I’ve recently been reviewing The Esoterrorists by Robin D. Laws with an eye towards how the core design ethos of the system — that the PCs always find every clue that can be found (as discussed in more length as part of my essay on the Three Clue Rule) — could be adapted to more generic purposes. (And quickly coming to the conclusion that is, in fact, so completely antithetical to the reasons that I play roleplaying games that it won’t work for me in any form.)

HARD AND SOFT LIMITS

But the game has prompted me to give some fresh thought to hard limits in system design, and the effect they have on scenario design for and the utility of a roleplaying game.

For example, let’s consider hit points: Imagine a hypothetical system in which the PCs have 20 hit points each. If each PC loses an average of 4 hit points each time they get involved in combat, then after four combat encounters the system is essentially mandating that the PCs stop fighting things (because the fifth encounter will kill them).

For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that in this hypothetical system there’s no way for a PC to heal or restore their hit points except to rest for 1 week without stressful activity. That becomes a hard limit for scenario design: If you design a scenario that requires the PCs to fight more than four times in a single week, then your scenario is most likely going to end in failure (as the injured PCs either retreat or die).

This is, basically, how D&D 4th Edition is designed. The math is more complicated due to healing and variable encounter difficulty, but when the party’s healing surges run out (or, more accurately, when the healing surges for a single PC run out), the adventuring for the day is over. It has a hard system limit on how many combat encounters you can have per day, and you cannot design encounters with more combat encounters (or more difficult combat encounters) without house ruling the system.

By contrast, previous editions of D&D used hit points as a soft limit because there’s no limit placed on how much magical healing a single character can receive in a day. Of course, there are practical limits to the amount of healing any given adventuring party will have available to it in a single day, so you can’t simply ignore the issue of depleting the party’s hit points across multiple encounters. But it’s a soft limit precisely because there are ways (within the rules of the system itself) for overcoming that limitation.

For example, imagine that you wanted to design a scenario in which the PCs were in control of a fortress and needed to defend it from an army of the undead. In 4th Edition the scope of this scenario is dictated by the system: You can’t have more than X encounters of Y strength because the PCs will run out of healing surges. In 3rd Edition, on the other hand, you can make the siege last for any number of encounters, as long as you’re willing to provide the PCs with the necessary resources (like wands of cure light wounds, for example).

The reason I bring this up is that in most traditional roleplaying games there aren’t actually many hard limits to be found. I’ve found them to be quite a bit more prevalent in indie games, but in most cases they’re also fairly obvious in such games.

For example, 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars features a core mechanic for each mission in which the GM is given a budget of threat tokens equal to 5 x the number of PCs. The GM constructs encounters by spending threat tokens, and when he runs out of tokens the mission is over. This limit isn’t hidden in any way. Knowing it is recognized as being an integral part of running and playing the game. (Which, when you get right down to it, is true for all hard system limits. It’s just that 3:16 acknowledges it.)

HARD LIMITS IN GUMSHOE

The GUMSHOE system used in The Esoterrorists, on the other hand, looks like a traditional RPG… but its design is riddled with hidden hard limits.

Allow me to explain the two core mechanics of the game:

(1) For any investigative task, the PC uses the appropriate skill and automatically succeeds at finding any of the appropriate basic clues in the scene. In addition, a PC’s ranking in an investigative skill gives them a pool of points which they can spend to buy additional clues using that investigative skill that are non-essential to the adventure, but interesting in one way or another.

(2) For any non-investigative task, a difficulty number from 2 to 8 is secretly assigned and 1d6 is rolled. If the roll is higher than the difficulty number, the PC succeeds. A PC’s ranking in non-investigative skills also give them a pool of points which they can spend on checks using that skill to give them a +1 bonus to their die roll.

Pools for physical skills are replenished every 24 hours. Pools for non-physical skills are only replenished when a scenario ends.

And there’s your hard limit. Or, rather, your many hard limits: Each and every skill is turned into a 4E-style hard limit. For investigative skills this is relatively muted by the “mandatory success” mechanics of the system, but this same mandatory success results in a very flat playing experience if it’s not being periodically spiced by pool buys.

In practice, these hard limits severely restrict the length of an Esoterrorist scenario.

