Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 177 - Back to Basics -Make Scenes not Stories

Episode Date: May 28, 2023

I have been guilty of trying to craft stories from an overview, a 50,000 foot view, if you will, and neglecting the individual encounters, scenes and scenarios.  In this episode I encourage you to do the opposite of this, focus on crafting these individual scenes to give you the flexibility to allow the PCs to take the story whatever direction they would like.   #dmtips #dnd #pathfinder #learnfrommistakes #orclicense

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. What I'm proposing to you is this, DMs. Focus on crafting the scenarios as building blocks for a bigger narrative, and let the player character choices dictate the outcome of the scenario. This outcome, plus the idea of an overarching story, should guide you into what scenario to put in front of the PCs next. what scenario to put in front of the PCs next. Thank you for listening to the Taking20 Podcast,

episode 177, continuing the Back to Basics series to talk to DMs about crafting campaigns using scenes and scenarios to give you more flexibility. I want to thank our sponsor this week, Mugs. I love to take my drinks from Mugs. Straws are for suckers.

Out on social media this week, I asked what you thought about interviews, and the response has been, well, kind of disappointing. I received a few messages saying that they liked them, and a few saying they thought they were okay, but liked regular content better, so it's kind of split 50-50. content better, so it's kind of split 50-50. You know, I'm trying to absolve myself of the responsibility of making decisions, and you are not helping me at all. Unless I get a torrent of opinions one way or another this week via social media or feedback at taking20podcast.com, I'll probably just do what I have been doing. When I find an expert on a topic whom I'd like to interview, I'll reach out and try to arrange it, but I won't be overly aggressive in pursuing interviews. Except for a few of my Let's Play podcast partners that I listen to quite a bit. Critical Role, Glass Cannon, Ventureforth, Find the Path.

Yeah, I will drop any topic that I've got to talk to them at any time. Please give this little podcast a like, rating, and subscription wherever you found it. Any one of these things helps increase the visibility of the podcast, and it's a little way that you can help me out. Now, there are two ways you can craft a campaign or adventure for your players. You can start with big picture first with plans on how it all will progress. You'll know how you want the players to solve every problem you throw at them and you drop scenarios with exact plans about how it will connect to the next one. So you can plan

your entire campaign from start to finish. But there's another way of planning your campaign where you think about the big picture and you use it as your guardrails, but you also only plan scenes or vignettes and then how they actually solve those problems or those scenes or vignettes, and then how they actually solve those problems or those scenes or vignettes or encounters dictate how the entire campaign will progress, but maybe with no plans on how you're going to get from the beginning to the end. First and foremost, your DM style should hopefully match your players' playing styles. If they want a tight-fitting story where they are gently railroaded towards a conclusion, I'm not going to tell you to stop doing that. You've got a good thing going, and changing it would just mess everything up. That being said, I mean, these two styles are a little bit different. I used to be in

the former camp. Overarching narrative, how it's going to proceed, what the PCs need to do to progress the story, all of it used to be planned out in advance. Frank, this is actually an easier way to DM. You plan what's going to happen, how things are going to transition, what will befall the party between major moments. The players will do A, then B, then C, then D, all aboard choo-choo. But my DM style has changed, especially over the last 10 to 15 years or so. Why did I change? Have I softened in my old age? Not at all. I can still

be a prick behind the screen, but my understanding of the game has evolved and players are more mature and capable than ever before. There's so much media out there about Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder and other tabletop role-playing games that new players are coming to the hobby more educated than ever before. I realize that railroading, which is that harsh term for planning out everything that will happen and how it'll end, kind of does my players a disservice for multiple reasons. First off, tabletop RPGs are collaborative storytelling. Players should have a voice in the story. Now, I throw that term around a lot, and I realized I haven't

defined it in about 165 episodes. So, collaborative storytelling. What is it? Collaborative storytelling is when each player and the GM have stories for their characters and for the game, respectively. The monk was abandoned at a monastery and is questing to find their parents. The rogue wants to become the Robin Hood for a small town. The gnome bard wants to experience new things to stave off the bleaching. The cleric is obsessed with learning more about their faith and seeks ancient knowledge of their goddess. Meanwhile, the DM is presenting this regional threat that needs to be countered to keep the world from being dragged into a new dark age. Each PC and the DM can influence the other

for the good of the world and the characters, or for the ill. Each character should have moments in the spotlight to show strength or weakness, make choices that benefit themselves, the world, or both, and the DM should put situations in front of the player characters to progress the story along. That's what it means to collaborate. It's not players versus DM. It's not one player being the main character and everybody else needs to support them. It's everyone working together to

tell their stories and support everyone else telling their story. The players aren't trying to blow up the campaign or working to foil their fellow players. Everyone at the table, even the DM, has the opportunity to step into the spotlight and then step back into the shadows and let others shine. Another aspect of collaborative storytelling that's on the DM's shoulders is to accept the player's description of what's happening. Let's say you're in a classic tavern brawl and one of the players says they want their character to hide under the heavy oak table because they're allergic to getting punched

in the face and they break out in black eyes and busted teeth every time that happens. GMs, you shouldn't say, well, the table's made of maple instead of oak because you just denied the player the opportunity to contribute to the story, even in a small way. This is a form of yes-anding from improv where you accept their suggestion or details and continue telling the story. Should you accept every suggestion that the players have? No, not necessarily.

