Not long ago, I saw a game result that bucked the established trend in outcomes, a potent reminder of the unpredictability of sports. After losing the first four games of a five-game series against Australia (T20 International Cricket), the Sri Lanka team posted a comprehensive win to salvage some pride and deflate Australian egos just a little.

It reminded me that a game consists of a number of smaller events, sub-contests within the scope of the overall game, which is itself a sub-contest within the broader totality of the series.

Win enough of these sub-contests, and you win the game. Win enough of the games, and you win the series.

So what does winning a sub-contest actually look like?

  • It could be viewed as a contest between individual batsmen and individual bowlers (or pitchers if we’re talking Baseball). The bowler / pitcher has just so many deliveries / pitches to get the batsman to do something he doesn’t want to do – swing at a ball that he shouldn’t, for example, or get his timing / accuracy wrong.
  • It could be the totality of that batsman’s time at bat against the entirety of the opposition team.
  • It could be the totality that batsman’s attempts to resist one particular bowler (cricket has multiple players delivering the ball to the batsman, unlike baseball, which has only the one specialist pitcher and perhaps a substitute / relief pitcher or two).
  • It could be the batsman’s performance in successive innings or times at bat within the game – the details are different cricket vs baseball, but the principle remains.

Each of these reveals something more about the course of the game, which is why statistical analyses of all these can be used to illuminate the course of the game.

Let’s boil all of these down into a generic category of analysis, which I’ll call a Granular Grouping.

Each granular grouping is the combined results of a group of deliveries or pitches – again, cricket and baseball aren’t quite the same in the way they do this. In baseball, this unit is an “innings” and multiple batsmen have to be overcome to signal the end of one; in cricket, it’s called an Over, and the batsmen concerned stay in the middle until removed from play. T20 cricket gets its name from the fact that each side gets a total of 20 overs in which to score (less if they do badly).

Again, let’s use a generic term, “Set Of Deliveries” for this, even more granular, breakdown of a passage of play.

And below that, we have a succession of deliveries that are the constituents of an individual Set Of Deliveries.

“Winning” one of these sub-contests depends somewhat on the context of the game at the time – it could be simply not getting out, or it could be scoring, or scoring a lot. In baseball it could be an RBI, or clearing the bases when they are loaded, or simply getting to first base. In general terms, it’s maximizing the potential benefit of the team relative to the potential gains at that point in time.

So, if we’re looking at a breakdown of the contest, it might be:

  • Series
    • Game
      • Granular Grouping
        • Set Of Deliveries
          • Individual Deliveries

But things take on a new perspective if we reverse that nesting sequence:

  •  
    •  
      •  
        •  
          • Individual Deliveries
        • Set of Deliveries
      • Granular Grouping
    • Game
  • Series

…because, viewed in this way, each item on the list becomes an emergent property of the preceding set of contests. ‘Win’ enough of the individual deliveries, and you will ‘win’ that set of deliveries. ‘Win’ enough sets of deliveries, and you will ‘win’ any granular grouping you care to examine. ‘Win’ enough of those granular groupings, and you will win the game. Win enough of the games, and you will win the series.

What’s interesting is that each level of this hierarchy imposes it’s own context and narrative and influence over the next delivery in the game. Someone scores that on paper probably shouldn’t? Advantage to their team. Someone doesn’t score that can usually be relied on? Advantage to the bowling/pitching team. Ahead on the scoreboard? Advantage, your team. Ranked way above the opposition? Then you are expected to do well, and that can lead to overconfidence and the occasional surprise from an under-estimated underdog. Ahead in the series? Complacency is always a danger. Nothing left to lose and everything to gain? Beware the wounded opponent!

You don’t even have to actually achieve these things – a trend in that direction is quite enough to influence the outcome at the next hierarchy up (always back the underdog – they won’t win as often, but it’s so much more satisfying when they do)!

Each game consists of an individual sequence of contests between bat and ball and the players wielding them. But you can never look at these individual sequences and tell the whole story of the game – you need the next level up the hierarchy to provide context and direction.

