Tag Archives: adventure design

The fifth-edition Dungeon Master’s Guide joins the battle against excessive backstory

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When I got my copy of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, I first looked at topics that overlap with posts I plan for this blog. If the DMG already said it, I will work on something else. Turns out, as good as the book is, I still have things to add.

In chapter 3, “Creating Adventures,” the book lists “Elements of a Great Adventure.” The list covers familiar ground, but one entry surprised me. Great adventures should put a clear focus of the present. “Instead of dealing with what happened in the past, an adventure should focus on describing the present situation.” The author wisely lists positive elements to aim toward, rather than negatives to avoid, but I see the negative: backstory. Avoid weighing your adventure with history and background that players either cannot see or don’t care about. This surprised me because Dungeon magazine once ranked as the number one perpetrator of excessive backstory.

Dungeon magazine 25For a paragon of superfluous backstory, see this room description from Dungeon 25. “Trophy Room. This room once contained trophies of war. Swords, spears, and armor of all kinds were dedicated here to the everlasting glory of the fallen orc leaders. Centuries ago, the walls were draped with elven banners, dwarves sigils, gnome heraldry, and the flags and standards of men, goblins, and various orc tribes. The moonorc leaders have stripped the room of anything useful in order to outfit the tribe. The weapons and armor were quickly divided among the warriors, while the flags and banners were torn down and used for blankets or ripped apart and resewn into bags, sacks, and clothing. The room now contains only refuse and rusty, unusable equipment.” The description could just list “refuse and rusty, unusable equipment,” but adds 100 words of fluff that cannot possibly come into play.

The quote comes via Bryce Lynch’s crabby, entertaining reviews of Dungeon magazine adventures on tenfootpole.org.

Of course, most backstory appears in the front of adventures under the heading “Adventure Background,” and starting with the words, “A century ago…,” followed by three more pages of background. For anything more complicated than goblin raiders, authors feel obligated to start their background a millennium ago.

Some backstory improves a game. Anyone building a world—or just a dungeon—must imagine the history of the place to make it consistent. Creating a backstory can inspire ideas. When players notice a little history, the game world feels more connected and vibrant.

But adventures never arrive light on backstory. I feel annoyed when an adventure makes me trudge through pages of phony history to run a game session. Judging by Bryce Lynch’s reviews of Dungeon magazine adventures, I feel pretty sure backstory killed his parents.

Why do authors weigh down adventures with superfluous backstory? I count three reasons:

  • Forgetting that adventures exist to be played. Unnecessary backstory seemed to peak in the era of the campaign setting, what James Maliszewski calls D&D’s Bronze Age (1990-1995). During this era, TSR seemed to produce products to be read more than played. They published seven campaign settings supported by mountains of supporting material and novels. Nobody could play a fraction of it all. If an adventure exists more to be read than played, then backstory adds as much as playable content.
    I have the theory that the folks who write role-playing adventures do it because they like to write. I know, crazy. You would think they would do it for the cash and girls. Some writers seem to discover that simply writing RPG products scratches the same creative itch that once led them to play role-playing games. Over time, the writing assignments pile up, their gaming buddies move on, and these writers find themselves writing for role-playing games, but not playing them. During this same bronze age, I seem to recall a lot of designers admitting that they no longer played the games they wrote for.
  • An obligation to justify the elements of the adventure. Dungeons have changed from the original monster hotels peppered with rooms plucked from a lethal funhouse. Even in a fantasy world, players and DMs expect things to make sense. In Backstory and Adventure Design, Gus L writes, “One of the best parts of wonder, strangeness and exploration is figuring out why and how something is in the game world and how it connects to the rest of that world. Without context, a dungeon is just a series of puzzles, rewards and enemies.” In this spirit, I offered “5 reasons someone might build a dungeon filled with clues and tests.”
     
    Remember when your math teacher insisted that you show your work? I’m a DM. I just want answers—just the history that enhances play. I appreciate if you can justify every detail of an adventure with some torturous back story, but you can keep most of it to yourself. I don’t need the history of Krypton to enjoy a Superman tale.
     

