How to Design Better Urban Adventures

[Hand of Evil]

Design encounters to happen as you need them not based on a location. This allows you to let the players run loose but can bring them back on track as needed. Examples of this is an NPC coming to them: I hear you are looking for the Slasher? Follow me. Yep, you can see it as rail roading but it works.

Give your players places to go. I let my players pick NPC they have made contact with, and locations, I limit the number to level+CHR Bonus. The players have to come up with description and a little background but know I will run them and pick their alignments. It is interesting to see who they come up with and the locations. Use your judgement here. Example: A bard should pick tavern keepers, other bards, maybe a noble or two and some locations. A fighter; other fighters, smiths, guards, adventures and locations where he would come into contact with them. A wizard; the guild hall, another wizard or two, the magic shop, the book store. Tell players that if they do crossovers on NPCs, they stack bonus.

Now that you have people and places pull them into your adventure. Maybe one of them has information, maybe one is involved. Again rail roading but it gets the players attached to the world around them.

For other stuff, see the DM Advice link in my sig, it has a number of threads listed on the subject.

 

[Janx]

Bringing an NPC to the PCs who introduces (and reintroduces) the plot isn't railroading. It's plot introduction.

The PCs can technically kill the NPC or ignore him, and thus ignore the plot.

A railroad would be where that NPC has the ability to force the party to pursue the plot (charm spell, higher CR, etc).

It's OK to use NPCs to remind PCs of the plot, or to instigate reactions from the PCs that might get them back on the plot. In my example, with the NPC and the mooks. The party may ignore the NPC, and kill the mooks, then go back to the bar. It's not a railroad, it's an attempt to get them into the story again.

Having stuff related to the story happen to the PCs, is life. Life happens. Sometimes bad guys do things that affect the PCs. The PCs are still free to ignore/run away from such events, but that don't stop it from happening.

If you're concerned as a DM about crossing the line to running a railroad, make sure that at each point, the PCs can opt out, or come up with a new plan. That means the bad guys may win, or the PCs may not do the most obvious (to you) thing.

If you want the players to bite your hooks consider:
The players have to like some NPCs
Make NPCs that like the PCs, and reward the PCs for good deeds (free food at the inn, etc).
When bad things happen to NPCs the players like, they'll be more likely to help
To make the players like the town, the town has to recognize the PCs as important and valuable. A parade for their last good deeds helps. The players gotta feel wanted, and recognized.

If the players just wanna carouse in town, and not pursue any obvious "fight evil" plots, they're not playing good characters. That's an alignment problem, and they've either got the wrong alignment, you've written the wrong adventure, or they're not playing in character (not everybody gets the point that if you write "Good" on your sheet, you are committing to trying to play the character as good. It's a role that you are trying to play).

If the players don't want any ties to any NPCs because it just brings trouble. Well, it's a lonely life, not having any friends. You can run a game where nobody talks to the PCs, or does them any favors, or tells them about any plot hooks. Basically, nothing interesting happens. IF the PCs try to cause trouble, let them have some bar fights, but then folks start shunning them for being trouble makers. It'll wreck that campaign, but the players gotta realize that there's consequences to how you play the game. If the campaign is about playing good heroes, then you expect certain behavior.

Janx

 

[cmanos]

The first thing you will need to know as a DM is that your players will go in the direction you do not prepare for. The best DM's are not those who have very detailed plans for almost every contingency, but very general plans that can be altered when the players go in an unexpected direction.

The best thing to do is to have some general ideas for side adventures that you can stick in whenever they stray. If they titally ignore the mjor plothooks, that's perfectly fine. The bad guys achieve their goals with no opposition and get stronger, making them harder to overcome in the future.

 

[Rel]

Very good advice so far in this thread. I'll add a couple of general tips that have worked well for me in the past:

1) Not every NPC is a jerk. I know this should be obvious but we have one GM in our group that has EVERY person we encounter be either outright evil or condescending to the point that we don't want to help them. Also, if the NPC is giving the PC's a job to do, at least some thought should be given to the question of "If this objective is so important, why don't you do it yourself?"

2) Create some enemies for the PC's right out of the gate and have them be recurring bad guys. One of the biggest issues with city gaming is that the PC's can get so lost in the maze of NPC's to interact with that the pacing of the session comes to a complete crawl. When I ran my last big city campaign (Sharn), I got the PC's in a fight with a group of humanoid gangsters (Daask) on Night 1. After that, any time things were bogging down, I could always have some gangsters pop out of an alley to start a fight and inject some action into the game. Regardless of how important or riveting your primary plotline is, you occasionally need to get everybody's blood pumping with a good old fashioned fight.

