When using a location-crawl structure (of which a dungeoncrawl is obviously the most well known example), the PCs explore an area room by room. You can see this clearly in the default action of the ‘crawl: If a PC is standing in a room and there’s nothing interesting for them to do in that room, then they should pick an exit and go to the next room.

This structure works well when designing an area that has a high density of interesting stuff in it. Not every room in a dungeon, for example, needs to be filled with interesting stuff, but probably at least half of them do, otherwise the pacing of the scenario collapses as the players robotically churn through empty rooms.

So what can you do when the scenario calls for a crawl-type exploration of a large area with only a few points of interest?

To some extent, of course, we’re talking about a fictional world and you can simply choose to design it differently: Shrink the scope of the area to sync up with the desired points of interest. (Or, alternatively, increase the number of points of interest to match the scope of the area.)

But this is not always desirable or even possible. For example, if the PCs are heading to an abandoned skyscraper in the post-apocalyptic urban wastelands, changing the skyscraper into a duplex is to fundamentally alter the nature of the scenario. And simply filling the skyscraper to the brim with various encounters would be inconsistent with the general premise that Downtown is a thinly populated desert. (It could also quite easily bloat the skyscraper exploration out of proportion to its importance in the scenario.)

Which, of course, brings us to the sector crawl. Like other crawls — location-crawls, hexcrawls, urbancrawls, etc. — it features keyed locations, geographic movement, and an exploration-based default goal. But while superficially similar to a location-crawl, the sector crawl is designed to handle low density areas. It consists of sectors, connections, and encounters.

SECTORS

You’ll start prepping your sector crawl by identifying your sectors. Basically, you’re breaking your scenario’s area into large chunks. Ideally you want these sectors to:

1. Broadly map to the characters’ understanding of the environment.
2. Generally have one point of interest per sector.

In fact, one way of designing a sector crawl is to list your points of interest — hive of mutants, cache of medical supplies, sarcophagus of the seer, etc. — and then figure out what “sector” each point of interest is in. It’s okay to have a few sectors with multiple points of interest, but if you end up with LOTS of sectors like that, you’ll probably want to think about breaking that part of your scenario down into smaller sectors. On the other hand, sectors without a point of interest should generally be very rare (or not used at all).

For example, each floor in our post-apocalyptic skyscraper might be a separate sector. Or perhaps the skyscraper is broken into three sectors – the Lower Floors (1-10), the Middle Floors (11-46), and the Upper Floors (47-69). Or maybe it’s the Ground Floor, Lower Floors, Upper Floors, and Penthouse.

The scale of these sectors, as you can see, will vary depending on the scenario, but you want them to flow naturally from the logic of the campaign world (as opposed to being arbitrary divisions) so that the players can choose how to navigate through the area. (Ideally the players won’t even know you’re running a sector crawl because their navigation decisions will flow naturally from a completely in-character point of view.)

CONNECTIONS

That brings us to the connections between sectors, which is the second thing you’ll want to prepare for your sector crawl.

By default, however, a sector crawl isn’t about the paths between sectors. You can generally access any sector from any other sector, although that navigation might be chokepointed through, for example, a central hub or elevator.

This open access might, in some cases, be only conceptual in nature. If you actually followed every step the PCs take, for example, you might discover that getting from the Lower Floors to the Penthouse is, technically speaking, only possibly by passing through the Middle and Upper Floors. But conceptually, players on the 5^th Floor can say, “Let’s take the elevator up to the Penthouse,” and they can just do that.

This open-access doesn’t mean that the PCs aren’t exploring the location. It just means that the meaningful choices will be ones of sequence and priority rather than geographical navigation.

(If this is making you uneasy, think about how node-based scenario design routinely gives PCs a slate of clues that effectively give them a menu of places to go next. An open-access sector crawl basically does the same thing.)

To support this, as you’re thinking about how your sectors are related to each other, you’ll usually want to avoid sector structures that only make sense after the characters have already explored them. Looking at a post-apocalyptic skyscraper, for example, the players can immediately intuit that it’s made up of various floor and they can go to various floors by going up or down through the skyscraper.

Conversely, if they arrive at the Great Gate of an abandoned dwarven city, they might have no idea what other sectors exist, which will make it difficult for them to make sector selections. If the PCs can’t get an immediate overview of a location when they arrive there, you may need to provide that information in some other form — maps, local guides, skill checks, divine visions, etc.

Tip: The overview might be provided as the point of interest for the Arrival sector. In other words, the PCs arrive at the Great Gate, and when they explore that sector you can tell them about the Grand Promenade, the Lower Galleries, and the seven Dwarven Minarets.

Sometimes, though, you’ll want a mysterious sector for the PCs to discover. These are sectors that are connected to (or hidden within) a specific sector, and can only be discovered or unlocked when the PCs explore that sector.

In most cases, once a mysterious sector has been revealed or accessed, it will become part of the sector crawl’s open access. (Meaning that it can be freely selected like any other sector in the future.) But it’s also possible for some sectors to act as chokepoints: In order to get from a sector on one side of the chokepoint to a sector on the other side of the chokepoint, you do, in fact, have to pass through the chokepoint sector.

Chokepoints can be used to create isolated sectors, but in other configurations you can actually think of them as the connection point between two different sector crawls.

A similar type of sector is the hub sector: If you’re in the hub, you can access any of the sectors connected to the hub. Conversely, you’ll need to pass through the hub to reach any of the sectors connected to it.

Hubs can be a useful way of conceptualizing particularly large sector crawls. Instead of needing to provide an overview of every single sector in the entire complex, you only need to provide an overview of the sectors connected to the hub and any “neighboring” hubs. It’s only when the PCs go to a new hub sector that you’ll need to overview the sectors connected to that hub.

The Great Gate of the dwarven city, for example, can serve as the hub for nearby features within the city (e.g., the Lower Galleries and the Dwarven Minarets), while also providing access to the Grand Promenade which is another hub.

A final key thing to understand is that the more chokepoints, hubs, and mysterious sectors you add to your sector, the more specific you are making the connections between your sectors. The more you increase that specificity, the more your sector crawl will begin blurring into a pointcrawl. This will become even more true if your sectors begin shrinking towards single points of interest.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it’s useful to be aware of what you’re doing.

ENCOUNTERS

A sector crawl doesn’t need encounters, but they’ll usually enhance the scenario and make the area feel like a dynamic, living environment. The specific encounter methods generally resemble those in other ‘crawl structures (like hexcrawls and dungeoncrawls) — they might be random or programmed; keyed to specific sectors or the entire scenario; and so forth.

RUNNING THE SECTOR CRAWL

Running a sector crawl largely consists of going to a new sector or exploring the current sector. Each time the PCs do one of these things, trigger or check for an encounter.

Exploring the sector will turn up:

• Its “identity” (if this was not already known);
• Its point of interest (i.e., the content keyed to the sector); and
• Any secret connections to other sectors (if you’re using mysterious sectors).

