Five weeks ago we introduced the subject of designing the core concepts of an adventure with Antagonists, building the actions of the enemy and letting the player characters respond to this. This is not the only approach to building an adventure; there are indeed many that work, and many that work well.
Immediately upon thinking of the approach discussed there, it also occurred to me that many adventures were built on the concept of the quest, that the player characters are given some objective which has some value to them and so pursue this objective on their own initiative. Even as I started to consider the concept, I recognized that there were at least three distinct ways to design a quest type of adventure, and that the three which had come to mind were fairly well correlated to three popular games that are often played at camp and by youth groups and community groups in suburban neighborhoods. Each of these is worth considering individually.
In case you didn’t catch the reference in the title of this article, the game of choice this time is Capture the Flag. A simple description of how the game is generally played should help get your mind focused on how this can be used as the framework for a role playing game adventure.
In Capture the Flag, the McGuffin–that thing that everyone in the story wants, so named by Alfred Hitchcock–is called a flag, and frequently looks more or less like one. Each team knows what the flag looks like, and maybe even where it is. Yet to capture their opponent’s flag (the object of the game) they must overcome the obstacles placed by their opponent. The first team to reach the other flag and bring it back to its side wins.
Although you could have a two-sided adventure of this sort, forget for a moment that the game normally has two sides. What matters in this design is that the player characters have to get somewhere (and perhaps get back again), overcoming obstacles along the way, but that they are not locked into any particular way of doing this.
That last part is important to this design. The players get to decide which way they’re going to go. They are not locked in to the referee’s planned course.
Doctor Who fans will no doubt have seen the classic episode, The Five Doctors, in which several “regenerations” of the Doctor are gathered in one place. One of them recites the poem:
To Rasilon’s Castle we go,
Above, between, below….
Each of three Doctors follows a different path to reach the objective. The first Doctor goes through the front door and finds his way past a wealth of tricks and traps such as stepping stones which must be followed in the correct pattern (as easy as pi). The second passes a yeti and the illusion of old friends in trouble while coming up through caves and basement dungeons beneath the tower. The third climbs a mountain past Cybermen and crosses a wire to the roof to come down from above. Each encounters different obstacles along the way, but each arrives at the destination. Any one of the paths was acceptable to reach the end, and that is the point of the flag capture design. The players will never know exactly what they would face; but they need to have at least a rough idea where they have to go, and then the choice of how to get there is in their hands, as they assess what is likely to face them along each path.
To design such an adventure, the referee needs an objective for the quest. The obvious objective is that the players need to get something which is there. I’ve been on such a quest for a Black Rose, which someone hired me to recover for them, and run such a quest in which a princess needed to find proof of her birthright. However, it is no less a quest if the objective is to deliver something to the other end. In this, I recall being bound by my character’s honor to escort a princess safely to her father’s kingdom, even though she was a drow princess and that kingdom was deep in the underdark where no one traveled. There and back again is a valid design, but often it is sufficient to make the quest one direction. The Poseidon Adventure is a one-way quest, as the trapped passengers attempt to find their way to freedom within the capsized liner. Adventures in which the characters must accomplish something and reach a pick-up point are also one-way flag captures, perhaps in two stages, that is, reaching a first objective where something is accomplished and then reaching a second objective where the heroes are rescued. Frodo’s quest to destroy the ring is in essence a flag capture; the objective is to reach Mount Doom, one way or another, so that the fires there will unmake the ring.
Not all conceivable ways to reach the goal will necessarily succeed. Dead ends are a genuine possibility in this sort of design. However, it should not become effectively a maze. It is inappropriate for the referee to suggest that there are multiple paths through when there is only one that will get through in reality. The obstacles may vary in magnitude and in nature significantly. It may be that the characters are prevented from reaching the goal because they failed to anticipate a hazard or obstacle which they could have overcome with forethought. Part of the challenge of this sort of adventure lies in determining the best route to take given the available resources and abilities. It should not feel as if this requires them to guess which one path actually reaches the goal; it should truly be that there are multiple possible routes which pose different hazards.
The design can be up front about this. There could be open strategy planning sessions in which information is given to the players (such as through non-player characters) indicating for example that one path would take a mere three days, but is extremely difficult, while another path has only minor hazards from bandits and stray creatures but will take three weeks. Players should be able to suggest alternate routes and means, such as sailing around part of the land or flying over the mountains, if these are possibilities in the game world.
This approach requires a great deal of general planning. That is, before the adventure can even be discussed, the referee has to know the lay of the land between the starting point and the flag, how much is actually known about that by the people involved, and what the major hazards are likely to be. It is not necessary, however, to plan all of these in detail. As long as the referee has enough material to start the characters on whatever path they take and sufficient knowledge of what lies ahead to give them an idea of the situation, the details can be created after the quest begins. Duplication of information is also quite acceptable. The basic stats on the one hundred fifty spear-wielding orcs who live in the mountains can be identical to those of half of the three hundred sword-wielding orcs who live in the valley, particularly if the characters are going to take either the valley or the pass and so only ever encounter one of those tribes. Obviously the various routes should not pose identical problems; but given that the player characters are only going to follow one of the available routes, they will be unaware that any particular problem they encounter, such as that bandit group that ambushes them somewhere along the way, would have struck no matter which way they chose.
There are several ways to design an adventure as a quest. This is a rather simple one structurally that offers plenty of opportunity for excitement along the way while giving the players meaningful choices in terms of their direction, their approach, and the kinds of obstacles they would prefer to face. It is never entirely linear, but does tend to reduce the prep time the referee must do in that each directional choice made by the players tends to limit future directional choices; they ultimately will choose one path, so the others need not be so detailed. (The most creative players may decide to increase their odds of success by splitting up and trying multiple paths; but as each path will entail game time investment, this should give the referee sufficient time to develop the multiple routes as needed.) We’ll come back to other ways to design quests, and other approaches to adventure design, in the weeks ahead. However, we won’t do that next week.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
