Tag Archives: choices

What Choose-Your-Adventure Books Can Teach Game Masters About Pacing and Decisions

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The play loop at the heart of a roleplaying game session focuses on decision making. The game master describes a situation. When the players face a decision they make a choice, and then the rules help determine an outcome and the game master describes that result. The situation changes, leading to a new decision. Repeat until everyone breaks for pizza.

In a role-playing game, scenes focus attention on the times when players fight a battle, talk to a non-player character, or or rush to escape the caverns beneath an erupting volcano. During scenes, players take moment-by-moment control of their characters. In combat, decisions come with each turn and the rules spell out the results. In roleplaying scenes, players speak for their characters and the game plays like a conversation. Scenes simplify the game’s core play loop so much that the game master can focus on running the players’ friends and foes.

Outside of scenes, game masters have a harder time knowing when to stop narrating and when to ask, “What do you want to do?” Every game master knows to pause to give the players chances to make decisions, but the challenge comes from finding the right moments to ask. If you ask players who lack a goal, they may just shrug. If you ask players with a goal who face no obstacles, then they only face a choice between carry on and quit. If you narrate past the moment characters want to act, then players become spectators. If you pause too often, then players feel mired in minutiae. But if you pick the perfect moments, the pacing in your game improves and players feel like they guide the action.

In a How to Use Scenes and Summaries to Focus on the Best Parts of a Role-Playing Adventure, I used the term summary for the game time out of scenes, dividing play into scenes and summary. That article helped game masters start successful scenes by looking for moments when the characters’ goal reaches an obstacle. A summary skips the uneventful parts of passing game time, speeding past the times when players travel a safe road, search a library, or collect a reward from a patron.

Buffalo Castle solo dungeon (1976) for Tunnels & Trolls

Buffalo Castle solo dungeon (1976) for Tunnels & Trolls

However, a lot of gameplay happens outside of scenes, and my categories of scene and summary fail to include most exploration. Scenes aside, the situation-decision loop most resembles choose-your-adventure books. Such books distill a roleplaying game’s core loop to a printed page. A passage describes a situation that readers imagine themselves in. At the end of the description, the text offers a menu of choices. The reader picks one and pages to the numbered passage that describes the outcome and sets the new scene. Solo adventures like the ones for Tunnels & Trolls follow the same format. Roleplaying games beat choose-you-adventure books by featuring a game master ready to allow surprising decisions and to run the supporting cast in scenes, but the pattern matches.

Choose-your-adventure books set a good example because they typically avoid the missteps that GMs make running the situation-decision loop in live games.

Choose-your-adventure books start characters with a goal. Characters need a goal or they have no reason to act. When D&D started, the game’s goal was to gather loot, but as the story and character started driving the game, players opted for higher goals. Nowadays, most players create characters with individual goals, often in collaboration with the group. See A Roleplaying Game Player’s Obligation.

To start an adventure, before you ever ask players for a decision, you typically hook them with a short-term goal for the whole party. The best hooks appeal to characters’ individual goals and often add an enigma to arouse players’ curiosity. When you don’t know the characters, create hooks that appeal to both paladins and rogues, to both do-gooders and treasure hunters. For more on hooks, see Whether You Call Them Rumors, Secrets, Clues, Hooks, or Leads, These Nuggets of Information Power Adventures and Campaigns.

Choose-your-adventure books offer choices that seem to lead toward the characters’ goal. Imagine trying to start an adventure by revealing that long ago a mighty warrior hid a magic sword in a long-forgotten location, and then asking the players what they want to do. The mere rumor would leave players with no clear choice of action, so the game stalls. Every adventure starts with a hook that (1) entices the characters to follow some goal and (2) reveals ways to reach that goal.

Even after you set the hook, future decision points should come when the players see options that might lead to success. Otherwise, players feel stuck. For more about options that lead to a goal, see How the Flawed Hooks in Descent Into Avernus Might Make D&D Players Feel Railroaded.

The Cave of Time (1979) choose your own adventure book

The Cave of Time (1979) choose your own adventure book

Choose-your-adventure books offer multiple options. The author of a choose-your-adventure book would never dare end a passage with one option, because the fun comes from choosing. But game masters never feel obligated to list the players’ options, so a lack of choices is less obvious. Nonetheless, if an adventure only ever gives one choice, players will notice the pattern. While dutifully following the one clear choice, they may feel railroaded.