     
    When your creative process leads you to create an elaborate history that the players will never learn, the game will still benefit. An unseen backstory will inspire telling details that make the game world more vivid. That history will lend the setting and characters a consistency that they would otherwise lack. 
  • A desire to share the creative work that led to the adventure. Most authors who create a detailed history as part of their creative process cannot bear to leave it untold. So they write thousands of words under “Adventure Background” and force me to sift the nuggets that will enter play. Like every writer, adventure authors must murder their darlings. (Or at least put them in colored insets as I do.)

Next: When and how to introduce backstory

How knowing the difference between a setting book and an adventure helps craft better adventures

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What makes an adventure different from a setting book? Both start with maps, locations, and characters, but what extra ingredients turn a source book into an adventure? You might name story or plot as that essential extra bit, but early adventures lacked anything like a story. Many players favor adventures without plots, where you can enjoy as much freedom to play as a sandbox.

Not an adventure

Not an adventure

The fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide says, “An adventure typically hinges on the successful completion of a quest.” The word “quest” adds some gravity to what could just be a search for loot, so I say “goal.”

Adventures start with a goal that leads to obstacles. The first dungeon adventures presents characters with the simple goal of retrieving treasure from the dungeon, and obstacles like monsters and traps that stand in the way. Forty years later, characters may chase other goals—they may never enter a dungeon, but the essential ingredients of goals and obstacles remain.

Even the most primitive D&D adventures assume the game’s default goal of gaining treasure to enhance your character’s power. The early game made this goal explicit by awarding characters experience points for treasure.

Setting books can include maps to explore, non-player characters to interact with, and perhaps even a monster lair, but without goals and obstacles, they fail to qualify as adventures.

The designers of fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons focused their design on supporting three pillars of play: combat, exploration, and interaction. Adventure creators rarely struggle to create goals and obstacles for the combat and exploration pillars, but they often fail to properly support the interaction pillar.

A combat encounter features a built in goal—to survive—and ready obstacles, the monsters. Great combat encounters may feature more interesting goals, hazards, and traps, but no one ever built a combat encounter by pitting characters against butterflies and rainbows.

To support exploration, adventures pair maps with number keys. Adventure designers create maps for locations that players have a reason to explore and that presents obstacles. If the players decide buy horses, you do not need a map of the stables keyed with a description of what’s on the floor of each stall. Sometimes adventures include maps and keys for ordinary buildings with mundane contents, but most authors know better.

When adventure authors try to support interaction, they often falter. They devise non-player characters who the players have no reason to interact with—NPCs who do not fit a goal. See “A priest, a warlock, and a dwarf walk into a bar and…nothing happens.” They create NPCs who present no obstacle to the PCs’ progress. (Certainly a few NPCs can simply provide flavor or exposition, but most NPCs should do more.) NPCs best fit into an adventure when players encounter them in pursuit of a goal, and when they present some obstacle. By obstacle, I do not mean that NPCs must serve as creatures to fight. NPCs can act as obstacles in countless other ways.

But many adventures see print larded with NPCs that fail to support interaction. The authors devise rosters of colorful characters, but stop short of devising ways to put them in the paths of the PCs’ goals. Authors lavish text on some shopkeeper’s aspirations and home life just so he can sell rope.

For example, Hoard of the Dragon Queen describes 22 NPCs who join the PCs on a two-month journey, but few of these NPCs entice the players to interact, and none act as obstacles. If I want to use any to “spice up the journey, or bring the trip to life,” I need to find ways to put them in scenes with the players. When I ran Hoard, I did this work. But designers Steve Winter and Wolfgang Baur claimed a bit of my money while working as RPG designers—a dream job. I paid them to do the work for me. Instead they dumped a load of parts, and then left the work to me. Ironically, the dragon cultists on the same journey, who may serve as obstacles, get no description at all.

Not enough for interaction

Not enough for interaction

Adventure designers fail when they suppose that character descriptions alone provide enough basis for interaction. Like maps and monster stats, NPC descriptions cannot stand alone in an adventure. Scenes provide the true basis for interaction.

Scenes require at least one of these three elements: a goal, an obstacle, and a lead. The best have all three elements.

The goal for a scene stems from what the players think they can accomplish by meeting a non-player character. Convince the fearful witness to name the assassin. Strike a deal with the troll to let you pass. Discover why the beggar keeps staring at the party. Whenever the players must persuade an NPC to provide help or information, they have a goal.

