A very easy trap to fall into as a GM is prepping the PCs’ actions: “When the PCs do X, this is what will happen.”

It’s easy because this is largely what an actual RPG session will look like: The PCs will do stuff and then other stuff will happen as a result of that. (Repeat.) It’s a trap because this only works if you’ve guessed exactly what the PCs will do.

That’s a problem because (a) you probably don’t have the gift of prescience and, therefore, (b) you almost certainly won’t guess correctly. (Or, at least, not a majority of the time.) At that point, your prep is going to start falling apart quickly and you’ll only have a few options:

1. Start railroading the players and force them to do the things you prepped for them to do. (This is awful. It’s antithetical to the entire reason we play roleplaying games in the first place and your players will hate it.)
2. Do lots and lots of contingency planning: Since the PCs might do lots of different things, you just need to make preparations for everything they might do! (Unfortunately, this will just result in a lot of wasted prep and the players are still likely to do something completely different.)
3. Throw out most or all of your prep and just start improvising like mad in a desperate attempt to keep up with your players!

None of these are particularly appealing options, but at least the third one is steering us in the right direction. Throwing everything out and flying by the seat of your pants, though, is an incredibly daunting prospect, and if we’re just going to end up throwing everything out anyway, shouldn’t we just abandon prep entirely? Maybe embrace a zero prep approach and hope for the best?

But I have good news. The only reason this is daunting is because you’re having to throw out all of your prep. And the only reason you’re having to throw out all your prep is because you prepped the wrong stuff. (Or, at the very least, you prepped it in the wrong way.)

There’s a better way.

Your prep can empower you rather than trapping you.

THE TRAP

The most extreme version of prepping the PCs’ actions is prepping a linear plot, with a specific structure of PCs do A → PCs do B → PCs do C, but it’s not the only one.

To show you what I mean, we’re going to take a look at “Out of the House of Ashes,” a scenario from The Zalozhniy Quartet, a Night’s Black Agents campaign by Gareth Hanrahan and Kenneth Hite.

SPOILERS FOR THE ZALOZHNIY QUARTET!

To be clear, this is a very good scenario in a very good campaign. I like this scenario quite a bit and recommend the campaign book. That’s why it makes such a good example.

The basic situation in “Out of the House of Ashes” is that an ex-KGB agent named Arkady Shevlenko has valuable information related to a vampiric conspiracy. Shevlenko is currently attending a trade conference in Vienna, where he is planning to defect to the CIA. The vampires, on the other hand, have very different plans: In an operation led by Sergei Rachov, they interrupt the CIA’s plan to extract Shevlenko, kill the CIA team, and convince Shevlenko to give them the information instead.

The PCs, of course, also want the information, and the designers consider a lot of different options for what the players might do and give the GM several contingency plans for likely variations of how events might play out.

But it’s nevertheless clear that the spine of the adventure is still built around a loose-but-intended plot (i.e., a series of specific actions the PCs will take):

1. The PCs become aware of Arkady Shevlenko and the information he has. (Several potential hooks are given, but one involves tracking an agent of the vampires named Sergei Rachov.)
2. The PCs arrive in Vienna and put Arkady under surveillance.
3. The PCs make contact with an MI-6 agent who chaperones them through a cut scene where they witness the vampires kill the CIA team.
4. The PCs contact Shevlenko.
5. The PCs extract Shevlenko from a performance of Marschner’s Der Vampyr at the Vienna State Opera.

And because the prep is structured around these specific PC actions, it all becomes surprisingly fragile. In other words, even through Hanrahan and Hite have included tons of useful options for the GM to use because they want the players to be free to approach the operation in any way that the players want, the fact that the material they’ve prepped is still organized around the plot (and presented via scenes triggered by the PCs’ actions) makes it incredibly difficult to actually use.

For example, let’s consider one deviation the PCs might make from the anticipated sequence: Instead of arriving in Vienna and then following Arkady Shevlenko, they instead put Sergei Rachov under surveillance to figure out what he’s doing.

This should be fairly straightforward, but what do I need from the book to pull this off in actual practice?

