“The players have ruined my adventure!”

I see a lot of GMs say this. It generally means that their players have done something that they didn’t expect. And now what are you supposed to do?!

Well, unless it’s a convention game (or some similar situation where there is a strictly limited amount of time available), my answer is invariably going to be, “Let’s see what happens.” (While doing a little happy dance in the back of my brain, because this is what makes RPGs so cool.)

In practical terms, it’s very easy for my players to do something which I hadn’t anticipated. But it’s generally very difficult for them to do something that I have absolutely nothing prepared for. I just don’t prep my scenarios that way. It’s more typical for them to do something unexpected and now the guy that I thought was going to be their patron is, in fact, their arch-enemy. But I still had the guy prepped, right?

So when the PCs have done something radically unexpected, most of the time I just keep doing what I was doing before: Selecting the tools built into the scenario and actively playing them.

In some cases, the PCs will end up tumbling into a section of the scenario that was prepped for a completely different type of interaction. (Common variations include “I didn’t think I’d need a stat block for that character” in relatively complex systems where stat blocks are time-consuming or “this will involve several dozen pieces moving in directions I didn’t anticipate”.) If this happens, I’ll generally call for a 5 or 10 minute break so that I can juggle the pieces into place smoothly.

For example: In my regular D&D campaign a long while ago, there was a situation where some allies of the PCs were going to get involved in a street war. But based on what the PCs were planning to do, it was pretty clear that they weren’t going to be directly involved in the street war. So I prepped that as a sequence of events that the PCs would hear about afterwards. Then the PCs shifted direction and ended up unintentionally right in the middle of the street war: So I took a 10 minute break to prep the additional stat blocks I needed.

In extremely rare cases, the PCs will manage to perform a complete scenario exit. When that happens, I will generally bring the current session to a close and spend the time necessary to prep the new scenario. (Generally you want to ad lib along the new path for a certain distance until the new frame is both clear and the PCs have clearly committed to it. If you imagine that the campaign is currently in Houston and the PCs decide to go to Dallas, you can probably get a fair distance down the freeway or all the way to the city limits of Dallas as you wind things down for the night. This is partly because it will help focus your prep for the new scenario. And it’s also because the players will sometimes abruptly reverse course and drive back to Houston.)

One example in my D&D campaign occurred when a PC landed on top of a randomly generated NPC after a failed teleport attempt. They became almost immediate friends and it turned out that the randomly generated NPC was on his way to a dungeon that he’d discovered. The PCs decided to tag along… to the dungeon that I had literally just created 5 seconds earlier. We were close to quitting time for the night in any case, so I wrapped things up and prepped the dungeon.

(The PCs then promptly decided not to go to the dungeon after all at the beginning of the next session and I had to scrap the entire dungeon. Which is the most prep I’ve had to scrap in the last 7 years of GMing.)

A more recent example occurred when I was running Eternal Lies: The PCs decided to aggressively pursue a two word reference in a letter that I hadn’t anticipated them glomming onto. In that case, we had enough time left in the current session that they booked their flights and, quite literally, got to the city limits before we broke for the night and I prepped a whole new scenario for them.

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.)