What's Forever For?

Feeling the Heartbeat of the Cumberland Style

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While I’ve been groping around for the tools and language for HTT (the High-Trust Traditional style of play Cumberland is devoted to) for as long as I’ve been a gamer, I’ve only blathered about it openly since the days of Google Plus, that platform Google hit-and-quit back in the day.

And my methods of trying to convey what it is have changed over the last 15 years or so, as dozens of perfectly-clear-to-me explanations have crashed and burned. Often, it’s mistaken for some tangentially-related idea. “Oh, you mean sandboxes!” No, if I meant sandboxes, I’d just say sandboxes. “Oh, you mean FKR!” No, if I meant FKR, I’d just say FKR. “Oh, you mean immersion!” No, that sounds comfy but it’s not what I mean. And so on.

It's often the case that we round to the nearest familiar idea.

Sometimes, not often, someone will be like “Oh, you mean … basically every Trad RPG ever.”

And … kind of! That’s closer! It’s still not there, but it’s more true than the others.

Because if you play any trad RPG long enough, you’ll have HTT moments. Depending on the prep-habits of the GM, and the roleplay-focus of the table, they’ll be more frequent, or less so.

HTT is about designing to support those moments as more than moments: they can be the dominant mode of play. Sessions or campaigns made of HTT moments. Or, as close as we can manage! It’s soup.

If that sounds mushy: yep. This is a spectrum of emphasis. It’s not about hard white lines. It’s not remotely puristic. It’s about wanting more of a thing, and recognizing that there are others who want more of a thing, and recognizing what kind of RPG design supports that desire.

So, You’re Like Someone Who Loves Pickles on Your Burger So Much That You Pile Your Burgers With Pickles?

Yes I do and yes, I do.

But back to RPGs.

Thirty-something years ago, I thought the heart of what I love in RPGs was Tactical Infinity, and I said so, on convention panels, in correspondence, and eventually named it in an article. That term has even gained traction over the years, in some of the other RPG neighborhoods.

But I was only partly right, and it took nearly ten years (because I was eyeballs-deep in the industry for that time) to appreciate the emphasis that phrase was missing. As I noticed exactly what that was, I happily expressed it in my work, from Vanth to Uresia to the Risus Companion and beyond, though it crystallized, almost entirely, in the early Fly From Evil runs. Once I started supporting more than just Tactical Infinity, those magic moments started flooding every session.

And, ridiculously, it was just … character. Character nature, character values. The phrase I needed, to honestly describe the design I needed, was Characterized Tactical Infinity, or CTI to save some typing. 

But Isn’t Tactical Infinity Already Characterizing?

That’s what I had been hoping, but the answer is: sometimes. Not always and, honestly, not usually. Not with a great deal of depth, if it’s unsupported by anything but attitude. I mean, great roleplayers are going to be great without support, but without support, their great roleplaying is often reduced to decoration, atop the gameplay.

That’s what I meant about the GM’s prep habits, and the table’s roleplay focus. Those can turn the “sometimes” into some version of “pretty often,” or more. Or, in many cases, a whole lot less. When it’s a whole lot less, that’s Low-Trust Trad, or LTT. The bulk of 80s and 90s RPG material were designed around the mushy middle ground, regular old Trad, or Medium-Trust Trad. That’s also, I think, where most campaigns landed: somewhere in that big ol’ middle, where pickles are something on the burger.

My own work for the RPG industry (my GURPS and Star Trek stuff and so on) was almost entirely MTT, with a few LTT jaunts as the work demanded, and some visible yearnings for HTT.

One of the social-media graphics
I use for introducing folks to HTT.

So You And Your Gamers Sit Around Talking Like This?

Oh! No. Very much no.

This isn’t table terminology at all. We don’t have or need any special table terminology. We just show up and roleplay, the GM is a regular GM doing the regular GM things. We put our d8s on one leg at a time, like anyone.

In fact, if we did show up to the table, determined, as players, to “play HTT,” we would fail to do so. Ironic but true. Only roleplaying gets us there. We show up to roleplay. Our characters’ perspectives are all we give a wet slap about, in play.

The GM alone can support the leap from that to HTT, and it won’t get there by us blathering about it at the table. The GM gets it there through prep.

The wonky language is design stuff. Crafty stuff. Its only value is to RPG design, and it’s mostly about scenario design, specifically (with a dash of worldbuilding).

Because the mushy middle isn’t some compromise. It’s the logical consequence of trad’s own shape and nature, and, frankly, MTT is awesome. If I could play in well-run MTT campaigns for the rest of my life, I’d be pretty content. I’d still feel that extra-special tingle in those HTT moments, but, with a good GM doing old-fashioned 80s-and-90s-style prep, those moments would be frequent enough.

Oh. Is That Nostalgia I Smell?

It’s mostly pickle juice. But generally, a firm no in the sense that I’m not interested in returning to the 80s. For one thing (and it’s a big thing) most of the HTT-supportive game design from the 80s and 90s was for military sci-fi (games like Space Master and Twilight: 2000 had scenario libraries where maybe 20% of the scenarios were HTT), and … I’m cool with military sci-fi, I am. But it’s not my jam. We had HTT support from other quarters as well (some great [old] ones from Call of Cthulhu, a few from the short-lived Flashing Blades and others), but it was mostly orbiting the sci-fi bang-shooty.

And, frankly, they got to HTT for their own reasons. So, their designs don’t serve as any kind of ideal for me. I’m glad they exist, to study. I’m glad they exist, to game with. But they’re a bit musty and moldy, and don’t address my own needs as a roleplayer in ’26 anymore than they did in ’86.

So, is this a thing from olden gaming times? Sort of. It has roots in the back-then.

But is this about nostalgia? No. This is about building things those fine folks never imagined, and maybe never would have wanted.

So when you look at the post-industry modules I’ve designed for publication (Big Dice Games currently publishes both Toast of theTown and Slimes in Blossom Grove, and both are free) they won’t seem very Space Master and they shouldn’t. They’re frothy, humanistic swashbuckly pulp-fantasy. Familiar Sights, which I designed for a YouTube run last year, is a kind of dark-heroic horror fairytale. I’m working on designs right now that are like those, but also 1930s private-eye adventures, post-nuke adventures, superhero, comic space-opera, and others. I’ve got some that are just cozy stuff like trying to help a friend have a great birthday.

And sadly, I haven’t yet found a single 80s or 90s HTT fantasy adventure. Pendragon had some HTT-ish seeds, but never a complete module. A few of the MERP modules peer close, then dance away, skittishly. Groovy works like Rough Night at the Three Feathers have the variables, but they’re charged situations rather than problems, and so on.

So, I don’t have much to be nostalgic for, except for some excellent GMs who first showed me this style at their table, because they happened to GM in a way that supports this, and they did it so well that I could never stop pondering it.

So I’m not having any 80s or 90s over here, except as a cadaver to dissect.

I call this one the Square of Gameplay.

So This Is About Designing Frothy Fantasy Adventures Shaped Like Twilight: 2000 Modules?

I mean.

Sometimes.

Sometimes, yeah.

But also, shaped around a different set of actual priorities and design goals. And shaped around whatever genres and modes and tones we want at the moment.

So, mostly no? But sometimes.