• Page 57 & 67: Rachov visits Dr. Ingolf, Shevlenko’s heart doctor. (Page 69: This includes giving him a vial of blood.)
• Page 73: He goes to a safe house on Veronikagasse.
• Page 68: He checks a dead drop where Dr. Ingolf leaves information for him.
• Page 63: On the evening of the next day, Rachov is at a reception at the Hotel Europe.
• Page 71: Rachov meets with a vampire named Simon Thonradel.
• Page 66: Rachov is at the Russian Embassy, meeting with Shevlenko.
• Page 76: Rachov attends Der Vampyr with Simon Thonradel. (Page 77: If the PCs don’t stop him, he extracts Shevlenko and takes him to a graveyard to interrogate him.)

Notice how the page numbers are jumping back and forth, and at almost every step, of course, I’m trying to tease information — particularly about the timing of events — out of a close reading of the text.

Imagine trying to do this in the middle of a session. It is, in fact, a daunting prospect. With an electronic copy of the book and a search function, it’s just barely imaginable that you could pull it off. If you only had a physical copy of the book, though? It’s almost certainly impossible.

But what’s the alternative? The players did something unexpected and charted a completely unique course through the adventure. Obviously you’d be left scrambling through your notes trying to stay one step ahead of them!

EMPOWER YOUR PREP

The situation I’m describing here is not, in fact, a hypothetical one: This is exactly what the players in my campaign did.

I was not, however, left scrambling.

Instead, I had this in my prep notes:

SERGEI RACHOV’S TIMELINE

Staying at the Lisky building on Veronikagasse.

DAY 0: Meets with Dr. Ingolf (ZQ, p. 67). Gives him the blood sample (ZQ, p. 69) and threatens him.

DAY 1 – 3 PM: Meets with Dr. Ingolf (ZQ, p. 68), who tells him about the CIA’s extraction plans at Hotel Europe.

DAY 1 – 8 PM: Hotel Europe Reception (ZQ, p. 62-64).

DAY 2: Rachov and Thonradel visit Russian Embassy. Their agent, Zhenya Mikaylou, gets them access to Shevlenko. (ZQ, p. 66)

DAY 3: Meets with Zhenya Mikaylou at the Veronikagasse building.

• Zhenya briefs him on anything she knows about Arkady’s activities.
• If Zhenya’s meeting with Lynne Feinberg happened, she’ll also be delivering Anna Shevlenko.

DAY 4: Attends Der Vampyr at Vienna State Opera with Thonradel.

• If they have Anna Shevlenko, she’s also in their private box opposite Arkady’s. (ZQ, p. 76)

So when one of my PCs trailed Rachov to the airport, saw him board a flight to Vienna, and then created a contact who could meet his plane in Vienna and follow him, all I had to do was look at my notes and know that he would be headed to the Veronikagasse apartment building. When the PCs arrived in Vienna a few hours later and took over the surveillance, I similarly had no difficulty keeping them up to date on where Rachov was and what he was doing.

(Until they killed him on Day 2. Then his whereabouts were significantly less important.)

You can see how simple, straightforward, and short these notes are. But why did I have them prepared? Had I successfully guessed that the PCs would be following Rachov?

Not at all.

Instead, after reading “Out of the House of Ashes,” I had immediately ignored the plot and the scene structure based on PC actions, and instead focused entirely on the situation:

An ex-KGB agent named Arkady Shevlenko has valuable information related to a vampiric conspiracy. Shevlenko is currently attending a trade conference in Vienna, where he is planning to defect to the CIA. The vampires, on the other hand, have very different plans: In an operation led by Sergei Rachov, they interrupt the CIA’s plan to extract Shevlenko, kill the CIA team, and convince Shevlenko to give them the information instead.

Looking at this situation I could easily see that it was being driven by three major players, each with a plan of action:

• Arkady Shevlenko
• Vampires / Sergei Rachov
• CIA Team

So I simply prepped a timeline for each of them, with each timeline fitting conveniently on a single page.

The timelines then indicated significant locations (the Russian embassy, the Veronikagasse apartment building, etc.) and major events (the CIA’s failed extraction of Shevlenko, the Der Vampyr opera operation, etc.). Each of these also got one- or two-page write-ups (which could be cross-referenced from the timelines to keep everything streamlined, focused, and easy to use).

Because these notes were now organized around describing the situation — the people, places, and events — rather than the PCs’ actions, I was able to respond to anything the PCs might do by simply reaching out, grabbing the appropriate part of the situation, and then using it to actively play with the group: What would Shevlenko do? What would Rachov do? When Rachov is killed, how do the vampires react to that?

