Scenario and setting design, with GM and players in mind

[pemerton]

For my recent Spire campaign, I largely used one sheet of prep: a mind-map that showed the relationships between factions and NPCs in the district of the city in which play was to take place.

I think I know the answer to this, but wanted to check: did your mind-map depend upon material in the book that detailed PCs, groups, "levers" and places?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

how many pages of prep do you think is required?

Required as in hard-required?

Zero, I'd say.

I'm not being sarcastic. But you're saying required, which means absolutely required, to me, and the answer is zero. I've run easily 10 hours on zero prep before, certainly zero written-down prep, particularly with PbtA games. I've also run them with many hours of prep.

Do prefer to run with absolutely zero prep? No, haha, I do not.

I think the guidelines you've set out for yourself are generally good though I would agree with @hawkeyefan that I'd probably go with a larger number of factions, if I intended to run that long, because some of them will become irrelevant or and like, if you only have 3, that's going to get pretty intensely focused on those 3 so they better be extremely interesting, and it limits the opportunities for another faction appearing to cause chaos. I'd also probably detail about 10 NPCs to start with, so long as the system I'm using allows me to rapidly generate NPCs.

That's kind of a big deal - PtbA Or Resistance (Spire/Heart), you can make up NPCs very very fast. But in a lot of RPGs you cannot. Like, Shadowrun it's hours of work to churn out a few non-generic NPCs (well it was in 5th anyway). So if I was playing a game where NPCs were a pain to created, I'd probably create a lot more.

Also I'm naturally prone to making up NPCs, if I wasn't (and I know one of the DMs I play with isn't) I'd probably prep more too (and maybe get a random NPC generator up in there).

The mind-map style approach @Hawkeye uses is very good for most things. For layered mysteries you can sometimes want to prep a bit more than that, but generally "stuff is going down, get involved/solve it" stuff can be done with a mind-map and quick thinking. One of the latest Spire books, the Magister's Guide (one think I kind of love about Spire is it has actual sourcebooks and they're actually useful but not needed, so many RPGs now either have no sourcebooks or they're absolutely dire and/or needed to make the base RPG work) has a whole section on how approach the game with zero prep, 20 minutes, 1 hour, and 2 hours, and different things to think about.

 

[pemerton]

Required as in hard-required?

Zero, I'd say.

I'm not being sarcastic. But you're saying required, which means absolutely required, to me, and the answer is zero. I've run easily 10 hours on zero prep before, certainly zero written-down prep, particularly with PbtA games. I've also run them with many hours of prep.

Do prefer to run with absolutely zero prep? No, haha, I do not.

I'm used to running sessions with little or no preparation - in Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant, Classic Traveller and other systems. But in this thread, as per my quoting of @Campbell in the OP, I'm trying to think about more "traditional" approaches to RPGing, where GM notes are a thing.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Oh, sure, it often times makes sense to keep something secret until there's a need to let the cat out of the bag. For example, defeating what you think is the big bad evil guy only to find out he's actually working for another even bigger badder evil guy.

One thing I really like is when the players intuit or work out that there's more going on, even though it hasn't been revealed to them, from the shape of the pieces they do have, and the spaces in-between them. If you don't prep some stuff that's not necessarily going to come out, or not going to come out immediately, that can't really happen. And it can be gold for future adventures.

Also, in my experience, anything deferred (i.e. not immediate) might not ever come out because plans might change, unless it's a railroad/nose-pull. You can plan some stuff to come out, but the PCs go in a different direction, or an NPC gets pushed off a cliff or whatever, and maybe it never does. And is that bad? Not usually. It is important to not overinvest in stuff that won't necessarily come out though.

Cyberpunk Red is very guilty of this.

Sadly true. I was trying to to forget, because I like some aspects of Red.

We're literally in the 2020s, and Mike and the gang are making the same mistakes they made in the 1990s writing about a theoretical future 2020. They're making mistakes people on the internet have been joking and complaining about since the very early 1990s. I mean, I remember having the "car thief" discussion on Shadowland.org in 1993, and even before then, offline, we'd discussed why are the rewards to irrationally tiny in SR? Cyberpunk 2020 wasn't quite as awful for this as SR, but it was pretty bad unless you just ignored what they were suggesting re: rewards.