As a game master, my favorite moments during a session come when I sit idle as the players’ debate the tough choices open to their characters. Each option balances hope with a price. All the options lead to consequences that will spin the game in a different direction. Watching these discussions, I know the game world has come alive. Players only occasionally face decisions so compelling, but a choice of one option becomes no choice at all. Asking for a decision just hides a shameful lack of options.

A D&D game can offer choices between two similar doors, and players will appreciate the option, but the best decisions come with enough information to make each selection different and promising.

Characters in a roleplaying game have freedom to attempt any action. Sometimes that latitude leaves players struggling to sift through options in search of a few promising choices. Too often, players may feel confused by their predicament in the game world. Either way, summarizing the situation and listing the most obvious choices cuts through the fog and brings focus.

If a decision leaves players struggling to choose an action, list the three most promising options, and then remind the group that they can also choose an option of their own. After all, unlike a book, you’re ready for anything.

For more on choices and information, see Dungeons Masters Can Make Fake Choices for Players, But Should You?. Also see How to improve your game by forcing characters into tough choices and The Best DM Tricks for Helping a Party Make Choices.

Choose-your-adventure books describe time passing until the character’s situation changes. Until the players face a decision, you can summarize any amount of game-world time in narration, from seconds to years. Don’t feel like you have to keep pausing to revisit decisions the players already made. Only pause when the situation changes.

If the players have already made the relevant choices, describe passing time until the situation changes, typically until players face obstacles. Pacing falters when DMs ask for a decision even when players just have a choice to keep going toward their goal or to give up. None of this means that players have to dutifully sit through narration that covers a month’s journey. Invite players to interrupt at any time. A good summary leaves players with a sense of passing events and with chances to pause and make decisions.

For example, dungeons tend to start with key choices over marching order, light, and strategy. Does the party plan to explore carefully or rush ahead to stop the midnight ritual? Will they listen at doors or check for traps? Does someone scout? Once these choices set a pattern and the dungeon starts to seem familiar, DMs can summarize the exploration until the situation changes. You can switch your pace between methodical exploration and summary many times during a session. In the areas with nothing new to discover and no threats to face, and no new decisions to make, take the shortcut of summarizing. Then when the players encounter something new, slow to a pace that lets them account for every action.

See Just Because a Dungeon Numbers Every Room Doesn’t Mean Players Have To Explore Room-by-Room.

Choose-your-adventure books end descriptions when readers feel eager to act. As a GM, you stop talking when (1) players have something to do or a decision to make and (2) the players understand enough to make a sensible decision. The barbarian needs to know about the lava-filled trench before making the choice to charge the dragon. All this may seem obvious, but it leads to some less obvious advice.

When you set a scene, the end of your narration should highlight something that dares the heroes to act. The best narration can skip the what-do-you-want-to-do question because they leave players eager to take action. Sometimes, that invitation to action comes from the monsters in the room. More often, some curious feature simply begs a closer look.

See End Your Descriptions With Something That Inspires Players To Act

Resist the temptation to start scenes late. The authors of choose-your-adventure books can succumb to the same weaknesses as game masters, I suspect we share a fault: As we narrate the start of a scene, things happen that make readers or players want to act. We talk about a changing situation, and then we keep talking. While choose-your-adventure readers can only grumble, players can stop the game.

If you run D&D for long enough, you’ll come to a situation where you must rewind game time because your enthusiasm for the villain’s big moment leads you to keep talking well after the players decide to act. Who can blame game masters? We planned for the bad guy’s monologue or culminating ritual and we want to follow it through before the players ruin it. Meanwhile, the players start throwing dice.

Sometimes even adventure boxed text suffers from the same authorial hubris. The author of a long, boxed passage becomes so eager to describe a scene develop that it becomes the tabletop equivalent to a cut scene. For a while, published adventures routinely offered boxed text that spanned columns. Sometimes the boxed text even narrated actions for the players. “As you step into the room…” In practice, no DM ever finished such readings before a player blurted, “I attack!” (In the authors’ defense, at times TSR published adventures written for an audience of readers rather than dungeon masters because no one could possibly play the avalanche of game content the company printed.)

