Adventure Wherever They Go

One thing I noted when reading through the Conan, Elric, and Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories was that the lead characters would quite often appear to wander quite aimlessly around their world, and wherever they went they would just happen to find adventure. Now, of course, a lot of that's inevitable - nobody wants to read "Fafhrd goes to the marketplace; he buys groceries; nothing much really happens."

But then, in an RPG, one can assume that the players likewise would much rather play "Bazaar of the Bizarre" than "Fafhrd goes shopping"! So, it's not completely irrelevant. And, in terms of campaign design at least, there's a name for that sort of thing: the sandbox. The GM provides a map, populates it will all manner of adventures, and the PCs get to wander around having their adventures.

However, I'm also inclined to think it has some relevance to adventure design as well, especially when dealing with one-shots, an especially with town- or wilderness-based adventures (rather than dungeon crawls). The thing is, it's not really practical for the GM to expect to specify the entirety of a small town for an adventure, or a research installation, or even a WH40k starship - they're just too big, especially for only a few hours of game time.

But what the GM can reasonably do is, when laying out his adventure location, highlight the key locations in a place, and prepare some event related to the adventure that occurs at each one. Other areas should be sketched in in broad terms ("the noble quarter is here, there are warehouses over here..."), with the option of more specific locations being marked when the players realise their significance. This has the advantage of flagging to the players, "you might want to look here", to avoid wasting their time, and it also helps any investigation along because until they've at least checked out all the key locations, they can't really get stuck.

Of course, that all seems a bit fake. And, indeed, it is - it's very much of the "the GM wouldn't mention it unless it was important" school of meta-gaming. But there seems to be a tendency in adventures (as evidenced in that first Numenera one-shot) for towns to be lovingly-detailed with fifty empty locales named - a tavern, a marketplace, several shops... all with "nothing to see here". The players are left to spin their wheels, because they can't see the three relevant trees in the forest. Which is already problematic, but when your entire projected play-time is 5 hours, it's even worse. So, cut it down to the essentials, and make sure that pretty much anything the players do "on-script" has some relevance to the story.

Incidentally, that may seem like a form of that "Chekhov's Gun" behaviour I complained about in my previous post. It's actually the opposite, though: in the CG example, every location that is to be detailed must be required for the plot, where here the locations are only relevant to the plot - they may or may not be encountered.

For example, if three locations are detailed (A, B, and C) and they're all required, then the only decision lies in the order to hit them. There are thus six possible plots: ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, or CBA. However, if the same three locations are detailed and they're all relevant, then there are sixteen possible combinations: A, AB, ABC, AC, ACB, B, BA, BAC, BC, BCA, C, CA, CAB, CB, CBA, or none.

Of course, in the base town for a campaign, you wouldn't want to be so restrictive. If the PCs are going to spend a lot of time in a place, you'll want many more locations, several of which they visit regularly, and many of which will simply be irrelevant to the adventure at hand. So I'm not suggesting some universal truth here!

One more thing: the players should probably take some hand in this as well. Instead of just saying "we go to...", they can really help but saying what they're expecting to do there. Those expectations may or may not be confounded, but they're still useful - "we go to the market to pick up groceries" makes for a very different scene from "we go to the market because I need to contact the thieves' guild". By flagging that to the GM, they allow him to skip over a whole load of irrelevant detail, and lets everyone just get on with things. Or not, if they prefer.