(Image: FreeImages.com / tijmen van dobbenburgh)

So you’ve got this great idea for a plot for your next RPG adventure. How do you go from that undeveloped idea to having a plan for the construction of that Adventure? Where do you begin?

It’s not an easy choice to make, except in hindsight. There are all sorts of options to choose from:

1. The Beginning
2. A Key Character
3. A Key Confrontation
4. One Problem
5. The Villain
6. The Ending
7. The Fragmented Approach

I’ve used all of these at one time or another, and in today’s article I’ll review each for their advantages, disadvantages, and limitations, and finally, examine how I choose between them.

Under the beginning-first model, the GM starts writing at “0” and proceeds 0-4-6-8-11-14-16-17-18; he then identifies critical points 3, 7, and 10, and plans alternate paths that the adventure could take at those points (5, 12, and 13); and, finally, schedules some incidental side-plots and encounters to even out the screen time (2, 9, and 15).

The Beginning

The most obvious starting point is at the beginning. All Adventures have one. From this initial beginning, you plan a straight and logical through-line for the primary story to follow, complete with any difficulties and pathways around them; you build in alternative solutions, allocate principle PCs to be the focus of attention in each section, and finally make sure that every character is getting a fair share of the spotlight, that each player is getting the sort of activity that they find entertaining, and that each PC is always doing something. Then you expect to ignore 90% of it because you don’t get to control what the players do, and will need to improv changes in response to the unexpected twists the players put on your neat and simple plotline.

The biggest, most obvious pitfall is that you might not see a logical path for the adventure to follow. The next most common is that the initial idea can morph and transform in uncontrollable ways while you are writing it, until the idea that you are supposed to be developing becomes lost and confused, forcing you to scrap all the development to date – and sometimes, these twists can so pollute your thinking that you never get clear of this flawed development and have to reinvent the whole idea. The third major pitfall is that if there is a logical flaw in the idea itself, this can remain hidden until you actually start play (when the players will point out your error with great relish). And, finally, you can embark down a logical path only to find that it doesn’t lead to the situation you expected it to, requiring characters to behave inconsistently, or be in two places at the same time, or be doing two things at once, in order to resolve the dilemma.

Against this formidable minefield of potential problems is a single great advantage: that you are designing the adventure in the same sequence, the same narrative flow, as the players will experience it. This compartmentalizes each potential choke-point, enabling you to deal with them individually and separately.

Frankly, if you employ the one-line-bullet-point-planning method that I have described a number of time here at Campaign Mastery, those pitfalls are minimized – but so is the potential gain from the advantage, leaving this the simplest but least effective technique.

A Key Character

The second approach is to work out the story from the point-of-view of one key character. This is usually a PC, though sometimes an NPC works better as being the plotting “vehicle”. It’s even possible to divide an adventure up into stages in which each PC gets a turn at being the “key character”, though this can be tricky and can seem contrived.

Some adventures in the Adventurer’s Club campaign are “star vehicles” for a particular PC or pair of PCs. That simply means that the subject matter shows off the PCs abilities or personality or involves the character’s history in some way that dominates the adventure context. That doesn’t mean that the other PCs don’t make significant or even vital contributions within the course of the adventure, it simply means that the adventure is “about” the key PC in some way. When this is the case, it can often make sense to plan the adventure following the story from the point of view of that one character, then dropping in incidental encounters, scenes, and plot sequences to give the other PCs some spotlight time along the way. Since we’re being careful to give each character his own “featured plots” in equal number, spotlight time should even out in the long run.5

If you were to draw a diagram of the plotting process, it would be virtually indistinguishable from the one shown earlier; only the sequence of plot points are likely to be different – “0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 15, 16, 17” for example.

A key aspect of this approach is to view the other PCs as resources that the “star PC” uses to solve his problems. In fact, I would go further and state that they should be viewed as resources that he has to use, because that guarantees that each PC (and hence, each player) has something to do in the course of the adventure.

A Key Confrontation

The third approach is best used when the whole purpose of the plot is to introduce an important NPC into the campaign. You start with the key confrontation that introduces the NPC, and work backwards from that confrontation. Depending on the specifics, this confrontation could come early in the adventure or be its climax.

For example, contemplate a character who is intended to provide information resources and expertise when the PCs need it. The key confrontation is between this NPC and the PCs, and the purpose is to demonstrate this capability. There are two obvious paths: either the NPC discovers a situation needing PC attention, and comes to them, or the PCs encounter a situation in which they need the expertise that the NPC has to offer, and go to, or are directed to, him. Either way, the situation in question is clearly at the heart of the adventure.