“Infinite Character Tactical Wossname”

Absolutely. “In-character creative problem-solving” is another fair phrase, if that’s cozier. I’ve written about Tactical Roleplaying before, and I’ve written about Characterization before, so if you’ve got those things down, you’ve got all the pieces. Let’s assemble the whole:

• Characterized: Gameplay reveals, exposes, explores, and challenges the nature of our PCs. To support this at the design level, scenarios consist of problems built more around values than capabilities, and the problems are carefully designed to have no “right” approach, because if there’s an objectively-correct answer, character has less room to matter than competence.
• Tactical: Gameplay isn’t just tactical, it’s crazy-richly-tactical, because the Invisible Rulebooks are the main rulebooks, and they are vast. The facts of the gameworld, the facts of the campaign so far, the facts of the scenario … all of those facts form the tactical playground, and that includes a lot of subtle and slippery facts, including a lot of facts the PCs don’t begin understanding, and might never completely understand. To support this at the design level, problems have complexity, nuance, exploration, mystery, and stakes the PCs are likely to be passionate about. Those stakes create the potential for outcomes the PCs will consider more- and less-desirable, and from that, we get gameplay.
• Infinity: Because the PCs are people (of whatever kind; droids and ghosts and bunnies can be people too), they can face problems however they want. They can try literally anything, and because there’s a living GM ready to make the call, literally anything can get a fair shake. What’s that you say? You hit Superman with a baseball bat? It doesn’t hurt him! He smiles warmly in response! You failed to hurt Superman! But you got a fair shake. To support this at the design level, scenarios consist of problems, and only problems. Rather than impose events like encounters, or Hard Choices, or narrative shapes, HTT scenarios are just the facts, about problems, usually clusters of problems, all tangled-up in a yummy mess. HTT scenarios are both fully open-ended and fully open-middled. We do not design infinity and we don’t do infinite prep, because we don’t need to. The infinity comes free in every box of trad. We just support it rather than tamping it down. With problems, we provide gravity-points worth orbiting, diving toward, or sling-shotting around, instead of boundaries.

But That Does Remind Me of Sandboxes and FKR and Immersion and Stuff

And that’s reasonable. Those are some neighborhoods nearby. The OSR, too - and some of what they do helps highlight why Characterized was the missing word, for me.

You can explore, and enjoy, and embrace Tactical Infinity while still being only tangentially concerned with character. In fact, you can, if you want, give zero shits about character and still have a grand old time testing player skill, which is what some OSR material is interested in, and it’s what a lot of LTT has always been interested in, going back to classic Champions modules and early Boot Hill. Player skill + character capabilities = game outcomes.

And, frankly, I think it’s a lot of what of those Twilight: 2000 modules are interested in, too.

But because a lot of those designers understood that the hard realities of post-nuke Poland is more nuanced than just Good Guys with Guns vs. Bad Guys With A Functioning APC We Would Like to Own, they cared about NPC motivations. They cared about what it might take to get a post-nuke community going and what might tear those communities apart. They understood the complexity and importance of logistics and diplomacy, because those are what war comes down to, in the end. They understood that, even in a war zone, people need clean drinking water even more than they need ammo. They understood that from small-unit tactics to whole-theater strategy, there are always more things to consider than mere capabilities. So, sometimes (about 20% of the time), they provided facts in so many dimensions (military, but also social, cultural, legal, religious, economic, and more) that they fired up the potential for combinatorial explosion in exactly the way that drives the cylinders of the HTT engine.

And I bet they had some awesome HTT moments. Even if they had no use or need for that term.

Combinatorial What-Now?

I’m not a computer guy, but I’ve dabbled. Basically, combinatorial explosion is considered a hazard if you’re making a computer game. It means, in practice, that you need to control the number of available choices, because choices combine, and they multiply and compound one another … to the point where, if you offer too many options, your software and your hardware end up with insanely-multiplied needs. You can quickly reach a point where you need something that feels like infinite code, and infinite RAM.

That’s why, in a videogame, things will often boil down to two or three choices at a critical juncture, or shunt play into a contained minigame environment where dozens of powers and weapons can combine, but they can do so because they’re defined in very finite dimensions, like damage and range and speed.

And it’s why, in a boardgame like Squad Leader, you can’t sneak through the village dressed like nuns unless the scenario hard-coded that option before play began.

That’s why I say Combinatorial Explosion is the combustion that drives our engine. Without a single line of code, and without a single line in a rulebook, the PCs can try literally, actually, anything. Because they’re people. Imaginary people! But we don’t hold that against them, and we don’t limit them. We give them complex problems, that matter to them, and then they create their own approach, and get a fair shake, every step of the way.

So Let’s See if I Got This. The GM Preps Problems, Then the Players Have to Solve Them?

Oooh, so close.

The GM preps problems, absolutely. Nailed that part.

But then the characters (not the players) do the rest. And what “the rest” entails is something we prep for, but have no intention of controlling or limiting.

Toast of the Town is still, as of this writing, the textbook example of what I personally mean by HTT design. One of several problems in that adventure’s cluster is that Dolemon Drake, the villain, has gotten away with murder, before the PCs even arrive.

So if the proper formulation was that the PCs “have to solve” the problems, that would mean that groups that fail to solve that problem would be doing something poorly.

But that’s not at all the case. That’s why, in Toast, I wrote about one table of playtest PCs who teamed up with Drake to save the lives of the people he’d convinced the townsfolk to go butcher. They chose to help him get away with the murders he’d already committed. Because they cared more about saving the still-living than avenging the already-dead.

That’s not failure, and it didn’t feel like failure, to the PCs (or the players). It felt like triumph.

And I’ve GMed that adventure for 30-something tables, and it’s gone 30-something different ways. Every group endeavored to solve the things they cared about. Many groups have sold some of the problems down the river, to better solve others.

Yes, please.

In simple wargame terms: the PCs decide what their “victory conditions” are. The module does not. The GM does not. The game rules do not. The PCs alone do, according to the problems at hand, according to their sympathies, according to their values, according to their life goals and party goals, according to what they know and what they think they know, and yes, according to their capabilities (just one ingredient in a highly varied soup). And the GM is there to support that. The GM has prepped, for that.

We, as players, trust our GM to prep stuff that matters to our characters. The GM trusts us to roleplay with sincerity. Adventure results.

Oh, That’s the Trust Part? I Was Going to Ask About the Trust Part.

Yeah, that’s a big part of it. There are some tangents worth considering (self-trust, etc.) but that circle is the most important. Basically, as a dedicated player who makes characters carefully fit to this table’s group and this table’s intentions for this campaign, I’m trusting that my efforts won’t be wasted, that my roleplaying won’t be just decoration. As a dedicated GM, I’m trusting that I’ve got a table full of sincere, engaged roleplayers to prep for, to serve, because in this style of play, “Game Master” is very much a service role.

A jokey little seed can't quite communicate everything,
but it helps land the basic idea of facts that expand
the range of PC action vs. those that constrict or prescribe.

Hmmm.

I agree.

So What Was All This About?

I’ve been promising to write an article describing High-Trust Trad. Here we are. This begins what those Lexicon posts were laying the groundwork for. This is my favorite kind of RPG.

I also created this post to highlight that, maybe, HTT isn’t what you want at all. It might not be something you’d enjoy. The profile of the HTT player … madly in love with both sincere roleplaying and with creative problem-solving, fused together … that’s a niche taste. Ditto the HTT Game Master, who finds joy in both substantial prep and constant improv.

We each have our own passions, and in these post-trad generations, “Tabletop RPG” means so many kinds of game, many of which bear no resemblance to Trad, let alone High-Trust Trad. There are RPGs now where you don’t even play a role. So it goes, and some of those are great! There are games out there for everybody, and there are hundreds of new ones every year.

But if something in all of this (waves hands vaguely at all of this) sparks a familiar fire in you … I’m preparing to consider beginning to think about emerging from the cocoon I’ve been in for a while. Been building a body of work, and it’s all about this. Adventures, resources, that new fantasy world, design-technique book and articles, yadda. Some of it amounts to a textual museum, for those curious about this design form, as it was and how it might become, and I’m hoping to someday have a little adventure-design club. With burger nights.

Going forward with several things in the works, I'll distinguish at need between historical HTT (works designed by others from approximately 1982 to 1997) and the Cumberland style, to which I've been privately devoted since Fly From Evil, and publicly since the free Uresia modules cited above.

In 1993 I thought that “Tactical Infinity” described what I was about. And I wasn’t wrong, I was just missing the why. I was missing the answer to the question: what’s that big ol’ infinite possibility-space for?

If it’s stocked with the right ingredients, we can use it to serve up that magical fusion, where roleplaying is the game.

