Something I discussed in The Art of Pacing is how scenes are framed and filled. The basic idea is that any scene in an RPG has an agenda (the question the scene is trying to answer) and the content of the scene is about trying to resolve that agenda. Most of your scenes will be about conflict: Two or more characters want mutually exclusive things and the scene is about which character gets what they want.

One problem GMs can run into once they understand this framework are non-combat scenes that end up being short and unsatisfying: The PCs have an objective. They briefly interact with the environment or an NPC. And then the scene is over and done.

First: In order for an objective to be interesting, there needs to be an obstacle preventing you from accomplishing it.

For example, let’s say that you have an objective of going to the corner store and buying a Coke. In general, that’s not going to result in an interesting scene because there’s no meaningful obstacle. But if there’s a team of ninjas hunting you through the neighborhood, it gets interesting. If you can’t leave your sister alone because you’re afraid she might commit suicide while you’re gone, it gets interesting.

For your combat scenes, the combat mechanics are generally taking care of providing interesting obstacles. But we could imagine a combat scene which was fairly boring: Imagine a single attack roll that resulted in all of the PCs’ opponents getting wiped out. (That’s not to say you should never have combat scenes like that, of course, any more than you should always have ninjas guarding the corner store.)

For your non-combat scenes, you need to figure out what the obstacle is. And you’ll get even better scenes if there are multiple obstacles, multiple objectives, or both. (In many cases you can simply set up the objectives of the scene so that they conflict with each other and, presto, you’ve got both.)

Technoir introduces a useful concept called vectors: You often can’t just jump directly to making an “I solve the problem” die roll. Instead, you have to make some preparatory rolls in order to establish a vector to the thing you actually want to effect.

For example: You want to shoot Victor inside his club. But you can’t just drive up outside the club and shoot him. First you’ll have to find some way to get inside (sneaking or fast-talking your way past the bouncers), then track him down, and then take your shot.

For example: You want to convince Michael to sell you the datachip. But first you’re going to have to get him to admit that he has it. Then you’ve got to convince him that there’s another way to save his sister. And then you’ve got to convince him that you’re offering him something worth the risk.

As with anything else you prep, you don’t want to fall into the trap of predetermining how the PCs are going to overcome the obstacles. Instead, just set the obstacles: Michael doesn’t want to admit he has the datachip. Michael needs it to save his sister. Let the players worry about how they’re going to overcome those obstacles.

Back to the Art of Pacing

There’s a particularly prevalent — but completely incorrect — belief wandering around that sandboxes don’t have scenario hooks.

To the contrary: A good sandbox has scenario hooks hanging all over the place. The successful sandbox will not only be festooned with scenario hooks, it will also feature some form of default action that can be used to deliver more hooks if the players find themselves bereft of interesting options.

For example, a typical hexcrawl sandbox features a rumor table (which serves up some arbitrary number of scenario hooks to the PCs) and a default action if none of those rumors sound appealing (wandering around the map until you find something interesting).

A megadungeon sandbox similarly features a rumor table and a default action (go explore some unknown part of the dungeon).

Prepping this plethora of scenario hooks can be daunting for a GM who believes that every scenario hook needs to be linked to a distinct, unique plot. The trick to a sandbox is that you don’t prep plots: You prep situations. And for the sandbox you’ll be able to hang countless hooks off of every situation. You’ll also discover how sandbox situations “stay alive” even after the PCs have interacted with them (instead of being completely chewed up and discarded).

For example, let’s say you’ve got a dungeon a fair distance outside of town that’s the remains of a Neo-Norskan temple complex. It’s currently being occupied by a Bandit King who has forged together an alliance of humans, goblins, and ogres. He’s also renting skeletons off a nearby necromancer.

In terms of scenario hooks, there’s all kinds of stuff you can hang on this situation: Bandit raids are terrorizing local villages. A powerful magical artifact was stolen from a local caravan. There are old legends about the Neo-Norskan temple and what it contains. Because of the skeletons, there are false rumors that the necromancer lives there. Or that the necromancer has allied with the Bandit King. (And you can salt these scenario hooks into the campaign in any number of ways: Rumor tables. Lore recovered from other locations. Allies of the PCs who are now in need. Et cetera.)