CONCLUSION: PREP TO PLAY

The important thing isn’t the specific structure of the ops timeline I used for this adventure. (The scenario you’re prepping will determine what structure is the most appropriate.) The point is that you’re organizing your notes into specific toys (or, if you prefer, tools) that you can easily grab and start playing with.

Call it the Rachov Principle: Instead of prepping a bunch of contingencies featuring Rachov (and scattered across a dozen different pages), you are instead prepping Rachov himself — a toy you can play in myriad ways and a tool that you can use to solve an infinite variety of problems.

in myriad ways and a tool that you can use to solve an infinite variety of problems.

This is also, obviously, not dependent on adapting a published adventure. You can — and should! — prep to play when designing original scenarios, too. (And, in fact, it’s much easier to organize your notes like this when you’re not having to first deconstruct poorly organized material.)

Either way, with your scenario notes organized into the toys and tools you want to use at the table (instead of into scripts based on guessing the PCs’ actions), you’ll be empowered to actively play with your players, flexibly responding to whatever they choose to do!

FURTHER READING
Don’t Prep Plots
Don’t Prep Plots: Prepping Scenario Timelines
Don’t Prep Plots: Tools, Not Contingencies
How to Prep a Module
Gamemastery 101

Review: Night’s Black Agents
Review: The Zalozhniy Quartet

Places to Go, People to Be has translated two more of my essays into French. This time it’s Don’t Prep Plots and Don’t Prep Plots: The Principles of RPG Villainy.

Interesting factoid about Don’t Prep Plots: It includes the summary of a plotted adventure. After presenting that brief summary, I included this note:

(This is derived from an actual, published adventure. Names and milieu have been changed to protect the innocent. Bonus points to anyone who can correctly identify the original source.)

I actually expected that someone would quickly twig to the identity of the published adventure I was talking about and identify it. But no one ever has.

Don’t Prep Plots: The Principles of RPG Villainy, on the other hand, was the first Patreon-sponsored post here on the Alexandrian. As always, my appreciation goes out to all of the amazing Patrons of the Alexandrian, without whom this site would be a more barren place and PTGPTB would have fewer things to translate.

Previous translations from PTGPTB include Three Clue Rule and Node-Based Scenario Design.

Don’t prep plots, prep situations.

That’s a maxim I first started preaching on the Alexandrian back in 2009. And one of the key things I talked about in Don’t Prep Plots is that you want to focus your prep on developing toolboxes instead of contingencies. Prepping contingencies catches you in the Choose Your Own Adventure trap, where you waste a lot of time trying to second-guess your players and developing mutually contradictory material for every possible choice they might make.

I’ve seen a lot of GMs, both before and after I wrote Don’t Prep Plots, discover the virtues of this lesson. And what frequently happens is that they begin applying the lesson at the macro-level of their scenario design, but continue making the same old mistakes at the micro-level. This is ironic, because it’s actually the micro-level stuff that is frequently the biggest and most useless time sink.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Eternal Lies lately, so I’m going to use it as an example of what I’m talking about.

SPOILERS FOR ETERNAL LIES

In Malta, the PCs find a hospital where two boys are being held by cultists and fed a “treatment” regime which is actually making them sicker. The published adventure anticipates that the PCs might try to rescue the boys and this happens:

Leaving the Hospital Superbissima is not especially difficult if the PCs are just visitors or patients. An Investigator may use Medicine or Disguise (Difficulty 5) to pose as another Investigator’s doctor and authorize the transport of the character to another hospital. (This probably requires the authorizing Investigator to sign a few forms.) A bit of Reassurance convinces hospital clerks that a patient feels fine and is ready to depart. A Reassurance spend convinces a clerk to the point that he or she doesn’t even write a suspicious note in anyone’s file or form much of a memory of the character — good for anonymity, if they need it.

The real challenge to escaping from the hospital appears under two other circumstances: when Donovan’s guards are there, watching who comes and goes, and when the Investigators have patients with them that are under Dr. Solazzio’s “special care.”

(Note that Investigators in the hospital as patients can get dosed with Nectar or put under Dr. Solazzio’s care for two broad reasons: either the cult recognizes them as enemies and decides to make use of the PCs’ vulnerability, perhaps to draw out their comrades, or you as Keeper decide that Dr. Solazzio’s attentions fall on them for purely dramatic reasons such as for pacing or exposition.)