Scenes without goals begin when NPCs approach the PCs. These scenes can provide flavor or exposition. For example, the players may help a merchant who speaks of the ghost ship raiding the coast, or a beggar who explains how the wizard looks just like a legendary tyrant. Most scenes without a goal establish one when an NPC explains what they offer, and then what obstacles the PCs must overcome to gain cooperation.

If an NPC only provides flavor without advancing the PCs’ goals, the players may enjoy a brief interaction, but soon they will wonder why you judged the NPC worth bringing on stage. “Who is this guy? Did we miss something that should make us care?”

A scene’s simplest obstacle comes when players must devise the right questions to get information they need from a willing source. Greater obstacles appear whenever an NPC in a scene proves unwilling or unable to help. For more, see “22 Reasons why a non-player character won’t cooperate.” Scenes without obstacles tend to play short. Once players get the bit of information or assistance they need, they tend to grow impatient, ready for the next challenge.

Even if an NPC helps the players, when a scene presents no obstacles, players will lose interest. If you devote too much time to colorful shopkeepers when the players just want gear, they will gripe. Perhaps not to you, but to me. I’ve heard them. A lack of obstacles means that an adventure’s denouement, where the PC’s patron grants treasure and ties up loose ends, never seems very compelling.

Most scenes end with at least one lead, some clue or item that directs the players to their next step. For example, a lead could be the identity of the burglar who stole the Casket of Wrath, or the key to the vault. The best scenes end with a choice of leads to follow.

Fourth edition Living Forgotten Realms adventures often supported interaction with scenes rather than just characters. The fifth-edition adventures I’ve seen lapse back to just listing NPCs. Why? I suspect the 5E designers associate scenes with railroading. They wish to break from the tight-plotting of 4E adventures, where players moved between encounter numbers 1-2-3, in order. Instead, they list characters, and so force me to give players a reason to meet them in scenes.

ELTU3-1 Good Intentions with my added blue labels

Scenes in the Living Forgotten Realms Adventure ELTU3-1 Good Intentions

The plots and NPCs in recent adventures like Hoard of the Dragon Queen and especially Murder in Baldur’s Gate show true ambition. I suspect the designers aimed for the role-playing equivalent of the n-body problem with the players and NPCs scheming, acting, and reacting in ways too dynamic for the constraints of scenes and encounters. So the authors delegate keeping track of all the threads to the dungeon master. We must become George R. R. Martin, except instead of getting years to hash out the details, we must improvise. To add to the challenge, these adventures still expect dungeon masters to adhere to an overall story, so I find myself choosing whether to use DM mind tricks to nudge the players back on course or to allow them to stray completely off text.  For me, the ambition of these adventures works better in scenarios I create, when I have a complete understanding of moving parts that I created. Published adventures work best when the DM can operate without mastery of entire storyline and its many, moving parts. They work best when they hold to encounters, locations, and scenes—with ample, meaningful choices for the players to choose a course from scene to scene.

Scenes do not contribute to railroading any more than dungeon walls. Railroading comes when adventures fail to offer players choices. If every scene ends with exactly one lead, then you have a railroad. If each scene ends with a few leads that offer interesting, meaningful choices, then you have adventure.

Related: For an example of my struggle to injecting more interaction into an adventure, see “What Murder In Baldur’s gate taught me about engaging players in role playing.”

Designing for spells that spoil adventures

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In my last two posts, starting with Spells that can ruin adventures, I discussed the various spells with the potential to spoil Dungeons & Dragons adventures, turning hours of fun into a quick ambush. You may say, “Why worry? Just rule that these spells don’t exist in your campaign.” Clearly, you have enough foresight to carefully examine the spell lists, establishing a list of dangerous spells and magic items that might ruin your campaign plans. Of course, you could also rule that Zone of Truth doesn’t exist in your game the minute it becomes a problem. But your players will hate that.

The D&D system’s spells and magic contribute to an implied setting that most D&D players and DMs share. As a DM, you can ban spells, but that offers no help for authors of adventures for organized play or for publication. Authors writing D&D fiction also must work around these spells, or ignore them and hope the readers fail to notice.

