Scenario and setting design, with GM and players in mind

[pemerton]

This post is prompted by the following remark posted by @Campbell about a week ago, about the way in which RPG participants can make decisions about the shared fiction:

When I run trad games (which is fairly often) I make these decisions primarily on my understanding of the setting/scenario, but that only works in my opinion when significant interaction design work is put into scenario and setting design. Players need means to find the facts on the ground and meaningful connections between setting elements to leverage. The environment doesn't have to be known, but I feel it should be meaningfully knowable and comprehensible.

Part of that involves designing NPCs that can be meaningfully convinced and relied on as we all rely on people in our daily lives. . . .

We all have those moments where we don't communicate as well as we can or we don't provide enough levers in the fiction for players to interact with.

Basically sure we follow the internal causality of the setting and defined NPCs within it, but we also design all of that. The impact of those designs are something we are accountable for and strive to get better at.​

How can we design scenarios and settings to enable players to find the facts on the ground and to provide them with enough levers in the fiction to interact with? What sorts of scenario and setting will generate an internal causality that is meaningfully knowable and comprehensible?

A lot of this is circumstance-dependent: both details of the fiction over time, and details of the shared experiences over time of the participants, will make a big difference. But I think some general suggestions might be possible.

For example, just thinking about NPCs: I think it supports @Campbell's desiderata if most NPCs are more-or-less faithful to the role they occupy in the setting. Corrupt, duplicitous, double-agent, etc NPCs are significant obstacles to players getting the sort of knowledge and leverage that @Campbell talks about.

What other general suggestions can be made?

 

[Campbell]

I'll have more later, but one of the most crucial points are designing settings and scenarios in a way where new information is more likely than not going to conform to player intuition rather than shock and surprise. Big unexpected reveals are generally not congruent with a focus on gameplay.

 

[pemerton]

@Campbell, that seems consistent with my suggestion about NPCs.

I think it also has implications of architecture and geography (which, for historical/legacy-type reasons, tend to loom large in RPG scenario and setting design).

Do you have any thoughts about how direct or indirect the ability to acquire information should be? I'm prompted to ask this question because classic D&D has "big reveal" architecture (in dungeons) but has player abilities (eg spells, demi-human detection abilities, etc) that allow players who use those abilities effectively to get a heads-up on the big reveal.

My own view is that there is a risk of that sort of approach (i) depending heavily on conventions about what is fair or not fair (as the players need to know when/how to deploy their detection/revelation-type abilities) and (ii) can become a bit inanely self-referential both in the fiction and in the play (a bit job-for-Aquamannish). But risk needn't equal reality: hence the question above!

 

[Umbran]

What other general suggestions can be made?

We can start with a precept - in an RPG, secrets that don't come out aren't of any value. They are pages the author wrote, but didn't publish.

As GMs and scenario designers, we can always make the antagonists so perfect that they never let any piece of information slip, and leave no clues. That becomes a block in our developing fictions.

In some games, NPCs are built the same as PCs. In other games, they use different rules and statblocks - but we can always think about what their PC-equivalent skills and abilities ought to be.

Just as the PCs make errors, fail checks, and so on, NPCs will do the same as they enact their schemes. Each time they do so is an opportunity to leave facts on the ground where the PCs can find them.

 

[John Dallman]

How can we design scenarios and settings to enable players to find the facts on the ground and to provide them with enough levers in the fiction to interact with? What sorts of scenario and setting will generate an internal causality that is meaningfully knowable and comprehensible?

The only way I've ever managed to design settings usefully is to think about them a good deal in advance, so that I grasp the basic nature of the places and its people(s). When I have done this, I find it reasonably simple to just play the NPCs according to their personalities and interests. I have a personal rule for this:

All the NPCs are characters belonging to players who aren't taking part at present. Nobody is just a walking plot point.​

Sometime, this means that NPCs surprise me-as-GM: as they come on-stage, the part of me that is playing them-as-characters insists on particular actions, that weren't what I expected. In my Infinite Cabal campaign, an NPC who was planning some mild fraud on the PCs, but had not met them, panicked when he first saw them and ran away. He'd just realised they were Big Damn Heroes and nothing good for him would come from his plan.

 

[Baron Opal II]

For the most part, having the NPCs being honest but with an agenda fits the bill. They're honest, so when you receive the information it will be useful. They have their own agenda, so there are means of persuasion or bargaining that allow the PCs to acquire what they need.