If the Investigators attempt to slip out in pursuit of Donovan or while his guards are in the hospital, see the scene Malta 4,”Pursuing Donovan,” p. 232, for stats on those guards. They take immediate note of strange behavior in their vicinity.

If the Investigators try to get Alexi or Monte (or both) out of the hospital, they have to get around some nurses and orderlies and go through the security staff. (They may even have to get through Donovan’s own guards, if they time their escape poorly.) This is not all that hard to do, really; it’s just hard to do anonymously. Waving guns around or making a total of a 2-point Intimidation spend is brutish enough to clear a gap through the hospital staff. Getting Alexi and/or Monte out of the hospital likely leads to a citywide manhunt for the boys and their “kidnappers,” with both crooked and legit police on the search for the Investigators.

Thus the Investigators may want to wear surgical masks or Disguises, since even a simple disguise (Difficulty 4 or 5) at least renders a character unidentifiable to witnesses who might be called upon, in this era without security cameras, to assert that “yes, that’s the one who carried that boy out of the hospital.” A surgical mask gives any character a dedicated pool point of Disguise within the hospital. A doctor’s white coast grants an additional pool point of Disguise. Either or both gives you a good reason for some NPCs to make lazy assumptions (“Just another surgeon, I guess”) or obstructive assumptions (“Excuse me, doctor, can you help me?”) about the character, depending on the success of the attempt. NPCs might challenge a disguise if the Investigators draw attention to themselves or interact with an NPC. Not all interactions call for the Difficulty 7 test befitting proper impersonation. In this context, it’s easier (Difficulty 5 or 6) to impersonate “a doctor” than it is to impersonate a particular Doctor (Difficulty 7). A Medicine spend might count as a point toward a Disguise roll if, for example, an Investigator wants to portray a visiting specialist (“Didn’t you get my telegram?”).

All disguises are temporary affairs, anyway, buying just enough time to take action, stymie the opposition, or delay consequences for recklessness or failure.

Once the Investigators get out onto the street, they must have somewhere to take the rescued boys (though see “The Knight”). Thus the situation gets more complicated. You may want to call for a Stealth or Shadowing test (Difficulty 5 close to the hospital, Difficulty 4 after that) to describe the Investigators’ attempted escape from the scene of their rescue. Alternately, they may try simply Fleeing the scene until they can make a single Stealth test to hide.

If the Investigators have devised a whole scheme for rescuing the boys and getting them free of the cult (perhaps involving fake papers and a ship out of Malta), let them explore it. If it proves to be too much of a distraction from the job at hand, gloss over details or assume that the characters succeed rather than testing for every damn task. Securing papers for the boys might just require a Law or Streetwise spend among the right contacts, for example, and getting the boys to safety might simply involve flying them out in the Winston-Rogers plane to Sicily and then sorting out the rest of it between Locales. If the logistics of a complicated rescue seem to be spoiling the players’ good feeling for doing the right thing, make things easier on the players (even if things stay complicated for the characters between scenes).

You can immediately see that there is a ton of verbiage being dedicated to specific plans that the PCs may or may not actually come up with. What I’m suggesting is that the prep for this should look something more like this:

ESCAPING THE HOSPITAL

There are two exits from the Hospital Superbissima: The front door and a side entrance used by employees. There are tall windows in the patient wards, but many of these are not designed to be opened.

NURSES: Collectively, the nurses of the Hospital Superbissima benefit from Awareness +2 to notice investigators snooping around areas they don’t have permission to be in or any other suspicious activity happening in the hospital.

HOSPITAL SECURITY: Security around the hospital is surprisingly tight. In addition to two guards in the lobby, a guard is also found at the nurse’s desk on each floor of the building.

[Insert a stat block for the hospital security guards here.]

DONOVAN’S GUARDS: If Donovan is on the premises, his guards are stationed at the entrance to the third-floor Intensive Care Ward and will respond immediately to anything they view as strange or suspicious.

[Repeat the stat block for Donovan’s guards here for easy reference.]

GETTING THE BOYS OUT: Getting Alexi and/or Monte out of the hospital, this likely leads to a citywide manhunt for the boys and their “kidnappers,” with both the crooked and legit police on the search for the investigators. Securing a place of refuge where people can’t spot the boys and report them may be difficult. Getting them out of the country may require securing (or falsifying) legal papers.