These limits, of course, aren’t entirely without their benefits. For example, once you recognize the hard limit, you’ll also realize that the system is silently mandating a diversity in the design of a scenario (so that you don’t rapidly tap out a single pool) — which, on the balance, is likely to be a positive more often than a negative.

But the negatives seem quite significant to me.

For example, in designing the investigative portions of a scenario you have two ways of dealing with the GUMSHOE hard limit:

(1) You can budget the number of “bonus clues” available in the scenario to make sure that the PCs will always have the points required to buy them. This avoids the problem of running out of points early in the game and then being forced to only engage the scenario at the most passive level available, but it raises the question of why the pools exist at all: It’s like sending you to a typical garage sale and then enforing a strict budget of spending no more than $1,000,000. Theoretically that’s meaningful, but in practice you’ve got all the money you need to buy everything on sale so it’s not a limitation at all.

(2) On the other hand, you can include more “bonus clues” over the course of the scenario than the PCs can afford. This means that the PCs will have to budget their points and only spend them selectively.

But here’s the problem: The players don’t know which of these approaches is true in any given scenario. (Particularly since most GMs aren’t going to read this essay and, therefore, aren’t going to make a deliberate decision in either direction. In practice, it’ll be a crapshoot from one scenario to the next which of these true. And which is true for which pool of points.)

And, furthermore, the design of the system is such that you often don’t know what you’re buying.

So either I’m giving you a million bucks and saying “buy everything at the garage sale”; or I’m giving you $5 and telling you to buy a random grab bag of stuff. It’s a feast or a famine and you don’t know which it is until it’s too late.

The problem becomes more severe for non-investigative tasks. Here the players need to spend the pool points in an effort to boost a random die roll above a target number that they don’t know. And they have to make that decision without any real knowledge of how many more die rolls of the same type they might be called upon to make.

So you’re bidding in a (frequently life-or-death) silent auction in what may (or may not) be a long series of silent auctions, the exact number of which you have no way of guessing.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Of course, the argument can be made that I’m being relatively harsh on a game system which was probably designed to provide nothing more than a semi-useful scaffolding on which to hang some group improv.

But I belong to that school of thought that believes that system matters. And I don’t come to that belief merely from a background in game design. It’s also derived from my experience as an improv actor: The improv structures you use have an impact on the creativity that happens. Being aware of the strengths and weaknesses of an improv structure is the first step towards (a) choosing the right improv structure and (b) mastering the improv structure you choose.

In any case, hard limits are something to watch out for in a game system. They’re the points beyond which the game either Fails Completely or, at best, Stops Being Fun. That needs to be taken into account: Generally to be steered clear of, but sometimes to be taken advantage of.

So against all common sense, you find yourself hankering to write up a railroad for your roleplaying group. You dream of a land where the rails are straight, the wheels are locked, and the players submissive.

Well, you’re in luck, because today we’re bringing you — courtesy of the Serpent Amphora trilogy — an educational primer in the Art of the Railroad with a step-by-step breakdown of the track-laying process.

STEP 1: MAKE SURE ALL OTHER FORMS OF TRANSPORATION ARE FAILBOATS

Remember: Your goal is not to design a robust scenario which will ensure that the adventure remains enjoyable and usable despite the players trying to make decisions for themselves. Your goal is to design a Disneyland ride to carry them past all the Exciting and Interesting Things you’ve designed for them to see. If the players try to tamper with their teacup, your adventure should throw up its hands in exasperation, take its ball, and go home.

The PCs decide to quickly check out another lead before abandoning it on the say-so of an NPC? They fail the entire mission.

The PCs decide to attack a group of elves preparing to ambush them? They fail the entire mission.

The PCs decide not to hire a guide and trust to their own Survival skill? They die.

You can earn bonus points by issuing Failboat boarding passes on the basis of die rolls that the players have no control over!

They fail a Diplomacy check to convince someone to help them? They fail the entire mission.

They fail an Intelligence check to remember a key piece of information? They fail the entire mission.

No trip by rail is complete unless the train has a casino car where the only game is craps and the penalty for a bad roll is a bullet to the back of the brain.

STEP 2: ALL TICKETS GO TO ALBUQUERQUE

It costs a lot of money to offer train service to all the major metropolitan areas. On the other hand, if you don’t offer that kind of service a lot of people won’t ride your trains. Fortunately, the solution is easy enough: You can advertise that your trains will take people to many different places, but the reality is that there’s only one train and it only goes to one place.