Duplicitous NPCs should be present but rare, often the "villain". This allows a contradiction to appear which is a clue unto itself. This can lead to the Observant Townsfolk and Gullible Muppet to have conflicting information, which will lead the PCs to question or pursue the Conniving Dastard.

If you're going to have multiple NPCs that can be interacted with, having the useful facts known by more than one helps avoid issues. If the PCs have offended the Observant Townsfolk, hopefully they also talk with the Canoodling Stableboy who also knows the same fact, even if only partially.

 

[prabe]

What setting stuff I come up with, I come up with specifically so the players/characters can find it, learn it, interact with it. I very rarely lie to the players--or even have NPCs lie to the PCs--because ... well, Sam Clemens is quoted as having said, "If you always tell the truth, you never have to remember anything." There's a similar conservation of bandwidth at play for me.

That said, I think there is sometimes value in finding a way to ... surprise the players/characters, while staying consistent with established facts and events and suchlike, if it can be managed honestly. I have had NPCs be honest but wrong before, when I knew I wasn't going to have to remember it for long. I have managed big reveals tens of sessions after planting something, while remaining consistent and even giving the PCs some clues.

There are other facets to my thinking, of course--not because I think more complexly than anyone else, but because it's a pretty complex subject. There's the thought that the players should trust the GM about the setting; the thought that if the PCs are being heroic (or heroic-ish) then most NPCs should want to help them; the thought that--as I'm sure the OP got at--the players/characters should have a sense of how the world and the people in it work, so they can make sensible choices for sensible reasons (to the extent those kinds of choices are compatible with the kinds of things PCs get up to).

 

[Lanefan]

I'll have more later, but one of the most crucial points are designing settings and scenarios in a way where new information is more likely than not going to conform to player intuition rather than shock and surprise. Big unexpected reveals are generally not congruent with a focus on gameplay.

I'm not convinced that big unexpected reveals are necessarily a bad thing. For example, the players might run a variety of characters in a long-term campaign in a consistent and well-portrayed setting and only find out several years in that what the PCs thought was their world is in fact all riding on the back of an enormous turtle. This sort of big reveal shouldn't have much effect on in-the-moment play but will (ideally) stand the players'/PCs' perception of the greater in-fiction world on its ear.

Or they might learn that their long-time mentor is in fact a vampire, (and has been all along) who may or may not have been manipulating the party's actions for years in order to suit his own ends. Yes this will probably reduce the PCs' trust of NPCs going forward, but in some ways that's kind of the point; in that it reinforces the idea that the setting is a dangerous place filled with dangerous people of whom the PCs are only a few.

And on a smaller scene-level scale, this outlook really fights against the use of illusions; where at first glance the scenario looks quite logical and reasonable but parts of it are illusions hiding what's really there. Why have illusion magic in the game if it can't be put to best use?

 

[pemerton]

the players might run a variety of characters in a long-term campaign in a consistent and well-portrayed setting and only find out several years in that what the PCs thought was their world is in fact all riding on the back of an enormous turtle. This sort of big reveal shouldn't have much effect on in-the-moment play but will (ideally) stand the players'/PCs' perception of the greater in-fiction world on its ear.

That doesn't seem very related to play of the game.

Or they might learn that their long-time mentor is in fact a vampire, (and has been all along) who may or may not have been manipulating the party's actions for years in order to suit his own ends. Yes this will probably reduce the PCs' trust of NPCs going forward, but in some ways that's kind of the point; in that it reinforces the idea that the setting is a dangerous place filled with dangerous people of whom the PCs are only a few.

This does seem related to the play of the game, and is an example of not doing what the OP suggests. To me it seems like GM solitaire play.

 

[Reynard]

The way I see it is this: if the scenario the GM has presented requires certain things be true, then these are GM defined, immutable facts (who the BBEG is, for example). Anything else -- anything that is flavor or important but not immutable -- is subject to change, and as such should embrace player input. if the PCs walk into an inn and one person in the inn is the collaborator they have been searching for, literally everyone else in the inn is undefined. So instead of going into a long monologue about people the PCs see in the inn, the GM should say:

"You open the door and step into the inn. It has been a long day on the road and you are dirty, tired, and frustrated that you are no closer to finding the collaborator. [The GM then asks each player in turn] Who do you see in the inn?" Of course, one of these NPCs the players just invented might be the collaborator, or the GM might mention them offhandedly in general description. The point is that the GM can offload a pretty significant amount of worldbuilding and scene setting by asking the players, with the added benefit of ensuring that the fiction of the scene matches what the players are envisioning.