Interesting Choices

To a very large extent, I believe what makes for a good RPG adventure (and, writ large, campaign) is the players making interesting choices for their characters.

(Of course, the majority of the fun of the RPG itself comes from the people around the table and the manner in which they bounce off one another. But that's not something that the game can really do anything about, and while a good group can have fun with a bad adventure, and while a bad group won't even have fun with a good adventure, there's still merit in having good adventures, is there not? Anyway, I digress...)

The thing is, it is by making choices that the PCs influence the plot - do they ally with the elves against the dwarves, with the dwarves against the elves, stay neutral, or try something else? The adventure should play out very differently in each case.

So, what is an interesting choice?

As far as I can see, an interesting choice requires three things:

• Choice
• Context
• Consequences

Choice

The most obvious thing that an interesting choice requires is, of course, choice. And by this, I don't just mean "the illusion of choice". There have to be at least two (preferably more) sensible answers to the question.

To give a simple, real-life example: when travelling from my parents' house to my appartment, there are many different routes. I can follow the M876 to the M9, and come into Falkirk from the East, I can leave the M876 at the first junction and make my way through Camelon and Falkirk from the West, I can take the back roads through Bonnybridge... These all have the same start and end points, but the routes are difference - this is a real choice.

Conversely, "death or cake" isn't a real choice. There's only one sensible answer: everybody will take cake. The only reason they would do otherwise is if they think it's a trick question... but then the real choice is "do I trust this guy?"

Neither is Hobson's choice a real choice. "You need to get from Glasgow to Edinburgh in an hour. You can take the car, bus, train, walk, horse, bicycle, build a hovercraft... Of course, the bus and train timetables don't sync up, and the other modes are too slow... I guess you'll be taking the car, then?"

(This all seems to obvious that I'm actually having a hard time coming up with good examples. And yet published adventures still fail - in the "Transylvania Chronicles" for Vampire, for example, the PCs quite frequently become mere spectators to Vampire history - if they do X, Y happens. If they do anything other than X, they fail... and Y happens.)

Context

Once upon a time, I made an appointment to see my dentist, and was told she was currently on maternity leave. I was also told that two other dentists were sharing her caseload between them, one male and one female. I was then asked which I would prefer to see.

That's a choice... but it's not an interesting choice. The only data I had on which to base my decision was utterly irrelevant to the choice itself - for all I knew, the male dentist could have been the single greatest practitioner of his art... or he could have scraped by with a minimal pass. Exactly the same was true of the female dentist.

(In case you really want to know, I saw the female dentist, purely because she was the first one mentioned. She did a decent but unremarkable job... which is probably the best possible outcome.)

"You come to a T-junction. Do you go left or right?" is, again, a choice. But without some sort of context, the choice is actually meaningless. Might as well toss a coin.

So, the players need some sort of context in which to make the decision. They need information!

But that doesn't mean they should automatically be given that information, nor indeed that they should be given all the information. Indeed, in many cases the most interesting choice comes where the players have only incomplete information and they know they don't have all the information.

For example, suppose the PCs are bounty hunters on the trail of their quarry. They are accompanied by a guide of dubious reliability (Meepo). "You come to a T-junction. To the left, thick spider webs cross the corridor, indicating that it is undisturbed. To the right, the webs have been hacked aside with a thick blade. However, Meepo indicates that the corridor to the left, although infested with dangerous spiders, is a much quicker route to the centre of the complex. Do you go left or right?"

See, that's an interesting choice - the safe option is to follow their target to the right. But that's likely slower. To the left, they face greater dangers, but it's quicker... if Meepo is to be trusted.

(And another example came up in last night's game - the party were seeking information about the source of the aurora, their guide indicated two local tribes that might be able to help, one of which had dropped out of contact while the other was unreliable but more likely to actually know. What do you do? The answer, in reality, was "have a twenty-minute discussion about our options". Which was pretty awesome. I really enjoyed last night's game.)

Consequences

So, the party goes left at the T-junction. At which point the DM, who's secretly making this all up as he goes, has them run into a room of orcs, and a fight breaks out.

Or, the party goes right. At which point the DM, who's secretly making this all up as he goes, has them run into a room of orcs, and a fight breaks out.

The players were given a choice. They may even have been given enough context to make that choice and to give the choice meaning. But that meaning has now been stripped away from the choice just as quickly, because in the end it just doesn't matter.

For a choice to be interesting it must be meaningful, and that means it must have real consequences. Even if those are merely the consequence of the road not taken - with D&D's choice of character class being the obvious example.

Now, not all consequences are equal. And in general, the greater the consequences the more meaningful the decision. Ideally, an interesting choice should have both positive and negative consequences for each option, and the players should be aware of many but not all of the consequences of their actions when they make the choice.

Returning to the example of the bounty hunters above... If the PCs take the safe option, then they know about four consequences: they avoid the danger of the spiders (+ve), they don't risk Meepo's betrayal (+ve), they don't risk losing the trail (+ve), but it will be slower (-ve). They don't know about the traps that their quarry has set (-ve), nor about the magic item in the complex that their target will beat them to, making the final showdown harder (-ve).

Alternately, if they take the risky option, the know about one consequence, can speculate on a couple of others, and don't know about a few more. They know there's greater danger (-ve). They suspect it's quicker (+ve). They suspect Meepo might betray them (see below). They don't know that Meepo isn't going to betray them, and in fact by showing him trust they'll turn him into a genuine ally (+ve). They don't know about the magic item, which they're now going to get to first (+ve).

Now, in full possession of the facts, it's reasonably clear that the risky route is probably the safe one. (But even so, it's only probable - the spiders are poisonous, after all!) But there's still no definitively right answer. More importantly, the consequences are distinctly different in each case - spiders vs traps and a harder showdown at the end.

Other Thoughts

When setting up a choice, it's generally best to offer a few, clear, distinct options. "Do you do A, B or C?" Give too many choices, and the whole thing takes too long to set up, becomes too complex, or can paralyse the group with indecision.

At the same time, it's important that there be scope for the PCs to do "something else". Perhaps they decide instead to set a fire and try to smoke their bounty out of the complex, bypassing the spiders and the traps entirely. Perhaps they just chart a course blindly North, and don't consult with either of the two tribes.

Very often, the consequence of offering interesting choices is that the party will simply skip some encounters. There's no getting around it - the GM will have to prepare more material than he actually needs. GM's should always be keen recyclers!

(Conversely, not every encounter needs to be bypass-able, at least within the scope of the adventure itself. In last night's game, whatever happened the party would have had to sail North through the mountains, which means they would have been attacked by drow for the big centrepiece battle. The only ways to avoid this would have been to abandon the voyage or to wait out the storm - both viable options, but both would effectively mean quitting the current adventure and doing something else. Now, if they'd decided to do that, then I'd have frantically ad-libbed something to move the campaign in another direction. Fortunately, I was reasonably certain that that wasn't going to happen.)