The tempo of decisions sets the pace of the game. Gamers joke that in D&D, seconds of combat take hours to play out, while weeks of travel pass in seconds. Much of a difference in pace stems from how frequently players make decisions. Combat encounters and roleplaying scenes fill time with nonstop choices, but can still feel fast paced. During the game’s slower periods, the game master merely summarizes the passage of time with few choices. Either way, the amount of narration between choices affects pacing. By adding more descriptions, the game’s pace slows. This might give players a break from the intensity of a major battle.

Roleplaying game sessions typically alternate between fast-paced scenes where players face rapid decisions, and slower spans of time where players travel or explore while making fewer choices. This ebb and flow creates a pleasing contrast between intense action scenes, suspenseful periods of exploration and discovery, and easy breaks where characters recover and players plan.

Related: For D&D Travel, Steer Clear Of Rolls Versus Random Punishment

For D&D Travel, Steer Clear Of Rolls Versus Random Punishment

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Dungeons & Dragons brings fun from many sources: from acting the roles of characters, from creating stories with friends, and from making choices and seeing their consequences in the game world. This post focuses on that last source of fun: Seeing choices play out, and sometimes surprise us, thanks to D&D’s volatile mix of rules, dice, and the hidden information behind the DM screen.

The choices players make during character creation lead to consequences throughout a character’s career. Every saving throw plays out the consequences of a choice made days or even years ago. But when choices quickly lead to consequences, D&D proves most engrossing. When my choice to play an agile rogue lets me dodge an explosive rune, I feel satisfied, but when I figure a way to trigger the trap from a distance, I feel pleased and engaged.

I once complained how casting the foresight made D&D less fun for me. Foresight erases the effect of a lot of the games choices. I thought gaining advantage on everything would prove fun, but it made the game less entertaining. Rather than making numerous small choices during a session to gain an edge, the wizard makes one choice to cast foresight and the rest matter less.

Originally, players rolling a D&D character faced no choices except for class. Now, players typically control every aspect of character building and most players talk about rolling a character in the same way we talk about dialing a phone. Most players like control over character creation, but that control also tempts designers to create situations that engage numbers on character sheets more than the choices players make in the moment.

Years ago, I played an adventure where the party floated on a raft down river with canyon walls on each side. As we floated, unreachable monsters atop the walls hurled down rocks and we made checks to avoid damage. The situation blocked any choices, so we could only ride along and take our licks.

The adventure’s designer surely hoped for a tense scene with plenty of action as characters race down a river dodging perils. On a movie screen, the sequence might have worked, but at the table it played as string of random punishments—an unwelcome chore.

To be fair, character-building choices factored into the outcome of the scene, but those choices came long ago when we chose how dexterous to make our characters. In a game, the most entertaining choices come in the moment. Character design choices come in second, often a distant second.

Surely some readers see the river raft scene as obviously flawed, but adventures by well-meaning authors include similar roll versus random damage sequences, especially when the party must cross from point A to B. That includes many adventures that I’ve played at conventions. Again, I understand the authors aims. After all, on the cinema screens in their imaginations, the sequences work, and besides authors learn by imitating adventure written by other pros who set similar patterns. Fourth-edition skill challenges often fit that pattern. “I learned it from you.” Sure, skill challenges offered choices, but typically with the obviously correct options of picking the skills with the highest options. Only small children find such decisions compelling.

The roll-versus-random-punishment dynamic often makes travel sequences fall flat. Suppose the party in Aglarond uncovers a lead that prompts a trip to Battledale. The DM decides to make the trip interesting and give a sense of distance by rolling for random encounters along the way. That approach creates a roll-versus-punishment sequence with only one choice: Quit (y/N)? So the party trudges on hoping to resume their story in Battledale soon.

Some might argue my point by recommending better ways to handle the travel sequence. Perfect! None of those better ways include the roll-versus-damage dynamic. They bring choices and the story to the journey, or they cut past the journey.