And so they make same mistake again? It's just silly. These are people with fancy equipment and specialized skills. There's never been a time in history you can get people like that for a pittance (unless you cut them in to a much larger deal as a share). Never, ever in human history. That's not going to change unless the market is saturated and supply wildly exceeds demand, and it isn't in any of these games! That's part of the whole deal of being an edgerunner (or shadowrunner). The market is not saturated. People are coming to you because they don't want the idiot gangbangers who you might be able to get for tiny money. The PCs are equivalent to builders hired on word of mouth (maybe cowboys but not cheap!), not itinerant laborers picked up off a street corner.

I could see a different RPG, where you were absolute bottom-of-the-barrel gangbangers with no specialized skills, little or nothing in the way of equipment (maybe a panel van and a pistol), and it's a Great Depression kind of deal where you're just desperate for work, and that could be a wild game of its own, but they make you create these skilled, usually-intelligent characters with lengthy backstories, and fancy gear, and then they're like "Here's less money than it costs to rent your flat for a month to plan and execute an elaborate extraction and potentially get into multiple firefights", and like the only reason they can justify it with is the game is designed to not kill your PC. And it's like, sure, but my PC doesn't know that... If they don't want us buying too much equipment, make the equipment more expensive or otherwise harder to get hold of - don't shortchange us to the point where setting seems weird!

Argh.

But I'm specifically referring to scenarios where the author gives the GM a ton of backstory and there's no obvious way to introduce it to the player while they're actually playing the game.

Yeah I've seen that and like, if you're writing for your own pleasure, and it doesn't detract from the game, fine.

But if you're writing an adventure for others to use, no, not fine. Annoying. Often downright confusing too. There was an adventure I read for some sci-fi RPG a few years back and they explained this hugely elaborate backstory that was hard to keep track of, and then it turned out like 20% of it even intersected with the actual adventure, and it was particularly confusing because there was a bunch of stuff in the backstory that it seemed like it would be good for the players to know, but the adventure at no point delivered that info. I read it through like three times trying to work it out (possibly this was Aeon/Trinty, the original one). Like if it's totally unneeded and won't come out, either don't put it in there, or clearly separate it from the other stuff!

Also sometimes it does detract from the game. With the above example there was stuff that was unnecessarily confusing and weird if you didn't know the deep backstory stuff. In fact I'd say White Wolf authors have been guilty of that quite a few times, especially when metaplot nonsense got involved.

Metaplots: not even once.

I'm trying to think about more "traditional" approaches to RPGing, where GM notes are a thing.

Fair enough - I'd say a couple of hours will easily be enough for something quite complex if you're inspired. If not sometimes it's better to just sketch out a little and see what comes up from the players, or work on it in small increments over a few days.

Re: levers I don't usually list them as explicit levers, but every NPC I try to make a human (er... or being... you know what I mean) with flaws and peculiarities and obsessions and vulnerabilities and a past. Even if they're only a couple of sentences long I'm likely imagining stuff about them. When I think about times stuff hasn't worked out as well as I've expected it's usually because I've made an NPC a bit too perfect and/or insufficiently human. Like, they came from somewhere, they care about stuff, they have a physical body, all these things will impact them.

 

[Manbearcat]

Explain further?

So for a Dogs’ Town:

* Why does Brother Bailey want revenge and upon Sister Grace (connect his box with her box w/ a Sin-related descriptor on the connector and connect one of their boxes to a blasphemer or a pagan).

* Why has Steward Miller not sufficiently intervened and resolved (he loves one, he is compromised by the other, he has been bullied into ineffectiveness by a former sinner the Dogs saved who is now an ideological purity zealout, he bears overwhelming shame before the King of Life > connect all with descriptor).


Rinse/repeat with several other Sin & Sorcery & Demonic Influence-entangled relationships until you’ve got a Town bursting at the seams with (perhaps interconnected) problems.


I handle Torchbearer Medium/Long Adventures the same:

* Situation/obstacles in box depicted via coded shorthand/descriptors.

