underground complex in which there are isolated pockets of “interest” which are designed to be run as a room-by-room crawl.

For awhile, I thought it was the difficulty of presenting meaningful navigation choices to the players in these environments. But once I came to think of them as “underground wildernesses”, this wasn’t a problem any more.

No, the primary problem was the transition from the room-by-room crawl to the underground wilderness (or vice versa): When the PCs enter a room with three exits and two of them lead to another room but the third leads to the more abstract labyrinths of the wider complex.

I mean, it’s relatively to just do it. But it’s more difficult to do it effectively.

Partly it’s the difficulty of finding a smooth narrative description of the shift. Mostly, however, it’s the damage to roleplaying and immersion caused by the imposition of the metagaming structure on the decision-making of the characters.

See, in most other circumstances it’s either the passage of time, the changing of circumstance, or the decision of the characters to do something different which smoothly transitions us from one game structure to another: But not so in this case. Circumstances remain unchanged and the PCs are making the exact same type of decision they’ve been making for the past twenty rooms… but suddenly the scenario structure is changing.

And, like I say, this can be handled pretty simply by saying to the players “we’re switching structures now” (or some equivalent thereof). But that has consequences on the decisions they’re making. (As a simple example, if I didn’t tell them “all the rooms beyond this point are empty, so we’re going to be switching to underworld exploration” then they might waste time searching those empty areas… which might have an impact when they return to the occupied rooms.)

In a lot of ways, this is all a mountain out of a molehill because it just doesn’t come up that often. But it’s something that my recent discussion of using multiple scenario structures has brought to mind.

Recently, though, I had an interesting discovery in my Ptolus campaign. Part of the vast megadungeons beneath that city are immense labyrinths built by the warlord Ghul. Ghul’s Labyrinth is filled with a number of bluesteel doors which are extremely difficult to bypass (being resistant to knock and lacking any normal lock to pick).

And these doors have proven to be ideal transition points between dungeon scenario structures because they’re natural transition points within the game world: Not only do they require a significant decision on the part of the PCs in order to pass through them, but they were actually built by Ghul to logically divide his demesne.

All of this, of course, ties back into the larger issues of making sure that your players’ decision within a scenario structure are associated with the decisions of their characters: Something I not only aesthetically prefer, but which is absolutely necessary if the scenario structure is actually unknown to the players.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 2B: A WOMAN ASSAULTED

March 18th, 2007
The 16th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

(more…)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 2B: A Woman Assaulted

In which assaults both inexplicable and inexcusable are committed against the innocent and guilty respectively, and a holy man asks a favor with long-lasting consequences…

The shivvel addict in the first part of Session 2 is what I sometimes think of as a “foreshadowing encounter”.

In the Shadow of the Spire is primarily designed as a node-based campaign (with a few wrinkles that I’ll discuss at greater length at a later date). This means that I do have some general sense of what will be included in the campaign, if not necessarily what will happen in the campaign.

(Although only a general sense: There are quite a few “foreshadowing encounters” scattered throughout these journals which foreshadow… absolutely nothing. The PCs went a different way. I like to pretend that I always meant for those to be “local color encounters”.)

In this particular case, I knew that the PCs were probably going to get wrapped up in a tight little knot of criminal conspiracy involving the shivvel trade. The pay-off starts coming in Session 7, but by laying the groundwork for shivvel here I’ve established some necessary exposition which will make the later stuff easier to present when it comes up. I’ve also established shivvel as part of the wider reality of Ptolus; so when I later say “the shivvel trade is important”, the players don’t have to just take my word for it: They know it.

A subtler example in this same session is Brother Fabitor. I knew that in Act II (which turned out to be several dozen sessions later) I would need someone from the Imperial Church to contact the PCs; thus the introduction of Brother Fabitor here.

I thought there was actually decent odds that Brother Fabitor would become a more significant NPC. And he might have if the paladin Alysta had remained part of the campaign. Instead the PCs ended up becoming more closely associated with Mand Scheben (who you haven’t met yet) and ended up engaging the Imperial Church in completely unanticipated fashion.

… but those are tales for the future.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 2A: WELCOME TO PTOLUS

March 18th, 2007
The 16th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

(more…)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 2A: Welcome to Ptolus

In which the darker side of Ptolus proves to be an addicting experience and the services of many are divided across shopping trips both past and present…

At the beginning of the campaign journal for this session, Tee shares the revelations she gleaned from reading through the Delver’s Guild membership papers. This is actually something that was resolved between sessions. In fact, I’ve still got the original e-mail from Tee’s player:

One thing that should probably be added to the journal is the matter of the ID papers.  Everyone took their set that says they are members of Ptolus (I’d imagine that Tee would either keep Agnarr’s for him, or explain to him what it means so he can hold it himself) and the rest of the papers were placed in the secret compartment of Tee’s trunk, and the trunk was then locked (Tee now carrying the key with her instead of leaving it in her room).

I’m not sure what happened with the Delver’s Guild papers offically, though I would imagine that the were distributed and not locked up with the ID papers, as presumably they are not falsified. On a side note – Tee would have read through her set of Delver’s papers (you said there was a packet of information) and probably gone through the ID papers that night, to see all of the things we were “members” of, to try to keep a mental list in case they were needed later, and to see if we were all members of the same things.

I’ve found it can often be quite useful to end a session at the point just before the players are going to engage in a lot of “down time” activities. These activities can then be resolved at length, in detail, and at leisure through e-mail or other means. This conserves table time, allows for more detailed explorations of certain aspects of the campaign, and can also keep the players engaged in the campaign between sessions.

This particular e-mail from the player was prompted by an e-mail in which I sent out the campaign journal for session 1 and asked all of the players to, “Please take a look through it and let me know if you feel anything was misrepresented
or anything important left out.”

This is another aspect of keeping a detailed campaign journal: The process of review not only helps to keep the record accurate, it also helps to reinforce the players’ memories of the session for future reference.

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to convince the players to actually read the campaign journal. So I’ve taken to secretly docking their XP by 50% whenever they don’t do it.

(No, not really. That’s just my way of seeing whether or not any of them are reading these essays. I’ve found that if players don’t want to engage in a campaign, you can’t force them to do so through punishments. You need to keep adding carrots and trying different techniques to see what will stick. And what sticks will often change over time.)