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I'll maintain this post as a living document for understanding the Cumberland style, updating it at need. I’m ghalev on Discord; hit me up to try my free, all-text, 1-on-1 adventure-design workshops, or drop me a line at blogmail@cumberlandgames.com. If you've published HTT-supportive works of your own, I really want to hear from you so I can help promote and celebrate them! And heck, as long as I've finally posted "the long version," here are additional shorter-version graphics from over the last 15 years:

Staring Back at the Invisible

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We've come to the final entry in the Lexicon series. If you're new, hi!

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Back in our very first entry, we met the goofy metaphor of the “Invisible Rulebooks,” the rules which can't be found in the "rules" part of the Book of Rules ... but they're still rules, because in an RPG, any fact with tactical relevance is the equal of a rule, whether it's a "+1 to hit" kind of fact or "the Duke is self-conscious about his baldness" kind of fact or "this is a genre where protagonists can’t die just by slipping on a banana peel" kind of fact, or many others.

It’s a metaphor; Invisible Rules aren't always literally invisible. If an adventure module specifies that the Duke is self-conscious, it's right there on the page, plainly visible but still (in this context) an "Invisible Rule," because we won’t see it in the “Rules.”

Rules (of every kind) have some other qualities worth noticing, beyond Visible/Invisible. Let’s dive into our final set of terms, laying those crucial qualities bare.

SHAREABLE/LESS-SHAREABLE

Let's say we're imagining a merchant, in a fantasy world. My idea of what "fantasy merchant" means might come from a book of real history, or a videogame, or from personal memories of a hilarious NPC my favorite GM in the 80s portrayed with an AWFUL Cockney accent. Most likely it's all of those, and more. I think about fantasy merchants a lot.

If you and I have played the same videogame, we have some common ground. This makes that portion of our Invisible Rulebooks shareable between you and I.

If you and I haven’t read the same history book, I could loan mine to you, if you want, and if you're interested in the topic or if it seems really important to our campaign, maybe you'll read it. So that's another degree of (potentially) "shareable."

But there's no way for you to go back in time, in MY life, and experience the exquisite agony of that hilarious NPC with the terrible accent. The best I can do is describe it, which is another kind of "shareable" that's much more limited. If your own gaming life includes a similar NPC, that’s a kind of shareable too, though we might also be making assumptions about the similarity of our experiences that are only partially true.

If we're gaming in a gameworld we both enjoy, we've both probably delved into some of the published world material for it ... and, in certain playstyles (like mine) that's such a critical form of shareability that the facts presented in the worldbooks almost REPLACE the "core rules" as OUR core rules. Those rules are “invisible,” but they’re right there on the page, and they matter a lot to us if we care about this setting being our setting for this campaign.

Some of my impressions of merchants are also based on modern shop employees, or characters from movies, things like that. I'm only semi-conscious of that vast stew of influences, which makes them difficult to share. You probably have a comparable, but different, set of impressions. Those impressions can still inform how you roleplay, and how I GM, so they're still part of our Invisible Rulebooks, but they're poor on this quality of shareability.

And of course, one of the advantages of the Visible Rulebooks is they're super-shareable, and labeled explicitly as rules. One of many reasons why, in MOST playstyles, the core rules ARE the core rules.

Anyway, "shareable" is a useful concept, and it (in the main) means what it sounds like. Moving on.

EPHEMERAL/RELIABLE

Wait, didn't we DO this one? Sure did, but we started with a focus on resources the PCs can use to solve problems, back in this article.

But any fact with tactical relevance is a rule, and resources are just sets of facts. The existence of the Duke's toupee (a gameworld fact) is a rule. The law of universal gravitation that can make it flutter into a canyon, is a rule (most gameworlds have it, though it works differently in James Bond's world than ours, ditto for Wile E. Coyote). The formal game-system rules for falling damage if he dives after it and plunges 200 feet to the rocks below, are rules. They all live somewhere on the spectrum from the Ephemeral to the Reliable. The Duke’s toupee might be highly ephemeral if it only matters during one adventure, but the law of universal gravitation tends to stick around.

Worth noting: a fact the designer imagined as Ephemeral, or that the Game Master intended as Ephemeral, is something the PCs might still find creative ways to leverage, many sessions, even many real-world years, down the line in a long campaign, and that's awesome, and something we want to keep with us as we design. When the PCs concoct an elaborate plan depending on the existence of a toupee they remember from five years ago? Oh my god, yes please.

So, Ephemeral and Reliable aren't new to the Lexicon, but it's time to recognize that they're part of our set of descriptors for rules, because any fact can be a rule, which means we can design using any body of facts.

FIRM/SOFT

This one's pretty simple. Some rules have no flex. They are FIRM rules, rock-hard in some cases. If firing a crossbow takes a -10 penalty in total darkness, that -10 penalty is very clear, objectively-defined, and not something to be nuanced or haggled over. It just IS. It is firm. Visible Rules lean ... firmly (though not invariably) into firmness.

Many Invisible Rules are just as firm, though. Newton's universal gravitation is, in _most_ game worlds, extra-crazy-firm. The Duke is definitely bald. Firm rule. Diamond firm, Adamantium firm. Southern Moss-Type Elves can see in the dark? Firmly so. Only an equally-firm declaration of exception ("Rufus the Elf is blind") can change that, case-by-case.

But the Duke's self-consciousness about his baldness, while it may definitely absolutely exist, has a lot of room for nuance when we treat it as a rule. It absolutely IS a rule – it's a fact the PCs can make tactically relevant – but, there's flex because self-consciousness is a softer concept, with a lot of variables, a lot of range. It has gradients. It has tipping points. It has overlaps. There's a lot of latitude for the GM to interpret it very differently from another GM, with both interpretations being equally fair. That same lack of firmness – softness – can make it attractive to PCs looking to use it creatively, and for that to work, we (the players) must be confident that our GM will give us a fair shake when we do.

Firm's a simple term with big implications. Some of the Invisible Rules are firm, but a lot of them are soft, and we like that. It's good for the kind of gameplay I build for, and the kind of gamer I am.

DIEGETIC/EXTRADIEGETIC (AND CORRESPONDENCE)

I need "diegetic" a lot. I don't enjoy the word itself, but I try to use standard game-design terms when I can, and it's a standard. A fact is diegetic if it exists within the gameworld. The Duke's toupee is diegetic; the Duke's self-consciousness is diegetic. The rules for falling damage are NOT diegetic. They're extradiegetic rules that enjoy clear correspondence to a reality within the gameworld, but the Duke doesn't know about the Visible Rules. He doesn't even know he's fictional. He's troubled enough by his baldness, so please don't tell him.

The idea of "clear correspondence" between diegetic and extradiegetic elements can be important if you lean a lot into the Visible Rules. I don't often, but when I do, correspondence is a useful concept. Very briefly: if “one point of ammo” for a bow [a game mechanic, and thus extradiegetic] exactly and reliably equals one arrow in the gameworld [the arrow is diegetic], that’s a case of clear correspondence. If “one point of ammo” equals a variable number of arrows because we’re modeling a week-long series of battles abstractly with just a few die-rolls, that’s a looser, less-clear level of correspondence. Game systems play at many levels of correspondence clarity (and tightness, and causality) for a lot of good reasons.

CHARACTER-FACING

This is super-crazy-important. Something is character-facing if the Player Characters have direct awareness of it. So, the Duke's self-consciousness probably doesn't begin play as Character-Facing ... it's something of value the PCs might or might not discover, and if they do, they can exploit it or leverage it in some way. And if they never learn it, it remains diegetic (it exists in the gameworld) but it's something the PCs can't use.

The Visible Rules are never character-facing. The PCs can understand that "falling into a canyon can kill you," and some PCs can calculate acceleration and terminal velocity and stuff ... but they can never read the corresponding game-rules for falling damage. This distinction is huge; I can’t overstate it no matter how desperately I want to. The Visible Rules can in many cases be leveraged by the players, but only character-facing facts can be leveraged by the characters.

In the style I design for, the thing this entire series has been laying groundwork for discussing, the players would rather be left out of things, thank you kindly. We prefer to game by roleplaying, at least as much as possible. We game through our characters, so to solve the problems presented by the adventure, we need tools we (the characters) can know, and think about, within the imaginary world. That desire creates some style-specific needs for adventure design.