The Best DM Tricks for Helping a Party Make Choices

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Sometimes in a Dungeons & Dragons game, a party faces a thorny decision and the action pauses while they weigh options and make plans. As a dungeon master, I sit back and listen, feeling like I won D&D. Such situations show players taking the game world and its threats seriously. It shows a game offering meaningful choices.

Other times, players must choose between, say, the left or right passage, and they stall. Those times, DMs can speed the game by helping the group make quick decisions.

Instead of asking the whole party, “What do you want to do?” I’ll ask one particular player for direction—usually the one who’s had the least to do. This can help bring a quick choice for the group. Scott Fitzgerald Gray writes, “I often try to put it in the form of saying to the quiet player, ‘Okay, while everyone else has been focusing on X and you’ve been keeping an eye out for trouble, you hear something. What do you do?’”

Of course, you can choose a party spokesperson in another way. “I occasionally ask who has the highest skill modifier appropriate to the moment at hand,” Will Doyle writes. For example, the character with the highest Investigation skill might choose how to tail the quarry.

Scott and Will commented when I asked DMs for tricks for expediting group decisions. This post reveals some other favorite techniques.

One of my favorite techniques comes from from Monte Cook’s book of advice, Your Best Game Ever. “Sometimes one player will attempt to speak for the group, saying something like ‘We turn on our flashlights and go inside the warehouse.’ If that happens, just go with it. If the other players don’t object, it makes things a little easier and moves them along a little faster. You don’t have to get confirmation from all the other players. It’s their duty to pay attention and interject with ‘Wait, I don’t want to go into the warehouse,’ or ‘I’ll stay outside while everyone else goes in’ if that’s how they feel.”

Early editions of D&D suggested the party appoint a caller, one player who spoke for the group. Perhaps we have reinvented the caller as a momentary role of expediency.

Characters in a roleplaying game have freedom to attempt any action. Sometimes that latitude leaves players struggling to sift through options in search of a few promising choices. Too often, players may feel confused by their predicament in the game world. Either way, summarizing the situation and listing the most obvious choices cuts through the fog and brings focus. “I’ll often give the players two reasonable choices and then add they can also do something else if they prefer,” writes Tom Pleasant. “Putting those two things straight up front, even if they don’t choose them, re-establishes the scene and clarifies their thoughts.”

I used to worry that suggesting a menu of likely actions might seem like an attempt to limit the player’s freedom, but they always welcome the clarity.

“Whenever you think your players aren’t sure where to go or feel forced to go down a particular path, offer them three choices,” Mike “Sly Flourish” Shea writes. “Each of these three options should be viable directions with clear meaning and motivations. There shouldn’t be a clear ‘right way’ to go and it shouldn’t simply be a random choice. As a GM, you shouldn’t prefer one path over another—players can tell. When you provide these choices, you should be happy to go with whichever one they choose.”

At the end of a session, I always like to ask for the party’s plans for the next game. This helps me plan, keeps the players looking ahead, and shows the players that their decisions guide the course of the game.

Many DMs like to jolt players from indecision by adding urgency to their predicament. Jon Lemich suggests that a DM say something like, “You hear a door hinge creak and new voices talking. You’re still hidden. Barbarian, what do you do?”

For the right tables, real-world time pressure can help force decisions. Nathan Hughes has told players that “something” will happen in 1 minute, and then set a timer. Roman Ryder purchased a set of 1, 3, 5, and 10 minute hour glasses. “I break them out sometimes for timed scenarios to turn up the pressure. I also recently used them for a map that had moving parts that were on a timer.”

I’ve had groups seeking a faster pace suggest an hourglass, but the wrong group could easily see such pressure as adversarial.

What techniques do you favor for expediting party decisions?

Do Dungeons & Dragons Players Hate Linear Adventures? Not When DMs Avoid Two Pitfalls

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A linear adventure is written, or at least planned, so every play group follows the same plot thread, through the same scenes, to the same conclusion. In Dungeons & Dragons, linear dungeons set the pattern, with walls and doors that channel players along a single route. Without walls, a linear adventure only ever shows players one course of actions to a successful end.

At best, critics accuse linear adventures of robbing players of choices between scenes. At worst, critics say linear adventures require dungeon masters to abuse their power to shunt players along a railroad. Instead of steering the adventure, players follow a fixed story.