This is particularly effective if you replace the “WELCOME TO ALBUQUERQUE” sign with a welcoming message from whatever town the PCs thought they were going to.

For example, the PCs fail the skill check to convince the boat captain to sail through the night so that they can get to their destination faster. When they finally get there, they discover that the villains got there just before them! Now they’ve had time to set ambushes! Oh no! If only they’d made that check or found a faster way!

… what? They made that skill check? Well, it’s a good thing they did, because this way the villains only managed to get there just before them! They’ve had time to set ambushes! Oh no! It’s a good thing they made that (meaningless) check!

STEP 3: HIRE CONDUCTORS TO TELL THEM WHERE THEY’RE GOING

Remember that both the train and the railroad tracks are invisible. This will occasionally confuse the PCs, who may forget that they’re on a train and will try to head off in their own direction. The quickest and easiest solution is to hire sock pupp– Err… Conductors. Why bother making it possible for the PCs to figure things out for themselves when you can just speak through your “conductors” and tell them what they should be doing?

It’s important to remember that “providing meaningful assistance” is not in the conductors’ job descriptions. Their job is to make the passengers jump through hoops, not listen to reasonable requests.

To make sure that the PCs understand who’s boss, try to make the conductor’s failure to supply necessary support completely irrational. For example, when a conductor shows up and tells them that the Gods Themselves(TM) have conjured up a coastal tsunami so that the local river will reverse its flow and speed their boat journey, then by god they are going to turn around, get back on their boat, and head upstream.

If the PCs ask why the 16th-level spellcaster telling them this divine message couldn’t just cast a teleport spell and instantly send the entire party to their destination, you might think that the correct answer is, “Shut up! That’s why!” You would be wrong. The correct answer is, “Think you I am sitting by idly? I and many others labor even as you do against the machinations of the Serpent Mother, assisting you in ways you cannot see, on battlefields other than this one.”

If the PCs point out that casting a teleport is surely easier than summoning hurricanes and reversing the flow of entire rivers, then they clearly haven’t learnt their lesson. And since they haven’t learned their lesson…

STEP 4: IF THE PASSENGERS GET OFF BEFORE THEIR SCHEDULED STOP, PUNISH THEM

The PCs respond to the encounter you’ve carefully crafted to show that they’re completely outmatched by your NPCs to conclude that they’re completely outmatched and go for help (despite the fact they aren’t supposed to go for help)? Then you should feel “no guilt” for killing them.

Arrest them, cripple them, or kill them — doesn’t really matter. They’ve been naughty, naughty children and they deserved to be punished for their willful ways.

STEP 5: IF THE TRAIN IS RUNNING OUT OF STEAM, ADD MORE ENGINES

Okay, you’ve done everything right: You’ve created an overwhelming combat encounter that the PCs can’t possibly defeat so that they’ll have no chance of stopping the NPCs from stealing the artifact and kidnapping their friend.

But the passengers have thwarted you by either (a) clever planning or (b) lucky rolling, and now the monsters who were supposed to be stealing the artifact and/or kidnapping their friend have been killed with their mission unfulfilled.

Don’t panic. The solution is simple: Add more monsters.

Should the dragon somehow be stopped from reaching [their friend], don’t worry — the PCs will still have to recover the [artifact]. The results, ultimately, are the same. If it didn’t get the [artifact], though, [their friend] should be captured instead, so that the PCs still have reason to go to the Hornsaw. If the dragon can’t take him, for some reason, and also didn’t get the [artifact], then simply have two more storm hags bear [their friend] away instead.

That didn’t work? Don’t worry. You can just keep adding monsters until it does!

STEP 6: PUT A BRICK WALL ON YOUR TRACKS

Everybody knows that the best railroad tracks are built with brick walls, right? Trains never run better than when they run into a wall.

To achieve this all-important effect you can make really poor assumptions about what the PCs are likely to do. For example, if you design an adventure in which they need to make a copy of a powerful magical ritual from the walls of an ancient tomb and then return that magical ritual to their employer, it’s probably a safe bet that they won’t spend a few extra hours to make a copy for themselves. That way you can assume that the bad guys will be able to steal the “only copy” of the ritual by kidnapping an NPC and “force them” to pursue the bad guys to get back the “only copy”.