SHOOTING MORE COWBOY HATS

Let’s go back to the comedy-action version of the Wild West, where we are rootin' and (mayhap) tootin' as well. In our Invisible Rulebooks relating to genre conventions, we have some very interesting rules when it comes to these other qualities. They are (in many games) firmly Invisible (not codified by the game system), but are they diegetic? Are they character-facing? If we are to impress the villain by shooting his hat safely off ... he's going to be LESS impressed if he's conscious of the genre convention, and MORE impressed if he's unaware of it.

But that doesn't make it a bright line ... in order to make the shot, we (the rootin'-tootin' imaginary we) must have some confidence that we can shoot the hat safely. And maybe we misinterpret it as our pure skill, or the hand of providence recognizing our righteous good-guy intentions. And more to the point, maybe exercising genre convention means stepping halfway out of character, because that kind of convention, while it isn't wholly diegetic, and isn't wholly character-facing, can be crystal clear to the players.

This isn't meant to provide some kind of conclusion about genre convention, but to illustrate how I examine each rule when designing an adventure, a world, a resource, or even a system. A lot of this stuff, as always, is mushy, and spectral, and we try to notice.

WRAPPING UP

Some folks have taken the Lexicon series as design or play theory, and maybe it's useful for that to some degree, for some folks, but that's not what I've been writing it for. This series builds the ground floor to talk about the kind of game-design techniques I'm passionate about without (fingers crossed) too many distracting asides.

And I want that very much. To talk about game design. With you. With people who game and design differently from me, but who might want to (in the grand tradition of our hobby) rummage through my stuff to pluck out a few tidbits to enhance yours. That kind of rummaging, and that kind of sharing, is good stuff.

I also hope to make connections with others who game near to my own neighborhood, but the sharing is good whether you do or not.

My kind of design, when examined from a “rules” perspective, likes to emphasize tactical roleplaying with lots of potential for characterization, and while I use every tool at my disposal, it mostly lives and thrives through adventure design focused on in-character creative problem-solving. When designing problems (clusters of which form the tactical core of these adventures) I have a clear preference for the qualities of the rules I choose to design around: They tend to be Invisible, Diegetic, Ephemeral, Character-Facing, and frequently Soft (but a mix is great). Those problems need to be as non-presumptive as possible, to give the PCs (not the players) maximum latitude to create and implement solutions.

SO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

I'll be collecting the entire Lexicon series into a spiffy little PDF, knitting it all together, probably with some fresh edits and side-notes. It'll be released next to a handful of other PDFs, some of which are just fun and fluffy tools, some of which are kind of hardcore design-methody. Some will be free, some for sale. These blogposts will remain, and the PDF collecting them will be one of the free ones.

And I'll finally use the "T" word! See you there.

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This image is a Hammondal thing.
It has nothing to do with the Lexicon.
I just like it.

Flavors of Presumption

It’s time for another dip into the RPG Lexicon, where I explore the terms I use (for the concepts I need) to design RPG stuff.  If you’re new to this peculiar series, you can check the tags for the whole caboodle, hit the Glossary page, or start with the Invisible Rulebooks.

Today’s term gets us deeper into the heart of design: presumptive. In order to design a scenario for the kinds of RPGs I love, the designer (whether the GM homebrewing or the pro seeking to publish) must master the art of non-presumptive problems. They are the construction material that allows the design to stand. They are the stuff of adventure.

But while “non-presumptive” is North on my compass, it’s a term that depends on “presumptive.” So, in problem design, what makes a problem a presumptive problem, a presumptive challenge, a presumptive obstacle? What does such a thing presume?

A presumptive problem presumes the approach the PCs will (in some cases must) take. Any problem with a finite range of viable approaches is, to some degree, presumptive. A more assertive near-synonym is prescriptive. The most common “flavors” of presumption are:

The Dongle-Slot

When there’s just one, and only one, exactly one solution, I call that a Dongle-Slot problem, to honor the action-movie cliché of the special USB thumb-drive (or far-future equivalent) that, when slotted into the right port, averts the nuclear disaster. We could just as easily call it a push-button problem or a dozen other names, but the term “Dongle-Slot” feels more closely akin to “Porn Logic” (which it is), and it makes me giggle, which is how the science works around here.

Dongle-Slots are the epitome of finite, but they can take infinite forms, from the passageway that can only be traversed by destroying the Statue Guardian to the Fair Folk who will only lift a finger to help if you join in their special Vernal Equinox Dance to the evil ritual summoning that can only be disturbed with a splash of the correct blood from the correct priest at the correct hour after said priest was correctly murdered, there are uncountable ways to present a lock that cannot be picked, broken, or circumvented, and that has but One True Key.

When an adventure design subverts a Dongle-Slot by making it a reward rather than a problem, I call that a Dongle-Slot Surprise, but that’s a subject for another day!

The Exclusionary

A few times a year, GM or designer friends of mine will brag that they’ve designed a problem that “can’t be solved with combat.” This is the most common expression of the Exclusionary: a problem designed to prevent or discourage an approach, and it’s basically a Reverse Dongle-Slot. You can do anything for love … but you can’t do that.

While “can’t be solved with combat” is the most ordinary expression of the Exclusionary, it’s important to stress that violence (or reducing it) isn’t the issue. The limits are the issue … the desire to diminish Tactical Infinity into something less tactical, not infinite, or both. Doesn’t matter if you’re excluding violence, excluding trickery, excluding the mage’s favorite spell, or excluding that thing your specific PCs like to do with the sack of potatoes and a leprechaun in a cage, going out of your way to prevent an approach is what makes this presumptive.

Speaking of exclusion, more broadly: I don’t consider presumptive problems taboo. Sometimes, you just want to put a magnetic storm in the upper atmosphere so the crew of the Enterprise can’t use the transporter. I get that. I do that. Around here, the design goal isn’t to avoid presumptive elements, but rather to recognize them, to keep them at the non-critical edges of a design: they are parsley, not steak. Plus, again, “presumptive” is a spectrum: most problems you’ll design will be to some degree presumptive. The goal is to reduce that, to break out of the lazy habits that get us there … not to eliminate it in puristic terms.

The Optimal

One of the slippery ways a problem can be presumptive is when the range of approaches is theoretically wide open … but there is one approach (or a forcibly tiny set) that is objectively optimal. This can undermine Tactical Roleplaying, because when one approach is optimal, it becomes kind of stupid not to do the optimal thing … and when it’s kind of stupid not to do the optimal thing, that chokes out the potential for characterization, keeping it in the shallows, because “is this PC kind of stupid YES or NO?” is about as shallow as it gets.

So lets say a designer has the “passageway that can only be traversed by destroying the Statue Guardian” in their adventure design, and wants to keep it, but fix it, to make it less of a creative chokepoint … But also just desperately wants the PCs to destroy the Statue Guardian. So, instead of really doing the work to make the problem more creative, the GM just notes that, technically, the stone around the corridor can be bored through with the right magic or equipment, and also, technically, there’s another path that would take the PCs 30 miles out of their way, and, technically, the Statue Guardian can be rendered inert by a spell the PCs don’t have, but they could abandon the quest for a few days to go acquire it. This kind of design can get really technical.

That’s an extreme example to illustrate the point, but the Optimal is truly the subtlest of presumptive flavors. It’s worth your while to develop your senses to spot them and improve them (and not just with technicalities). Ironically, the tools of the Optimal can even be used to dismantle it, and we’ll get into that in a later entry.

The Videogame Choice

This one gets bandied about under many names: the Big Choice, the Moral (sometimes Ethical or other) Dilemma, the Quandary, the Trolley Problem. In tabletop RPGs, it's when the design just gives up on creative problems where PC priorities will emerge organically through the solutions they create … instead, we just shove a microphone in their face and demand they pick a side. Another way to knock characterization into the shallows.

