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Plots or Crawls?

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
Do you plot stories or dungeon crawlers?

If you plot stories, what's your approach?
 

ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Do you plot stories or dungeon crawlers?

This is an extremely interesting question for me! I could go on for some time about this topic, but to answers briefly, I do neither.

I have grown weary of the location-based storytelling that is the classic way to to present RPG scenarios. I have purposefully tried to avoid that style in my recent games. Last Thursday's game was a cyberpunk adaptation of an obscure cult movie that is basically a road trip based on random encounters. The game was a 'points of light' style affair in some key locations around Helsinki, although my original plan was to turn even the locations into random encounters, as the characters wandered around streets alien to them.

The game before that was planned to take place in just one apartment (although the game play did escalate also outside), so that instead of characters moving in space, they moved from bad situations into worse. (This was a hostage drama where the characters were the hostage takers.)

On the other hand, I do not want to plot stories either. I see story as what unfolds when the game is played, and I do not want to railroad the game to match my personal vision of a predefined story. (I quite like the idea of players being able to contribute to the reality of the game even outside the actions of their characters - Whimsy Cards are an old but still valid example of this technique.)

I try to construct the scenario from events - occurrences that have multiple potential outcomes. This is a bit like The Garden of Forking Paths - I'm not sure what would be the best way to present branching structures like these, but so far I have used mind mapping techniques. (Maybe Campaign Logger can at some point come up with something better?)
 
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JochenL

CL Byte Sprite
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Borderland Explorer
Either-or?

I usually create background plots and place them into a sandbox, then let the players mess around. For dungeons, I normally resort to preexisting stuff and tweak it to my liking as I normally don't have the time to put in the necessary work to make them as dense as I like it. And social situations and resulting conflicts come easier to me than carefully planned rooms, traps, and monsters.

For the background plots, I let myself get inspired by my daily life experience, in-game player comments, and plot inspiration tools like Plotto (which I started to use recently).
 

gazza666

New member
Gold WoA
It very much depends on the game. If I'm running D&D5e, or pretty much any level based game, where the players are expecting their XP total to tick up regularly, I tend to go for dungeon crawls with a thin veneer of plot over the top, as that fulfils the requirement for progress while still offering reasonable choices (however meaningless "shall we go left or right?" is without knowing anything else - but clever players can scout so that the decisions are meaningful).

If I'm running something less progress based (say, RuneQuest, Champions, Traveller) then I definitely go for more plot based design, since I can typically get away with a lot more exploration focus than combat focus in such games.

I do try and avoid railroading either way, but honestly railroading gets a bad reputation - there's nothing innately wrong with at least mild railroading: "Well OK dudes, you can decide to refuse the king's request to help him fight the chaos beasts currently eating his daughter, but honestly if you do that I'm going to need to call this session early because I don't have anything prepped for the consequences of that yet."
 

Nemsoli

Member
Platinum WoA
Depends on what I'm running. Lately, I've been taking the lazy approach and running the Dungeon of the Mad Mage. So far, not a lot of tailoring required and my players seem happy. I do have 2 backstories (had some churn on the players after several left at the end of the Dragon Heist campaign). I should prod the other 2 for more details, but seeing as they are in an endless dungeon, I have time.
 
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