If a sector has multiple things to discover, the PCs might find all of them through a single exploration action or find them one at a time (requiring more exploration actions in order to find additional stuff).

And that’s it! Running a sector crawl is actually quite straightforward.

A SECTOR OF ONE

I’ve found it occasionally useful to conceptually think of some locations as a “sector of one” when running them.

For example, in a mystery scenario there might be a house which contains exactly one clue. The players, perhaps conditioned by the ubiquitous location-crawls found in RPG scenario design, might decide to start searching the house one room at a time – essentially treating it like a dungeoncrawl.

Knowing that it’s a rather large house and they’ll spend most of their time not finding stuff that isn’t there, I might push them into a sector crawl and frame their actions appropriately: They say they’re going to search the kitchen, but I simply handle the resolution of the action as searching the whole house (i.e., the house is a single “sector” and they’re performing an exploration action there).

Note: I’m not saying this is the one-true-way of handling this situation. I can think of a half dozen different reasons why you might want to handle the house search as a location-crawl even though there’s only one clue to be found.

This can also be a good thought experiment for how you run a sector crawl, particularly if you’re finding yourself defaulting back into treating the area as a location-crawl. Unless the players are aware of the sector crawl structure (and it’s a structure that doesn’t always lend itself to that), you’ll often be figuring out how to interpret the players’ declared actions within the context of the structure.

For example, they may not explicitly say, “I’m exploring this sector.” But they might say that they’re looking for a place to sleep. Or are searching one section of the sector. Or are looking for medical supplies. All of those can be treated as exploring the sector (and trigger the sector’s discoveries and encounter).

The same thing will be true of navigation, where you’ll need to figure out if certain actions are just moving around inside their current sector or if it’s actually moving to a different sector (and, if so, which one).

UNTESTED: MEGADUNGEON SECTORS

This is something I haven’t had a chance to actually test yet: Converting sections of a megadungeon into sectors.

I’m not talking about designing a megadungeon-like scenario as a sector crawl. (Although you can easily do that, as demonstrated with the example of an abandoned dwarven city above.) What I mean is running a megadungeon as a dungeoncrawl, but when the PCs have “cleared” a particular section of the megadungeon (akin to clearing hexes in a hexcrawl) you convert that section of the megadungeon into a sector.

This would hypothetically allow the players to quickly move through cleared sections of the megadungeon. If you’ve run large dungeons or megadungeons before, you’ve probably already done something akin to this in a purely informal way. (Skipping the boring stuff and getting to the interesting bits, right?) What I find interesting about formalizing this into a sector crawl is that it would still provide a structure for triggering encounters there or even exploring to discover hidden secrets the PCs had previously missed.

It would also give a convenient structure for handling restocking the dungeon – i.e., unclearing the area as new monsters migrate in. For more details on that sort of thing, check out (Re-)Running the Megadungeon.

If you’d like to see a sector crawl in action, there’s one in the upcoming Apeworld on Fire! adventure for the Feng Shui roleplaying game. Designed by Paul Stefko, we used a small sector crawl for a section of the adventure in which the PCs are exploring an abandoned arcanowave laboratory while being hunted by a nanostock demon!

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation-by-necessity with the party-planning scenario structure I shared here on the Alexandrian back in 2015. It seems like almost every other time I sit down to design or develop a scenario these days, I find the party-planning scenario structure staring back at me:

• In Welcome to the Island for Over the Edge, I used it to fairly pure effect with Jonathan Tweet to design “Seversen’s Mysterious Estate,” which I describe in more detail over here.
• In Quantronic Heat for the Infinity RPG, Nick Bate and I used it to model a full season in an illegal remote racing circuit. This took the basic structure and spread it across multiple days.
• For “Battle of the Bands,” also in Welcome to the Island, I worked with Jeremy Tuohy to adapt the structure for modeling a road trip studded with micro-adventures.

Basically, the more designers who pitch me awesome, expansive concepts for adventure scenarios, the more I find myself coming back to the party-planning scenario structure as the foundation we can easily adapt to make those concepts work in practical terms.

This has been really interesting and exciting work. I had largely thought of the party-planning structure as being fairly narrow and specific (but very useful!) in its utility, but the more my designers and I have been using it, the more powerful and flexible it has proven to be.

I haven’t been sharing these new insights here on the Alexandrian largely because, for a long time, I thought of these scenarios as just being specific applications of the party-planning structure. (Any time you use a scenario structure, after all, you’re adapting it to the needs of the specific scenario.) But while this is true for some of the scenarios I’ve been designing, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that several of these structures have developed enough that it’s not just a matter of them being adapted to a specific scenario; they’ve been adapted to support whole new classes of scenarios, making them distinct scenario structures in their own right.

Today we’re going to look at the scenario structure for festivals which I developed for Jonathan Killstring to use in his upcoming Burning Dragon scenario for the Feng Shui roleplaying game.

THE FESTIVAL

Burning Dragon is an outdoor art and music festival in the Gobi Desert that gathers each summer to “forge the dragon.” Lasting more than a week, it culminates in a huge wicker effigy of a dragon being literally lit aflame to complete the symbolic purging of the festival.

This structure, however, can be used for any large gathering that the PCs will be exploring in detail: a large convention, a long weekend at RenFest, a visiting carnival, a theatrical fringe festival, the Fortnight of the Blood Moon, the Conclave of the Goblin Princes, the solar migration of the star-whales… whatever.

DISTRICTS

Break the festival location into separate districts. These should generally be diegetic (i.e., the PCs should be able to understand the divisons; they’re not arbitrary game concepts) and are likely to reflect the organization of the festival itself. If the people running the festival were to publish a flyer for participants, what would the map look like if you flipped it open?

Another rule of thumb you might find useful is that if the PCs are in one district they should generally not be aware of what’s happening in any other districts unless it’s an event of cataclysmic proportions. (The idea is that if you want to know what’s happening in another district, you’ll need to go there and find out.)

You don’t need a lot of different districts, but if you’re having difficulty breaking your festival into separate districts then it’s very possible that it would be more appropriate to handle your event using the party-planning structure (even if it’s a party on a very large scale).

DISTRICT CHARACTERS

For each district, create the NPCs the PCs are likely to meet there. Again, you don’t need a lot. Just two or three can be enough. These can include characters who are particularly important to the district (like an event organizer or guest of honor), but also think about characters who can be representative of the average festival attendee in that district.

For ease of use, I recommend that ANY character you want attending the festival be associated with a specific district. (Everybody at the festival has to be somewhere after all.) But although they’re associated with a particular district, don’t be afraid to have the PCs run into these characters in other districts. To that end, I also recommend prepping a master list of festival NPCs (and the districts they’re keyed to) for easy reference.

