This image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay has come up a number of times when I’ve searched for illustrations to accompany articles. I’ve been waiting for just the right occasion to use it!

Integration. What does that mean, exactly?

Well, in mathematical terms, it means – essentially – accumulation of results from designated start point to designated end-point. In social terms, it roughly translates to incorporating or mixing one thing with another so well that the results appear completely uniform and consistent. Both are on speaking terms with the usage of the term in this article.

This post has been inspired by part of a conversation with one of my players on Saturday. We were discussing whether or not I had ever contemplated “turning pro” and GMing for money, which is a subject for another day, when he made the point that any campaign I ran would strike trouble because my campaigns demand an inherent buy-in to roleplaying.

I replied that this wouldn’t be a substantial problem because I would simply specify “roleplay-oriented” in the description. Which is when the player made a really astute point – that most people, when they read that, would assume that it meant ‘combat-light’, and that description doesn’t fit my campaigns at all.

Integrating Combat and Non-Combat Action Sequences

For a start, I want to make it clear that I generally broaden my horizons by conflating “Combat” and “Non-combat action sequences”. When thinking about such things, I don’t generally distinguish between the two, I treat them both in the same way and as different shades of the same color.

The reasons for this are simple, and have their roots in the way players approach the two – both are handled in exactly the same way, in strong contrast to the way everything else gets handled.

You see, with ‘everything else’, characterization and personality and in-character decisions and thoughts and words tend to be uppermost in the players minds, and I do everything I can to encourage this. Similarly, in my mind as GM, these things are also near the top of the priority ladder, second only to the need to tell a story that the players will find entertaining and engaging, and hence will want to participate in.

As soon as some sort of action sequence comes around, game mechanics, and especially those game mechanics that pertain to the abilities and actions of their individual character, climb the ladder. At first, they share the same rung as the characterization elements described, and then they climb over the top of those elements and assume the ascendancy – unless I take active measures to oppose this hierarchical inversion.

That’s more easily said than done, too, because (of necessity), game mechanics are also elbowing their way to the forefront of my thinking as GM.

I combat this by thinking as much as I can about the characterization elements in advance and making specific notes concerning their applicability and impact on the tactical situation and any decisions that might have to be made on behalf of an NPC. That means that I don’t have to think about them as much when the time comes AND I have a reminder in front of me not to neglect them.

Integrating Planned Action with Plot

A lot of what appears spontaneous in any campaign isn’t, or shouldn’t be. I put considerable effort into considering action sequences as “advancing the plot by other means’, to borrow from a famous definition of war in terms of diplomacy.

That comes in two flavors, in any practical sense. The first is maintaining awareness when prepping for the day’s play of what actions a PC might initiate – what stimuli I’m putting in front of them, and how they might react. That includes any skill checks to actually do something (as opposed to simply knowing something).

Everything should be couched in terms of the PCs – how they will find out about it, what they might think of it, how they might react to it, what they might attempt to do about it, how likely they are to succeed or fail, and what the consequences will be. This is, of course, an impossible ideal, a theoretical abstraction that can never exist perfectly in the real world – but I strive to get as close as I can in every game session to that ideal.

The second flavor is always ensuring that every scripted action sequence serves a plot purpose (even if that purpose is to have the players spinning their wheels while the plot thickens around them).

In practice, the latter receives heavy (at least in part) because we only play any given campaign once a month, and only for a handful of hours (usually less) at a time. There’s little time to waste, so everything has to be to the point – even if it doesn’t seem to be so at the time. And I never have an encounter or piece of dialogue or whatever doing only one ‘job’ if it’s capable of doing more than that without compromising that primary purpose.

If we were to play twice as often, or for twice as long at a sitting, my prep burden would only increase about 50%, because I could afford to be that much more casual about such things – as was the case a decade or so back. Even playing until 6:30 (as we used to do), instead of 5PM (as we now do), would be a significant playing time increase – 4.5 or 5.5 hours instead of 3-to-4.5 hrs. That’s either +50% or +22% – so even the most pessimistic view of the increase would add up to more than an extra two game sessions worth a year, and it could be as many as an extra six.

This isn’t to voice a complaint – it’s simply to place some context around what I’m describing so that readers can interpret what I do and adjust my advice to fit their own circumstances.

Integrating Plot with Planned Action

The converse is also true. While the impact any pre-planned action sequence on the plot is critical, the plot should always impact on any pre-planned action sequence. Action should always have a plot purpose, as I said, but plot should always guide and shape the action, too.

The easiest way for this to happen is to have the plot define the parameters of the action sequence – the terrain in a battle, for example. If any action sequence is not so defined, that action sequence is too generic, in my book, and the action sequence and plot both need to be honed until they mesh more specifically. There’s another impossible ideal here towards which I try to aim – to have every action sequence sufficiently unique and defined that they couldn’t possibly take place in exactly the same way at any other time, place, or circumstance than the one dictated by the plotlines – both as defined in the immediate term, and in any broader long-term, and in any other plot structures that happen to be relevant to the campaign.

You can get a long way toward this ideal simply by choosing, whenever there are multiple approaches to a problem or situation, the one that is most appropriate to the character supposedly tackling that problem or situation – in other words, with good role-playing. From that foundation, though, preplanning is necessary to go any further.

Most GMs discover this, and the value of it, simply by taking advantage of an opportunity to think a few minutes ahead every now and then. They find that their plot it more engaging, the action seems more appropriate, and the characters seem more ‘solid’ and realized. After it’s happened by accident once or twice, they start deliberately courting the benefits, and that sets their feet on the slippery slope of game prep.