So one day the PCs grab one of these hooks and they go off and they kill the Bandit King and they take the magical artifact he was carrying.

Over and done with, right? Only not really, because the guy who originally owned the magical artifact still wants it, so now the PCs are getting attacked by bounty hunters attempting to recover the artifact. Meanwhile, they didn’t wipe out all the bandits and the remaining goblins are renewing their raids under the leadership of the One-Eyed Ogre.

So the PCs go back to the Neo-Norskan temple and this time they wipe out all the bandits, permanently ending their threat to the region. Except now the Necromancer sees a big, open dungeon complex filled with the discarded corpses the PCs have left in their wake, and so he moves in and animates the corpses as a skeletal army.

Which all sounds like a lot of work, but because you prepped the whole thing as a situation to begin with you haven’t needed to spend more than about 5 minutes “refreshing” this content between sessions: You’re reusing the same maps and stat blocks over and over again. You spent a little time putting together new stat blocks for the bounty hunters when they showed up. And there was probably some light re-keying necessary for the changes the Necromancer made when he took over the complex.

You didn’t have to buy a whole new set of tools every single time. You just occasionally added a new tool when necessary. (And occasionally removed a hammer that the PCs had broken.)

This can be easier to visualize with a location (which is why I use it as an example), but the same basic process holds true for, say, factions in an urban campaign. Create a gang that’s, for example, manufacturing and marketing a drug derived from blood that’s been harvested from vampires and you should be able to use that toolkit to generate dozens of sessions of play.

The other thing that happens in a sandbox campaign is synergy between the different elements of the sandbox: By holding onto the artifact that was stolen from them, the PCs make enemies of House Nobuzo. This unexpectedly earns them a patron in the form of House Erskine, unleashing a flurry of scenario hooks from the “feuding noble houses” toolkit you designed. As the PCs get drawn into that world, they’re approached by a minor house named Tannar: They’re currently allied to House Nobuzo, but their daughter has been murdered by the Necromancer who has now stolen her body in order to transform her into his Corpse Bride. If the PCs can rescue their daughter from a fate literally worse than death, they’ll break their alliance with House Nobuzo and pledge for House Erskine.

After that scenario has resolved itself, you might find that the players are now actively looking for minor houses that they can endear to their political causes by doing favors for them. (Which would organically create a new default action for delivering scenario hooks.)

In any case, once your sandbox toolkits start interacting with each other like this, you’ll quickly find that the sandbox is basically running itself.

In 26 years of play, I have literally never seen PCs voluntarily surrender. Admittedly, beyond a certain point my villains largely stopped asking.

The only time I’ve had PCs taken prisoner is because they’d been beaten into unconsciousness. There was one incident about 3 years ago where a single PC got separated from the rest of the party and was captured (the rest of the party ended up using a wish spell to rescue her). The previous incident was about 4 years before that where all but one of the PCs were captured (the other PC was somewhere else at the time that the rest of the party was beaten unconscious).

Recently, I was running Eternal Lies, a published campaign which, on two occasions, expected (but didn’t require) the PCs to be captured. In one case, the PCs simply avoided the entire situation by staying three steps ahead of the bad guys. In the other, the NPCs whose “vast numbers” were supposed to make them surrender got hosed down in a hail of machine gun fire before they had a chance to even open their mouths and demand the white flag.

There was one group about 4 years ago who briefly discussed surrendering because they were near death and had been cut off from the surface by a half dozen giants and an entire platoon of orcs. They decided that it made more sense to literally cut their own heads off so that the elven wizard could stick them in a bag of holding, turn invisible, and fly them out to get resurrected. (Surprisingly, that worked out for all but one of them.)

Whenever I see a published adventure that requires the PCs to surrender, I take it as a very strong indication that the product was never playtested. (In my more cynical moments, it also makes me suspicious that the author has never actually played an RPG.)