Or perhaps the confrontation is to be between a Mastermind’s flunky and the PCs, and the purpose is simply to reveal that there is a mastermind lurking in the shadows. This is a situation in which a small plotline, seemingly complete and isolated, is unexpectedly revealed as a small part of a bigger picture. The connection is usually by way of something that would normally be present or resolved as part of a self-contained plot that is not. It might be that the adventure is about the NPC acquiring some resource on behalf of the Mastermind; the PCs stop the NPC (eventually) but when they go to recover the resource, it has gone. Or it might be that the self-contained adventure is complete, lacking only one thing: a motive for the NPC to do whatever it was that he tried to do in the course of the adventure. Or it could be something more dramatic – the NPC does something, the PCs hunt him down and are about to capture or interrogate him. He says something melodramatic like “You may eventually get the answers you seek, but it will all be too late. I am defeated but another has already taken my place,” and then suddenly shrivels up and wastes away, or he bites on a hollow tooth releasing poison into his system, or whatever. Note that the latter won’t work very well in D&D where clerics frequently have access to spells that neutralize poison!

Either way, you work back from the fact of the central confrontation to the reasons for that confrontation, and then to how the PCs become aware of whatever the cause is, and so on; then work forwards from the point of confrontation to resolution of the adventure. Then you add in any branches and ensure that “all roads lead to Rome” – or, in this case, to the confrontation that is the point of the whole adventure. Everything else that happens exists in the plot only because of that confrontation.

Functionally, the same map of plot developments can be used to represent this flow of construction, because the plot is essentially still a relatively linear construct. In this case, 1, 2, 6, 14, 16, or 17 are all locations that could be the central confrontation, because they are all “funnel points” through which the plot has to move. 1 or 2 only work if the NPC is bringing the cause to the PCs; 6, 14, or 16/17 are far more likely otherwise. 16 or 17 only work if the central confrontation is to be the climax of the adventure, implying that the confrontation is with an enemy or opponent. For all other types of “confrontation”, 6 and/or 14 are the most likely plot points; 6 is early, and leads to a complex situation in which the PCs have several choices about paths within the narrative; 14 is far more straightforward. 6 doesn’t lead directly to the climax, while 14 is far more strongly connected with that climax, and so is likely to be about some revelation concerning whatever has already happened within the adventure.

One Problem

A similar approach is to define one problem that you want the PCs to have to solve. Answering the basic questions – why they have to solve it, how they have to solve it, how they find out about it, what’s their motivation, what effect will solving the problem have on the campaign, and so on – defines what the PCs need to derive from prior plot points within the adventure.

There’s one essential difference between this approach and any others, and that is that this approach marries naturally into the achievement of PCs goals. The logic is simple: The PCs have a goal, the problem stands in their way, and so the problem has to be solved.

This has the advantage of defining the essential nature of plot points 0, 1, 16, 17, and 18 for you. In 0, the PCs begin to pursue their goal, in 1 they discover that there is a problem, in 16 they find the solution to the problem, in 17 they put that solution into effect, and in 18 they achieve whatever it was that they set out to do. Everything else is either incidental or relates to the parameters of the problem, or sometimes, the parameters of the solution.

What do I mean by that? Simply that sometimes problems have simple but unacceptable answers – “Nuke ’em from Orbit, it’s the only way to be sure” – “but that’s EARTH you’re talking about!” – and the problem is about finding ways to deal with the restrictions that prohibit or constrain that obvious solution “Maybe we can use a pheromone of some sort to lure them all to a remote island or remote points on each continent, or something, then nuke just that.” “What about NORAD? We don’t want to start World War III, we’ve got enough problems.”

The Villain

It is often essential to develop the story from the point of view of the Villain. You start by working out how to the story would play out “if everything goes according to plan” and then look at when, where, and how the PCs can force him to deviate from that plan.

For example, in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, the PCs are about to attempt to prevent the biggest, slowest, crime wave in the history of New York City, as one gang attempts to rob the 12 wealthiest targets in the city (okay, 11 plus one target of opportunity).

In developing this plotline, we worked out how the crooks were to pull off the robbery – this required a new super-acid that was especially effective at tunneling through the granite and basalt of NYC’s bedrock – how they got the acid, how they came up with the plan, how they recruited the people they would need, how they were to keep the whole operation secure, and how they planned to get away with it. Then we started looking for ways in which this whole operation could come unstuck, little by little.

