Adventure Design 101: The Plot – Story

My last post discussed a method of setting up a plot by creating a web of characters’ actions, motives, and goals.  That design begins with simple building blocks and interconnects them to create a more complex structure.  I’ve had great success with it, and I design many of my adventures in that way.  It is, however, a little bit counterintuitive.  If it’s not to your tastes, don’t worry — there are other methods of plotting that can serve equally well.

Instead of a character-driven method, for instance, you might try an event-driven method.  When I was starting out as a gamemaster, I used what I call storyboarding, after the film organization method.

A storyboard is a static graphical and text representation of a film, first developed in its modern form by Disney for their animated features of the late 1920s and early 1930s.  It was widely adopted for live-action films in the 40s.  It’s essentially a comic-book of the film — concept-sketch images of each scene, often several per scene, along with a brief text description.  It provides a visual layout for the film to follow and allows, among other things, for scenes to be “designed” for the camera before shooting begins.

A storyboard, in short, takes a long-running continuous plot and breaks it down into “snapshots” which are arranged in order.  And that’s exactly what you do with the plotline when you’re designing this way.

Let’s take the same example from my last post.  In our adventure, we have a greedy dragon kidnap a princess because it wants to ransom her for the king’s treasury.  The king turns to the PCs to get her back.

To turn this into a storyboard, we need to break it down into a chain of events.  Many of these events will be encounters, but some of them might be things that happen while the PCs aren’t around, yet that still influence the plot.  You could also think of this as a timeline of the adventure, if that helps.

The first event in our storyboard is one of those extra non-encounter events:  The dragon kidnaps the princess.  At this point, you would decide why, if you didn’t already have that settled.  You would also consider any other fallout of the event.  Was any damage done to the castle during the attack, or was the abduction by stealth or magic?  Were there any witnesses?  If not, how does the king know the dragon was responsible?  Did it deliver a list of its demands?  If so, was it through magic, or carried by a minion?

This might look a little familiar:  Once again, you’re starting with a relatively simple idea, and defining and developing it more closely as you consider its angles.  The event itself is your sketch in the storyboard; the “how” of it, the answers to the questions you’re asking yourself, are the narrative.

The second event is an encounter:  The king requests the party’s help.  How?  Does he summon them to court and ask personally?  Does he send heralds out bearing news of the reward he’s offering for the return of the princess?  Are the PCs his loyal knights, royal wizard, high priest of the realm, and so forth?  Does a mysterious cloaked stranger in the tavern happen to mention it to them?  Once again you’re determining the specifics that will make the in-game roleplaying encounter come to life.

What about the third event?  It could be a confrontation with the dragon, but this would make the storyboard feel jumpy.  There’s a narrative gap between the PCs accepting the quest and the PCs encountering the dragon that needs to be filled in order for the story to feel smooth.  So we’ll push the confrontation off a little bit and come up with something else.  It seems reasonable that the party might have to locate the dragon’s lair in order to stage a rescue, so that could be the third event.  How is this done?  Research at the wizards’ guild?  Discussion with a sage of dragon-lore?  Tracking the beast through the wilderness?  Begging a favor of the well-connected guildmaster of thieves?  Whatever we choose, we know that this will be a roleplaying encounter as well, possibly a skill challenge.

Fourth event:  It’s still a little early for the confrontation.  We could probably get away with it, but it makes for a pretty short story that way.  Let’s add a little more to it by saying that the party, having found the lair, next needs to explore it.  They’ll try to learn the lay of the land and locate (and perhaps free) the princess.  They might run into traps the dragon has set, or minions it’s pressed into service.  It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a little bit of combat here, but the exploration is going to be the main focus.

Fifth event:  This could be the rescue, the confrontation, or both.  Let’s say both — that makes it more dramatic.  Perhaps the PCs have to complete a skill challenge to free the princess from her imprisonment, while at the same time they’re fighting the dragon, and perhaps a minion or two.  There will be opportunities for both combat and roleplaying here — and if the party is clever, and desires to, they can possibly avoid combat altogether by tricking or negotiating with the dragon.

Sixth event:  Having dealt with the dragon and freed the princess, the party needs to deal with the “twist” — she doesn’t want to go home, she wants to adventure.  This is mostly a roleplaying encounter, although a PC who’s quick on the trigger might decide to knock her out with a combat power.  What exactly are the ramifications of attacking a princess in this kingdom?  What about kidnapping one?  If the PCs don’t return her, is the king likely to decide that that’s what happened?  Or does he know about, and maybe even approve of,  his daughter’s adventuring aspirations?

Seventh event:  The party delivers the princess and earns their reward.  There’s some roleplaying here, a chance to wind down and wrap up the session, and maybe sprinkle some plot hooks for the next adventure.

Storyboarding has a number of advantages.  It sketches out an entire plot arc, so that you’ll have a solid idea of where things are going to go next.  It feels pretty natural to most people — we tend to think of a story in terms of beginning-middle-end, and breaking it down into discrete linear blocks of time, or events, is a relatively easy process.  Finally, it lets you go into as much depth regarding any one particular event as you’d like, without forcing you to go into the same depth for every one.

On the other hand, storyboarding isn’t as good for improvising on the fly.  If you use the character-driven problem-motive-action system, you’ll generally have a pretty good idea about how the NPCs will act in unforeseen circumstances; if you storyboard and the game runs in a completely unexpected direction, you might have to scramble to catch up.  It’s also possible to fall into the trap of sticking too rigidly to the storyboard.  If you’re running the dragon plot above, what do you do when the PCs decide they want to ally with the dragon, providing it with information about the king’s efforts to thwart it, in exchange for a cut of that treasury when he finally breaks down?  It’s easy, and tempting, to make the dragon refuse to entertain such a request and move into the combat you’d scripted, but that might not be the best course for the game.  Even a smaller change can upset your storyboard:  if the party decided during event six that they wanted to support the princess’s aspirations, then event seven simply doesn’t happen, at least not then.

You can account for some changes by creating “alternate timelines.”  For instance, an alternative event seven would be a wind-down roleplaying session where the party and the princess discussed what sort of adventure they might embark upon.  Even so, this is a definite limitation of the storyboard method.  You simply can’t script for every possible event, and the players will often surprise you.  Be ready to drop the storyboard and improvise if you need to.

Next in the series:  Setting.

Related posts:

1. Adventure Design 101: The Plot – Problems
2. Adventure Design 101: The Setting
3. Adventure Design 101
4. Adventure Design 101: The Villain
5. Adventure Design 101: Dungeons That Live