SIDEBAR: Remember that the Knight may already be watching the investigators at this point. If they get into trouble in the hospital, he’s likely to step in and help them out. Or at least offer them a place of refuge.

ON THE USE OF TOOLS

And that’s pretty much it. What’s the distinction here, beyond a greatly reduced word count (and, thus, work load)?

As the GM, note that if your players were to propose any of the escape plans proposed in the original text, you should be able to look at the tools provided in the second description and figure out what the result or response will be. More importantly, if the players propose some completely different plan (calling in a bomb threat, rappelling through the windows at night, taking hostages, casting a spell to escape with the kids to another dimension, etc.) you should also be able to pick up the tools (the layout of the hospital, the nurses, the security guards) and figure out what will happen.

While prepping the adventure, you don’t need to think to yourself, “What will happen if my players decide to disguise themselves as doctors? Well, I guess they’d make a Disguise check. I better write that down!” Not only because it’s self-evident, but because there are at least a half dozen other possibilities for what they might do. Whatever work you’re putting into trying to figure out the myriad tactics the PCs might employ in a particular tactical situation, you’d be far better off making your toolbox larger and more interesting.

PREPPING YOUR TOOLBOX

But what constitutes the difference between a tool and a contingency? For example, isn’t prepping this information about the hospital dependent on the PCs going to hospital? Doesn’t that make the whole thing a contingency? And even if we lay that concern aside, how do we actually identify what the useful tools are? I mean, the bad guy might have a collection of early Picasso paintings. How do I know whether to prep the Picasso collection or the alarm system on his windows?

I find this generally boils down to two questions.

First: What will the PCs be interested in? Not what they’re going to do, but what they’ll be interested in. Where their focus will be. (In a mystery scenario this is relatively easy to predict because it usually equates to wherever the clues are pointing them.) It’s possible to get pedantic and argue that “being interested” constitutes an action, but I think the distinction being sought here is generally pretty clear.

Second: What are the NPCs’ plans? These can be specific to the events of the scenario (“they want to blow up Woodheim”) and possibly even specific to the PCs (but not specific to the actions of the PCs) if their current plan is aimed at the PCs (like Lex Luthor obtaining kryptonite to deal with Superman). But most of the plans you’ll be looking at will actually be a lot more general and long-standing than that.

The hospital scenario is an example of this: The cult doesn’t want the boys to escape. What precautions are they taking to prevent that from happening?

Similarly, if you were designing a mansion for a mob boss you’d ask questions like: What type of security system does he have? What does he enjoy doing at home? What does his daily schedule look like?

If the mob boss is currently planning to assassinate the head of the local Triads, then you’d start asking yourself questions like: Who does he hire to do that? If things go bad, what resources does he have to protect himself?

All of these questions will guide you towards creating either the long-standing status quo or the current trajectory of action that the PCs are going to be thrusting themselves into. And what you want to focus on is that situation which exists without the PCs and let your players worry about the thrust.

Which, I suppose, ultimately brings us full circle:

Don’t prep plots, prep situations.

FURTHER READING
Empower Your Prep: The Rachov Principle
The Railroading Manifesto
Node-Based Scenario Design
Gamemastery 101

This is an example of prepping a detailed scenario timeline, an important part of scenario-based prep as described in Don’t Prep Plots. It’s taken from my current campaign, In the Shadow of the Spire.

MY PLAYERS SHOULD STOP READING

(more…)

If you’re GMing a roleplaying game, you should never prep a plot.

Everyone’s tastes are different. These matters are subjective. What works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. Yada, yada, yada.

But, seriously, don’t prep plots.

First, a definition of terms: A plot is the sequence of events in a story.

And the problem with trying to prep a plot for an RPG is that you’re attempting to pre-determine events that have not yet happened. Your gaming session is not a story — it is a happening. It is something about which stories can be told, but in the genesis of the moment it is not a tale being told. It is a fact that is transpiring.

PREPPING WITHOUT PLOTS

Don’t prep plots, prep situations.

What’s the difference?

A plot is a sequence of events: A happens, then B happens, then C happens. (In more complicated forms, the sequence of events might fork like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but the principle remains the same.)