You can score bonus points by making the assumption ludicrously easy for the PCs to overcome. For example, there’s no logical reason for PCs preparing to engage in a long overland journey to buy horses; therefore it’s perfectly reasonable to make the timing of events depend on them definitely not buying horses. And since that’s not ridiculous enough, you should make sure to plan for encounters (mandatory ones, of course) in which the PCs will fight mounted opponents… and still continue to assume that they won’t have any horses to ride after defeating them.

The important thing is that it doesn’t matter what the PCs do. You’ve got a schedule to meet and a story to write, and no one is going to get in your way.

A question I’m asked with surprising regularity is, “Why do you waste money on adventure modules?” It’s a question generally voiced with varying degrees of disdain, and the not-so-hidden subtext lying behind it is that published adventure modules are worthless. There are different reasons proffered for why they should be ignored, but they generally boil down to a couple of core variations:

(1) Published adventures are for people too stupid or uncreative to make up their own adventures.

(2) Published adventures are crap.

The former makes about as much sense to me as saying, “Published novels are for people too stupid or uncreative to write their own stories.” And the latter seems to be derived entirely from an ignorance of Sturgeon’s Law.

On the other hand, I look at my multiple bookcases of gaming material and I know with an absolute certainty that I own more adventure modules than I could ever hope to play in my entire lifetime. (And that’s assuming that I never use any of my own material.)

So why do I keep buying more?

There are a lot of answers to that. But a major one lies in the fact that I usually manage to find a lot of value even in the modules that I don’t use.

Take, for example, Serpent Amphora 1: Serpent in the Fold. While being far from the worst module I’ve ever read (having been forced to wade through some true dreck during my days as a freelance reviewer), Serpent in the Fold is a completely dysfunctional product. It’s virtually unsalvageable, since any legitimate attempt to run the module would necessitate completely replacing or drastically overhauling at least 90% of the content.

A QUICK REVIEW

The only thing worse than a railroaded adventure is a railroaded adventure with poorly constructed tracks.

For example, it’s virtually a truism that whenever a module says “the PCs are very likely to [do X]” that it’s code for “the GM is about to get screwed“. (Personally, I can’t predict what my PCs are “very likely to do” 9 times out of 10, and I’m sitting at the same table with them every other week. How likely is it that some guy in Georgia is going to puzzle it out?) But Serpent in the Fold keeps repeating this phrase over and over again. And to make matters worse, the co-authors seem to be in a competition with each other to find the most absurd use of the phrase.

(My personal winner would be the assumption that the PCs are likely to see a group of known enemies casting a spell and — instead of immediately attacking — they will wait for them to finish casting the spell so that they can spy on the results.)

Serpent in the Fold gets bonus points for including an explicit discussion telling the GM to avoid “the use of deus ex machina” because it “limits the PCs”… immediately before presenting a railroaded adventure in which the gods literally appear half a dozen times to interfere with the PCs and create pre-determined outcomes.

The module then raises the stakes by encouraging the DM to engage in punitive railroading: Ergo, when the PCs are instructed by the GM’s sock puppet to immediately go to location A it encourages the GM to have the PCs make a Diplomacy check to convince a ship captain to attempt dangerous night sailing in order to get to their destination 12 days faster than if the captain plays it safe. The outcome of the die roll, however, is irrelevant because the PCs will arrive only mere moments after the villains do whether they traveled quickly or not. On the other hand, if the PCs ignore the GM’s sock puppet and instead go to location B first for “even a few days” then “they will have failed” the entire module.

So, on the macro-level, the module is structurally unsound. But its failures extend to the specific utility of individual sequences, as well: The authors are apparently intent on padding their word count, so virtually all of the material is bloated and unfocused in a way that would make the module incredibly painful to use during actual play.

The authors are also apparently incapable of reading the rulebooks. For example, they have one of the villains use scrying to open a two-way conversation with one of their minions. (The spell doesn’t work like that.)  More troublesome is when the PCs get the MacGuffin of the adventure (a tome of lore) and the module confidently announced that it has been sealed with an arcane lock spell cast by a 20th level caster and, therefore, the PCs won’t be able to open it. The only problem is that arcane lock isn’t improved by caster level and the spell can be trivially countered by a simple casting of knock.