In prepping the characters, use the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template to make it easy to keep all the characters straight and quickly pick them up during play. Print out on NPC per sheet and keep them loose so that you can quickly pull out the sheets for each NPC participating in a particular conversation.

DISTRICT LOCATIONS

Define your district physically by describing major sites or landmarks there. These points of interest may be places the PCs are going to (and, therefore, potentially serve as motivations that bring them into the district) or the PCs might discover them as they explore a district for the first time.

Once again, a little can go a long way here. In fact, if you find yourself listing a whole bunch of locations in a district, you might want to take that as a cue to split the district into several different districts.

DISTRICT EVENTS

District events are things that happen in the district. Some events will naturally be keyed to specific locations and/or characters, but don’t lock them down too tight unless you need to. (It’s more useful to keep things flexible for when you’re actually running the scenario.)

Every district should have at least one event keyed to it. There’s no limit to the number of events you can choose to include in a district, but an over-abundance of events are likely to be wasted prep. Generally speaking, PCs will tend to go to a district once, do the things they need to do there, and then move on. This generally means that keying more than two or three events to a district will make it necessary to really cram stuff into that single visit. There are situations where that can work, but they’re probably the exception rather than the rule.

(Another exception is if your scenario is structured in such a way that the PCs are motivated or required to repeatedly crisscross the festival, visiting districts over and over again. Additional events can be useful then.)

TOPICS OF CONVERSATION

The last tool you’ll prep, as with other social events, are the topics of conversation.  These might be momentous recent events, fraught political debates, or just utter trifles (like an argument about which ska band is the best). For example, in Burning Dragon the topics of conversation include:

• Ganbaatar is the odds-on favorite in the traditional wrestling competition this year. He bench-pressed a pickup truck over in the Badlands earlier. For real, though!
• There’s a big-shot director (S. Khünbish) shooting a film here at the festival.
• Did you know the festival grounds are actually the site of an ancient Mongolian fortress? I heard that the place was ruled by four Wu sorcerers, but it was burned down by four evil shaman-kings who came to steal the secrets of the Wu.
• A young woman was apparently assaulted or kidnapped during the opening ceremony this year.
• How many wheels are too many/not enough on a vehicle. (Later, the topic shifts to how many spikes are too many/not enough on a vehicle.)
• How far along has construction gotten on the dragon effigy.
• There’s a big turtle over in Dust Town. Like, a really big turtle. Nobody seems to know how it got there, but everybody’s trying to get a selfie with it.

I recommend mixing in a few “irrelevant” topics of conversation to camouflage (or, at least, contrast) the “important” stuff. During play, these topics of conversation should also pick up stuff that’s been happening in play (either keyed district events or just whatever mischief the PCs have been getting up to).

RUNNING THE FESTIVAL

Start with your Opening Shot: What happens when the PCs arrive at the festival? What do they immediately see? What’s immediately happening that they can either choose to interact with or be provoked to interact with?

Ideally, this opening shot will also orient the PCs. By the end of it, the players should clearly understand how the festival is organized — i.e., which districts exist and how they relate to each other.

Now that the PCs are at the festival, follow their lead as they attempt to accomplish whatever goal brough them here in the first place. This will usually involve them going to one of the districts. (If they don’t choose a district and instead just want to do something “at the festival” in a general sense — look for information, look for a GMC, etc. — that’s fine. You can either arbitrarily choose a district in which they find the thing they’re looking for or are interrupted by something interesting happening.)

When the PCs are in a district, you’ll mostly be picking up the various tools you’ve prepped for that district, putting them together in different ways, and figuring out how to have fun with them. Broadly speaking, in each district there are three “slots” that you can drop elements into:

• Arriving in the district.
• While doing something in the district (i.e., the reason the PCs came to the district in the first place).
• Leaving the district.

Pay particular attention to how different elements can be combined. For example, if the PCs want to talk to a NPC, could that conversation be happening in one of the specific locations within the district? Are there other NPCs who could join the conversation? Could the district event start happening in the middle of the conversation?

Similarly, if the PCs are in a location, what NPCs might be hanging out there? If there’s an event, how might it affect one of the locations? And so forth.

Although some things may happen to the PCs and force them to react – for example, an NPC might com up and start talking to them – mix things up by also including characters, locations, and events that the PCs can observe and then choose to react to (or ignore). If they don’t react to Old Bill stealing horses from the inn’s stables, that’s fine! They’ll probably see them again.

Similarly, if the PCs are wrapping up a scene, don’t feel like you need to immediately push them into a new one: Ask the players what they want to do next and then use their answer to frame up the next set of tools.

If the PCs are heading into a particular district and you find yourself looking at all the tools in the district uncertain of what should happen, just trigger the district event when the players arrive and see where things go from there.

TIMING OF EVENTS

Festival-type events often have a formal schedule of events: Such-and-such a convention panel happens at 1pm on Friday; so-and-so is performing on the Lilliputian Stage at 6pm on Saturday; the draconic convergence will be at high noon on Sunday.

It will therefore be tempting to prep this schedule. Inasmuch as possible, however, you actually want to try to avoid drawing up or otherwise establishing any such specific schedule.

There are a couple reasons for this. First, even a modest festival-type event will likely have dozens and dozens of events on its schedule. Few of them will be relevant to the PCs, creating a ton of wasted prep.

Second, this type of schedule tends to tie your hands too much when actually running the scenario: It would be ideal for the PCs to see Professor Clayton’s presentation on quantum fluctuations in Antarctica, but the event was scheduled for 1pm in the Lilac Room and the PCs went  to the Lilac Room at 2pm instead. (This is why the structure keys events to districts instead of specific times. The events are being mapped to the decisions and actions most likely being taken by the PCs.)

Note: If this still feels weird to you, take a look at a typical dungeon key. Frequently these keys will feature room descriptions in which some specific event is happening at precisely the moment when the PCs arrive at that location. It’s not that the game world is standing still; it’s that our prep is abstracted in order to make it possible to manage the infinite complexities of the world.

This is also why festival-type events, unlike other social events, don’t have a main event sequence: You don’t want the festival to feel like a meeting with a specific agenda. You want it to feel big and messy, with lots of things happening all the same time.

So what should you do when the players want to know when a particular event is happening? Broadly, there are two responses:

• It’s happening right now, so you’d better hurry if you want to make it.
• It’s happening a little later, giving you enough time to either make preparations or do something else first.

Now, there can be exceptions. The two most common ones are, in my experience, an Opening Ceremony (which probably doubles as your opening shot) and the Big Finale at the end of the festival (which might be the epilogue of the scenario or a huge, tangled convergence of everything and everyone the PCs have encountered, mixed together into a single, huge gathering modeled as a subset party-planning scenario.)

Other Landmark Events like this are possible depending on the exact nature of the festival you’re creating, but my recommendation remains that, unless it’s absolutely necessary, you’re better leaning away from this and just keying these events to an appropriate district.