A situation, on the other hand, is merely a set of circumstances. The events that happen as a result of that situation will depend on the actions the PCs take.

For example, a plot might look like this: “Pursuing the villains who escaped during last week’s session, the PCs will get on a ship bound for the port city of Tharsis. On their voyage they will spot a derelict. They will board the derelict and discover that one of the villains has transformed into a monster and killed the entire crew… except for one lone survivor. They will fight the monster and rescue the survivor. While they’re fighting the monster, the derelict will have floated into the territorial waters of Tharsis. They will be intercepted by a fleet of Tharsian ships. Once their tale is told, they will be greeted in Tharsis as heroes for their daring rescue of the derelict. Following a clue given by the survivor of the derelict, they will climb Mt. Tharsis and reach the Temple of Olympus. They can then wander around the temple asking questions. This will accomplish nothing, but when they reach the central sanctuary of the temple the villains will attempt to assassinate them. The assassination attempt goes awry, and the magical idol at the center of the temple is destroyed. Unfortunately, this idol is the only thing holding the temple to the side of the mountain — without it the entire temple begins sliding down the mountain as the battle continues to rage between the PCs and villains!”

(This is derived from an actual, published adventure. Names and milieu have been changed to protect the innocent. Bonus points to anyone who can correctly identify the original source.)

A situation, on the other hand, looks like this: “The villains have escaped on two ships heading towards Tarsis. One of the villains transforms during the voyage into a terrible monster and kills the crew, leaving the ship floating as a derelict outside the coastal waters of Tharsis. At such-and-such a time, the ship will be spotted by the Tharsis navy. The other villains have reached the Temple of Olympus atop Mt. Tharsis and assumed cover identities.”

THE DIRTY SECRET

Many people are intimidated by the idea of prepping without a plot. It seems like a lot of work. If the players can do anything, how are you supposed to cope with that?

The dirty secret, though, is that it’s actually a lot more difficult to prep plots than situations.

To understand why, let’s take a closer look at our example of a plotted adventure. It’s a tightly-knit sequence of events that, when broken down, looks like this:

(1) The PCs pursue the villains. (What if they don’t?)

(2) The PCs have to choose to follow them by ship. (What if they decide to ride down the coast? Or teleport?)

(3) The PCs have to spot the derelict. (What if they roll poorly on their Perception check?)

(4) The PCs have to board the derelict. (What if they just sail past it?)

(5) The PCs have to rescue the survivor. (What if they fail? Or choose to flee before realizing the survivor is there?)

(6) The PCs have to question the survivor. (What if they decide not to pressure an injured man?)

(7) The PCs have to go to the central sanctuary of the temple.

(8) The assassination attempt on the PCs has to play out in a very specific way.

What you’re looking at is a chain of potential points of failure. Each of these points is heavily designed with a specific and expected outcome… and if that outcome doesn’t happen the GM is left to railroad the players back onto the tracks he’s laid out.

By contrast, let’s look at what we need to design this same adventure as a situation:

(1) The PCs have to pursue the villains. (This is the hook into the entire scenario. It’s a potential failure point shared by all scenarios. If the PCs aren’t interested in going to the red dragon’s lair, it doesn’t matter how you prep the lair.)

(2) You need to design the city of Tharsis. (Where is it? What’s it like? What can the PCs do there? Et cetera.)

(3) You need to design the derelict ship.

(4) You need to design the Temple of Olympus.

(5) You need to stat up the Tharsis navy, the villains, and (possibly) the survivor.

(6) There needs to be a way for the PCs to know the villains are hiding out in the Temple of Olympus. (In the plot-based design, this is one of the failure points: They either question the survivor or they have no way of knowing where to go next. In situation-based design, you would use the Three Clue Rule and figure out two additional methods by which the PCs could reach this conclusion. This can be as simple as making a Gather Information check in Tharsis and/or questioning the captain/crew of the ship the villains took.)

Here’s the dirty secret: Take a closer look at that list. With the exception of #6, those are all things that you also needed to prep for your plot-based design. (And even #6 is one-third complete.)

Here’s an analogy: Situation-based design is like handing the players a map and then saying “figure out where you’re going”. Plot-based design, on the other hand, is like handing the players a map on which a specific route has been marked with invisible ink… and then requiring them to follow that invisible path.