The all-too-easy-to-open “Unopenable” Tome is also an example of the authors engaging in another pet peeve of mine: Writing the module as if it were a mystery story to be enjoyed by the GM. Even the GM isn’t allowed to know what the tome contains, so when the PCs do manage to open it despite the inept “precautions” of the authors he’ll be totally screwed. And the tome isn’t the only example of this: The text is filled with “cliffhangers” that only serve to make the GM’s job more difficult. The authors actually seem to revel in serial-style “tune in next week to find out the shocking truth!” nonsense.

Maps that don’t match the text are another bit of garden-variety incompetence to be found in Serpent in the Fold, but the authors raise it to the next level by choosing to include a dungeon crawl in which only half the dungeon is mapped. The other half consists of semi-random encounters strewn around an unmapped area of wreckage which are too “haphazard” to map and key. Despite this, the encounters all feature very specific topographical detail that the authors are then forced to spend multiple paragraphs describing in minute detail. (Maps, like pictures, really are worth a thousand words.)

As if to balance out this odd negligence, the authors proceed to round out the final “chapter” of the adventure by providing an exhaustive key to a mansion/castle with 50+ rooms… which the GM is than advised to ignore. (And I mean this quite literally: “In order to [“get right to the action”] have them notice the bloodstains in the entry foyer, and thus, likely, find the bodies. Make the trail that leads to the infirmary a bit more obvious […] it should be easy to keep the PCs moving up the stairs and to the final confrontation with Amra.”) In this case, the advice is quite right: The pace of the adventure is better served if the PCs don’t go slogging through a bunch of inconsequential rooms. But why is a third of the module dedicated to providing a detailed key that will never be used?

Round out the package with a handful of key continuity errors and elaborate back-stories and side-dramas featuring NPCs that the PCs will never get to learn about (another pet peeve of mine) to complete the picture of abject failure.

THE STRIP MINE

I tracked down the Serpent Amphora trilogy of modules in the hope that I would be able to plug them into a potential gap in my Ptolus campaign. Unfortunately, it turned out that the material was conceptually unsuited for my needs and functionally unusable in its execution. So that was a complete waste of my money, right?

Not quite.

To invent a nomenclature, I generally think of adventure modules in terms of their utility:

Tier One modules are scenarios that I can use completely “out of the box”. There aren’t many of these, but a few examples would include: Caverns of Thracia, Three Days to Kill, In the Belly of the Beast, Death in Freeport, Rappan Athuk, and The Masks of Nyarlathotep. Tier One modules might receive some minor customization to fit them into my personal campaign world or plugged into a larger structure, but their actual content is essentially untouched.

Tier Two modules are scenarios that I use 80-90% of. The core content and over-arcing structure of these scenarios remains completely recognizable, but they also require significant revision in order to make them workable according to my standards. High quality examples include The Night of Dissolution, Banewarrrens, Tomb of Horrors, The Paxton Gambit, Beyond the Mountains of Madness, and Darkness Revealed. (For a more extreme version of a Tier Two module, see my remix notes for Keep on the Shadowfell.)

Serpent in the Fold is a Tier Three module: These are the modules which are either too boring or too flawed for me to use, but in which specific elements can be stripped out and reused.

(Tier Four modules are the ones with interesting concepts rendered inoperable through poor execution. Virtually nothing of worth is to be found here, since you’re largely doing the equivalent of taking the back cover text from a book and writing a new novel around the same concept. Tier Five modules are those rare and complete failures in which absolutely nothing of value can be found; the less said of them, the better.)

For example, consider that mansion with high quality maps and a detailed key for 50+ rooms.

That mansion is practically plug-‘n-play. Less than 5% of it is adventure specific. That’s an incredibly invaluable resource to have for an urban campaign (like the one I’m currently running).

But the usefulness of Serpent in the Fold doesn’t end there. I’ll be quite systematic in ripping out the useful bits of a Tier Three module (since I have little interest in revisiting the material again). Starting from the beginning of the module, I find:

Inside Cover: A usable map of a simple cave system.