If you’re interested in seeing this scenario structure in practice, Jonathan Killstring’s Burning Dragon will be released in June 2021. If you’d like to get early access to the PDF next month, you can join the Feng Shui Dragons subscription program, supporting the creation of new Feng Shui supplements.

Go to Part 1

“If once we shake off pursuit, I shall make for Weathertop. It is a hill, just to the north of the Road, about half way from here to Rivendell. Gandalf will make for that point, if he follows us. After Weathertop our journey will become more difficult, and we shall have to choose between various dangers.” – Aragorn, Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

UNPATHED ROUTES: The basic route system described above assumes that the route follows a clear and unmistakable path — a road or river, for example. Some routes don’t follow paths, however. These generally take the form of a landmark chain: Head north to Archet, then turn east to Weathertop. Turn south from Weathertop, cross the road, and then head west until you hit the road again.

To handle unpathed routes, you’ll need to add mechanics for both (a) getting lost and (b) getting back on track after you’ve become lost. (This may also include a mechanic to determine whether or not you realize that you’re lost.)

A single route can also include both pathed and unpathed sections.

HIDDEN ROUTE FEATURES: The gansōm bridge was washed out by the spring floods, releasing howling water spirits into the Nazharrow River. Before arriving in the Bloodfens, the PCs were unaware of the presence of goblin rovers. They’re pleasantly surprised to discover that the Imperial checkpoint at the Karnic crossroads has been abandoned, its regiment summoned north to deal with peasant rebellions.

Although I mentioned before that PCs need to be aware of distinctions between the available routes in order to make a meaningful choice between them, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to know everything. Some aspects of a route’s speed, difficulty, stealth, expense, landmarks, or hazards can be initially hidden from the PCs and only discovered later.

In some cases, hidden route features can be uncovered before the journey begins if the PCs research the route or can get their hands on better maps.

FORKED ROUTES: Sometimes the choice of route (or additional choices of route) can appear after the journey has begun. These can include detours, in which the fork in the route eventually collapses back into the original route.

Detours are often made in response to hidden route features discovered along the way (the gansōm bridge has been washed out, so you need to figure out a different way across the river). PCs can be both pushed and pulled by detours, however: In addition to trying to avoid bad things on the original route, they might also choose to turn aside to gain some benefit (from an advantageous landmark, for example), usually at the cost of time.

PROCEDURAL CONTENT GENERATORS: Procedural content generators are generally nonessential to a scenario structure, but properly designed they can be large boons in content creation and can even unlock unique gameplay. Other than a random encounter table, what other content generators could we potentially develop?

I think one thing we can immediately rule out is trying to develop a map generator. Nothing wrong with a good random map generator, but it doesn’t feel like it’s directly connected to route travel. The assumption of the route system is that you know where Point A is, where Point B is, and what the general routes between them are going to be.

However, you might occasionally faced with a map like this one:

And need to ask yourself, “How can you get from Secomber to Dragonspear Castle?” There’s one obvious route that goes down the Delimbyr River to Daggerford and then along the Trade Way, but is that the only route?

So our first procedural content generator might randomly determine a type of route:

• Road
• River
• Landmark Chain
• Magical

You could bias that so that 1-5 is Road, 6-7 is River, 8-9 is Landmark Chain, and 10 is Magical on a d10 roll. If I literally roll a d10 while sitting at my desk here, I get a 1 and discover that there must be an old, disused road that crosses the High Moor. (It might be a remnant of the Netherese Empire.)

Let’s go back to the Secomber-Daggerford-Dragonspear Castle route on the map above. Remembering that a route is largely defined by the sequence of landmarks spaced along its length, we can see at the moment that the only landmark we know about is the city-state of Daggerford. So perhaps we develop a landmark generator. You could randomly determine a number of landmarks (perhaps 1d6+1) for a given route, and then generate specific landmarks in various categories:

• Settlement (town, village, fortress, shrine, inn)
• Ruin
• Lair
• Route Feature (bridge, wall, tunnel, toll, fork in the path)
• Natural Landmark

There’s likely other categories to be explored, and you can also easily dive down into any number of detailed sub-tables for each of these categories.

Now that you have a list of landmarks for the route, you might want to think about how those landmarks relate to the route itself. A landmark doesn’t necessarily need to be directly on the road, for example, so we could randomly determine the landmark connection:

• On Route
• Detectable From Route (sight, smell, sound)
• Detour (you have to leave the route in order to visit/see the landmark)

As you’re generating landmarks, you may want to get a better sense of how they connect to the wider world. So you might use a path generator to determine if the landmark is functionally a crossroads for many different routes or if it can only be reached along the road, river, or other route that the PCs are currently following.

You can use any number of methods to determine the presence/number of routes connected to the landmark, then randomly determine the type of route (see above), and then use a d8 for compass direction or d6 for hex direction to randomly determine the rough direction of the route.

Where do these other routes go? Unless the PCs express interest, you don’t necessarily need to explore that, although it can often provide good local color. (“About midday you come to the Inn of the Prancing Fairy. It lies at a crossroads with the road leading to Elegor in the north.”) Often you can just look at your map and get a pretty good idea of where they might go.

For example, if the PCs are travelling down the Delimbyr from Secomber to Daggerford and they come to a ruined tower that you determine is a crossroads with a route heading to the southeast, you could pretty easily conclude that there must be a small tributary river flowing out of the Misty Forest that joins the Delimbyr here.

As you’re describing the PCs’ journey, it may also be useful to describe the changing terrain they’re passing through. A terrain feature generator could use a simple mechanic like having a 1 in 6 chance each day of the terrain changing, and then tables to determine the new terrain features that they encounter (likely based on the base terrain type they’re traveling through). Terrain features could include vegetation, debris, obstacles, things seen on the horizon, etc.

RUNNING WITH ROUTES

As you begin running games with the route system, here are a few things to keep in mind.

First, the structure does not inherently make travel interesting. If you think of the structure as a way by which specific scenes (the landmarks and random encounters) can be easily framed, then it follows that you still need to make those scenes meaningful.

By default, the route system will lead you towards a generic travelogue (“…and then we went to X and then we went to Y and then we went to…”). But the best travelogues find ways to elevate the sequence of events. You want your game to resonate with the powerful journeys of The Lord of the Rings, rather than plodding along in the dull procedural of something like The Ringworld Engineers.

If you’re of a dramatist bent, think of what kind of story you want to be telling with this journey: Exploration, a race, escape, survival, self-discovery, edification. Or is the journey simply a convenient framing device for a number of individually interesting and complete short stories? Journeys can set mood (think of the emotional toll of Frodo and Sam’s long trek across Mordor), emphasize a theme (sure are a lot of goblins in these fens), establish current events (passing caravans of refugees from the war), or provide hooks to side quests.