* 2-4 lines off of each box for spatial ingress/egress attached to related boxes w/ pithy descriptor of connecter (climb/descent/chasm/chute/chimney/ fissure/portal/bridge/lift/hike/river etc and if test or vs/Ob or Nature).

* Location/Gear/Monster Twists at bottom (which look like PBtA moves).

* If Loot or Loot Roll required.

 

[MGibster]

One thing I really like is when the players intuit or work out that there's more going on, even though it hasn't been revealed to them, from the shape of the pieces they do have, and the spaces in-between them. If you don't prep some stuff that's not necessarily going to come out, or not going to come out immediately, that can't really happen. And it can be gold for future adventures.

Oh, yeah. That's always enjoyable beacuse it usually means the players are engaged. But I confess that I'll sometimes change what I have planned because the players come up with a theory that's better than what I came up.

I mean, I remember having the "car thief" discussion on Shadowland.org in 1993, and even before then, offline, we'd discussed why are the rewards to irrationally tiny in SR? Cyberpunk 2020 wasn't quite as awful for this as SR, but it was pretty bad unless you just ignored what they were suggesting re: rewards.

I was never part of those discussions back in the 1990s. But I always noticed in Shadowrun that it seemed impossible to ever get ahead, even temporarily, and I remember asking our GM, "We're not making enough cash for my character to even replace broken/lost equipment and ammunition. Why is my character in this line of work anyway?"

And so they make same mistake again? It's just silly. These are people with fancy equipment and specialized skills. There's never been a time in history you can get people like that for a pittance (unless you cut them in to a much larger deal as a share). Never, ever in human history.

I'm thinking of the various times in history when young men trained to fight have suddenly found themselves unemployed. It usually causes a lot of problems for society unless they can redirect those young men to other activities or at the very least point them at other societies. Likewise, those edge runners are going to find more lucrative work for less risk to themselves.

But the impression I get from Red is that you're specifically directed to create characters that value looking cool above all else and have a deep abiding hatred for "The Man." But that seems so shallow compared to even the recent video game Cyberpunk 2077. Most of the characters you run into aren't really all that concerned about looking cool and are instead worried about things that actually matter. Silverhand is obsessed with his hatred of Arasaka, Judy wants to make life better for those working at the Cloud but making them independent of the Tygers, Panem is concerned abour her brother and the rest of her family, even Takemura supports Arasaka in part because he thinks they'll make the world a better place.

If I were a new player coming to Red after playing 2077, I'd be confused. What's the game about? Am I just supposed to look cool? Why is my character an edge runner?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But I confess that I'll sometimes change what I have planned because the players come up with a theory that's better than what I came up.

For real. I'm not going to be like some showrunner who sticks to his original plot even when the fans came up with a vastly better one. More often rather than a better one outright though they just have some cool ideas I can incorporate.

But that seems so shallow compared to even the recent video game Cyberpunk 2077. Most of the characters you run into aren't really all that concerned about looking cool and are instead worried about things that actually matter.

Indeed, and what's weird is I think this is something of a recurring issue with Mike Pondsmith's games and their original setup. It's also present in slightly different forms in Castle Falkenstein and Cybergeneration, for example. They expect you to make a character who is seriously into behaving a certain way even though it doesn't make sense/flow naturally from the setting, and isn't really supported by the suggested rules/outcomes.

This can cause real problems, particularly if the players create PCs that fit the setting and chargen rules, but don't fit the often unclear "irrational behaviour" requirement.

Of course complicating matters even further is that when you hear about Mike Pondsmith's own game, or how he actually runs, like via Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads, the PCs in his game don't seem to have the same "hating the man is my #1 priority!" problems and do seem to be more rational, but also like, not full-time edgerunners at all (even though the game has been clearly assuming the PCs will be!).

Spire addresses this issue by having the PCs be part of the Ministry from the outset, so you have to have some idea why you joined and a commitment to behaving this way. I feel like if it was an RTG game they'd have the exact same setup and classes and so on, but have skipped the whole Ministry thing and just be expecting the PCs to be taking anti-Aelfir action because of course they would. (I might be being unfair on Mike here, as the more I think about it, the more pervasive in a certain generation of RPGs this issue seems to be.)