The fourth edition attempted to eliminate every last adventure ruining effect. Fly effects really just let you jump. The ethereal plane is gone, or at least inaccessible. Linked portals replace the long-range teleport spell. While I favor this approach over keeping all the problem spells in in the system, I concede that the purge might have been heavy handed.

So that brings us to today. Seeing Zone of Truth in the D&D Next spell list inspired me to write these posts. These spells and effects need careful weighing of the benefits they offer to the game, and more thought to how they effect adventures and the implied game setting.

For the designers of D&D, I have the following suggestions:

  • Spells that compel honesty or discern lies do not add enough to the game to earn a place in the game. These spells could exist as a optional elements.
  • Spells that detect evil should only detect the supernatural evil of undead, outsiders and the like.
  • Divination spells must provide hints and clues rather than unequivocal answers, and should discourage players from seeking answers too often.
  • Scry spells must be subject to magical and mundane counters such as the metal sheeting that blocked Clairvoyance and Clairaudience in the first edition.
  • Scry spells should never target creatures, like Scrying, but only known locations, like Clairvoyance and Clairaudience.
  • Ethereal travel must be subject to barriers such as gorgon’s blood mortar, permanent ethereal objects, and perhaps even vines, as mentioned in the original Manual of the Planes.
  • The game should offer some magical countermeasures to teleportation, such as Anticipate Teleport, and the ability to make these spells permanent.
  • The Dungeon Master’s Guide needs a chapter on magical effects that the DM should plan for in campaign and adventure design, starting with fly and divination.

Next: But how do you win?

Scry and fry

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(Part 2 of a series, which begins with Spells that can ruin adventures.)

Third edition Dungeons & Dragons added the Scrying spell, which unlike Clairvoyance and Clairaudience could target a creature rather than just a familiar location. Scrying worked in conjunction with Teleport to make villains vulnerable to the scry-buff-teleport system of ambush, also known as scry and fry.

The target of the Scrying spell gets a save, but the wizard can always wait for another attempt, or just scry Igor or minion #3. The game offers a couple of eighth-level, defensive spells in Screen and Mind Blank. Will the Dark Lord mind blank Igor too? None of these spells can be made permanent, so apparently, every high-level villain needs archmages on staff just to thwart do-gooder knuckleheads who can cast a sixth-level spell. In practice, the best defense might be a DM with the chutzpah to fudge an improbable number of saves. The Pathfinder system makes the spell easy to counter with lead shielding. Why didn’t Gary Gygax think of that? He did. In the first edition, metal sheeting blocked Clairvoyance and Clairaudience.

The teleport ambush worked so well, and the game offered so few countermeasures that Monte Cook stepped up in 2001 and included spells like Teleport Block, Teleport Tracer, and Teleport Redirect in his Book of Eldritch Might. In 2005, the Spell Compendium finally added practical countermeasures to the base game with Anticipate Teleportation and Greater Anticipate Teleportation. These spells delay the arrival of teleporting creatures into an area long enough to foil an ambush.

Anticipate Teleportation serves as an excellent example of a countermeasure that allows problematic spells to continue working, while adding interesting complications that makes using them risky. If Anticipate Teleportation can be made permanent, then it adds a perfect solution to the game. Teleport Redirect, on the other hand, counters Teleport with an easily lethal trap. As a DM, I want to avoid killing an entire party due to an unwise teleport.

Players don’t like having the DM nullify the cool things they can do, even if it’s cloaked in the guise of the villain’s wards and traps. If your villain happens to use some of the gotcha effects, you’re really going to see some angry glares across the table. “So you’re saying that after you heard us talking about teleporting, the bad guy just ‘happened’ to have Teleport Redirect in place.”

Players hate when you use your DM’s knowledge of their plans to invalidate their cleverness or cool toys. (And unless you can point to the gotcha, spelled out in advance, in ink, players will always suspect this.)

The ideal defenses to game-ruining spells make the spells riskier to use without invalidating them, like Anticipate Teleport. The counter effects cannot be so devastating that players feel punished for daring to use their hard-earned magic against the DM’s pet villains. And some countermeasures, like metal sheeting, need to be within reach of canny villains who cannot afford to keep archmages on retainer.