Regardless, think about the agenda of the scenes you’re framing to. Why are you framing to these moments? What’s the bang that forces the PCs to make one or more meaningful choices in that scene? (These topics are discussed at more length in The Art of Pacing.)

If you can’t think of any agenda or bang for a particular landmark, then consider demoting that landmark to a part of the abstract description of the journey or even drop it entirely. (The truth is that the PCs will see a lot of stuff on the road. You’re going to skip over most of it. The important thing is to figure out what stuff you need to focus on in order for the journey to be meaningful.)

THE PROBLEM WITH MULTIPLE ROUTES: A fundamental problem with the route system is the choice between routes. This inherently creates a choose-your-own-adventure structure in which you’re prepping a lot of material for two different routes and then immediately throwing out at least half of that prep as soon as the PCs choose one route over another.

There are, however, a few ways that you can mitigate this problem.

First, you can often minimize wasted prep by having the players choose their route at the end of a session. You still need to broadly prep each route so that a meaningful choice can be made between routes, but this is fairly minimal and you only need to prep the chosen route in fully playable detail.

Second, in many cases there may not actually be a choice between multiple routes. We talked about this briefly before, but if the decision of route boils down to a calculation rather than true choice, then you only need to prep the route that’s calculated to be best.

Third, you can focus your prep on proactive elements that are relevant regardless of which route is chosen.

Being chased by the bad guys is an easy example of this: With the Ringwraiths chasing them from the Shire to Rivendell, the hobbits — and, later, Strider — make a number of route choices balancing speed, safety, and stealth. The threat of the Ringwraiths (and their other agents) make these choices interesting, but you only need to prep the Ringwraiths once.

You can also feature content that the PCs carry along the road with them. For example, you might prep a murder mystery and/or romantic drama that features the team of hirelings the PCs have brought along on the journey. For the “Battle of the Bands” scenario in the Welcome to the Island anthology for Over the Edge, Jeremy Tuohy and I developed an interlinked system of road talk and encounters on the road that create an evolving drama with the NPCs the characters collect along the way.

Fourth, you can find ways to reuse, reincorporate, and recycle material so that even if the PCs don’t see the stuff on Route B on this particular journey, you’ll still end up using it at some point in the future.

BACK TO HEXCRAWLS

Which actually brings us all the way back to hexcrawls.

Because it turns out that a lot of the stuff we’ve built into our route system — landmarks, navigation DCs, terrain, travel times, etc. — actually just fall out of a fully stocked hexcrawl with no additional prep whatsoever.

This is one of the many reasons that a truly ready-to-play hexcrawl would actually be one of the highest value supplements a game company could publish. The utility of the hexcrawl is incredibly high to any individual GM, particularly if you can eliminate the inefficient nature of most hexcrawl prep by spreading that value across an audience of hundreds or thousands.

(Unfortunately, most hexcrawl products aren’t fully stocked and ready-to-play. They just provide a very high level overview of the would-be content of the hexcrawl, leaving a lot of the actual work in the GM’s lap.)

To be clear here, I’m not saying that we should abandon the route system and go back to hexcrawling. The hexcrawl system is still optimized for exploration, not travel. What I’m saying is that if you map a route across a fully stocked hexcrawl, then 99% of the work in defining that route for us in the route system can just be directly yanked out of the hexcrawl content.

If you’re working from a hexcrawl, you can also begin experimenting with trailblazing structures in which the PCs create their own routes through the wilderness. In fact, whether you have a system for trailblazing or not in a hexcrawl campaign, you’ll probably find that the PCs just naturally create routes for themselves: They want to get back to the Citadel of Lost Wonders so that they can continue looting it, and they will figure out how to make that happen. These routes almost always take the form of landmark trails, and will often feature the PCs making their own navigational landmarks to fill in the gaps.

THE ROUTE MAP

Whether you’re working from a hexcrawl or not, if your campaign regularly features travel then you will, over time, begin to accumulate a collection of planned routes that crisscross the local region. Over time, it is likely that this route map will evolve into a pointcrawl: As the routes intersect and overlap with each other, the map will develop enough depth that the players can make complex navigational decisions and begin charting out their own routes in detail.

If this is a style of play that appeals to you, it may be tempting to imagine sitting down and planning this elaborate route map ahead of time as part of your campaign prep. There may be a few major, obvious routes where this makes sense, but for the most part I recommend resisting the temptation. Partly because the thought of all that wasted prep makes the little winged GM on my shoulder wince, but mostly because it’s intrinsically more effective to let the players (by way of their PCs) tell you where they want to go and what the important routes are.

In transportation planning there’s a concept called the desire path: These are the paths created by the erosion of human travel across grass or other ground covering. It’s the way that people want to travel, even if the planned or intended paths are telling them to take a different route.

It has become quite common for urban planners to open parks, college campuses, and similar spaces without sidewalks, wait to see where the desire paths naturally form, and only then install the pavement.

You’re doing the same thing here: Following the players’ paths of desire and developing the campaign along the lines that they have chosen.

FURTHER READING

If you’re interested in delving deeper into this sort of thing, I recommend checking out:

• Pathcrawls from Detect Magic
• Pointcrawls from Chris Kutalik
• Subhex Wilderness Generation from 9 and 30 Kingdoms

Let’s imagine that your players are in the city of Dweredell and they need to go to the village of Maernath to study the ancient crypt of the founder of the Verdigris Order.

How does that trip play out at the table?

The first option is the easiest: Skip it. Look at your map to figure out the distance between Dweredell and Maernath, consult a table of wilderness travel speeds to calculate how long the trip will take, and then say, “Okay, having journeyed northeast across the Viridwold, a week later you arrive in Maernath.”

There’s nothing wrong with this approach. In many cases, it will be exactly the right way to handle travel. Following the precepts of The Art of Pacing, you’ve determined that there are no interesting choices to be made during the journey and so you’re framing past that empty time to the next set of interesting choices.

But often you’ll reflect on this and feel vaguely unsatisfied. Perhaps you’ll think of any number of fantasy stories you’ve read in which the act of journeying from one location to another is a significant feature of the narrative and feel like you’re missing out on an opportunity. (These stories aren’t limited to fiction, either. Xenophon’s March of the 10,000 would be really boring if the Anabasis was just, “We left Cunaxa and, long story short, we were back in Greece two years later.”)

This line of thought — “Something should happen on the road to Maernath…” — often leads to some variation of Vaarsuvius’ Law of Random Road Encounters:

Of course, this still feels a trifle unsatisfying. You can see this in the expression of the “law” itself: Rather than being an awesome part of your game, the random road encounter feels like some sort of obligation.

(I will also briefly channel my grumpy grognard long enough to point out that if you’re handling random encounters properly they should be neither tedious nor a waste of time, but that’s a separate topic.)

Nevertheless, it feels like you could be doing more.