From Reddit:

At the conclusion to this school year’s campaign, in order to pick up at the beginning of next semester, I want to have Pelor and Sehanine fight, with Pelor winning and eating Sehanine’s heart to become corrupted. However, if I just set the gods in a valley and describe what happens as they throw down, I feel like I am taking away my players agency. Advice?

My response to this is based on Part 2 of The Art of Pacing, and I thought it raised some specific points that might be of interest to others:

Right now you’re setting the agenda of the scene as, “Will Pelor eat Sehanine’s heart?” That’s an understandable impulse because it’s clearly the biggest and coolest thing happening in that particular moment. But, as you note, that agenda doesn’t mention the PCs at all and, therefore, prevents them from taking any meaningful action.

Instead of focusing on the outcome of the god-fight, you need to figure out what the PCs’ agenda will be during the fight: What is it they’re trying to accomplish and what are the obstacles they’ll need to overcome to accomplish it?

Another way to think about this would be to replace the god-fight with a similarly cataclysmic event. For example, the PCs are in Los Angeles and the Big One hits the San Andreas fault. The agenda here would not be, “Will the earthquake destroy Los Angeles?” The answer to that question is beyond the PCs’ control. The agenda will instead involve the PCs reacting to the immediate chaos and destruction around them, probably answering variations of, “Can you survive?” or “Can you save that person/place/item?”)

Or you could actually think of the god-fight as a spectator event. For example, let’s say your PCs go to a football game. There are two possibilities here: Either the event is narrated very quickly and you move on to the next interesting thing which actively involves the PCs (“The game goes to sudden death overtime, but the Vikings pull out a victory. What do you do after the game?”). Or you’re focused on an event happening at the football match which is unrelated to the game (so that the agenda is something like, “Will Carlie kiss you?”). Or the PCs are able to take actions which somehow impact the outcome of the game (by stopping the gangsters who are trying to assassinate the star wide receiver or by outfitting the home team’s shoes with Flubber or whatever).

Returning to the god-fight, you’ll find that the same techniques apply. You could spend 30 seconds describing the titanic fight in brief (but effective) detail before moving onto the next agenda that’s immediately relevant to the PCs. Or you could set agendas that:

• Deal with the collateral damage of the fight (saving themselves or others).
• Use the god-fight as the backdrop for some other conflict. (Which may have nothing to do with the god-fight; for example, as the gods begin to fight the PCs might be attacked by a group of assassins. The narration of the god-fight backdrops or thematically complements the fight against the assassins; maybe by-products from the god-fight affect the assassin fight in cool ways.)
• Allow the PCs to directly affect or influence the god-fight (maybe there are local shrines to the gods that they can imbue with energy; or they could organize mass prayers; or travel to points of sympathetic divine resonance in the region and sacrifice their divine spell slots to aid their god).
• Or the outcome of the god-fight (for example they might be able to take actions during the fight which will either aid or hinder them later while dealing with Pelor’s corruption).
• Allow the PCs to learn something from the god-fight.

If you’re struggling to come up with an appropriate agenda, don’t be afraid of letting your players set the agenda. For example:

GM: Pelor and Sehanine start to fight. What do you do?

Players: We RUN!!

Presto. The agenda is, “Can they escape?” and you should be able to run with it from there. Even if they decide there’s no possible agenda for them to pursue (like people just enjoying the football game in front of them), it’s still a useful technique:

GM: Pelor and Sehanine start to fight. What do you do?

Players: We sit in stunned silence and watch.

Now you can launch into you 60 second description of the titanic battle playing out in front of them, but you haven’t removed their agency. (They’re the ones who chose to stay and watch.)

Final tip: Break the fight into a half dozen or so distinct beats. Describing these beats succinctly is the 60 second description, but the beats also provide a flexible structure for any other agendas that might be pursued. (If they start fighting assassins, for example, each beat gets described as the backdrop to a round of combat. If they try to save people in a nearby village, some or all of the beats provide complications to that effort. And so forth.)

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #15