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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9285928" data-attributes="member: 70468">Justin provides contrasting examples in “<a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots" target="_blank">Don’t Prep Plots</a>”. The first is what he calls a plot:(1) The PCs pursue the villains. (What if they don’t?) (2) The PCs have to choose to follow them by ship. (What if they decide to ride down the coast? Or teleport?) (3) The PCs have to spot the derelict. (What if they roll poorly on their Perception check?) (4) The PCs have to board the derelict. (What if they just sail past it?) (5) The PCs have to rescue the survivor. (What if they fail? Or choose to flee before realizing the survivor is there?) (6) The PCs have to question the survivor. (What if they decide not to pressure an injured man?) (7) The PCs have to go to the central sanctuary of the temple. (8) The assassination attempt on the PCs has to play out in a very specific way.The second one is proposed as a situation:(1) The PCs have to pursue the villains. (This is the hook into the entire scenario. It’s a potential failure point shared by all scenarios. If the PCs aren’t interested in going to the red dragon’s lair, it doesn’t matter how you prep the lair.) (2) You need to design the city of Tharsis. (Where is it? What’s it like? What can the PCs do there? Et cetera.) (3) You need to design the derelict ship. (4) You need to design the Temple of Olympus. (5) You need to stat up the Tharsis navy, the villains, and (possibly) the survivor. (6) There needs to be a way for the PCs to know the villains are hiding out in the Temple of Olympus. (In the plot-based design, this is one of the failure points: They either question the survivor or they have no way of knowing where to go next. In situation-based design, you would use the <a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule" target="_blank">Three Clue Rule</a> and figure out two additional methods by which the PCs could reach this conclusion. This can be as simple as making a Gather Information check in Tharsis and/or questioning the captain/crew of the ship the villains took.)Note the commentary in number six. The problem is not that that GM has decided the PCs have to go to the central sanctuary of the temple. It’s that the techniques used to accomplish that goal are vulnerable to failure (unless the GM acts overtly to ensure the required event happens). If the PCs don’t question the survivor, they have no way of knowing where to go next. Justin suggests using the three clue rule to remove this failure point by providing redundancy.What I am referring to “plot” is predetermined events that have to happen. This is similar to the definition Justin offers in the introduction of “Don’t Prep Plots”:First, a definition of terms: A plot is the sequence of events in a story. And the problem with trying to prep a plot for an RPG is that you’re attempting to pre-determine events that have not yet happened. Your gaming session is not a story — it is a happening. It is something about which stories can be told, but in the genesis of the moment it is not a tale being told. It is a fact that is transpiring.The issue I am identifying is that the solution being proposed is only changing how you arrive at those pre-determined events. Justin expands upon this technique in his “<a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7949/roleplaying-games/node-based-scenario-design-part-1-the-plotted-approach" target="_blank">Node-Based Design</a>” series of essays. Each of the critical events the GM wants to happen would be <a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/8015/roleplaying-games/node-based-scenario-design-part-6-alternative-node-design" target="_blank">funnel points</a>.In a sense, yes. Any information that points to something else is a “clue”. When the GM describes a cave and then describes the statues out front of adventures and hapless (and unlucky) people terrified of something, that is a clue there is some kind of monster (a basilisk, gorgon, medusa, etc) that can turn people to stone. As noted in <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-alexandrian’s-insights-in-a-nutshell.703060/post-9285804" target="_blank">post #41</a>, I’m trying to distinguish between that (saying something about the world or foreshadowing danger) and wanting a specific event to occur. For example, if I want the players to fight the monster in the cave, then foreshadowing the danger may be self-defeating if it causes them to flee or pursue some other approach.Random events or in response to actions the PCs undertake. If the PCs undertook some action (such as consorting with contacts, performing research, etc) with the goal of finding out where the bandits are, and they rolled a success, I would be obligated to tell them where the bandits are (in a way that respects both the state of the world and follows from how the information was required).For Justin, the difference matters. He views having the clues be placed, discovering them, and interpreting them as necessary