Despite the criticism, players don’t hate linear adventures as much as DMs think. We tend to judge harshly because we see the lack of options. But in a successful adventure, players never see the walls.

When the walls become plain, players may complain about a lack of freedom. Linear dungeons, with their obvious walls, always risk criticism. Adventures without walls can also flaunt a lack of options. Imagine an adventure where players follow a patron’s plan or a commander’s orders from scene to scene. Unless catastrophe upsets the plan—or assassins reach the commander—the adventure would feel scripted and less satisfying.

Linear adventures work best when success in each scene brings the clues that lead to the next scene. Then, for all the players know, a different choice in the scene or unseen clue could have spun events in a different direction. To players, each success leads to the clues needed to set a new objective. Players favor one choice over an overwhelming number of choices, and certainly over feeling stuck without a direction.

Make no mistake, players still like to face a few, clear choices. Linear adventures grow better when they include decision points that pose options. (Of course, such adventures no longer qualify as linear.)

For adventure creators, linear adventures bring advantages. They’re compact. Authors can devote their energy—and a published adventure’s pages—to developing content that reaches play. No DM with an ingenious dungeon room wants players to miss it.

The limits of a convention time slot makes linear adventures particularly common in programs like the D&D Adventurers League. Linear adventures can consistently fit in a convention time slot. Players in organized play tend to forgive the limits imposed by a 4-hour session, but some do complain when adventures reveal a lack of choices.

But organized-play adventures with more options draw complaints too.

Adventurers League administrator Claire Hoffman explains that when adventures offer more choices, some DMs gripe about prepping content that may not reach play.

Most DMs understand the value of extra prep, but some players fuss too. Those who enjoy the accomplishment of clearing a dungeon or of completing every quest feel frustrated when an adventure teases them with more options than they can explore. The Howling Void by Teos Abadia sets a brilliant example of a 4-hour adventure with a wealth of options. In an elemental node, Earth motes float like aerial islands. Players must choose which to visit. Teos explains that some players left the adventure disappointed because they could not explore every location. The adventure proved so fun that players wanted it all. Still, adventures shouldn’t cater to completists. Better to leave players wanting more.

Linear adventures may fall short of an ideal, but if they avoid flaunting their limits, players seldom mind. One exception bothers players. When the only choice suggests a style of game that players dislike, they will resist.

During these rebellions, the players telegraph what the want to do in the game. In a podcast, Mike “Sly Flourish” Shea explained, “If the king is speaking, and the barbarian charges him, maybe you ought to start the players in the dungeon.” Clearly players crave a fight. “I’ve seen it the other way too, where in my DM-head I’m thinking, now they’re going to fight 12 orcs, and the players are doing everything they can to negotiate with the orcs. ‘Just fight the orcs!’ But the players are telegraphing their desire to have an interaction.”

If your players dislike intrigue, and the next clue in a linear adventure suggests they infiltrate a masquerade, that’s when they rebel.

You can avoid such problems by setting up situations tailored to the style your players favor. If you know your players, such tailoring probably becomes natural. If not, then an ideal episode lets players choose styles. Let players enter the castle by infiltrating the masquerade, sneaking over the walls, or battling through a secret entrance into the dungeons below.

Players don’t hate linear adventures; players hate being driven into a style of game they dislike. Players who read gaming blogs may resist by accusing your adventure of railroading, but the rest will start a fight at the masquerade.

Why Dungeons & Dragons Players Don’t Love Sandboxes as Much as They Think

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Many role-playing gamers set sandbox adventures as an ideal. We all agree that railroads make bad adventures, so do sandboxes offer all the virtues that railroads lack?

In role-playing adventures, sandboxes and railroads fall on ends of a spectrum. Railroads offer players no options. Sandboxes allow complete freedom, including freedom to choose a goal. If a character favors a bartending in Barovia over vampire hunting, they still get a place in the campaign.

Boxes of sand let kids choose their own goals. They can make sand castles, bake sand cakes, anything. And when they grow up, they can stage miniature battles.

Some games deliver all the freedom of a box of sand. Minecraft lets you play a survival game, but it owes its success to all the other things you can do: Some players build forts or replicas of the seven wonders. Some create a circuits from redstone. Players make their own goal.

