Plot for the Win

“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of normie contact.”
—Robert McKee

At their core, RPG adventures are stories, just like screenplays or novellas--and just like screenplays or novellas, one vital element you cannot escape is the plot. It’s this plot, this overarching narrative, that ties your encounters together and makes a roleplaying game different from a tactical wargame. For a game of RECON or Heavy Gear or even Savage Worlds, you may sit down and play a battle or a series of battles with little more than a set of winning objectives to guide you. For a roleplaying campaign, though, you’re telling a story, and, whether you’ve sat down and meticulously outlined each plot point ahead of time or whether you’re GMing by the seat of your pants, story always means plot.

WHY SHOULD I EVEN CARE?

I’ve met naive gamemasters that scoff at other GMs that like to plan their adventures, believing so utterly in their keen ability for extemporaneous GMing that they scorn preparation in any form. I’ve also met authors that mock story outlining, believing that any form of story planning stifles their creativity and the organic progression of their art.

Both views are misguided, not least because they misunderstand what it means to plan a story.

Any story outline, whether you’re writing or gamemastering, is a set of landmarks for the direction you want your story to take. It doesn’t railroad your characters nor your player characters into a particular set of actions, (although you might) any more than giving a traveller a map forces hir to follow it. What it does is help prepare you to run your story in a manner that is clearly and consistently moving toward a logical, satisfying, well-reasoned conclusion. 

It avoids those situations where you pull out the big reveal at the end, and your players sit back and scratch their heads and say, “Huh? That doesn’t make any sense.” (Those are the worst!)

Whether you’re writing fiction or gamemastering an RPG, your job in the moment is to extrapolate the actions your characters or player characters take and translate those into meaningful consequences within the scope of your adventure. If your characters followed closely to the outline you envisioned when you created the story, that’d be easy. The more they veered off course from your mapped narrative, the more creativity you’ll have to bring to bear to make their actions have a meaningful impact on the conclusion of the story. Especially for player characters, it’s entirely possible that they’ll choose to abandon your story completely and do something they find more compelling. In that case, their actions may have little to no impact on how the story comes out. (I suspect it’s these kinds of ornery players that most often take the perspective as GMs that outlining a story beforehand isn’t worth the trouble.) It’s usually best to be prepared for this eventuality, as well--in story as in life, just because you had nothing to do with an event doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect you.

It is possible to roleplay without ever telling a story. Sandbox roleplaying video games excel at this. In these games, though, it’s hard for your character to have any lasting impact on the world and characters around hir (other than killing or destroying them, of course)--and isn’t that the whole fun behind campaigning? 

MAKING A STORY OUTLINE

The most straightforward story outline for an RPG adventure notes the encounters you need to progress your plot from intro to conclusion. 

First, you’ll have an intro or a hook. This is the encounter (let’s call it a scene) where you tell the players the problem they’ll be facing in the scenario. It may take the form of a mission briefing, a job offer, or an urgent plea for help, but it all serves the purpose of informing your protagonists of the conflict in your story. Mind you, the intro doesn’t have to be a single encounter. Particularly in horror stories, an intro might encompass several scenes that build mounting dread around a central plot. In its simplest form, though, an adventure outline has an opening encounter that will convince the PCs that the problem in the adventure pertains to them in some way compelling enough for them to face it.

For tiny subplots, the very next scene might be the conclusion, where the PCs face the antagonist or challenge and resolve the story, whether through combat or through conversation. For most plots, though, there will be one or more intermediate encounters that develop the threat and storyline. Each of these scenes serves to progress the plot and move the characters closer to the conclusion of the story.

So what is a scene, in the context of adventure planning? A scene or encounter, depending on the verbiage you prefer, is nothing more complicated than action or interaction that happens to the protagonists: a combat encounter, a social encounter, or a challenge to the characters’ skills. Sometimes your players will drive this action and set up an active encounter (one that the PCs establish on their own) for themselves; sometimes, you’ll spring a passive encounter (one that NPCs initiate with the PCs) on them. You can plan for both types of scene in your preparations.

The scripted scenes you’ll impose on the PCs to drive your plot along are easy to plan. You can plan them to happen when the PCs reach a particular place (this is very common in dungeons), where you can control the tactical aspects of the battle. When your storyline is on a timetable, you can plan them to happen at a particular hour or point in the story regardless of where the PCs are. As needed, you can also plan them to happen under a given set of circumstances, like when the PCs find a particular object or take a specific NPC in their party. Often, these trigger circumstances are just common sense, based on the specifics of the encounter, and don’t really require any thought nor explanation.