ROBUST DESIGN

The advantage of situation-based prep is that it’s robust. Surprisingly, however, that robustness doesn’t require a lot of extra work. In fact, as we’ve shown, it usually requires a lot less work. Here are a few things to consider while doing situation-based prep.

THREE CLUE RULE: I’ve already devoted a lengthy essay to the Three Clue Rule. Basically, the Three Clue Rule states: For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues.

The theory is that, even if the players miss two of the clues, you’ve got pretty great odds that they’ll find the third and figure things out.

The Three Clue Rule can also be applied to adventure design in general: For any given problem in an adventure, you should always prep at least one solution and remain open to any potential solutions your players may devise. But for any chokepoint problem (by which I mean “a problem which must be overcome in order for the adventure to continue”), try to include three possible routes to success.

That may sound like a lot of work, but these distinct paths don’t need to be particularly convuluted. (In fact, they shouldn’t be.) For example, a problem might be “Mickey Dee has a piece of information the PCs need”. The solutions can be as simple as (1) knock him out and take it; (2) negotiate with him for it; or (3) sneak into his office and steal it. The actual prep that you do for any one of these solutions takes care of 99% of the prep for the other two.

It should be noted that, just because any given solution is “simple”, it doesn’t mean that the scenario will be (or should be) simple. The convulution of the scenario arises from the way in which a series of problems are overcome. And the nice thing about situation-based prep is that you don’t have to figure out exactly how these problems will be strung together — that arises naturally out of the actions taken by the PCs.

GOAL-ORIENTED OPPONENTS: Instead of trying to second-guess what your PCs will do and then trying to plan out specific reactions to each possibility, simply ask yourself, “What is the bad guy trying to do?”

The most effective way of prepping this material will depend on the particulars of the scenario you’re designing. It might be nothing more than a sequential list of objectives. Or it might be a detailed timeline.

Note that some scenarios won’t be based around the bad guys trying to carry out some specific scheme. They might just be going about business as usual when the PCs decide to show up and make a mess of things. In other words, the “goal” might be nothing more than “maintain the standard guard rotation”.

If you’re interested in seeing this type of prep work in action, I’ve put together a lengthy example of using detailed timelines from my own campaign. (My players should not click that link.)

DON’T PLAN SPECIFIC CONTINGENCIES: Whatever approach you take, the key aspect is that you’ll usually be laying out what would happen if the PCs don’t get involved. If you get some ideas about contingency plans, go ahead and jot them down, but don’t waste too much time on them.

I say “waste your time” because that’s exactly what most contingency planning is. The basic structure of contingency planning is: If the PCs interfere at point X, then the bad guys do X2. If the PCs interfere at point Y, then the bad guys do Y2. If the PCs interfere at point Z, then the bad guys do Z2.

Of course, if the PCs don’t interfere at point X, then all the time you spent prepping contingency X2 is completely wasted. Even more importantly, if the PCs do interfere at point X then point Y and point Z will generally be fundamentally altered or even cease to exist — so all the prep work that went into Y2 and Z2 is also wasted.

This is where situation-based prep usually gets maligned for requiring more work: People think they need to try to prepare themselves for every conceivable action the PCs might take. But, in point of fact, that’s not situation-based prep. That’s plot-based prep juiced up on Choose Your Own Adventure steroids. It’s the type of prep you would need to do if you were programming a computer game.

But you’re not programming a computer game. You’re prepping a scenario for a roleplaying game. When the PCs choose to do X or Y or Z (or A or B or C), you don’t need a pre-programmed reaction. You’re sitting right there at the table with them. You can just react.

KNOW YOUR TOOLKIT: In order to react, you need to know your toolkit. If the PCs start investigating Lord Bane, what resources does he have to thwart them? If they lay siege to the slavers’ compound, what are the defenses?

Typical “tools” include personnel, equipment, physical locations, and information.

For example, if the PCs are investigating a local Mafia leader then you might know that:

(1) He has a couple of goon squads, a trained assassin on staff, and two bodyguards. You might also know that he has an estranged wife and two sons. (These are all types of personnel.)

(2) He lives in a mansion on the east side of town, typically frequents his high-end illegal casino in the secret basement of a downtown skyscraper, and also has a bolt-hole set up in a seedy tavern. (These are all physical locations.)

(3) He has blackmail material on one of the PCs. (This is information.)