It started with a rat plague (NYC has those from time-to-time, like most modern cities); that was followed by a blizzard (which we transplanted from a decade earlier in the campaign historical background, but which also occur in NYC from time-to-time); and then by a few days of unseasonably warm weather, which melted the snow, overloaded the storm-water system, and produced localized flooding in basements, and which killed off most of the rats. Rat bodies then began showing up in unexpected places, showing unusual rates of decomposition and in some cases, ingestion of some sort of poison. That led the PCs to investigate the danger to the citizens (negligible due to dilution) and the sewers that were the source, which in turn led them to the new tunnels being dug with the super-acid, and hence to the discovery of the body of the nefarious scheme. The PCs still don’t know where Substance X comes from, or who the mastermind is, or how they planned to get away afterwards; but they do know the gang’s base of operations, and how close they are to completion of their tunneling efforts, and hence have some idea of when the whole thing is going to go down.

While it would be possible to come up with this sequence of plot events starting from the beginning, the risks of some hole in the logic are heightened, and the risks of some contradiction are far higher; working out the story from the point of view of the villains negated those risks.

The Ending

There are times when the best approach is to start with the outcome that you want, and work backwards from that. This is especially the case where the adventure is part of a larger narrative or plotline.

There’s a big trick to not making these plot trains, and that is ensuring that whatever the outcome of the self-contained adventure, it will always have the effect on the bigger picture that you want to achieve. That means, in terms of that bigger picture, that you don’t care about the outcome of the current adventure.

For example, let’s say that the “bigger picture” is that a magical artifact is to be stolen. Why, and by whom, is for later adventures to reveal. This means that the current adventure’s real sole purpose is to justify the PCs learning of this robbery. So anything that puts the PCs in proximity to the location of the artifact will do; and anything beyond that basic requirement of the adventure is irrelevant to the big picture and can be dedicated to making the current adventure as entertaining as possible. It would probably help to work out how the artifact was taken and applying a second requirement that it not be prevented by anything the PCs were likely to do in the course of the adventure; the simplest answer would be to have the item stolen before the adventure even starts, and a fake left in its place. That can be revealed as part of the climax, when the villain grabs the ‘artifact’ from its display case and attempts to use it to facilitate his escape, only for nothing to happen; it might be that there’s a command word that he doesn’t know, it it might have failed for some other reason. It’s only in the post-climax wash-up that the fact of the substitution, and hence the robbery, are discovered.

Once again, the same basic plot development structure diagram can be considered illustrative. 17 and 18 are defined – the climax and the denouement – and the rest is all a question of how do the PCs get from whatever their situation was at the start of the adventure to participating in that climax.

The Fragmented Approach

The fragmented approach is a blended hybrid of two or more of the methods already listed. For example, you might start with the outcome, as described above; that gives you the basic parameters of the end of the adventure. Because you already know what the PCs status is at the start of the adventure, you might then be able to progress part-way through your plotting by choosing one character as the vehicle by which the adventure hook reaches the PCs as a group, defining 0 through 6. All that remains is the adventure itself, which you might then create by following the villain who is to be confronted in the climax and working out events from his point of view. Where you need to define multiple paths through part of the adventure because the PCs will have choices to make, some of these may be defined by following the villain’s point of view while others are derived from key confrontations – as in, “if the PCs don’t choose to follow line-of-inquiry X and learn Y as a result, how else might they learn Y? Well, who else would have the raw information and necessary mindset to determine Y? Call that person Z…” That defines this vital sub-element of the adventure in terms of a confrontation between the PCs and Z, which may require an insertion early into the plot of the PCs becoming aware of Z.

Because I do a lot of big-picture plotting, I would be entirely likely to have inserted an earlier adventure into the continuity for the express purpose of bringing Z to the PCs attention. Introducing both problem and solution to an adventure can make the whole thing seem to pat and contrived. If you can make part of that introduction in advance of need, the entire campaign becomes more robust and adventures more interconnected. If you can make that introduction a side-benefit of an adventure you were planning anyway, so much the better.

Making the choice

With so many options (and I had one more, but have forgotten the specifics while distracted writing other articles, so have redacted it), it’s important to be able to identify the best choice for any given situation.

There are actually five different methods by which I select the approach that I am going to use for the generation of any given adventure. They are the Deliberate Choice, the Inspired Choice, the Willful Choice, the Personality Choice, and the Arbitrary Choice.