I can perform a similar breakdown of an RPG, and that’s where things get even more interesting:

  •  
    •  
      •  
        •  
          • Individual Die Rolls / Interactions
        • Individual Combats / Encounters / Narrative Passages
      • Acts or Plot Sequences within an Adventure
    • An Adventure
  • A campaign

It’s not the ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ that matters so much (though that can be important, too); the style and tone of each level of the hierarchy is an emergent property of the cumulative effect of the layer below it.

Sometimes, it can be hard connecting two layers that are widely separated in the hierarchy, and so this truism can get overlooked. When you are focused on individual die rolls or game interactions, you don’t often think about the broader pictures, and if you do, your thinking probably doesn’t go beyond that combat / encounter / narrative passage.

It’s too easy to focus on the trees and miss the forest, to lose sight of the bigger picture.

While working on Assassin’s Amulet, and before that back when we were first planning Campaign Mastery (and a few other collaborative projects), Johnn complimented me on my ability to keep sight of the shape of the forest even while focusing on an individual leaf within it.

Most GMs are not so adept at this, he said, and admitted that he himself was one of them.

I’ve always had a natural aptitude in this area, and was forced to develop it by circumstances which led me to need to write multiple adventures in advance and then play them in close succession; it’s far more normal to develop adventures in rough sequence with playing them. At most, you stay one or two adventures ahead. When you’re prepping six or eight adventures at a time, it becomes easy to drop hints and continuity in one adventure that won’t pay off until two adventures later. Continuity is naturally strengthened. And that strengthens awareness of the emergent properties that compound over different layers.

The skill was further sharpened by my training and experience as a Systems Analyst – in order to understand the purpose behind a particular line of code, you often had to understand the purpose of the module as a whole, and in order to understand the purpose of the module and how it interacted with others the way it did, you usually had to understand the system as a whole, even superficially.

When you’re a computer programmer writing code, it becomes too easy to focus on each individual line of code and forget the bigger picture, especially when that line of code is not doing what you want it to do. A Systems Analyst has to be able to take the problem reported by the system owner and drill down until they find the line or lines of code that aren’t doing what the owner wants or needs them to do, then understand why that is the case. You have to continually assess the impact of small-scale changes on the bigger picture.

There was one occasion when a system owner requested a change that would have slowed the performance of their whole system to an unacceptable level; the coding changes themselves were relatively trivial, but the collective impact of them would be disastrous. Awareness of the big-picture consequences of the change enabled me to report to them that making the change they wanted would require them to purchase faster hardware – presenting them with the choice of living without the coding changes (and accompanying procedural alterations) or investing far more than they had anticipated. The manager used his ability to look at the bigger picture to determine that the improved functioning of his department would justify the expenditure, and made the request for the faster equipment – going from a 286-based PC, first to a 386-based PC, and then to a 486 and finally a Pentium.

Returning to the question of the big picture in an RPG, it’s not actually all that difficult to implement a big-picture perspective. Two steps are involved – one at the start of each individual combat, encounter, or narrative passage, and one at the end.

Before

Take a moment to remind yourself of the role this combat, encounter, or narrative passage is to have within the bigger picture. It only takes a couple of seconds.

This reminder of context allows you to shape the specifics of the individual die rolls or interactions. Every tactical choice, every roleplaying choice, is given a specific direction by this contextual appreciation. Sometimes, that can mean sacrificing a little short-term entertainment or a “brilliant idea” for broader longer-term value from the confrontation; that’s when this reminder really pays off, by letting you better assess whether or not the “brilliant idea” really is “brilliant” or would actually fall into the category of “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. It won’t stop every such misstep, but it will reduce them in frequency, and the cumulative impact of many such decisions can be profound at the campaign level.

After

Few encounters / interactions will ever go exactly according to script / expectation – so much so that you can be better off not trying to get too specific in your planning. Ideally, the fact that the encounter / interaction has happened at all will be enough to propel the plot forward towards an entertaining resolution.

