Now that we’ve gone over what not to do, let’s take a look at some of the right ways to craft an adventure. As I touched upon earlier, there is always a tension between giving your players the freedom to be self-directed and needing them to engage with the adventure you’ve prepared. Railroading—that is, simply throwing roadblocks in the players’ path—is the bad way to relieve this tension. However, you still need some method of herding the players down a vague narrative path. So how do you balance the freedom of the players with the GM’s need to plan the adventure?
The problem is not that the GM has a final destination for the players in mind, so much as the methods she is employing to get them from point A to point B. So let’s look an example of another kind of story-teller who creates shared narratives with audience participation:
magicians.
Magicians often employ audience members as part of their act in order to reinforce the impression of reality. By introducing seemingly independent actors into the production, the magician tricks us into accepting the premise that they are not in complete control. That they could only accomplish their feats of wonder through magic. However, while a magician may present the illusion of free choice, you can be certain that none truly exists.
As a GM, you need to learn to create the same effect, making your players think they are making their own choices, even though you know what they’ll pick ahead of time. In other words, you need to cheat. There are a number of ways this can be accomplished, but the ultimate goal is always the same: to make the players feel that they are the ones in control of the game, not you. After all, it’s never, “Pick the Three of Diamonds.” It’s, “Pick a card, any card!”
To pull off this con, you will need to use a number of tricks. Some are employed by magicians or illusionists, while others are more literary in their origins. The through-line to remember is that you aren’t trying to take away the players’ ability to choose. You’re just making it as easy as possible for them to choose to do what you want them to do. There is a subtle—but critical—
distinction. So let’s look at three of the most common tricks you can use, and then we’ll talk about how they all fit together.
1. Quantum Narrative Uncertainty
Although they share a common imaginative space, the GM and the Player are really looking at two different worlds. To the player, the game world has an objective reality where everything is real. A sword is a sword, a spell is a spell, and a skeleton is a skeleton. The GM, however, observes a subjective reality where what is “real” changes from moment to moment. Does the skeleton have 9 hit points or 10? How many monsters are behind this door? Is the evil wizard’s staff +2 or +3? To the GM, the only things which are real are what the players are observing right now. The future is indeterminate, the past is subject to interpretation.
In literature this is known as Verisimilitude: Something which is false but which has the appearance of reality. It is essentially the art of making something fake appear real. A work of fiction is not believable because it’s literally true, but because it follows an internally consistent logic which makes it feel like itcould be true. Concepts which are blatantly impossible in our current world, such as magic, time travel, and superpowers, have the air of reality because they act according to both an internally consistent set of rules and our natural expectations of the universe.
Let’s say Superman is shot with a kryptonite bullet. We can suspend our disbelief and feel concern because, even though Superman and kryptonite are both imaginary, within the fictional reality of a comic book we know that kryptonite kills Superman. If Superman were
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suddenly and inexplicably immune to kryptonite, it would destroy the appearance of reality—
the verisimilitude—of the story.
As the GM, you need to give the players the illusion of a continuous and on-going world.
In reality, however, you don’t need to create that entire world; just the parts that the players personally observe. Everything outside of their field of vision is in a state of flux; a Schrödinger’s Universe, if you will. By staging that nebulous reality in a certain way, you can give players the feeling that anything can happen without having to literally plan for every possible circumstance.
2. The Communist Choice, or “All Roads Lead to Rome”
This is a tool often used in stage magic, especially card tricks: You hold up two cards and ask a player to pick one. If they pick the left card, you announce they’ve picked their card and put down the right. If they pick the right card, you announce they’ve chosen which to discard, and still put down the right card. In either case the player was allowed to make a choice, and the fact that both choices result in the same outcome is irrelevant.
To put this into the terms of an RPG, let’s look at a very simple dungeon: A single room with two doors. One door leads to a nigh-unkillable demon. The other leads to a treasure trove containing the demon’s one weakness. The PCs need to go to the treasure room first in order to complete the adventure, but what if they pick wrong? The trick is that they don’t know which door is which. No matter which door they go through first, it leads to the treasure vault.
Now, as I stated earlier, you never want to invalidate the players’ choices by contradicting them. But so long as they don’t know the result of those choices beforehand, that outcome is essentially arbitrary. In a grander sense, this means you want to focus your preparation on results, rather than causes. You don’t want to tie essential plot points to specific people, places, or things. Rather, plot points should exist is a rough haze, ready to snap into place with the events of the game.
If your next adventure takes place in a lost valley, it doesn’t matter how the PCs get there, just that they do. It might not even need to be a valley. It could be an island lost in fog, a city in the clouds, or a parallel dimension at a right angle to our own. Because the GM acts as a gatekeeper for the game world, he or she has the ability to alter the universe more or less at whim, so long as the verisimilitude is preserved and the players believe they are acting freely.
To put it simply: don’t move the PCs around the board, move the board around the PCs.
3. Guiding
Human beings are remarkably susceptible to being led down certain paths of thought.
Because the players rely on your subjective description of events, you can subtly direct their thought processes. The way in which you describe scenes can have a remarkable effect on how they regard NPCs, what they do and do not pay attention to, and to what extent they act cautiously or recklessly. Simply having players roll perception tests or asking “Are you sure you want to do that?” is enough to send many players into fits of paranoia. Describing one thing with unnecessary detail will make them certain it’s of critical importance29and have them scouring it for any scrap of information.
Books on acting, writing, and stage magic are all going to be full of great tips on methods to draw people down the paths you want them to follow without them realizing you’re doing it. The important thing to remember is not to use brute force to shove the players around. You need to be subtle when guiding them.
For example, you could give them an item which is potentially powerful but will only work once a subsequent task is completed. The players will be champing at the bit to complete any task you lay before them so long as they perceive it as being in their own interest.