Integrating Planned Action with Characterization

There are times when plot and characterization can be in a tug of war, and times when they are both pulling in the same direction. The latter are reasonably easy to cope with – it’s just a matter of going with the flow, after all; but the former occasions are more problematic.

Just how problematic depends on the exact situation within the game. If the opposition between the two is not too extreme, you can often resolve the conflict by inserting a roleplaying/characterization ‘beat’ into the middle of the action sequence. “I wish you weren’t making me do this” or “Under other circumstances, things might have been different” or any of a thousand other expressions of regret over the choice being imposed by the plot.

(Care needs to be taken with this, however, because it inevitably adds more paths to resolution of any conflict with the PCs, which can rebound and reverberate within the plot).

Even more superficial conflicts can be avoided by basing any tactical decisions on the personality of the character making those decisions – good roleplay, again.

But, in more extreme cases, you may need to insert additional backstory to reduce the options available to the NPC to those that are compatible with the plot. This is the great advantage of the GM relative to the players: they have to live in the moment, the ‘now’, except as exempted from this restriction temporarily by the GM, whereas the GM is free to insert whatever background material he needs; the only constraints are the limits of his imagination and sense of fair play (and the fact that if he abuses this power too strongly, he will be a GM without players).

In even more extreme cases, it might be necessary to introduce revisions or deviations into the characterization, supported by appropriate events in his or her backstory, of course. In other words, if character and plot are in conflict, change the character! While this approach always works if done properly, there is a price to be paid in terms of consistency of characterization, so it is best not to over-use this solution; and the best way to avoid over-use is to reserve this for when your back is to the wall and nothing else will suffice.

Integrating Characterization with Planned Action

As usual, the converse is also true – a character’s personality is only partially defined by motivations and justifications and rationales; the primary definition stems from the accumulation of their actions and choices. One of the cleverest and most interesting ways of redefining a character is to change the perception of past actions!

I love having ‘good, moral characters’ that do the ‘wrong thing’ from the point-of-view of the PCs because it is the ‘right thing to do’ from the NPCs perspective. And ‘bad, immoral characters’ who do the right thing not because it’s ‘the right thing to do’ but or the personal benefits they can squeeze out of it. And the occasional ‘boy scout’ whose solutions result from oversimplification of problems and short-term thinking. And the even rarer out-and-out villain who makes no bones about being antisocial and looking out for #1 without conscience or remorse. And characters who want to do the right thing (as they see it) but have made a mistaken assumption, or a wrong interpretation, or simply have a flaw in their logic. And, most rarely of all, a character who wants to do the wrong thing (as they see it) but get it all wrong in practice. Populate your campaign with those six archetypes and endless fun and depth of characterization both results and is perceived to have resulted!

Integrating Random Action with Plot

Most of the above was not part of our conversation, on Saturday, which moved on to random encounters fairly quickly. It was suggested (truthfully) that my primary approach to integrating random action (in the form of wandering monsters or other ‘by chance’ encounters) is to generate a specific encounter table in which every result advances the plot in some predictable way. As with any other GM’s force, if all outcomes are satisfactory in terms of the GM’s “agenda”, you don’t care which one(s) actually eventuate!

But I also have three other strategies that I employ in conjunction with this approach, which presupposes sufficient prep time and prescience to both know that such an encounter table will be needed, and the wherewithal to actually create one.

First: Generate your random encounters in advance, during game prep, and then integrate the products of chance into the plot, redefining them as necessary, and amending the plot as necessary.

Second, when using legitimately third-party or preset encounter tables, integrating the results with the ongoing plot before the encounter actually starts. I do this more frequently than most of my players ever realize. After all, when you roll an encounter, you have to decide how the encounter will come to the attention of the players, and how the terrain, circumstances, and other context, will integrate with the encounter; it doesn’t add too much burden to that to consider what impact they might have on the plot and how you can use the encounter to further your agenda (of entertaining everyone).

And third, being prepared to sacrifice part or all of the plot on the alter of that agenda. If all roads lead to Rome, who cares which one events steer the PCs down? Never sacrifice the long-term fidelity of the campaign with a slavish adherence to whatever you had planned in the short term. Your adventures should be treated as living things, growing and evolving in unexpected directions, guided only by the ultimate principle of long-term entertainment and direction. My players forget, on a regular basis, that I do this – but if you want an example (and proof that it happens), consult the write-up of Mortus from a few years back, and in particular how adequate prep gave me the freedom to cope with it when the players wanted to do something that wasn’t in the plot.

Random chance can derive from player choice or unusual die roll results – from the GM’s point of view, it should make no difference; adventure-internal plotlines should be robust enough to accommodate and even harness these events; that’s the point I was striving to make in Compounds Of Confusion: Luck and the GM, and Shades OF Yes and No.

Getting The Mix Right

The net effect of all these techniques is that, for the most part, my players simply can’t tell what’s been pre-scripted and what hasn’t; and the discontinuity between action sequences and roleplay sequences are substantially blurred and obscured, if not erased completely.

Action furthers the plot, the plot creates the need for action, and outcomes from action sequences further advance and define the plot. Integration is achieved when you can only tell where one ends and the other begins in hindsight (and not even then with complete certainty). Both plot and action sequences are strengthened by the integration, and the campaign becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Or, to put that last point another way: do it right, and you get many times the game-play value for your prep-time buck!

A shorter post than usual because of the Easter Long Weekend. I hope everyone has had a happy, comforting, and comfortable break! See you all next week, when I’m thinking of offering up another serving of the Forbidden Weapons of the Omega Archive. ‘Till then, Game on!