I use the term “Videogame Choice” for a several reasons, but mostly to highlight that this is the kind of gameplay that can work really incredibly well in videogames, where a canned narrative can create a truly knotted, even gut-wrenchingly difficult choice (the ending of Life is Strange, virtually everything in the Walking Dead series, much of the Dragon Age games, and on and on).

Saints Row IV Boils It Right Down

But the reason they work so well in videogames is that, since videogames must be programmed, they thrive on the finite, even when sometimes managing an illusion of something more. When we’re playing a face-to-face RPG with a living, creative Game Master … we can, and should, expect much more than just a moment of selection. Videogame Choices can be very dramatic, but they are just giving up and shoving the mic, and as GMs we can not only do better, we can do better by many orders of magnitude.

Note that Videogame Choices include not only literal questions posed to the PCs, but any situation where there’s a clear A-B or A-B-C type choice: there’s just enough of the plague cure for Village A or Village B and the PCs must decide where to deliver it, etc. In fact, we could call it ...

The Menu

In truth, the Videogame Choice is a subset of the Menu, the umbrella term for any problem that boils down to selecting from a set of prepared somethings, instead of creating and implementing personal solutions.

A Menu doesn’t always try to be BIG or emotionally weighty, and menus can exist at many layers of RPG design. Sometimes, they’re provided as a consolation prize for other kinds of presumption: "yes, the only optimal approach is to fight the bandits, but you have over 200 spells and 30 pole arms to choose from!" And again, with emphasis: it’s not about the fight. It’s about the presumption.

And sometimes, the menu can be so large that it feels like a kind of freedom, if not any kind creation. And sometimes, the interplay between choices can result in emergent solutions that do feel like creation, at least a little. And sometimes that really is a suitable consolation prize. But if we leverage the potential of the Game Master sitting right there … we can do much, much better, if we want to.

Closing Notes

As with many of the most important conceptual tools in RPG design, the idea of the “presumptive problem” is slippery, mushy, spectral, and sometimes highly subjective. We can get lost if we forget that ideals are stars to sail by, not destinations. But if we never even look up, we begin lost, and our designs suffer.

Where we hit our stride is seeing those stars as whole constellations. By its lonesome, the ability to spot and repair a presumptive element is trivial … but when we marry it to other awareness like Tactical Roleplaying, Characterized Roleplaying, Porn Logic, and exploring the upper ends of the Invisible Rulebooks, it becomes an essential part of our toolkit.

My own ideal is what I call the half-dozen rule: I should be able to rattle off a half-dozen viable approaches to any critical problem without breaking a sweat ... then, after breaking a sweat, I should be able to rattle off a half-dozen more, and state with honest confidence that if I kept on sweat-breaking, I could keep on rattling, to infinity ... or at least to the limits of my ability to describe approaches.

And sometimes I get very near that star, but even when I can't, I sail by it.

The Big List of RPG Plots

What follows is a scrap of trivia . . . my collection of RPG plots, in abstract form. I built this by examining the premises of hundreds of published adventures for all systems (including those systems dear and departed from print), trying to boil them down to common denominators. The results are presented here: arbitrary, and sometimes redundant. Nevertheless, I turn to this list when I'm stuck for a fresh premise for next week's session of my campaign, whatever that campaign might happen to be about at the time. It helps me keep from falling into thematic ruts (my least favorite kind). With any luck, it might serve a similar function for you.

Note: The "plots" are arranged in alphabetical order by title. Since the titles are arbitrary, this serves no useful function at all. And if you want shakespearean five-act hoozits, plot trees, Man Versus Himself and other Serious Literary Bunkum, try Writer's Digest. This ain't Oxford, baby.

Any Old Port in a Storm

The PCs are seeking shelter from the elements or some other threat, and come across a place to hole up. They find that they have stumbled across something dangerous, secret, or supernatural, and must then deal with it in order to enjoy a little rest.
    Common Twists & Themes: The shelter contains the cause of the threat the PCs were trying to avoid. The shelter houses a Hidden Base (q.v.). The PCs must not only struggle for shelter, they must struggle to survive. The place is a legitimate shelter of some kind, but the PCs are not welcome, and must win hearts or minds to earn their bed for the night.

Better Late Than Never

Some bad guys have arrived and done some bad guy things. The PCs were none the wiser. The bad guys have now made good their escape, and the PCs have caught wind of it in time to chase them down before they make it back to their lair, their home nation, behind enemy lines, etc.
    Common Twists & Themes: The bad guys escaped by stealing a conveyance that the PCs know better than they do. The bad guys duck down a metaphorical (or literal) side-road, trying to hide or blend into an environment (often one hostile to the PCs). If the bad guys cross the adventure's "finish line" (cross the county line, make the warp jump, etc.) there's no way to pursue them beyond it.

Blackmail

Usually through trickery (but sometimes by digging into the PCs' past), an antagonist has something to hold over the heads of the PCs and make them jump. This could be any kind of threat from physical to social, but it depends on the villain having something - even if it's information - that others don't have. Now, he is pulling the strings of the PCs, telling them to do things they don't want to. The PCs must end the cycle of blackmail, deprive the villain of his edge, and keep him temporarily satisfied while doing it.
    Common Twists & Themes: The adventure hook involves the PCs doing the villain a good turn, which allows him to take advantage of them (very cynical!). To succeed, the PCs must contact other folks that are also being used. The PCs aren't the victims at all, but somebody they care about/are charged to protect, is.

Breaking and Entering

Mission objective: enter the dangerous place, and retrieve the vital dingus or valuable person. Overcome the area's defenses to do so.
    Common Twists & Themes: The goal is not to extract a thing, but to destroy a thing or interfere with a process (kill the force-screen generator, assassinate the evil king, stop the spell from being cast, wreck the invasion plans, close the portal). The goal has moved. The goal is information, which must be broadcast or otherwise released from the area as soon as it is found. The job must be done without alerting anyone. The PCs don't know the place is dangerous. The PCs must replace the thing with another thing.

Capture the Flag

The PCs must secure a military target for the good guys. There are bad guys there that prefer not to be secured. The fundamental tactical scenario.
    Common Twists & Themes: The PCs must assemble and/or train a force to do the job with them. The PCs are working with flawed intelligence and the target zone isn't as described. The PCs must coordinate their own efforts with an ally group (possibly putting aside rivalries to do so). The target zone includes a population of innocent people, fragile goods, or some other precious thing that mustn't be harmed in the crossfire.

Clearing The Hex

There is a place where bad things live. The PCs must make it safe for nice people, systematically clearing it of danger.
    Common Twists & Themes: The bad things can't be beaten with direct conflict. The PCs must learn more about them to solve the problem. The Haunted House. The Alien Infestation. The Wild Forest.

Delver's Delight

The PCs are treasure-hunters, who have caught wind of a treasure-laden ruin. They go to explore it, and must deal with its supernatural denizens to win the treasure and get out alive.
    Common Twists & Themes: The treasure itself is something dangerous. The treasure isn't in a ruin, but in a wilderness or even hidden somewhere "civilized." The treasure is someone else's rightful property. The treasure turns out to have a will of its own.

Don't Eat The Purple Ones

The PCs are stranded in a strange place, and must survive by finding food and shelter, and then worry about getting back home.
    Common Twists & Themes: The PCs must survive only for a short period of time, until help arrives, the ship and/or radio is repaired, or some such thing (in "repair" scenarios, sometimes the PCs must discover some fact about the local environment that will make such repairs possible).

Elementary, My Dear Watson

A crime or atrocity has been committed; the PCs must solve it. They must interview witnesses (and prevent them from being killed), gather clues (and prevent them from being stolen or ruined). They must then assemble proof to deliver to the authorities, or serve as personal ministers of justice.
    Common Twists & Themes: The PCs are working to clear an innocent already accused (possibly themselves). The PCs must work alongside a special investigator or are otherwise saddled with an unwanted ally. Midway through the adventure, the PCs are "taken off the case" - their invitation/authority to pursue the matter is closed (often the result of political maneuvering by an antagonist). The climax is a courtroom scene or other arena of judgment. The scale is highly variable for this type of adventure, from a small-town murder to a planetwide pollution scandal.