Page 10: Three adventuring companies are detailed. (These are particularly useful to me because Ptolus feature a Delvers’ Guild full of wandering heroes responding to the dungeon-esque gold rush of the city. Ergo, there’s plenty of opportunities for the PCs to bump into competitors or hear about their exploits. Such groups are useful for stocking the common room of an inn or pub in any campaign.)

Page 25: An interesting mini-system for climbing a mountain. It features a base climbing time and a system for randomly generating the terrain to be climbed (prompting potential Climb checks which can add or subtract from the base climbing time). I’d probably look to modify the system to allow additional Survival or Knowledge (nature) checks to plot the course of ascent (to modify or contribute to the largely random system presented here).

Page 27: A very nice illustration that I can quickly Photoshop and re-purpose as a handout depicting a subterranean ruin.

(As a tangential note: I wish more modules would purpose their illustrations so that they could be used as visual aids at the gaming table. You can make your product visually appealing and useful at the same time, and you’re already spending the money to commission the illustration in any case.)

Page 33: Another useful illustration that can be quickly turned into a handout.

Page 54-55: A new monster and the new spell required to create them.

The module also features countless stat blocks, random encounter tables, and similar generic resources that can be quickly ripped out and rapidly re-purposed.

So even in a module that I found largely useless and poorly constructed, I’ve still found resources that will save me hours of independent work.

When you’re dealing with a module like Serpent in the Fold that you have no intention of ever using, these strip-mining techniques can be used to suck out every last drop of useful information without any particular care for the husk of detritus you leave behind. But similar measures can also be employed to harvest useful material from any module, even those you’ve used before or plan to use in the future.

As I mentioned last month, my adventure The Halls of the Mad Mage won an Honorable Mention in the One Page Dungeon Contest. It has now been collected in the One Page Dungeon Codex 2009, a collection of the winning entries from the contest. You can also check out the One Page Dungeon Compendium, which collects all of the entries to the contest.

I haven’t had a chance to do more than skim over some of the material, but it looks like there’s some really amazing stuff in there. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can cull from it into my Ptolus and Borderlands campaigns.

You might also be interested in taking a look at the One Page Dungeon article at campaignwiki.org. Primarily assembled by Alex Schroeder, it includes links to the blog posts of the individual creators in the contest (often offering some really interesting insight into their design process).

Awhile back, ChattyDM (Philippe-Antonie Menard) announced the One Page Dungeon Contest. For those not familiar with the One Page Dungeon Concept, the idea was originally conceived by David Bowman (Sham’s Grog & Blog) and then developed by Chgowiz (Old Guy RPG Blog) and Amityville Mike (Society of Torch, Pole, and Rope). Basically, the One Page Dungeon is a template for designing a complete dungeon in one page.

To a certain extent, the point of the template is to emphasize that you don’t need a lot of laborious prep to run a successful adventure: With nothing more than a dungeon map and a couple of pertinent notes, a GM can use his creativity at the game table to take care of everything else. I think a lot of us fall into the trap of thinking that our adventure notes need to be rigorous documents, but the reality is that, when we embrace our own ability to improvise creatively, that level of detail is more than over-kill.

If you’re willing to embrace that lighter design ethos, the One Page Dungeon is not only great for its ease of prep. It’s also great for ease of running. With a One Page Dungeon you don’t have any notes to flip through: You have your rulebook, a single sheet of paper, and your dice. The entire dungeon is literally laid out in front of you. This isn’t just simple, it’s usable.

Of course, there are a lot of things the One Page Dungeon can’t do. And thus, for me, its value is primarily in its use as an exercise: The artificial strictures of the form force you to become more creative while reminding you that simplicity has its value.

So, long story short, there was a contest. And for this contest I was inspired to whip out a One Page Dungeon of my own: The Halls of the Mad Mage.

The design of the Halls was inspired by M.C. Escher:

The Halls of the Mad Mage twist back on themselves in impossible spatial contortions. Here you’ll find everfalling rivers, endless stairs, and mobius chambers.

So I was quite happy when I won Best Geometry in the One Page Dungeon Contest:

Those of you interested in taking a tour of the Halls of the Mad Mage should feel free to download the PDF:

THE HALLS OF THE MAD MAGE

Map made with Dundjinni software, http://www.dundjinni.com