to play a mystery scenario. He says in his “<a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule" target="_blank">Three Clue Rule</a>” essay (parenthetical added for context):This (the approach used by Gumshoe) is a mechanical solution to the problem. But while it may result in a game session which superficially follows the structure of a mystery story, I think it fails because it doesn’t particularly feel as if you’re playing a mystery. Laws’ fundamental mistake, I think, is in assuming that a mystery story is fundamentally about following a “bread crumb trail” of clues. Here’s a quote from a <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20070219035419/http://www.dyingearth.com/pagexxfebruary2007.htm" target="_blank">design essay</a> on the subject: I’d argue, first of all, that these fears are misplaced, and arise from a fundamental misperception. The trail of clues, or bread crumb plot, is not the story, and does not constitute a pre-scripted experience. What the PCs choose to do, and how they interact with each other as they solve the mystery, is the story. As mentioned in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0425219240/digitalcomi0a-20http:/www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0953998134/digitalcomi0a-20" target="_blank">The Esoterrorist</a> rules, we saw this at work during playtest, as all of the groups had very different experiences of the sample scenario, as each GM and player combo riffed in their own unique ways off the situations it suggested. But, in point of fact, this type of simplistic “A leads to B leads to C leads to D” plotting is not typical of the mystery genre. For a relatively simplistic counter-example, let’s return to Sherlock Holmes in <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/244/244-h/244-h.htm" target="_blank">A Study in Scarlet</a>: WATSON: “That seems simple enough,” said I; but how about the other man’s height?” HOLMES: “Why, the height of a man, in nine cases out of ten, can be told from the length of his stride. It is a simple calculation enough, though there is no use my boring you with figures. I had this fellow’s stride both on the clay outside and on the dust within. Then I had a way of checking my calculation. When a man writes on a wall, his instinct leads him to write above the level of his own eyes. Now that writing was just over six feet from the ground. It was child’s play.” This is just one small deduction in a much larger mystery, but you’ll note that Holmes has in fact gathered several clues, studied them, and then distilled a conclusion out of them. And this is, in fact, the typical structure of the mystery genre: The detective slowly gathers a body of evidence until, finally, a conclusion emerges. In the famous words of Holmes himself, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” What is true, however, is that in many cases it is necessary for many smaller deductions to be made in order for all of the evidence required to solve the mystery to be gathered. However, as the example from A Study in Scarlet demonstrates, even these smaller deductions can be based on a body of evidence and not just one clue in isolation.To reiterate my position, I’m treating having a required sequence of events as a “plot” even if the techniques allow different approaches to getting there. The “plot” is the required getting there. I’m also distinguishing from having placed the clues ahead of time versus saying things as the system requires. Justin appears to consider this an important distinction as well. The approach I’m using would not provide the kind of play he wants in a mystery scenario.Note that in the case where I have a situation where I need facts to support deductions about what has happened, I would use the three clue rule. Early in my the campaign I’m running with my homebrew system, I had a scenario where the PCs were investigating the ruins of a town. A mage had taken up residence there to perform research, but she disappeared and a monster appeared in her place. I used the three clue rule to make sure that there was adequate evidence of what had happened. The PCs eventually figured it out and rescued the mage from her predicament. (Alas, I did not start <a href="https://www.enworld.org/search/2746768/?t=post&c%5Bthread%5D=682741&c%5Busers%5D=kenada&o=date" target="_blank">posting recaps</a> until much later in the campaign.)In retrospect, I don’t know if I would prepare that scenario now the way I did early in the campaign. Applying the three clue rule robustly was a pain. I had to generate multiple sets of clues and weave them all together into the scenario in a way that made sense. At the time, I didn’t have a conflict resolution process. Checks were handled in a traditional way as pass or fail tests of a task’s success. Now that I have better tools for handling conflict resolution and managing who says, I am more inclined to specify the situation and lean more on the system to discover the clues in play instead of authoring them up front as part of the scenario design.</blockquote>

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