Escort Service

The PCs have a valuable object or person, which needs to be taken to a safe place or to its rightful owner, etc. They must undertake a dangerous journey in which one or more factions (and chance and misfortune) try to deprive them of the thing in their care.
    Common Twists & Themes: The thing or person is troublesome, and tries to escape or sidetrack the PCs. The destination has been destroyed or suborned by the enemy, and the PCs must take upon themselves the job that either the destination or their charge was meant to do when it got there. The person is a person attempting a political defection. Safe arrival at the destination doesn't end the story; the PCs must then bargain with their charge as their token (exchanging money for a hostage, for instance). The PCs must protect the target without the target knowing about it.

Good Housekeeping

The PCs are placed in charge of a large operation (a trading company, a feudal barony, the CIA) and must, despite lack of experience in such things, make it work and thrive.
    Common Twists & Themes: The PCs are brought in because something big is about to happen, and the Old Guard wants a chance to escape. The peasants, neighbors, employees, etcetera resent the PCs, because their method of inheritance looks outwardly bad and everybody loved the old boss.

Help is on the Way

A person (church group, nation, galaxy) is in a hazardous situation they can't survive without rescue. The PCs are on the job. In some scenarios, the hook is as simple as a distant yell or crackly distress signal.
    Common Twists & Themes: The victim(s) is (are) a hostage, or under siege from enemy forces, and the PCs must deal with the captors or break the siege. There is a danger that any rescue attempts will strand the rescuers in the same soup as the rescuees, compounding the problem. The rescuees aren't people, but animals, robots, or something else. The "victim" doesn't realize that he needs rescuing; he thinks he's doing something reasonable and/or safe. The threat isn't villain-oriented at all; it's a natural disaster, nuclear meltdown, or disease outbreak. The rescuees can't leave ; something immobile and vital must be tended to or dealt with at the adventure location. The PCs begin as part of the rescuees, and must escape and gather forces or resources to bring back and proceed as above.

Hidden Base

The PCs, while traveling or exploring, come across a hornet's nest of bad guys, preparing for Big Badness. They must either find some way to get word to the good guys, or sneak in and disable the place themselves, or a combination of both.
    Common Twists & Themes: The PCs must figure out how to use local resources in order to defend themselves or have a chance against the inhabitants.

How Much For Just The Dingus?

Within a defined area, something important and valuable exists. The PCs (or their employers) want it, but so do one or more other groups. The ones that get it will be the ones that can outthink and outrace the others, deal best with the natives of the area, and learn the most about their target. Each competing group has its own agenda and resources.
    Common Twists & Themes: The natives require the competing factions to gather before them as pals to state their cases. The valuable thing was en route somewhere when its conveyance or courier wrecked or vanished.

I Beg Your Pardon?

The PCs are minding their own business when they are attacked or threatened. They don't know why. They must solve the mystery of their attacker's motives, and in the meantime fend off more attacks. They must put two and two together to deal with the problem.
    Common Twists & Themes: The PCs have something that the bad guys want - but they don't necessarily realize it. The bad guys are out for revenge for a dead compatriot from a previous adventure. The bad guys have mistaken the PCs for somebody else.

Long Or Short Fork When Dining On Elf?

The PCs are a diplomatic vanguard, trying to open up (or shore up) either political or trade relations with a strange culture. All they have to do is manage for a day or so among the strange customs without offending anybody . . . and what information they have is both incomplete and dangerously misleading.
    Common Twists & Themes: The PCs were chosen by somebody who knew they weren't prepared for it - an NPC trying to sabotage the works (pinning this villain might be necessary to avert disaster).

Look, Don't Touch

The PCs are working surveillance - spying on a person, gathering information on a beast in the wild, scouting a new sector. Regardless of the scale, the primary conflict (at least at the start) is the rule that they are only to watch, listen and learn. They are not to make contact or let themselves be known.
    Common Twists & Themes: The target gets itself in trouble and the PCs must decide whether to break the no-contact rule in order to mount a rescue.

Manhunt

Someone is gone: they've run away, gotten lost, or simply haven't called home in a while. Somebody misses them or needs them returned. The PCs are called in to find them and bring them back.
    Common Twists & Themes: The target has been kidnapped (possibly to specifically lure the PCs). The target is dangerous and escaped from a facility designed to protect the public. The target is valuable and escaped from a place designed to keep him safe, cozy, and conveniently handy. The target has a reason for leaving that the PCs will sympathize with. The target has stumbled across another adventure (either as protagonist or victim), which the PCs must then undertake themselves. The missing "person" is an entire expedition or pilgrimage of some kind. The target isn't a runaway or missing/lost - they're just someone that the PCs have been hired to track down (possibly under false pretenses).

Missing Memories

One or more of the PCs wakes up with no memory of the recent past, and now they find themselves in some kind of trouble they don't understand. The PCs must find the reason for the memory lapse, and solve any problems they uncover in the meantime.
    Common Twists & Themes: The forgetful PCs voluntarily suppressed or erased the memories, and they find themselves undoing their own work.

Most Peculiar, Momma

Something both bad and inexplicable is happening (racial tension is being fired up in town, all the power is out, the beer supply is drained, it's snowing in July, Voyager still has fans, hordes of aliens are eating all the cheese), and a lot of people are very troubled by it. The PCs must track the phenomenon to its source, and stop it.
    Common Twists & Themes: The PCs are somehow unwittingly responsible for the whole thing. What seems to be a problem of one nature (technological, personal, biological, chemical, magical, political, etc) is actually a problem of an alternate one.

No One Has Soiled The Bridge

The PCs are assigned to guard a single vital spot (anything from a mountain pass to a solar system) from impending or possible attack. They must plan their defensive strategy, set up watches, set traps, and so on, and then deal with the enemy when it arrives.
    Common Twists & Themes: The intelligence the PCs was given turns out to be faulty, but acting on the new information could result in greater danger - but so could not acting on it, and the PCs must choose or create a compromise. The PCs learn that the enemy has good and sympathetic reason for wanting to destroy the protected spot.

Not In Kansas

The PCs are minding their own business and find themselves transported to a strange place. They must figure out where they are, why they are there and how to escape.
    Common Twists & Themes: They were brought there specifically to help someone in trouble. They were brought there by accident, as a by-product of something strange and secret. Some of the PCs' enemies were transported along with them (or separately), and now they have a new battleground, and innocents to convince which guys are the good guys.

Ounces of Prevention

A villain or organization is getting ready to do something bad, and the PCs have received a tip-off of some sort. They must investigate to find out more about the caper, and then act to prevent it.
    Common Twists & Themes: The initial tip-off was a red herring meant to distract the PCs from the actual caper. There are two simultaneous Bad Things on the way, and no apparent way to both of them - how to choose?

Pandora's Box

Somebody has tinkered with Things Man Ought Not, or opened a portal to the Mean People Dimension, cracked a wall at the state prison, or summoned an ancient Babylonian god into a penthouse. Before the PCs can even think of confronting the source of the trouble, they must deal with the waves of trouble already released by it: monsters, old foes out for vengeance, curious aliens who think cars/citizens/McDonald's hamburgers resemble food, and so forth.
    Common Twists & Themes: The PCs can't simply take the released badness to the mat; they have to collect it and shove it back into the source before it the adventure can really end. The PCs are drawn in to the source and must solve problems on the other side before returning to this one. A secret book, code, or other rare element is necessary to plug the breach (maybe just the fellow who opened it). A close cousin to this plot is the basic "somebody has traveled into the past and messed with our reality" story.

Quest For the Sparkly Hoozits

Somebody needs a dingus (to fulfill a prophecy, heal the monarch, prevent a war, cure a disease, or what have you). The PCs must find a dingus. Often an old dingus, a mysterious dingus, and a powerful dingus. The PCs must learn more about it to track it down, and then deal with taking it from wherever it is.
    Common Twists & Themes: The dingus is incomplete when found (one of the most irritating and un-fun plot twists in the universe). Somebody already owns it (or recently stole it, sometimes with legitimate claim or cause). The dingus is information, or an idea, or a substance, not a specific dingus. The PCs must "go undercover" or otherwise infiltrate a group or society, gaining the dingus by guile or stealth.