The Deliberate Choice: Outcome Primacy

The Deliberate Choice comes down to purposefully selecting the choice based on how this adventure is to fit into the bigger picture of the campaign. Unless the adventure is a deliberate fill-in standalone situation that I am preparing to keep on standby until I get caught short on my game prep, every adventure I write for a campaign has a bigger-picture element to it, whether that be a plot development, a character development, a character introduction, a consequence or outcome, or some logical middle step. For example, if you introduce villain A who is pursuing one agenda within the bigger picture, and later introduce villain B, who is pursuing a different agenda within the same bigger picture, you need to think about how they will react, and relate, to each other. Villain B might decide that Villain A is a threat, and either attack directly, or attempt to use the PCs as cat’s paws to do it for him; or might decide that he can use Villain B as a distraction; or that they have mutually-harmonious goals (at least in the short-term) and that an alliance was worth exploring.

When you know what the bigger picture need is, you may be able to use that to make your choice. Or that relationship to the bigger picture might be such that almost any adventure will “do the job” and that the best you can derive from that bigger picture is some parameters for what you don’t want. In which case, having defined your needs a little more clearly, you can move on to the next decision-making technique.

The Inspired Choice: In My Little Mind’s Eye

Sometimes, you will have an idea. It might be for a scene, or a setting, or a personality, or a combination of abilities, or a problem that would be fun to inject the PCs into, or to inject into the lives of the PCs. It doesn’t matter what it is, when you are inspired, identify the development method that starts with the subject of your inspiration and follow that technique.

The Willful Choice: On Theme

When no brilliant flashes of inspiration arrive, my next step is to refresh my recollection of the themes of the campaign, and design an adventure around one or more of those themes.

It’s hard to be more specific, because every theme and every mode of expression of that theme, will favor a different development technique. For example, one of your themes might be “you can lose everything and still be a winner”; Assuming that the primary expression of this theme in the campaign is for the PCs to “lose everything” and somehow still emerge as “winners”, you don’t want it to be one of them. That means an NPC, and that means the character-centric approach is probably best; though you could also look on this as an outcome-based development. The key terms are “winner”, “everything”, and “lose” – defining what the NPC has lost, and how, and how that either leads to his ultimate success or how he “wins” in some fashion despite his loss, defines the adventure – then all you need do is figure out how the PCs fit into the story, and rewrite the whole thing from their point of view.

Sometimes, this prompt also fails to produce inspiration, or you are already working your campaign themes hard, or you simply haven’t defined any, or – if you are waiting for these to develop on their own in the course of play – you simply don’t know what they are, yet. In any of these circumstances, the Willful choice gets you nowhere, and it’s time to move on.

The Personality Choice: Selecting A Focus

There are some plot ideas that naturally imply a focus on a particular character (usually a PC). Some characters are constructed or endowed in such a way that they take a featured role in almost every adventure. Between these two phenomena lies the implication that there are other characters who won’t get their share of the spotlight unless you deliberately engineer one for them.

I described how to do so in two recent articles: Character Capabilities, which focuses on what a character can do, and Character Incapabilities, which focuses on what a character can’t do.

Using the techniques described in those articles to develop an idea for a character-driven plot which can then be planned and constructed using the “Key Character” approach described above, is the approach that I usually adopt when Theme lets me down.

It should be noted that it’s not necessary to restrict yourself to retrograde temporal awareness – i.e. characters with spotlight deprivation from recent adventures – you can also preempt the problem occurring by inserting a plotline to feature a character who you know is not going to get another feature for a while to come, according to your big-picture plans.

The Arbitrary Choice: Anyone for Darts?

Finally, we have the arbitrary choice. Having exhausted all the other reasonable methods for choosing an approach to the development of this adventure, it’s time to make a selection at the metagame level. That normally means “what haven’t I done recently, and is there a big-picture campaign-level reason for that?”

It might be that it’s been a while since you had a simple slug-fest without deeper meaning or significance – and that a romp is called for. It might be that you haven’t done a “slice of life” in which the PCs simply live their day-to-day lives with nothing “important” happening. Maybe it’s a while since you’ve done a mystery.

Look for a change of pace – in fact, look for a couple of them, and then see which ones are ruled out by the tone and circumstances that you want to maintain within the bigger picture.

And then, if all else fails, roll some dice.

The Erroneous Choice: Getting It Wrong

Inevitably, it will happen – you will make the wrong choice, or encounter an unusual situation in which the right choice fails to deliver. This usually results in your getting stuck somewhere in the plotting, though it may also reveal itself when reviewing your plans in the form of what is even worse, a predictable or plodding plot. It happens to all of us.

