Once I came to see scenes as an emergent property of game play (rather than something that’s prepared), I began to realize that scenario prep is almost entirely about designing tools. Or, perhaps more accurately, toys. Running an RPG is about picking up these toys and actively playing with them, just like the players are actively playing their PCs.
In creating these tools you’re still thinking about how they’ll be used at the table. But it’s more like designing a hammer (“I know this tool will be useful for hammering nails”) than it is writing an IKEA instruction manual (“here is how the scene with Diego will work”).
At the table, players are going to say things like, “Let’s build a chair!” And the GM will be thinking, “Great! I’ve got a hammer, a bunch of wood, and some… screws? Well, let’s make it work.”
It may only reflect my predilections as a GM, but I’ve found over time that node-based scenario design seems to inherently lend itself to a naturalistic form of prep. I’m not sure if that’s the ethos of active play pushing node-based design in a particular direction or if it’s that node-based design has naturally fostered active play. Or both.
But, in short, the more comfortable I become with node-based scenario design, the more I find that the design arises out of the diegetic organization of the game world itself.
For example, when I’m designing something like the Lytekkas hypercorp, the nodes I design (and how those nodes are organized) overwhelmingly tends to mirror the organization of Lytekkas in the game world. (You can see this in the earlier examples, which were based on things like the geography of the game world or the corporate divisions of Lytekkas.)
When I’m struggling with node-based design, a trick I’ve learned is to pick an NPC and ask, “How would they see this stuff? How would they use it? How would they interact with it?” Whether that’s a hypercorp CEO in an orbital penthouse or a Triad 49er on the rough streets of Hong Kong, the in-game perspective is almost always illuminating.
Of course, this makes sense, doesn’t it?
If node-based scenario design is based on the flow of information – if the structure of a node-based scenario is made up of the paths formed by the information – then it follows logically that node-based scenarios will mirror how that information naturally flows through the game world. And, of course, that flow will be determined by the actual relationships between people, places, organizations, and events in the game world. In how the nodes are related to each other.
Thus, as you design your scenarios, you naturally break the game world apart into discrete chunks. Each chunk (or node) is either a toy or a collection of toys that you can pick up and play with, while the connections between nodes show how those toys are related to other toys, making it easy for them to be endlessly combined and recombined in actual play.
And that’s node-based scenario design.
FURTHER READING
Using Revelation Lists
Game Structures
Hexcrawls
5 Node Mystery
Gamemastery 101
Very insightful and the best result of node based scenario design.Table story: running the Dragon Heist Remix I came to the point were the PCs went to Gralhund Villa and were on the verge f abandoning this line of investigation. Some months ago I would have panicked and try to railroad them in the scenario. Now I just thought that they will lose the stone and listen of the raid the next day, the campaign is still pretty much on tracks! They then discovered the onlookers and by dusk they interrogated the Zhent onlooker to learn of the planned raid. Now being convinced that the Gralhunds have in fact the stone, they are actively working the raid into their heist plan. Prefect!
The trouble I generally have is more of an art than science: how to actually funnel a story into the prepared nodes in homebrews and not make it so sandboxy that the PCs lose themselves completely (happened even in my homebrew remix of Storm Kings Thunder).
GreekGeek, Here’s an idea to try. Rather than making your nodes into geographic locations, you could build them as a set of circumstances. Then no matter where your party goes, they can meet the NPC you need them to meet. They can find the clue they need to find. Some features will have to be location-specific, but a lot could be made more flexible to drop in wherever they are needed, which kind of seems like what you did with the raid & heist you mentioned.
The topic of this post reminded me of Conway’s Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law): a (software) system’s design mirrors communication structure of the organization that designed it. There were even attempts at applying “reverse Conway’s Law” that is reorganize the development teams so that they’ll mirror the desired architecture of the system.
The biggest problem I have with nodes is how to store them. To understand the relations, I have to see whole graph of nodes, but big networks are a pain to maintain and modify manually.
Ideally I would like to have a software that automatically draws relationship graph based on node properties, and adjusts it if the nodes are changed. I found only one that can do that (The Brain), but still hoping to find an alternative.
@Dmitry: That’s very interesting!
@Random_Phobosis: I honestly work from lists. See Using Revelation Lists. Visualizations can be useful, but it takes very little complexity for them to just become noise, IME. YMMV.
(I’ll have to check out The Brain.)
The theory makes a lot of sense to me. Can you please give a few examples of some tools/toys that you’ve designed?
I find the biggest challenge is making the links between the nodes obvious with appropriate clues. For example, my Halloween scenario involved a ghost appearing and wanting revenge. While open to players solving it however they could manage, my intent was that they would investigate the history of the murder that created the ghost and try to put her spirit to rest by righting the past wrongs. A pretty typical situation. The problem is that while I have a background story that everyone in town has heard, the murder itself happened long in the past and most of the major characters still alive are now off in hiding with no contact or current knowledge of one another. A large number of events also occurred without anyone else around who could know anything about what really happened. Even making proactive clues was rather difficult.