Recent Ruins

A town, castle, starship, outpost, or other civilized construct is lying in ruins. Very recently, it was just dandy. The PCs must enter the ruins, explore them, and find out what happened.
    Common Twists & Themes: Whatever ruined the ruins (including mean people, weird radiation, monsters, a new race, ghosts) is still a threat; the PCs must save the day. The inhabitants destroyed themselves. The "ruins" are a derelict ship or spaceship, recently discovered. The "ruin" is a ghost town, stumbled across as the PCs travel - but the map says the town is alive and well.

Running the Gauntlet

The PCs must travel through a hazardous area, and get through without being killed, robbed, humiliated, debased, diseased, or educated by whatever is there. The troubles they encounter are rarely personal in nature - the place itself is the "villain" of the adventure.
    Common Twists & Themes: The place isn't dangerous at all, and the various "dangers" are actually attempts to communicate with the party by some agent or another.

Safari

The PCs are on a hunting expedition, to capture or kill and elusive and prized creature. They must deal with its environment, its own ability to evade them, and possibly its ability to fight them.
    Common Twists & Themes: The creature is immune to their devices and weapons. There are other people actively protecting the creature. The creature's lair allows the PCs to stumble onto another adventure.

Score One for the Home Team

The PCs are participants in a race, contest, tournament, scavenger hunt or other voluntary bit of sport. They must win.
    Common Twists & Themes: The other contestants are less honest, and the PCs must overcome their attempts to win dishonestly. The PCs are competing for a deeper purpose than victory, such as to keep another contestant safe, or spy on one, or just to get into the place where the event goes down. The PCs don't wish to win; they just wish to prevent the villain from winning. The event is a deliberate test of the PCs abilities (for entry into an organization, for example). The event becomes more deadly than it's supposed to.

Stalag 23

The PCs are imprisoned, and must engineer an escape, overcoming any guards, automatic measures, and geographic isolation their prison imposes on them.
    Common Twists & Themes: Something has happened in the outside world and the prison security has fallen lax because of it. The PCs have been hired to "test" the prison - they aren't normal inmates. Other prisoners decide to blow the whistle for spite or revenge. The PCs are undercover to spy on a prisoner, but are then mistaken for real inmates and kept incarcerated. The PCs must escape on a tight schedule to get to another adventure outside the walls.

Take Us To Memphis And Don't Slow Down

The PCs are on board a populated conveyance (East Indiaman, Cruise Ship, Ferry, Sleeper Starship), when it is hijacked. The PCs must take action while the normals sit and twiddle.
    Common Twists & Themes: The "hijackers" are government agents pulling a complicated caper, forcing the PCs to choose sides. The hijackers don't realize there is a secondary danger that must be dealt with, and any attempt to convince them is viewed as a trick. The normals are unhelpful or even hostile to the PCs because they think the PCs are just making matters worse.

Troublemakers

A bad guy (or a group of them, or multiple parties) is kicking up a ruckus, upsetting the neighbors, poisoning the reservoirs, or otherwise causing trouble. The PCs have to go where the trouble is, locate the bad guys, and stop the party.
    Common Twists & Themes: The PCs must not harm the perpetrator(s); they must be bagged alive and well. The bad guys have prepared something dangerous and hidden as "insurance" if they are captured. The "bad guy" is a monster or dangerous animal (or an intelligent creature that everybody thinks is a monster or animal). The "bad guy" is a respected public figure, superior officer, or someone else abusing their authority, and the PCs might meet hostility from normally-helpful quarters who don't accept that the bad guy is bad. A balance of power perpetuates the trouble, and the PCs must choose sides to tip the balance and fix things. The "trouble" is diplomatic or political, and the PCs must make peace, not war.

Uncharted Waters

The PCs are explorers, and their goal is to enter an unknown territory and scope it out. Naturally, the job isn't just going to be surveying and drawing sketches of local fauna; something is there, something fascinating and threatening.
    Common Twists & Themes: Either the place itself is threatening (in which case the PCs must both play National Geographic and simultaneously try to escape with their skin, sanity, and credit rating) or the place itself is very valuable and wonderful, and something else there is keen on making sure the PCs don't let anyone else know. Other potential conflicts involve damage to the PCs' conveyance or communication equipment, in which case this becomes Don't Eat the Purple Ones.

We're On The Outside Looking In

Any of the basic plots in this list can be reengineered with the PCs on the outside of it. Either the PCs are accompanying other characters in the midst of such a plot (often being called on to defend the plot from the outside, as it were), or they are minding their own business when the others involved in the plot show up, and must pick sides or simply resist. For instance, with Any Old Port In The Storm, the PCs could already be enjoying (or native to) the shelter when a strange group arrives. If the "the PCs are unwelcome" variant is employed, then perhaps the PCs will be the only voice of reason to still the religious fervor, racial prejudice, anti-monster sentiment, or whatever else is the source of conflict.
    Common Twists & Themes: The PCs find themselves on the receiving end of the adventure. Take any of the plots here and reverse them, placing the PCs in the position where NPCs (often the villain, fugitive, etcetera) normally are. Instead of hunting, they must be hunted. Instead of fixing, they must avoid getting "fixed" themselves (ow). Alternately, leave a classic plot intact but turn the twists upside down, making them twistier (or refreshingly un twisty).

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Tips and Tricks

Surrender yourself to metaphor. I've written the plots in the language of (typically very physical) action-adventure genres, because that's the basic form of roleplaying adventure - but if you're playing on more levels than that, the list can still punch its weight. Just remember that every thing, place, and foe can really be a piece of information, person, and unhealthy attitude, as surely as a space station can be a dungeon and a magical residue can be a fingerprint.

Double up. A nice basic method is the chameleon game, where an adventure presents itself as one type of story in the "hook layer" but reveals itself as something else. Sometimes, the switch is innocent and natural - Don't Eat the Purple Ones, for example, makes a good hook for Running the Gauntlet, and Most Peculiar, Momma is a logical lead for Pandora's Box. Sometimes, the switch is something more sinister or deliberate, with NPCs selling the adventure as one thing when it's really another. This can still be innocent, in its way, if the NPCs have been duped themselves, or if they're just desperate for help and worried that nobody will be eager to tackle the real problem.

Throw yourself a curve. Your players will, anyway, so practice early. Pick two random entries from the Big List and make your adventure on those, no matter what comes up - the first one is the hook layer; the second is the meat of the adventure. If the same entry comes up both times, go with it! Two layers can have a similar structure but very different roots or details.

Double up, part two: Some very satisfying adventures weave two separate (or thematically-related) plots together. An easy way to make this work is to make one plot physical and the other plot personal. That way just one of the plots puts demand on the PCs' location, while the other one can tag along anywhere. For example: the PCs are hired to escort a prince to a summit so he can appear before the masses and end a war (a physical and simple example of Escort Service), but on the way, they realize that the poor guy is suicidal because state obligations have ruined his love life, and must prevent his self-destruction by either fixing the problem or convincing him to shoulder the burden (a personal and metaphorical example of Ounces of Prevention).

Don't Panic. A lot of GMs come to the Big List only once they've begun to panic. Don't crucify yourself just yet! In particular, don't fuss too much over plot, as many GMs do. All of the plots here can provide a tried-and-true, simple structure, and structure is all you need a plot for in a roleplaying game.

Remember to play to the strengths of the medium - most all of which are about character, not plot. Only in an RPG can you experience a fictional character on a personal, first-hand level. Outline your adventures to make the most of that. Any plot that contains more than a basic structure is more likely to pull attention away from character, and that's burning the bridge for firewood. All you need to do is be ready to roll with the curves and have fun hamming it up. Relax. Game.