When that happens, you have two choices:

1. If you can identify exactly where the problem lies, then you can restart the plotting process using the method that most closely associates with producing a solution to the problem, and hope to navigate your way through the roadblock by coming at it from a different angle;
2. Or, alternatively, you can begin with the developmental framework that best generates material that is as different as possible in every respect to what you’ve already got, and hope to be able to salvage some of what you’ve done already with cut-and-paste into this new framework.

The first is the jigsaw solution, and the second is the rejection solution. And they both lead to The Fragmented Approach.

The Jigsaw Solution

For example, you may reach a point in your plotting where you need to know something that simply hasn’t been defined, and that you can’t choose arbitrarily. Or you might reach a point where something is inconsistent or contradictory, like a smart character who has to do something really stupid – in which case, you need to either establish that the character has a flaw, a “blind spot” if you will, or you need to engineer his circumstances so that the “stupid choice” appears to be the smart thing to do. More than one big plan has failed because of the combination of overconfidence, and solving a short-term problem in such a way that it causes long-term problems. Or, worst of all, you realize that you have created an adventure that takes free will away from the PCs at some critical point.

The result is that you find that you have some pieces of the “puzzle” that is the complete adventure, but not all of them – and the development tool that you are using is not helping you find the missing pieces.

We encountered this problem while working on the Adventurer’s Club adventure that I described earlier, in that while we had our mastermind, based on what capabilities he needed in order to plan and execute the crime, we didn’t have a satisfactory motive and didn’t have an explanation for how he got his hands on a sufficient (i.e. industrial-scale) supply of “Compound X”, the super-acid. We had some ideas as to the origins of “Compound X”, but needed to find a way to connect that origin to the supply.

Well, when you need someone to act out of character, you need to arrange their circumstances so that none of the in-character responses are either available to him, or would seem correct under those circumstances. In other words, we defined a checkpoint in the backstory to the adventure, defined a required outcome at that checkpoint (the NPC acts out of character), and used “The Ending” at that checkpoint as our starting point. By the time we had finished doing that, we had a completely different perspective on who the villain was and why he was doing such terrible things – and the whole adventure was more robust and internally-cohesive as a result. And, we think, it will be more interesting to the players as a result – though they don’t have the key information yet, so we’ll have to wait and see a game session or three on that front!

The Rejection Solution

Sometimes, though, you will find that you have written yourself into a corner, and need to throw away part or even all of what you’ve already done – you don’t know how much, yet.

The best solution is to pick an approach that focuses on the complete opposite of your previous starting point. If you were outcome-focused, or had an idea for the ending, or had a key problem to be solved at the climax, then the place to start is at the beginning. You may be able to salvage part of your previous work by working the plot from the point of view of the antagonist, as you defined him in the course of the previous plotline.

One of two things will happen. Either you will discover how to alter what you had previously done to get around the roadblock, for example by tweaking the personality of the antagonist in some respect, or you will reach a similar position within the adventure’s plot in a partially-or-completely different situation to the one that led back to your previous starting point.

Your choices when that happens are to keep going forwards, incorporating what you can of the old work, and ultimately ending up with something that is internally coherent, or to look for a trigger mechanism of some sort that will change the current situation (second draft) into something resembling the problematic situation (first draft).

There have been times, for example, when I have found that one small change to an NPC that had no direct effect on the situation at the point where I was having plot problems had, instead, a ripple effect from earlier in the adventure that solved the plot problem indirectly – but until I was able to view “the whole adventure” as a set of cause-and-effect chains, some of which had been derived by working backwards from the end and some which had been developed by moving forwards from the beginning, that I could see why I was having the plot problem and could change it. In the end, redefining a secondary priority of an NPC solved the problem. (This may seem a little vague; that’s because I’m trying to simplify a large and complex situation that would take many pages to describe down to a paragraph).

As a general rule of thumb: When you strike trouble, define what you need and what you know, and start at the other end of the adventure using those definitions and one of the other approaches.

The Perfect Choice: Getting It Right

But let us dwell no longer on the potential for trouble, and instead consider the opposite situation. When you get things right, it’s as though everything falls into place of its own accord; no sooner do you ask a plot question than the solution comes to mind.

Since I worked out my five-step technique-selection process, this is what happens, more often than not.

The resulting ease of plotting has made this my standard methodology over the last 18 months or so – in fact, since October 2014. I do it this way ALL THE TIME. That’s got to make it worthwhile for readers to at least consider making it theirs, as well.