TRAVEL BY HEXCRAWL

At this point, with the rise of the Old School Renaissance, you may have heard about hexcrawling. That’s supposed to be a method for handling the wilderness in your campaign, right? So obviously the solution to your lackluster travel scenario is to build it as a hexcrawl.

I’ve written a whole series about how hexcrawls work, but the basic version is that you draw the wilderness as a hexmap, key each hex on the map with interesting content, and then trigger the content when the PCs enter the hex. The hexcrawl structure is primarily designed to support exploration, and if you’re prepping a single journey from Point A to Point B it is not the structure you want to use.

To demonstrate why, consider this hexmap from the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and imagine that your PCs want to take a trip from Warwik to Forcastle:

In order to prep that chunk of map as a proper hexcrawl, you would need to key every hex on the map. If you limited yourself to just the main peninsula of land shown here, that would mean prepping more than forty hexes of content. As the PCs journey from Warik to Forcastle, however, they would only visit a fraction of these hexes. In other words, you’ll end up prepping a lot of content that will never be used.

It’s clear that this is not an efficient way of prepping a specific journey through the wilderness, and it touches on a more fundamental truth, which is that the prep load for a hexcrawl really only makes sense if you’re going to be re-engaging with the same patch of wilderness dozens of times.

(This is trivial to achieve with an open table, where you can have dozens of players and characters traipsing across the same chunk of the world, but can be more difficult in a dedicated campaign with a single group of characters.)

The obvious rejoinder here is that you could theoretically prep this hexcrawl without prepping content for all these hexes. You could instead focus only on the hexes the PCs are likely to pass through. For example, in a journey from Warwik to Forcastle it’s relatively unlikely that they’ll end up at Wormshead Point.

BASIC TRAVEL ROUTES

As you begin zooming in on the most likely paths that the PCs could take from Point A to Point B, however, you’ll quickly discover that the hexcrawl structure itself is filled with procedures that become irrelevant if the PCs are following a predetermined route. What we really want is a structure dedicated to route-based travel that can focus our prep and be run efficiently at the table.

CHOOSE YOUR ROUTE: When beginning a new journey, the first thing the PCs must do is choose which route they’re going to use. This choice is only possible, of course, if the PCs are aware of what routes they can use to get where they’re going. They might gain that information from things like:

• Maps
• Local guides
• Mystical assistance
• Personal experience

If the PCs don’t know of any routes from where they are to where they want to go (and can’t find one before departing), then what they’re actually doing is exploring and you can default back to hexcrawling or a similar structure.

In order for the choice of routes to be interesting, there must be some meaningful distinction between the routes. “Meaningful” in this case means that it’s something the PCs care about. Common distinctions include:

• Speed. One route is faster than the other. (You will always need to calculate how long each route will take.)
• Difficulty. One route is more difficult to navigate. It might require special knowledge, special tools, or special skills to successfully traverse. (Climbing through the mountains or being able to answer the riddle of the gate-sphinx.)
• Stealth. One route will make it easier for the PCs to avoid detection. This can either be in general or a particular route might make it more difficult for one specific NPC or faction to detect them. (You can also conceptually invert this and instead think of it as a route making you vulnerable to detection from a particular faction: If you take the High Road you might be pressganged by the king’s army. The army’s recruiters don’t go into the Bloodfens, but if you go that way you’ll be at risk from the goblin rovers.)
• Expense. The cost of traveling the route. (This can be as simple as the price of a ticket.)
• Advantageous Landmarks. A route can have beneficial pitstops long the way, making it potentially more appealing than other options. (Visiting the Oracle of Delphi or seeing an old friend.)
• Hazards. Conversely, there might be a significant hazard along one of the routes. (You can enter Mordor this way, but you’ll have to figure out some way past Minas Morgul.)

In order for this to be a choice rather than a calculation, you’ll want to have the routes distinguished by at least two incomparable characteristics.

For example, consider a journey from Waterdeep to Neverwinter.

You look at the map and say, “You can take the High Road or you can travel by sea.”

“What’s the difference?” they ask.

“Well,” you say, “You’ll get there faster by sea.”

This is not a choice. It’s a simple calculation: The routes are identical except for the speed with which they’ll get you to Neverwinter, and so you take the route which is faster.

But if you instead say, “Well, it’s faster to sail, but there are reports of Moonshae pirates hitting ships along the coast,” this is no longer a simple calculation. The PCs have to choose whether speed or safety is more important to them.

One solid set of incomparable distinctions is all you need for this to work, but you can always add more (and you will generally find them arising naturalistically out of the given circumstances of the game world). Watch out, though, for inadvertently turning the choice back into a calculation as you add complexity. For example, you might say:

• The sea route is faster and is dangerous due to pirates.
• The road is dangerous due to the hazards of the Mere of Dead Men.

If the pirates and the restless undead of the mere are known to be equally hazardous, then you’re back to a straight-up calculation: There’s equal danger on both routes and one route is faster.

(This doesn’t happen if the PCs can’t be sure of the relative hazard posed by the pirates and undead. In that scenario it becomes an incomplete information problem. This is one of the subtle ways in which My Precious Encounter™ and similar design methodologies that always adjust the difficulty of the game world to the level of the PCs so that all challenges are identical degrade the depth of play. It creates a meta which eliminates incomplete information problems. But I digress.)

This is also why the PCs have to care about the distinction between routes. If speed isn’t actually important to them (they need to be there before June and either route will get them there by April), then Faster + Hazardous vs. Slower + Safer is still just a calculation, this time of which route is safer.

Don’t feel like you need to create stuff to make a particular route a viable choice, though. Just recognize that it’s not a choice and don’t present it as such (or explain why it isn’t if that’s relevant). For example, if you’re trying to get from Chicago to Indianapolis, you wouldn’t consider “first drive to St. Louis, then turn around and drive back to Indianapolis” as an option. (Because why would you?)

TRAVELING THE ROUTE: You’ll want to break the journey into a number of turns. I recommend multiple turns per day (so that it’s possible to have more than one encounter per day), and if you’re also doing hexcrawling in the campaign I recommend using the same timekeeping. (This consistency will make it easy to swap back and forth between the two travel structures. More on that later.) If we were using my structure for hexcrawls, this would mean six watches per day (two of which would generally be spent travelling and four resting).

There are three things you’re tracking as part of your procedure:

• Landmarks. A route is fundamentally defined by the sequence of landmarks that are spaced along its length. This might be permanent structures (cities, statues, etc.) or they might be programmed encounters that only apply to this specific journey (a broken down wagon, an ambush by goblin rovers, etc.), but either way they’ll be encountered at specific points along the route.
• Random Encounters. If you’re designing an encounter table specifically for the journey, I recommend keeping it pretty simple unless you’re planning to use this route repeatedly.
• Resources Used. Food, water, etc. This is optional, and there are many types of trips in which it won’t be relevant. (For example, if food and board are included in the price of your ticket.)