D&D used to force a goal on characters

Original Dungeons & Dragons never started as pure sandbox, because the rules included a goal: Take treasure from dungeons and the wilderness. By rule, characters who won treasure gained experience and power. They won D&D. See The fun and realism of unrealistically awarding experience points for gold.

When the original D&D characters reached high, name level, the game turned into a sandbox where players chose a new goal for their characters. Stronghold building offered fighting men an obvious goal, but some other classes lacked anything as clear. What do you want for your bard or druid? Should a wizard build a tower or start a school? Apparently, many high-level wizards go mad and build dungeons. Where else could the living-chess puzzles and reverse-gravity rooms come from? Endless possibilities await!

Instead of embracing the freedom of a high-level sandbox, players returned to dungeons.

Sandboxes can overwhelm players with choices

In Why Dungeons & Dragons (and Role Playing) Took Years to Leave the Dungeon and How the dungeon crawl’s advantages propelled Dungeons & Dragons to success, I described the attraction of dungeons. Among other advantages, dungeons limit the characters’ options. This doesn’t just help dungeon masters prepare, it helps players.

Common wisdom suggests there is no such thing as too many choices, but psychologists conclude that people flooded with options become paralyzed by them.

When dungeon masters offer a true sandbox and come willing to improvise any course their players choose, they confound players. Once the players stop wondering what they’re supposed to do, they struggle to choose from boundless possibilities. Whatever they finally decide, they leave the table with a nagging feeling that they chose wrong.

The value of limited options

In D&D, dungeons, patrons, and hooks all limit the options that players’ face. Such tropes give players direction. A little direction improves the game.

Make no mistake. Players still want options. Every game session should leave players wondering what might have happened if they followed a different course. Mike “Sly Flourish” Shea recommends that giving players three plus infinite choices. DMs should offer three known options that take characters closer to their goal, while being open to anything players want to try.

Many sources of DM advice suggest seeding a sandbox setting with hooks—opportunities for players to land in stories of their choosing. Exactly. Those hooks help players narrow all the options of an open world to a sweet spot of three plus infinite choices. They nudge the game a bit closer to the railroad end of the dial. Some railroad-phobics might even argue that such hooks show a DM working too hard to push players through a story. Their ideal game only works with perfectly spherical, frictionless players. The real players at your table want hooks.

The sandbox dungeon

D&D’s mega-dungeons limited players’ choices, but many fans still tout multi-level dungeons as sandboxes. Sure, characters need to adopt the goal of seeking treasure, but they never need to dutifully follow a story arc planned by a DM. Plus, players could chose a difficulty level by deciding how deep they dared to delve. A few D&D players still favor that style of play.

Embracing story and fewer options

Despite the freedom of a dungeon sandbox, most D&D players craved story and deeper motivations. The D&D game changed to provide. When Tracy and Laura Hickman penned a series of classic modules including Ravenloft and the Desert of Desolation trilogy, they led the change. Their introduction to a self-published version of Pharoah gives D&D adventures four, new requirements:

  1. A player objective more worthwhile than pillaging and killing.
  2. An intriguing story that is intricately woven into the play itself.
  3. Dungeons with some sort of architectural sense.
  4. An attainable and honorable end within one or two sessions of playing time.

When characters explore Castle Ravenloft, they quest for more than loot. They aim to free the land from the menace of Lord Strahd. Adopting the goal of a story takes a measure of freedom from players. Now the their options narrow to the choices that lead to the magic items that will help defeat Strahd. Few players mind. They see clear options that take them closer to achieving their characters’ aims. As the adventure progresses, the players’ paths narrow to a railroad that leads to a final confrontation.

Of course, at any time, the characters could leave the railroad and open a tavern in Barovia, but that never happens. Partly because D&D players like doing D&D things such as smiting evil and winning treasure. Partly because players follow D&D’s social contract by honoring the DM’s preparation. Mostly because players enjoy stories in D&D and they willingly abandon the freedom of a sandbox to foster them.

Too often, D&D fans tout sandboxes as the pinnacle of adventure design. Dungeon masters and adventure authors aim for the freedom of a sandbox, but just leave players feeling adrift. Players enjoy D&D most when they see a few, clear options that take them closer to achieving their characters’ aims.