 

[Lanefan]

Very often I find that there isn't an obvious point in the scenario to introduce this knowledge and the scenario doesn't provide the GM with any tips on where or how this might happen.

True, there may never come a time in the scenario where introducing that knowledge makes sense; and so it remains unintroduced - - - at your table.

But the next table might end up completely focussed on that knowledge while ignoring things your group found to be of great importance; the author has to provide for both, and both groups still end up solving the case.

Take a murder mystery. One table of players might focus on the body itself - how did it die, how did it get here, forensics, etc. - and largely be able to solve things from that angle. Another table might almost ignore the body and focus instead on the deceased's actions and movements leading up to the killing, and largely solve it from that angle. A third group might ignore all of this and start right in on the deceased's known friends and associates, and solve the mystery from that angle.

In the adventure write-up - particularly if it's been written for someone else to run - all of this info has to appear, even though all three of the above tables never learned more than maybe half of it.

As a player, if I don't know and am unlikely to learn what's really going on, then who cares? If that man robbing the bank was actually mind controlled by space slugs but I never find out, then it may as well not be part of the setting at all.

For you, perhaps. But let's look closer at this.

Your PCs see someone robbing a bank and (for whatever reason) do nothing beyond watch events unfold. During the robbery it occurs to some of the PCs that the robber is acting strangely, as if compelled by something. The GM knows it's space slugs, but your PCs don't and never will unless you-as-PCs follow up and do the investigating required to find this info out....in other words, bite on the adventure hook.

Put another way: if you want to know there's probably a way to find out; but if you don't want to know or don't think it's worth following up or just aren't interested, then you'll never find out. The GM (or author, if it's a canned scenario) doesn't know ahead of time how you-as-players/PCs will react to this or any other hints or clues you come across; meaning all those hints and clues have to be there even if 75% of them are ignored or never found.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes the space slugs just go on dominating people and robbing banks.....

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think I know the answer to this, but wanted to check: did your mind-map depend upon material in the book that detailed PCs, groups, "levers" and places?

So I looked at my mind-map and some of the notes I made before beginning play, and here's a bit of a summary.

PC Related Factions and NPCs
So during character creation, each player receives and/or chooses Factions and NPCs they're to which they're connected. For example, our Knight PC needed to choose his order (Knightly orders in Spire are more like biker gangs than the ideal chivalrous brotherhood) and each is pledged to a pub. So the player created "The Order of the Wolf and Hound". I created an NPC head of the order and made her a Bond of the Knight (a Bond being an actual mechanical thing in the game, with a rating that indicates the strength of the relationship).

Character creation also dictates that the Knight choose a Squire as another Bond, and must decide if the Squire is optimistic or pessimistic. The player created Nathan, an optimistic and bright-eyed Squire. We played this (doomed) kid as an overeager intern, willing to do anything that was asked of him.

Also, once we began play and the PCs made their way to the district of Red Row (a district we decided they grew up in, but had been away from for many years during their Durance, or period of indentured service to the high-elves) the Knight used his ability to declare that he knew a Pub in the area where he knew the owner. So we created the Lone Wolf Inn & Pub, owned by Jenkins, a former member of The Order of the Wolf and Hound. This became their base of operations in the area.

The other PCs had similar Bonds that needed to be chosen, and some Factions that went along with them. Additionally, the PCs are all members of a clandestine resistance organization called the Ministry of Our Hidden Misstress, and they have a contact in that organization. So even before we got to anything I prepared as GM, we already had about four relevant Factions and about a dozen NPCs. All of these served as resources for the players to bring to bear during play.

Setting/GM Factions and NPCs
The setting itself has many Factions suggested in the book. Many of these are related to the functions of the city.... the City Watch and the Solar Guard and the Paladins are all related to the keeping of order, for example, though each has a bit of a different niche; the City Watch is like beat cops and are most often drow, the Solar Guard is like the religious Inquisition of the high elves, and the Paladins are the enforcers that hunt down heretics and dissidents. I had one Paladin in mind as a possible foil for the PCs, so I named her, and gave her some details, and jotted down some other names as possible members of each Faction, but was not committed to any of them.