Next: Designing for spells that spoil adventures

Spells that can ruin adventures

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Have you ever had an adventure spoiled by a spell? Through the history of Dungeons & Dragons, a variety of spells carried the potential to short circuit or spoil whole categories of adventures—at least without significant planning to avoid the spells’ potential.

Spells like Detect Lie (later Discern Lies) and Zone of Truth threaten to eliminate intrigue. They would turn A Song and Ice and Fire into short story.

When spells like Commune and Speak with Dead in the game, you can forget whodunits.

The Prince of Murder’s army of assassins cannot keep him safe in his mountain aerie if the characters can scry and fry.

Many of the adventure spoiling spells existed in the early days, but given the play styles of the times, they posed few problems.

Once upon a time D&D games took place in huge sprawling dungeons like the one under Castle Greyhawk, where monsters wandered and players balanced their own encounters by deciding how deep they dared to go.

Adventures never featured intrigue. You never needed to find the real killer from among a group of suspects. As the Dungeon Crawl Classics adventures advertised, “NPCs were there to be killed.”

Detect Lie probably started as a way to determine if the captive Kobold was lying about the treasure behind the “untrapped” door ahead. It also deterred the thief from stealing your stuff. Know Alignment simply existed so the cleric could tell the paladin who to kill first.

A few troublesome spells existed in the early days, but Gary built in solutions for the DM. The description of Commune says, “It is probably that the referee will limit the use of Commune to one per adventure, one per week, or even one per month, for the gods dislike frequent interruption.” Strangely, when you want to know who betrayed the party, the gods always prove too busy. The Contact other Plane spell could potentially gather lies or drive the caster insane. How bad do you want to know? In practice, these spells typically provided the Dungeon Master with a way to give hints to stuck players.

In the early days, information spells couldn’t ruin adventures, but travel and movement spells could.

As long as the players stayed indoors, Fly wasn’t a big deal. Outside, it let players fly past obstacle and enemies or just bomb and strafe them from out of reach. Every DM who fails to plan for flying will see mid-level encounters ruined, but you learn fast.

Ethereal travel can threaten to take dungeons right of the game. Any cleric with the 5th level Plane Shift spell could take seven friends ethereal, allowing them to waft through the dangerous dungeon stuff and go straight for the treasure. AD&D attempted to limit the problem by populating the ethereal with tough wandering monsters and the random Ether Cyclone. Apparently that failed to deter enough adventurers because Tomb of Horrors includes this note: “Character who become astral or ethereal in the Tomb will attract a type I-IV demon 1 in 6, with a check made each round.”

The Manual of the Planes finally gave Acererak and other dungeon makers options other than contracting with the Abyss for ethereal security. Now you could overlap your stronghold with barriers such as ethereal stone, or you could mix gorgon blood into your mortar. Inexplicably, third edition made the gorgon-blood trick an optional rule. Thanks guys. Who’s side are you on?

By the time 3E came around, some designers had become so immersed in the story slant of D&D that they forgot how broken ethereal travel could be. How else can we explain Ghostform–just add invisibility to Ghostform and you can phase through any dungeon. Ghostform appeared at 4th level and rose to 8th in errata! The four level revision must be a record.

Eventually, even in the early days, the mega-dungeon seemed a little tired to a lot of folks. Dave Arneson started mocking the routine in his Blackmoor campaign, where the dungeon entrance featured turnstiles and holy water dispensers.

In the mid 70s, at a kitchen table somewhere, for the first time ever, a DM told his players that their characters met a cloaked stranger in the back of the inn with a special job. The plotted adventure was born. Suddenly the DM needed to plan adventures around a class of spells that could ruin everything.

You might suppose the new interest in plot would lead the second edition designers to reconsider all the spells that stand as an obstacle to fun plot elements like mystery, double-dealing, and skulduggery. Mostly, the designers doubled down by adding spells like Zone of Truth. At least they added a saving throw to Detect Lie, giving any DMs willing to fudge die rolls the power to save their adventures. (Unless the players just rely on Detect Evil to determine who to kill.)

I cannot imagine situations where the truth and alignment-determining spells add to the game. They only stand as an obstacle to certain types of adventures.

Next: Scry and fry