@Belgand
For ancient mysteries and cold cases, I typically rely on a lot of persistent “artifact” clues, alongside the rumors, old news stories, and intimate knowledge from descendants/silent witnesses/police/coroners.
In your case, the suspect might not be around, but there’s a diary hidden under the floorboards in their old house, complete with vacation photos of them at the isolated cabin to which they have now retired.
Then you just need some early clues that would point the PCs to the location of these persistent elements.
“I began to realize that scenario prep is almost entirely about designing tools. Or, perhaps more accurately, toys. Running an RPG is about picking up these toys and actively playing with them, just like the players are actively playing their PCs.”
I think one thing that discourages GM’s from doing this is that it’s hard to know how “hard” you should play these, particularly when the toys are used in an adversarial manner toward the PCs. There are a couple reasons for this:
1) Resolution Complexity:
While RPGs do provide clear rules for micro-structures like combat (the thugs attack the players with daggers), they don’t usually provide rules for more nebulous or organization-scale maneuvers (the mastermind sends the thugs to tail the PCs, intercept their mail, find out where one PC’s mom lives, then kidnap her and read her mind for intelligence before threatening her life in a back-room negotiation to make that PC secretly betray the party).
While you could theoretically roll for all these actions in quick succession, that’s way too much simulationism for most peoples’ tastes. You could resolve this intrigue with a single roll (with gradients of success), but again, most games don’t provide advice on this.
More narrative systems tend to handle these situations better, because they hand-waive the details and base their mechanics around the “summoning” of complications at appropriate moments. FATE would handle this as a compel on the “Tailed by Thugs” aspect, with a simple mechanic for the player to dodge it (pay a fate point, refuse the compel).
Paradoxically, I find that the more granular and simulationist the rules, the greater the reliance on GM fiat. The complexity makes neutral resolution too difficult. GMs have to just “make things happen” according to taste. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but the lack of a regulating mechanism makes it easier to overshoot.
2) GM Metagame Knowledge:
While players have their character sheet, they generally don’t have perfect knowledge of the opposition’s composition, abilities, resources, positioning, and intelligence. The GM generally DOES know exactly what the PCs can do, and will be listening to their plans at the table. There’s a valid fear of letting that knowledge bleed over into play, and unintentionally shutting down player initiative by making the opposition too smart and capable in countering player tactics.
In conclusion, I think part of the perceived safety of railroaded scenarios stems from the fact that prep is inherently inflexible, and therefore safely limited in scope. It’s much harder to overstep the bounds of plausibility, fairness, and challenge when your toys can only do one thing.
A lot of this seems like it would with the Storylet structure advocated by Failbetter games (creators of the online game “Fallen London” and the computer game “Sunless Seas”). Emily Short, an interactive fiction writer and developer who now works for them has written a lot on it. Very much a system of gating story parts (storylets in their parlance, almost exactly like nodes here) with different qualities (very similar to clues here).
For them, it can also be a matter of resource requirements on top of that. In comparison I think clues might be pointers where qualities are things necessitating an opening of a new node.
But regardless, if unaware of the structure, it is worth looking into and definitely goes beyond traditional CYOA branching.
Node-based scenario design seems like a really good answer to the concrete question of “how does it happen?” in TTRPGs for all the reasons outlined in these essays. But I’m wondering now how this structure helps the GM and their group answer the abstract question of “what does it mean?”.
Is theme something that is predominantly prepped and run by the GM, or created in play by the players with their characters and the GM with their toys? Is the highly flexible structure of nodes in the gameworld matched by a an equally flexible set of abstract meanings that can be derived from the concrete actions in play?
Perhaps there could also be fruitful contrast between railroading and meaningful choice in what a given game means, as well as how it plays out.
@QuestWriter:Theme is a big topic, but its presentation is going to large boil down to either
a) Elements in the narrative which are collectively related through the theme, express the theme, or comment upon the theme; and
b) A “thesis statement” supported by both those elements and the events of a story.
In terms of RPG adventures, the first part of this is relatively simple. If you want to thematically explore the idea that, say, “power corrupts” then you can stock your adventure with different examples of power’s corrupting influence.
The traditional “thesis statement” of a planned narrative is where it gets trickier. In an RPG, it’s going to be far more effective to think of theme in terms of a question; or possibly multiple questions all interrogating the same central idea.
Manifesting these questions will be primarily a matter of scene framing. See The Art of Pacing for more on that.
Theme in RPGs is thus, IMO, a fundamentally interactive construct. As with the “plot” of the adventure, you won’t actually know how the theme will ultimately express itself or what the conclusions of your thematic exploration (if any) will be until you’ve actually played the game.