It follows that at the end of each interaction / encounter, a moment of attention to the impact on the bigger picture of the way the interaction / encounter actually played out is rarely a wasted effort. Either things are on track, or they are not; and if not, now is the time to start planning some remedial action.

It might be, for example, that the PCs have emerged from an interaction with completely the wrong idea about what’s going on. When this happens, you have two choices: alter reality (what you have planned, and have used as a guide to what has been established within the adventure) to conform with the player’s interpretation, or finding a way to let them discover and correct their error before it derails the adventure / campaign.

Big-picture reviews permit you to reshape the remainder of the adventure as necessary to accommodate the twin ambitions at the heart of any RPG story: letting the characters do what their players want them to do, while advancing the plot towards a satisfactory resolution.

The perfect RPG Text Editor

This doesn’t exist, so far as I’m aware. It relies on a nested document structure and an interface to match.

Consider the following diagram:

  • The left-hand column is the Campaign stream. For any given adventure, it contains notes from the previous adventure, the campaign significance of this adventure, and notes for the next adventure.
  • The second column breaks down the adventure into its structural elements. In this example, Introduction, Acts I, II, and III, and an Epilogue.
  • The third column breaks down Act I – labeled Phase One on the diagram – into four scenes and a conditional plot element with two choices, A and B.
  • The Fourth column contains specifics for the second scene of Act I, or the specific plot consequences of each choice in the conditional.

Notice that this is exactly the same sort of adventure breakdown that we’ve been discussing.

A word processor designed to use this structure would look something like this:

  • The campaign context window lets you move through the three campaign elements – notes from the previous adventure, the campaign significance of the current adventure or a plot overview, and any notes for the next adventure – something you can add to during play.
  • The Adventure Structure contains space for you to give an overall breakdown of the adventure.
  • The Plot breakdown is a brief synopsis of what’s supposed to be in this scene and how it relates to the overall plot.
  • The main text area is where you do most of your writing. This contains the specifics of the scene – narrative, encounters, dialogue plot branches and conditionals, and so on.
  • If you highlight text in the main window and drag it to one of the smaller windows, it will simple append it to the current item displayed in that smaller window. But if you highlight a list in the main window and drag-and-drop, it creates new entries – one from each bullet point in the list – and inserts them after the current selected item and before any other items that may already exist – except in the plot breakdown panel, there it simply inserts the text in the chosen position.

That means that your workflow would be like this:

  • Create a ‘new adventure’.
  • Import the ‘next adventure’ notes from the previous adventure. This creates a permanent connection between the two so that if those notes get updated, so do the imported notes in this adventure.
  • Import from a master document / campaign plan (or copy and paste) a synopsis of what this adventure is all about and how it fits into the campaign
  • Decide what the main beats of the adventure are going to be – how will the story break down? Create a bullet list spelling out this synopsis in the main text window.
  • When you’re satisfied, highlight the list and drag-and-drop it into the Adventure structure panel. Entries within that level of the document are immediately created from each of the bullet points of the list.
  • Look at the first item on the adventure structure. Think about how that will need to be structured and what content will be needed. Create a list in the main text area.
  • Do the same for the next part of the plot, repeat until you have a list of content required for each part of the adventure. Doing it all in the main window in multiple lists means that you create a detailed breakdown of the whole adventure – letting you change one part to fit another.
  • With the first part of the adventure displayed, select your first list and drag-and-drop into the plot breakdown panel.
  • Move to the second part of the adventure structure and drag-and-drop your second list. Repeat for all the others, too.
  • This leaves your main text area empty; your campaign context is giving you an overall summary of the adventure, your adventure structure is giving you a general summary of this part of the adventure, and the plot breakdown is a list of the component parts needed to turn this part of the adventure into something playable – which doubles as a ‘to do’ list.
  • So now you set about actually writing the narrative, writing any canned dialogue, describing encounters, etc, until you have satisfied the list shown in the plot breakdown panel. Any time you need to, you can glance at one of the other panels to remind yourself of how it’s all supposed to fit together.
  • Repeat for all the other items on your to-do list. Make any notes about how the next adventure will be affected and drag them into the “next adventure” panel.
  • Congratulations, your adventure is complete and ready-to-run.