Then the district of Red Row is a crime riddled location, with three major criminal organizations in a kind of delicate detente. I liked this idea as it seemed ripe for exploitation and disruption by the PCs, so I ran with it. Each of those Factions had a handful of NPCs to go along with it. In addition to these three criminal Factions, there were about four to six related Factions. Most of these were suggested by the books, but they suited things so well I felt no need to alter them. I gave one Faction a bit more specificity, but otherwise ran them largely as presented.

All told I think that at the start of play, we had about 12 Factions in play to some extent, and probably about 25 NPCs, though many of them at this point were loosely sketched at most. Probably about 15 or so that would be immediately relevant to play.

The amount of prep this consisted of was maybe a couple hours' worth of work. I did spend some time reading the book, and if we counted that, then it would go up, for sure. But aside from reading, all I did was jot down some ideas on a page, consider them, and then put them all into the mind-map, which as I said was my primary reference during play. Spire NPCs do have stat blocks, but they also provide a whole bunch of generic blocks like "City Watch Guard" or "Retroengineer" that I just cut and pasted these onto two or three pages so I had them at hand instead of having to flip through the book during play. So my mind-map, three pages of stat blocks, and the map were all I used during play.

 

[Lanefan]

In thinking of how we design settings and scenes, I think it’s better for a GM to introduce elements with the intention that the players will discover them, not with the intention that the GM will at some point reveal them.

So looking at the admittedly roughly sketched idea of the PC patron that turns out to be a vampire… far better to design this situation with the means for the players to learn this on their own. Clues of some sort, friendly NPCs who may offer info, unfriendly NPCs who they can leverage, and so on. These are the kinds of levers I think you’re talking about (or, at least, examples of such; there are other kinds for sure).

Thing is, from my viewpoint the players discovering these things and the GM revealing them are the same event and occur at the same time; the discovery from the player side leads to, and thus is, the reveal from the GM side. That said...

If the patron’s true nature isn’t discovered by the players, but instead revealed by the GM like a third act twist we’ve all seen in genre fiction, I think it’s far less meaningful as a game. The scenario is problematic for several reasons, especially the longer into the game it occurs, but I think this is the main concern.

It puts the players in a passive state of participation.

...I also don't think third-act twists necessarily put the players in a passive state of participation. Their level of passivity will be shown by what, if anything, they do with or about this new information; or whether they care about it. Personally, I think if they don't care about the third-act twist and-or it doesn't spur them to significant action it just means I've done a lousy job of setting it up during acts one and two - and yes, over the years I've certainly had a few of these fall flat on their faces. I've also had some work out quite well, though, so it's not a technique I'm about to abandon completely.

Third-act twists are IMO a different sort of thing than a more basic setting reveal, in that a 3a-twist is (ideally) directly related to the PCs and-or whatever plot is going on or emerging at the time; while a basic setting reveal - e.g. the world is all on the back of a turtle - is more broad-based and applies equally to any PCs in the setting whether currently in play or not.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to design settings with such revelations in mind.

I do, if only because it allows me-as-GM to legitimately maintain a sense that there is always more out there to discover should they care to look for it. It also allows me to keep those things in my pocket as either adventure hooks or unexpected developments for later in the campaign, and as I run long open-ended campaigns havign a few of these in the chamber can be very handy sometimes.

Spoiler in case any of my current or former players happen to read this:

Spoiler

There's a secret about my current setting that's been in place since before the campaign started which, fourteen years in, nobody yet knows: their binary-planet system is held in place (and to some extent held together; it's otherwise astronomically impossible for two planets to be and remain as close to each other as these are) by several high-tech and divinely-created satellites. Sooner or later, should the PC levels ever get high enough, some adventure or other is going to take them to one of these satellites; at which point with any luck they'll figure this all out while also realizing that keeping these satellites in one piece and functional would be very beneficial to all.

They've already found in-play the means to get to the satellites (several vessels known to be spaceships) but don't know how to operate them or where they can go.

But if none of this ever happens and none of it ever comes to light, it's no skin off my nose other than the hour or two of thought and writing I put into it back in 2007.