What about distance traveled? If you’re familiar with my hexcrawl structure (and many others), you’ll know that a key part of the procedure is determining exactly how far people have traveled each day. When traveling by routes, though, this is unnecessary because this is built into the design of the route: You know the total time it will take to traverse the route, you know at which times along the route you’ll encounter landmarks, and travel along most types of routes will generally be far more predictable and consistent than traipsing through the wilderness. (At a meta-level, variable travel distance creates an additional variable that complicates mapping and navigation in wilderness exploration. This is largely irrelevant if you’re traveling along a known route, which is another reason to ignore it.)

If the PCs take actions which vary the speed of their travel, you can apply those modifiers directly to the route timetable. If you really want to do the simulation of variable distance traveled per day (and there are scenarios in which this could easily be relevant), then it’s fairly easy to add this into your procedures.

On that note, let’s talk about additional features and levels of complexity that you can add to this basic, streamlined structure.

Go to Part 2

“Most of the campaigns I’ve really enjoyed have been in systems I didn’t like.”

“A great GM can take any RPG and run a good game.”

“I just want a system that gets out of the way when I’m playing.”

What I think these players are discovering is that most RPG systems don’t actually carry a lot of weight, and are largely indistinguishable from each other in terms of the type of weight they carry.

In theory, as we’ve discussed, there’s really nothing an RPG system can do for you that you can’t do without it. There’s no reason that we can’t all sit around a table, talk about what our characters do, and, without any mechanics at all, produce the sort of improvised radio drama which any RPG basically boils down to.

The function of any RPG, therefore, is to provide mechanical structures that will support and enhance specific types of play. (Support takes the form of neutral resolution, efficiency, replicability, consistency, etc.) If you look at the earliest RPGs this can be really clear, because those games were more modular. Since the early ’80s, however, RPGs pretty much all feature some form of universal resolution mechanic, which gives the illusion that all activities are mechanically supported. But in reality, that “support” only provides the most basic function of neutral resolution, while leaving all the meaningful heavy lifting to the GM and the players.

To understand what I mean by that, consider a game which says: “Here are a half dozen fighting-related skills (Melee Weapons, Brawling, Shooting, Dodging, Parrying, Armor Use) and here are some rules for making skill checks.”

If you got into a fight in that game, how would you resolve it?

We’ve all been conditioned to expect a combat system in our RPGs. But what if your RPG didn’t have a combat system? It would be up to the GM and the players to figure out how to use those skills to resolve the fight. They’d be left with the heavy lifting.

And when it comes to the vast majority of RPGs, that’s largely what you have: Skill resolution and a combat system. (Science fiction games tend to pick up a couple of additional systems for hacking, starship combat, and the like. Horror games often have some form of Sanity/Terror mechanic derived from Call of Cthulhu.)

So when it comes to anything other than combat — heists, mercantile trading, exploration, investigation, con artistry, etc. — most RPGs leave you to do the heavy lifting again: Here are some skills. Figure it out.

Furthermore, from a utilitarian point of view, these resolution+combat systems are all largely interchangeable in terms of the gameplay they’re supporting. They’re all carrying the same weight, and they’re leaving the same things (everything else) on your shoulders. Which is not to say that there aren’t meaningful differences, it’s just that they’re the equivalent of changing the decor in your house, not rearranging the floorplan: What dice do you like using? What skill list do you prefer for a particular type of game? How much detail do you like in your skill resolution and/or combat? And so forth.

SYSTEM MATTERS

What I’m saying is that system matters. But when it comes to mainstream RPGs, this truth is obfuscated because their systems all matter in exactly the same way. And this is problematic because it has created a blindspot; and that blindspot is resulting in bad game design. It’s making RPGs less accessible to new players and more difficult for existing players.

I’ve asked you to ponder the hypothetical scenario of taking your favorite RPG and removing the combat system from it. Now let’s consider the example of a structure which actually HAS been ripped out of game… although you may not have noticed that it happened.

From page 8 to page 12 of The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, Arneson & Gygax spelled out a very specific procedure for running dungeons in the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It boils down to:

1. You can move a distance based on your speed and encumbrance per turn.

2. Non-movement activities also take up a turn or some fraction of a turn. For example:

• ESPing takes 1/4 turn.
• Searching a 10′ section of wall takes 1 turn. (Secret passages found 2 in 6 by men, dwarves, or hobbits; 4 in 6 by elves.

3. 1 turn in 6 must be spent resting. If a flight/pursuit has taken place, you must rest for 2 turns.

4. Wandering Monsters: 1 in 6 chance each turn. (Tables provided.)

5. Monsters: When encountered, roll 2d6 to determine reaction (2-5 negative, 6-8 uncertain, 9-12 positive).

• Sighted: 2d4 x 10 feet.
• Surprise: 2 in 6 chance. 25% chance that character drops a held item. Sighted at 1d3 x 10 feet instead.
• Avoiding: If lead of 90 feet established, monster will stop pursuing. If PCs turn a corner, 2 in 6 chance they keep pursuing. If PCs go through secret door, 1 in 6 chance they keep pursuing. Burning oil deters many monsters from pursuing. Dropping edible items has a chance of distracting intelligent (10%), semi-intelligent (50%), or non-intelligent (90%) monsters so they stop pursuing. Dropping treasure also has a chance of distracting intelligent pursuers (90%), semi-intelligent (50%), or non-intelligent (10%) monsters.

6. Other activities:

• Doors must be forced open (2 in 6 chance; 1 in 6 for lighter characters). Up to three characters can force a door simultaneously, but forcing a door means you can’t immediately react to what’s on the other side. Doors automatically shut. You can wedge doors open with spikes, but there’s a 2 in 6 chance the wedge will slip while you’re gone.
• Traps are sprung 2 in 6.
• Listening at doors gives you a 1 in 6 (humans) or 2 in 6 (elves, dwarves, hobbits) of detecting sound. Undead do not make sound.

I’ve said this before, but if you’ve never actually run a classic megadungeon using this procedure — and I mean strictly observing this procedure — then I strongly encourage you to do so for a couple of sessions. I’m not saying you’ll necessarily love it (everyone has different tastes), but it’s a mind-opening experience that will teach you a lot about the importance of game structures and why system matters.

The other interesting thing here is that Arneson & Gygax pair this very specific procedure with very specific guidance on exactly what the DM is supposed to prep when creating a dungeon on pages 3 thru 8 of the same pamphlet. (These two things are conjoined: They can tell you exactly what to prep because they’re also telling you exactly how to use it.) Take these two things plus a combat system for dealing with hostile monster and, if you’re a first time GM, you can follow these instructions and run a successful game. It’s a simple, step-by-step guide.

“Now wait a minute,” you might be saying. “You said this procedure had been ripped out of D&D. What are you talking about? There’s still dungeon crawling in D&D!”

… but is there?