And finally, here's The Little List of Nearly-Universal Plot Twists That Work With Almost Any Plot Ever: The PCs must work alongside an NPC or organization they'd rather not pal around with (those who are normally rivals or villains, or just a snooty expert sent along to "help" them, etc). The victims are really villains and the villains are really victims. The PCs meet others who can help them, but won't unless the PCs agree to help them with their own causes. The villain is somebody the PCs know personally, even respect or love (or someone they fall for, mid-story). The PCs must succeed without violence, or with special discretion. The PCs must succeed without access to powers, equipment, or other resources they're used to having. The villain is a recurring foil. Another group comparable to the PCs has already failed to succeed, and their bodies/equipment/etc provide clues to help the PCs do better. There are innocents nearby that the PCs must keep safe while dealing with the adventure. The adventure begins suddenly and without warning or buildup; the PCs are tossed into the fire of action in scene one. The PCs must pretend to be someone else, or pretend to be themselves but with very different allegiances, values or tastes. The PCs can't do everything and must choose: which evil to thwart? Which innocents to rescue? Which value or ideal to uphold? The PCs must make a personal sacrifice or others will suffer. The PCs aren't asked to solve the problem, just to render aid against a backdrop of larger trouble: get in a shipment of supplies, sneak out a patient that needs medical help, or so on. One of the PCs is (or is presumed to be) a lost heir, fulfillment of a prophecy, a volcano god, or some other savior and/or patsy, which is why the PCs must do whatever the adventure is about. There is another group of PC-like characters "competing" on the same adventure, possibly with very different goals for the outcome.

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This revision of the Big List is the result of several additional years of gaming, game writing, and what hopefully amounts to accumulated wisdom. It's also the result of letters from several readers who poked me in the ribs when I had overlooked something important! Any suggestions for expansion to this list should be directed to me via email, and they will be welcomed with open arms and slobbery kisses. You can also download this article in a spiffy PDF form.

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The Big List of RPG Plots is dedicated to the many, many fans who've let me know how helpful it's been, and especially to those who've helped make it better: Peter Barnard, Glen Barnett, Colin Clark, David Lott, Jason Puckett, Marc Rees, Carrie Schutrick, and Jeff Yaus, plus a few mysterious heroes who never let me know their true identities. This is for all the GMs out there logging the hours to give their players an enjoyable game.

All contents of this page Copyright ©1999, 2002, 2018 by S. John Ross

Click Here for the Polish translation by Szymon Brycki

Scenario Stress-Test: The Cross-Genre Gauntlet

Without playtest and blindtest, any work of RPG design is doomed to be its weakest self. As a designer, I know that song by heart ... but as a campaign Game Master, I don't have the resources to test each week's adventure before I run it. To address the tension between my standards as a designer and my desires as a GM, I've devised a handful of stress-tests: modes of interrogation for untested adventures. Bolts of lightning, in the brainstorm.

Stress-testing doesn't replace real testing, but it can help me spot weaknesses (so I can carve them out) and strengths (so I can play them up). Each is a mental exercise, a quick solitaire game of sorts, taking just a minute or two. One of my oldest and most reliable is the Cross-Genre Gauntlet.

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To send a module down the Gauntlet, I challenge myself to adapt it to three other genres, rapidly. Sometimes I scribble out the adaptations on paper or on my phone. Sometimes I do it entirely in my head while I wash the dishes or cook a meal.

There’s just one rule in the Gauntlet: the superpower swap rule. If the adventure’s home genre includes superpowers (in the broadest sense, including spell-casting, psionics, and Sufficiently Advanced Technology), then two of the conversion genres must be devoid of such things. If the adventure's home genre is already devoid of such things, two of the conversion genres must contain irrational super-stuff.

For one example, if I'm designing an adventure for some Space Opera gaming, that's a genre well-stocked with superthings, from super-sensors and gravitics to the occasional green-blooded pointy-eared psychic. So to successfully run the Gauntlet, I must adapt my adventure to at least two genres where that isn't the case: Cold-War Espionage, for example, or the world of The Three Musketeers.

For another: if I'm designing a mystery or caper or gang-war drama for Fly From Evil, that's a game of fictionalized history devoid of supernatural elements. To send such an adventure down the Gauntlet, I must adapt it to at least two genres where the laws of physics are something that happens to other people: Elfy-Dwarfy Fantasy, perhaps, or the genre-colliding oddity of Encounter Critical's world of Vanth.

The process of conversion amounts to identifying the bones of the design (things like goals, obstacles, motives, stakes) and re-dressing them with the props and costumes of the target genres. The value of the process is roughly threefold: recognizing the adventure's parts, sticking the adventure more clearly in my memory, and challenging its robustness.

Recognizing the Parts

First, recognizing which parts are 'the bones of the design' and which are just 'props and costumes' is enormously valuable for my focus as a GM. It highlights those things as tools for when I need to goose a lagging pace, or help a conflicted Player Character find their own focus. It's hardcore wheat-from-chaffing. You set your fantasy adventure on a magical airship? Great, that’s colorful, but is it just color? What happens if you move it to a Midwestern American town? PCs now have too much access to the broader world? Okay, the flying ship wasn’t just about color, it was about isolation. Move it to a remote archaeological dig, or a hard-to-reach Appalachian community, perhaps? Did that do the trick? Role understood. And so on.

Sticking in the Mind

Second, it's a powerful mnemonic. I have no patience for mid-game page-flipping or other pace-killers, and spending a few seconds re-dressing the villain's henchman for Star Wars, the Marvel Universe, and France in the 1620s doesn't just give me perspective on his role and nature, it decorates him with colorful symbols I'll remember easily, because in my mind he's now wearing the lace-and-leather gloves of the French court, a green-and-yellow HYDRA uniform, and the stupid little hat of an Imperial officer. That's a version the PCs will never see, not directly, but it's a potent tool for my own mind's eye.

The Stress-Testiest Part

Finally, thanks in part to the superpower-swap, I'm kicking the tires on the module's robustness. Superpowers are super-fun and super-atmospheric, but they're also super-shortcuts which can weaken a design when we sleep at the wheel.

For example: I love mysteries. I love them in part because, as a player, I'm a role-player and problem-solver, and mysteries zero in on both. As a GM, I also love them because I'm a lazy GMing so-and-so, and mysteries are the simplest adventures for me to design, prep, and run (they're chock full of pacing handles for one thing, and easy to stock with eccentric NPCs that form the adventure's connective tissue).

In a world dripping with superswag, though ... mysteries graduate from "easy" to "almost too easy," thanks to a dozen super-rugs to sweep things under and a row of super-butts to pull answers from. If your adventure depends on the supernatural to make sense, it’s often too weak to stand. If your adventure crumples when the PCs start casting spells or pointing tricorders at it, it’s too weak to walk. A robust adventure can run, leap and soar in both rational and fanciful environments. Adventures that can’t do so aren’t necessarily bad (some precious flowers wither outside their greenhouse) but they could be better, and one of the benefits of stress-testing is seeing how. If I design a mystery for Uresia or Call of Cthulhu or Star Trek ... and then mentally adapt it to a straight-historical or hard-SF setting, those lazy dependencies leap from the design and punch me in the eye. In the nice way! On the flip-side of the GM screen, if I adapt a historical mystery to a fantasy world, I begin to spot thin zones where PC magic might render it bland or un-challenging to the PCs: faults in the structure, load-bearing walls that are not up to code.

The Gauntlet might seem an oddball practice at first. After all, if you designed a Space Opera adventure, you’re only going to run it as a Space Opera adventure in your Space Opera campaign with Space Opera characters who have Space Opera expectations ... what difference does it make if it would falter as Cold-War Espionage? Maybe none, and yet ... when you take your adventure for a jog through other genres, you will learn things about it, and you'll GM it with clearer understanding, sharper recollection, and the confidence that comes from a well-kicked tire. If you're lucky, the players will kick even harder, but you'll be a little more prepared.

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I love writing about GMing and chatting about GMing, and I'll write more about the stress-tests in the future. If you'd like to discuss this post or float a GMing thingy you'd like my perspective on, drop me a line.

It'll Make Sense to A Few. Not Me, Mind You.