I’m not going to provide a full adventure as an example, but I need something to demonstrate why this is so much better. So let’s zoom in a bit, just as this word processor would do.

  • Overall Purpose: Cagliostimo (villain) obtains a magic talisman that enhances his powers substantially, while the PCs smash a plot to replace the Crown Prince with an impersonator.
  • Adventure Structure: The PCs discover a plot against a member of the Royal Family while hearing rumors of Cagliostimo’s minions stirring near Elvensland.
  • Plot Breakdown: Missing informant ‘Wiezel’; Usual Haunts; Wiezel uncovered; what he overheard in the sewers; Ranger in the inn; rumors of Cagliostimo’s Goblin Ninjas; a hard decision.
  • Narrative describing a PC noticing that Wiezel is missing.
  • A listing of his usual haunts, with thumbnail descriptions. NPCs encountered at each, personality profiles, none of them have heard from Wiezel.
  • A hint as to where Wiezel has gone to ground.
  • Wiezel dialogue – why he’s in hiding (he’s terrified), how he came to be in the sewers at the wrong time and place, what he overheard – the plot against “the Royal target”, Wiezel discovered by the plotters, the chase, the escape.
  • Meanwhile, a Ranger arrives at the Inn (Party HQ), on his way to the Elvensland. Description, Dialogue, Tells the PCs of the rumors of Cagliostimo’s Ninjas.
  • PCs gather to update each other and have to decide – chase the rumors of Cagliostimo, or deal with the plot right in front of them. If the rumors were more substantial, the decision might be different, but the more immediate threat is right here, as Nessa (NPC ally) will point out.

If all this sounds a little bit like a relational database, it is. But it’s a purpose-driven database with a purpose-driven interface, and saves everything in a single plain-text file with a defined internal structure.

The available substitute

There is no program out there that is exactly like this. Some of the programs that are designed for scriptwriting come close, but none of them do it all. I doubt that it will ever be written.

So, what’s the next best thing?

Well, that’s what I use to write my adventures now – and these articles, too; a plain text file.

I start with the overall purpose of the adventure. Under that go anything carried forward from the last adventure (no automatic update, I’m afraid), which I have simply copy-and-pasted into the document. Beneath that, I list the adventure structure – broad bullet points describing how the PCs are going to get involved, what challenges they will have to overcome, and how the adventure will resolve. I then copy that list and break down each item into a summary of what’s needed for that act, just as I have above. I then copy that list and replace each item on it with the actual content.

It’s not as good as having the context information & synopsis right in front of you at all times, but it’s all there and easy to scroll to, so much better than nothing.

The Big Picture

The great advantage to this structured approach is that I can pay attention to the big picture when designing the next layer down, and this attention trickles down through the subsequent layers of the adventure. I don’t have to worry about the big picture while writing a particular piece of narrative, I just have to adhere to the ‘work order’ given by the next level up the hierarchy, which has, in turn, been constructed to deliver the requirements of the hierarchy level above it. In effect, the ‘big picture’ permeates the structure.

What’s The Downside?

There’s a price-tag attached to everything, and in this case, some of the spontaneity gets lost and replaced with deliberate direction – not to the players, but to the GM. That’s all right; if the players deviate from the prepared and expected course, you can easily retreat back to the next level up in the hierarchy and make sure that the important bits aren’t missed. So your capacity to cope with spontaneity and improvisation actually increases. But you do have to adjust your GMing style to welcome that improvisation rather than fighting it, which is often the natural instinct.

A bonus up-side

Quite often, in compensation, this approach is faster to write, and there’s much less chance of leaving something out.

There’s no such thing as a perfect solution. But this comes fairly close.


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