Alternately, it’s sometimes necessary to come up with encounters on the fly as your players choose to veer off into uncharted territory--however, you can also plan for these moments by making up some unscripted encounters the GM can throw in as appropriate, based on the PCs’ actions. Just like with scripted encounters, these don’t have to involve combat. 

One side encounter might revolve around a crumbling stone fountain in the middle of a field. The PCs can examine it to determine its use or its construction; they can try to repair it; they can decipher the inscription to learn its purpose. They can smash it or ignore it. Later on, they can use it as a landmark or go back and try to get water out of it or ask about it at the nearest temple or library. 

Another side encounter might involve finding an unusual plant the druid or ranger thinks is used in potions to cure petrifaction. The party takes the herb and tries to find a place to sell it before it dries out.

Perhaps the PCs happen across a line of peasants dressed in mourning clothes and carrying a wooden box on their shoulders. Perhaps they meet a troupe of travelling entertainers. Perhaps they find combat.

The point is, there’s no end to the types of scenes you can prepare, and many of them can be adapted to fit whatever situation you need in the game. Many scenes will relate directly to your main plot, but you can also design a couple to introduce sidequests or subplots the PCs can follow if they’re interested. You can create others to lead them back to the main plot if they wander. A few may simply be red herrings. With any scene you design, though, always keep in mind how it relates to the central plot of your adventure and how this scene moves the story toward its conclusion. 

Most of the scenes in your adventure should directly progress the main story in some way. Unless your group gets to game a lot, you probably have a limited time to finish your story. The more sessions you intend to spend on an adventure, the more subquests you can introduce--but unless you’re seeding plots for future adventures, it’s generally not a good idea to distract the players with more than one sidequest, or two short sidequests, per session.

Similar to sidequests are subplots. Subplots are recurring storylines that pop up in the middle of other stories. Most often, you’ll see these in individual character arcs. These make great additions to your adventure if you want to change things up--but again, beware time constraints. Subplots are best executed a little at a time over an extended period, so keep these types of encounter short and suggestive. Don’t spend a lot of time, but do leave them wanting more.

Besides these, you can always fill out an adventure with optional encounters, those unclassified events the GM can toss into the mix if the session needs a bit of irrelevant conflict. (Or if the players start goofing off. Personally, I like to plan the dangerous combat encounters to use when the players start to goof off.)

PACING THE PERIL

Consider a dungeon. In a dungeon, you’ll have one room with a combat encounter. In the next room, you’ll place a trap or a puzzle; then an empty room with nothing but scenery and set pieces. Then you might have another combat encounter, and then the stairs to the next level. If the dungeon has an open layout, the players will have some control over which order they face each challenge--but the point stands: you don’t have combat in every single room.

Why not?

In a word, pacing.

D&D 4th Edition tried to enforce this sense of pacing with the concept of the Short Rest: a break between combat encounters that allowed characters to recover their once-per-combat abilities and to restore their Hit Points. (It was one of the things I really liked about 4th edition.) In Shadowrun, its Treat and Heal spells took up to 10 minutes apiece to cast, doing effectively the same thing. Even without such rules constructs, though, players tend to create their own breaks between combat by looting bodies and searching for treasure.

Still, drifting from combat to combat in a neverending stream of battle is no way to tell a story. In a story, you may lead with an action-packed combat scene, but then you switch to dialogue to give the audience a chance to catch their breath. The protagonists go through a thrilling chase sequence before they reach another combat, and then the story cuts to an exploration scene where the heroes search for a clue. Finally, armed with this information, they go to find the bad guy’s lair for the concluding scene. 

In short, don’t forget to break up the action. When the PCs are set to storm the enemy camp, it’s easy to plan five or six combat encounters in a row without stopping to consider what that will do to your story. Instead, add traps and locked doors to let the thief show off her skills. Put in a room full of low-level enemies to give the wizard that perfect chance to use Sleep. Introduce an injured prisoner so the cleric has more to do than cure his allies’ battle scars all the time. Include a shifty mercenary lieutenant so the bard can try to persuade her and her soldiers to leave without a fight. Include some unusual stonework to give the dwarf a chance to recognize pertinent details about the environment. Put in a secret door or two for the elf to detect.

Different playing groups prefer different playing styles. Some groups like combat-heavy games, while others prefer more interaction. If you can deliver adventures with coherent storylines that feature challenges that will allow all of your players to share in the experience, that’s usually enough to make you a good GM. Add in plot twists, surprise endings, subplots, and sidequests? If you can do that and maintain an uncluttered plot that satisfies your players, your players will think you are great.

Game well, friends.

Jonathan Andrews