How do you plan your adventures?

[Appletoe]

Alright, I'm sure someone's already made a thread dealing with this kind of question before but I can't find anything on search right now so I'm making this thread.

Basically, how do you create adventures for PCs to go on? 'How to be a GURPS GM' recommends you split the adventure into NPCs, locations and encounters. Has anyone done this and did it go well for you? HTBAGGM also mentions another way to plan adventures which is to have multiple plot hooks open at any one time and have the PCs stumble upon them at their leisure. Is this similar to how you come up with your games?

[johndallman]

There are several ways of doing it, depending on how the game as a whole is structured. Here's an example:

I run a police campaign in a fantasy city, twice a year, at a convention, for a stable group of players. Each session is a case, from the first news that a crime has been committed, to (hopefully) an arrest, with enough evidence and/or confession that the result of a trial isn't in much doubt. The first part of preparation is to envisage the crime, how it was done, who did it, and why.

I try to invent crimes that show up the differences between the fantasy society and the real world, and between this fantasy society and a "standard" D&D one. The crimes are not usually meticulously prepared by an evil mastermind: the people who do them have human failings and blind spots.

Once I have the crime, I know a bit about the people who did it. Then I need to figure out more about them, and how the crime becomes known: what is discovered, when someone calls the police, what they get told. That's the point at which the players start to get involved.

After that, my ability to pre-plan is limited, since I don't know how they'll do the investigation or who they'll talk to in what order. I have a fair idea of what they'll need to find out, and I'll try to keep them from wandering off the subject too far for too long, but this is a bit unpredictable. In the latest case, they got very lucky with some tracking and skipped the murderers' attempt to obscure where they had gone, and the game finished an hour early. In a previous one, they found a red herring and chased it to the point that they found and solved a completely different crime, not realising until they had done that that it was a red herring. That session overran.

For this kind of campaign, the main NPCs are the criminals, any witnesses, the victim if it's a murder, and the PC's supervisor. Sometimes they need to get in an expert, but I've had to make those up on the fly sometimes. The main location is the crime scene, but there may be others. The encounters are usually not violent: they're mainly witnesses, and the criminals.

[mook]

It varies widely, from "thick player packets and lots of detail" to "winging it from a single page," but NPCs - Locations - Encounters is often in there.

Here are some concrete examples:

• A few different one-shots from past conventions.
• The start-to-finish process of building two different one-shots. (In these examples, the prep steps are "1: What Is It?", "2: What Happens?", "3: The Player Characters," "4: Adding Detail," "5: Finalizing the Characters," and "6: Final Details."
• A self-contained, ready-to-play Old West adventure.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Appletoe

Basically, how do you create adventures for PCs to go on? 'How to be a GURPS GM' recommends you split the adventure into NPCs, locations and encounters. Has anyone done this and did it go well for you? HTBAGGM also mentions another way to plan adventures which is to have multiple plot hooks open at any one time and have the PCs stumble upon them at their leisure. Is this similar to how you come up with your games?

I don't really split "NPCs" and "encounters": They're on a spectrum. Every NPC is a potential encounter waiting to be actualized; conversely, every encounter involves an NPC, though not necessarily one with a full character sheet.

How I do this varies from campaign to campaign. In my supers campaign Sovereignty, nearly every session was built around an insanely powerful NPC that the PCs would have to deal with in some way (climaxing in their going to Olympus and getting into a fight with Ares and Athene). In contrast, in my current fantasy campaign Tapestry, the PCs are sailing up the coast of a continent they've never seen before, and I figure out what societies, cultures, and races they encounter as they go. They've encountered elves from four different cultures, for example, from the ones who asked "have you prepared an environmental impact statement" from the ones who nested in trees like gibbons and pursued them with bolas. Back when I ran Whispers, my first THS campaign, I offered the PCs (a private investigative agency) a series of cases to investigate, which they pursued on their own schedule—though I occasionally had to prod them a little. The NPCs there were partly victims of various crimes, partly perps, and partly people they were involved with in their personal lives—for example, Constanza Fiori, the 11-year-old daughter of one of the PCs, emerged as a major figure over the course of the campaign.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by johndallman

I try to invent crimes that show up the differences between the fantasy society and the real world, and between this fantasy society and a "standard" D&D one. The crimes are not usually meticulously prepared by an evil mastermind: the people who do them have human failings and blind spots.

That was exactly my formula for running mysteries in Transhuman Space, particularly the part about showing how THS was different from the end of the 20th century.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That was exactly my formula for running mysteries in Transhuman Space, particularly the part about showing how THS was different from the end of the 20th century.

I may well have been influenced by Transhuman Mysteries; I started this campaign a couple of years after it came out.

[Donny Brook]

I start with a setting and build it from macro to campaign-relevant-micro at increasing degrees of detail. At the local level I will know the economy, territory, culture and politics very well. Usually I will discover good drivers for competition and conflict in this process. Then I identity a fewNPCs who must exist and flesh them out for my own sense of the setting.

At this point I will take the idea to potential players to gauge interest and see what sorts of people they want to play within the parameters I am up for. This is critical because it will guide what plot possibilities (people, organizations, motives) will be available to pursue.

At this point, PC building as the next part of setting building as allies dependsnts social positions, jobs etc are fit in.

[L.J.Steele]

Let's start with the two basic schools of thought -- sandbox and railroad (or in more mild versions, ball of twine).

I'm a twine GM myself. I want a strong introductory scene with at least one obvious lead-out to another interesting scene, and at least a rough outline of the spine of an adventure. Doesn't have to follow the spine, but the spine is always there if/when the PCs start thrashing about.

When I'm starting a new campaign, I'm likely to be more twine-ish, and as the PCs get familiar with the setting and start setting their own goals, more sandbox-y.

Usually I'm looking for a hook to inspire me -- could be a scene, could be an NPC, could be a dilemma for one of my PCs. (At one point in a FATE SotC western adventure, I wanted to have a bank robbery, but couldn't figure out how to work it in. Then I hit on having one of the PCs (the mystic) wake up in the bank vault holding a gun on a terrified teller who wanted to know which safety deposit box it was he wanted open. [He'd been possessed by his past self -- which fit one of his disads.]

If you haven't seen Blake Synder's Save the Cat, see if you can scare up a copy -- it'll give you decent insight into the three-act structure your players have been lapping up unconsciously since their childhoods.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by L.J.Steele

Let's start with the two basic schools of thought -- sandbox and railroad (or in more mild versions, ball of twine).

I consider both sandbox and railroad to be failure modes, in good Aristotelian fashion.

[Kalzazz]

Quest intro (usually but not always featuring a quest giver)
Some X number of challenges
Boss fight
Wrap up

That is my basic plan for an adventure