(4) He has bribed a local cop. (This is a different type of personnel.)

And just like a real toolbox, you should have some idea what the tools are useful for. You know that a hammer is for nails and a screwdriver is for screws. Similarly, you know that the goon squad can be used to beat-up the PCs as a warning or to guard the bolt-hole. You know that the estranged wife can be used as a source of information on the mansion’s security system. And so forth.

You can think of this as non-specific contingency planning. You aren’t giving yourself a hammer and then planning out exactly which nails you’re going to hit and how hard to hit them: You’re giving yourself a hammer and saying, “Well, if the players give me anything that looks even remotely like a nail, I know what I can hit it with.”

(For example, you know that the estranged wife is familiar with the details of her husband’s operations and the security of the mansion. That’s the hammer. What you don’t have to figure out is how the PCs get that information from her: Maybe they just ask her nicely. Or bribe her. Or offer to protect her. Or they plant a surveillance bug on her. Or tap her phones. Or kidnap her sons and threaten to kill them unless she plants a bomb in her husband’s mansion. These are all nails. The players will provide them.)

The other trick to designing your toolkit is organizing the pertinent resources into usable chunks. Take the goon squads for example: You could try to track the actions of every individual goon while running the adventure, but that quickly becomes incredibly complicated. By organizing them into squads you give yourself a manageable unit that you can keep track of.

On the other hand, don’t let this organization shackle you. If you need an individual goon, just peel ’em off one of the squads and use them. You’re drawing a forest because that’s easier to map — but if the PCs need to chop down some firewood, don’t miss the trees for the forest.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Despite my tongue-in-cheek opening to this essay, there’s nothing inherently wrong with plot-based design. Plenty of great games have been run with tightly or loosely plotted scenarios. And the argument can certainly be made that, “The players don’t care if they’re on a railroad, if the train’s heading to Awesome Town.”

But I’ll admit that, in my experience, Awesome Town is usually a lot more awesome when I let the PCs chart their own course.

Is that because I’m such an amazingly awesome GM that I can always roll with the punches and come up with some awesome improvisation? Maybe. But I think it has more to do with the fact that the players are actually pretty good judges of what they want. And if they come up with a detailed plan for infiltrating the mob boss’ downtown casino as card dealers and gamblers, then they’ll probably have a lot more fun seeing that plan come to fruition than if I artificially quash it so that they can go back to my “awesome” idea of kidnapping the sons of the mob boss and using them to blackmail his wife.

(Which isn’t to say that the PCs should always succeed. Overcoming adversity is awesome as well. But there’s a difference between a plan that doesn’t work because it didn’t work and a plan that doesn’t work because I, as a GM, want them to be doing something else.)

And with that so-called advantage of plot-based design laid to one side, I’m not sure what it’s really supposed to be offering. On the other hand, the advantages of scenario-based design are huge:

(1) It requires significantly less work to prep.

(2) It empowers the players and makes their choices meaningful.

The latter really cannot be emphasized enough. For me, the entire reason to play a roleplaying game is to see what happens when the players make meaningful choices. In my experience, the result is almost always different than anything I could have anticipated or planned for.

If I wanted to tell my players a story (which is what plot-based design really boils down to), then it’s far more efficient and effective to simply write a story. In my opinion, if you’re playing a roleplaying game then you should play to the strengths of the medium: The magical creativity which only happens when people get together.

For examples of what I’m talking about, you can also read about the Unexpected Successes from my own table. The Twin Deaths of Thuren Issek are particularly awesome.

On the other hand, if you have a group that’s used to being shown the Correct Path and then following it, suddenly throwing them into the deep-end of an open-ended scenario may have disastrous results, just like any other sudden shift in the style of play. Others, of course, will immediately take to it like a fish takes to water. But if you’re running into problems, just sit down and talk things over with your players. Explain where the disconnect is happening. Maybe give them a copy of this essay so that they can have a better understanding of what’s going on (and what’s not going on) behind the screen.

I suspect that once they know the shackles have been taken off, they’ll revel in their newfound freedom.

FURTHER READING
Three Clue Rule
Don’t Prep Plots: Scenario Timelines
Don’t Prep Plots: The Principles of RPG Villainy
Don’t Prep Plots: Tools, Not Contingencies
Empower Your Prep: The Rachov Principle
Gamemastery 101