3) Try to create a "dungeon" within or nearby the city. One problem with city games is that some players will take the tack of "report it to the proper authorities" as the solution to any problem. And what fun is that? If you have a lawless area nearby where the PC's have to deal with their own problems then you get rid of that issue to at least some degree. Sewers beneath the city, ancient ruins beneath the sewers, the "abandoned" moathouse near town, all of these are good ways to give the PC's a short break into "dungeon crawl mode" as part of the city adventure.

4) Several people have said it already but I'll reiterate: Let bad things happen if the PC's don't address them. In fact, I'd suggest that you have bad things happen regardless. Throw tons of hooks at the PC's and they won't be able to fix every problem. The ones they don't fix will evolve into BIGGER problems, which will be suitable for fixing later when they're more powerful.

 

[bento]

Great advice everyone - thanks for taking the time to write in!

It's often hard to balance wanting the players to lead the action with providing a good story. They can't read your mind and you have to quick on your step to the directions they take.

I guess getting my players trained to get the most out of NPCs interaction will take time, just like teaching them combat tactics. There's no easier path to learning than from your own mistakes - right?

I just have to be patient, make sure that all the necessary NPCs are in place and that action will happen no matter what. It's up to them whether the consequences turn into their favor.

 

[Hand of Evil]

You also may want to think about a relationship chart for the powers of the city. It is good for deciding reactions to the players as they adventure.

 

[Janx]

Another thing to consider, is to give the PCs clues, DM to player. Halfway through an dialogue encounter, if the PCs don't get it, break out of character and tell them that you'd planned this to be a source of clues encounter. Lifting the veil on how the adventure is assembled a little bit might help the players figure out how to navigate it. After awhile, you shouldn't have to do this, as they learn to identify encounters.

It might also help, before the session starts, to tell the players what kind of adventure you're about to run. Is this a dungeon crawl, killfest, mystery, diplomacy, or something adventure. Tell them, so they get into the right frame of mind. If I know we're playing a diplomacy adventure, I may be less hasty to draw a sword for every encounter.

Another thing to do, is to whip up a ton of little side trek events that you can use to spice up the city. A long time ago, I had a 1 page adventure thing I wrote up called "Thief's night out" I had a random table of all sorts of "opportunities" a thief would be looking for, as well as pursuit rules I whipped up. The file is long since gone, but the point is, in a city, a thief is interested in what's going on, so make lots of small things happen. Bar fights, police patrols, unwary pedestrians, busy markets, etc. I wrote it to handle side quests for a solo thief in the party, but this type of material would be useful for all the PCs.

On the advice of having lots of plot hooks, you might want not to have too many. When faced with 20 choices, the party might balk at choosing, or try to solve them all at once. When faced with a few obvious choices, they'll be more likely to pick one. Plus it's less material to write. What you do want to do, is lay the seeds for future adventures and plots. Thus in adventure 1, they meet a busy wizard, unrelated to their current problem. In adventure 2, the busy wizard hires them to do something (active plot). In adventure 3, PCs track down something, that ends up tied to busy wizard. In adventure 4, they confront the busy wizard. In all 4 adventures, you only had to have one active plot, but you have to lay out the material for the future plots. You don't even have to plan it all at once. Just introduce NPCs now, that show up again later.

In that same vein, planning all that intrigue can be hard. It may be easier to just to transform NPCs from being what you said they were to something different, when you need a plot idea. Don't overdo it, but keep that tactic in mind.

A big factor in devising plot hooks, especially in the beginning, is to come up with stuff that would involve the whole party. A plot that only one PC cares about is likely to split up the party, or get vetoed and ignored. A plot that the whole party cares about will make your job easier. In fact, you only NEED 1 plot that the whole party will pursue. You might have to use multiple hooks to get the whole party involved in. Giving thought to the motivations of each PC (and player) and figure out a plot and set of hooks that will get them involved would be useful. Then have a back-up plot if that fails...

 

[lukelightning]

Make sure the players know what the city is like; give 'em a paragraph description of the area as a default. Let them know if the city watch has a presence, if people carrying weapons are commonplace or shunned, stuff like that. Don't let them walk around all day and then suddenly spring a "surprise, weapons are banned in the city, the watch arrests you all and takes your stuff!"

 

[Conaill]

A great starting adventure that would be a snap to adapt to OA is The Hunt for the Charter (Google it and you'll find it - it's free).

Could you post a link after all? I couldn't find it through Google - maybe you misspelled the title?

 

[LostSoul]

We talked about this very thing when they were drawing up characters. I "mandated" they provide a description and several character flags. My goal is to get them personally involved in the game by bringing up their own storylines as we go. More active than passive.

You said they had some flags there - what are they? Play to those. The NPCs should conflict or support those goals that they players gave their characters, so the players will want to get involved with the NPCs.