THE SLOW LOSS OF STRUCTURE

Many of the rules I describe above have passed down from one edition to the next and can still be found, in one form or another, in the game as it exists today. But if you actually sit down and look at the progression of Dungeon Master’s Guides, you’ll discover that starting with 2nd Edition the actual procedure began to wither away and eventually vanished entirely with 4th Edition.

The guidance on how to prep a dungeon has proven to have a little more endurance, but it, too, has atrophied. The 5th Edition core rulebooks, for just one example, don’t actually tell you how to key a dungeon map. (And although they have several example maps, none of them actually feature a key.)

One of the nifty things about a strong, robust scenario structure like dungeon crawling is that with a fairly mild amount of fiddling you can move it from one system to another. This is partly because most RPGs are built on the model of D&D, but it’s also because scenario structures in RPGs tend to be closely rooted to the fictional state of the game world.

This is, in fact, why you probably didn’t notice that 5th Edition D&D doesn’t actually have dungeon crawling in it any more: You’re familiar with the structure of dungeon crawling, and you unconsciously transferred it to the new edition the same way that you’ve most likely transferred it to other games lacking a dungeon crawling structure in the past. In fact, I’m willing to guess that removing dungeon crawling from 5th Edition was not, in fact, a conscious decision on the part of the designers: They learned how to run a dungeoncrawl decades ago and, like you, have been unconsciously transferring that structure from one game to another ever since.

Where this becomes a problem, however, are all the new players who don’t know how to run a dungeoncrawl.

Most people enter the hobby through D&D. And D&D used to reliably teach every new DM two very important procedures:

1. How to run a dungeon crawl

2. How to run combat

And using just those two procedures (easily genericizing the dungeon crawling procedure to handle any form of location-crawl), a GM can get a lot of mileage. In fact, I would argue that most of the RPG industry is built on just these two structures, and that most GMs really only know how to use these two structures plus railroading.

So what happens when D&D stops teaching new DMs how to run a dungeoncrawl?

It means that GMs are now reliant entirely on railroading and combat.

And that’s not good for the hobby.

THE BLINDSPOT

If you need another example of what this looks like in practice, check out The Lost Mine of Phandelver, the scenario that comes with the D&D 5th Edition Starter Set.  It’s a fascinating look at how this really is a blindspot for the 5th Edition designers, because The Lost Mine of Phandelver includes a lot of GM advice. They tell you that the GM needs to:

• Referee
• Narrate
• Play the monsters

They give lots of solid, basic advice like:

• When in doubt, make it up
• It’s not a competition
• It’s a shared story
• Be consistent
• Make sure everyone is involved
• Be fair
• Pay attention

There’s a detailed guide on how to make rulings. They tell you how to set up an adventure hook.

Then the adventure starts and they tell you:

• This is boxed text, you should read it.
• Here is a list of specific things you should do; including getting a marching order so that you know where they’re positioned when the goblins ambush them.
• When the goblins ambush them, they give the DM a step-by-step guide for how combat should start and what they should be doing while running the combat.
• They lay out several specific ways that the PCs can track the goblins back to their lair, and walk the DM through resolving each of them.

And then you get to the goblins’ lair and…  nothing.

I mean, they do an absolutely fantastic job presenting the dungeon:

• General Features
• What the Goblins Know (always love this)
• Keyed map
• And, of course, the key entries themselves describing each room

But the step-by-step instructions for how you’re actually supposed to use this material? It simply… stops. The designers clearly expect, almost certainly without actually consciously thinking about it, that how you run a dungeon is so obvious that even people who need to be explicitly told that they should read the boxed text out loud don’t need to be told how to run a dungeon.

And because they believe it’s obvious, they don’t include it in the game.  And because they don’t include it in the game, new DMs don’t learn it. And, as a result, it stops being obvious.

(To be perfectly clear here: I’m not saying that you need the exact structure for dungeon crawling found in OD&D. That would be silly. But the core, fundamental structure of a location-crawl is not only an essential component for D&D; it’s really fundamental to virtually ALL roleplaying games.)

THE BLINDSPOT PARADOX

Paradoxically, this blindspot not only strips structure from RPGs by removing those structures; it also strips structure from RPGs by blindly forcing structures.

It is very common for a table of RPG players to have a sort of preconceived concept of what functions an RPG is supposed to be fulfilling, and when they encounter a new system they frequently just default back to the sort of “meta-RPG” they never really stop playing. This is encouraged by the fact that the RPG hobby is permeated by the same meme that rules are disposable, with statements like:

• “You should just fudge the results!”
• “Ignore the rules if you need to!”

A widespread culture of kitbashing, of course, is not inherently problematic. It’s a rich and important tradition in the RPG hobby. But it does get a little weird when people start radically houseruling a system before they’ve even played it… often to make it look just like every other RPG they’ve played. (For example, I had a discussion with a guy who said he didn’t enjoy playing Numenera: Before play he’d decided he didn’t like the point spend mechanic for resolving skill checks; didn’t like XP spends for effect; and didn’t like GM intrusions so he didn’t use any of those mechanics. He also radically revamped how the central Effort mechanic works in the game. Nothing inherently wrong with doing any of that, but he never actually played Numenera.)

As a game designer, I actually find it incredibly difficult to get meaningful playtest feedback from RPG players because, by and large, none of them are actually playing the game.

And these memes get even weirder when you encounter them in game designers themselves: People who are ostensibly designing robust rules for other people to use, but in whom the response to “just fudge around it” has become so ingrained that they do it while playtesting their own games instead of recognizing mechanical failures and structural shortcomings and figuring out how to fix them.

EXCEPTIONS TO THE BLINDSPOT

To circle all the way back around here: System Matters. But due to the longstanding blindspot when it comes to game structures and scenario structures in RPGs, we’ve stunted the growth of RPGs. Most of our RPGs are basically the same game, and they shouldn’t be. The RPG medium should be as rich and varied in the games it supports as, for example, the board game industry is. Instead, we have the equivalent of an industry where every board game plays just like Settlers of Catan.

Now there are exceptions to this blindspot when it comes to scenario structures. Partly influenced by storytelling games (which often feature very rigid scenario structures), we’ve been seeing an increasing number of RPGs beginning to incorporate at least partial scenario structures.

Blades in the Dark, for example, has a crew system that supports developing a criminal gang over time. Ars Magica does something similar for a covenant of wizards. Reign provides a generic cap system for managing player-run organizations in competition with other organizations.

Technoir features a plot-mapping scenario structure that’s tied into character creation and noir-driven mechanics.

For Infinity I designed the Psywar system to provide support for complex social challenges (con artistry, social investigation, etc.).

You can also, of course, visit some of the game structures I’ve explored here on the Alexandrian: Party Planning, Tactical Hacking, Urbancrawls. The ongoing Scenario Structure Challenge series will continue to explore these ideas.

Go to Game Structures