Some of them break the game or shatter the narrative. I once had a player jokingly describe the airship he was piloting as being, quote, full of C4. Never mind the fact that C4 didn't exist in this world. I'm not taking that suggestion. Sorry. I just said, ha ha ha, RDX hasn't been invented yet, so it's not full of C4 didn't exist in this world, I'm not taking that suggestion, sorry. I just said, ha ha ha, RDX hasn't been invented yet, so it's not full of C4. He then amended his suggestion

to say it's full of grain. And this could be a Back to Basics episode all its own, but for now, just accept the definition that collaborative storytelling is supporting other people's stories around the table and accepting the details they contribute to the story. other people's stories around the table and accepting the details they contribute to the story. This idea is the heart of RPGs. It is a social contract, for lack of a better term, about how we will behave towards each other. The vast majority of the time, players are respectful and supportive, with character-world conflict being much more common than character-character conflict.

Generally, that doesn't necessarily mean you can't have a great campaign or one-shot built around character conflicts. As I stop talking for a second and look around where I am in the episode, I now realize that I have wandered so far off my intended path, I am somewhere in the wilderness. Let me catch a ride back to my original topic. Because RPGs are collaborative storytelling, it's up to the DM to support collaboration with the players. The easiest way I've found to do that is to define scenarios or scenes and place them in front of the player characters to deal with however they may. The outcome and how they're

handled will dictate what the next scene could be and how they could get there. In other words, this gives DMs flexibility. The only challenge for DMs who use this method is that they will have to ask themselves how they would handle an outcome from combat, social encounters like diplomacy, intimidation, or bribery, and be ready to adjust the bridge to the next scene on the fly based on how characters handle it. to adjust the bridge to the next scene on the fly based on how characters handle it. Another reason I changed my DM style is because PCs don't follow your plans. You can have a narratively interesting campaign designed and your PCs come along and crap all over it. You have this magnificent airship encounter planned where they are flying from Swansea to

Norwich. Oh, they are going to be aerial encounters and rough turbulence and maybe a failure of the magical life support systems that keep the short ship warm while it's in the air. When your PCs say, eh, we'd rather stay on the ground and I wouldn't go buy horses. But my encounters and the trip and meeting Captain Tarkovsky and his lascivious wife Amelia, she turns out to be a doppelganger. She's helping the flying raiders and it's gone. All gone.

The heavenly aroma of betrayal hanging. The heavenly aroma. The heavenly aroma betrayal. Damn it. The heavenly aroma of betrayal is hanging in the air so delicious, like a smell coming off of a hot grill full of food. Gone. All gone. The PCs have made their choice.

And if you suddenly say, there's no horses, only airships. Because unless there's an in-game reason for a horse shortage, you're railroading them into the airship because you want it to be the next encounter, which I think is most of the time a mistake. Let the players know that airships would get them faster. Let the players know that the airships would get them there faster. Absolutely. Tell them about the options about how to get to Norwich. Sure. Encourage them one way because, for example,

their benefactor is willing to pay for airship tickets? You betcha. But force them when they've already decided when they want to go buy horseback? Now it starts to violate that social contract I talked about earlier. But Jeremy, what do I do with my airship encounters I painstakingly built and loaded maps into Roll20? Save them! Put them back in your DM notebook and you're ready if they travel by airship later. You didn't waste that time. It'll pay off down the road. Given their freedom that they should have, PCs are going to zig when you think they'll zag. They'll run when you think they'll fight. They'll run when you think they'll fight.

They'll negotiate when they should bribe their way out of it. They'll jump off a fucking 200-foot cliff rather than being captured for your planned confrontation with the big bad. Thinking in terms of scenes allows you to adjust and rearrange the Lego blocks of these scenes in different order with different connector pieces as you need to when it's necessary because of character choices. Scenes are easy to pre-build. I keep using the term Lego pieces, and that's exactly the way I think of them.

I need to compile all the Lego pieces I have in my notebook and my favorite ones from the past and put them in a handy book for people to use as drop-in encounters that can be connected to form stories. You know, I just threw that out as a half-baked idea, but I kind of like that. If I can somehow transition to like a 32-hour day and have time to work on that, I'll get that done. Until then, or when I retire, that project will have to wait. Finally, I changed my style because it's easier to pre-build the little scenarios than it is the entire story arc from Young Farm Girl Hunting Rats from He- Take two. I finally- Take three.

Finally, I changed my style because it's easier to pre-build the little scenarios than it is the entire story arc, from young farm girl hunting rats and hay bales to killing God three weeks later. I'm just the facilitator. The story should unfold the direction the player characters take it. My hours and hours and hours of pre-planning tended to encourage certain solutions, and that's not giving players the freedom their characters should have. Does that mean that the DM should make any plans? Of course not. Plans may be useless, but planning is invaluable. We're DMs, and we have a major role to play in

this collaboration. However, the players have the right to help dictate how everything is resolved, from the smallest social encounter to the final encounter where they're on Mount Olympus talking to Zeus. Okay, I'm like more than 12 minutes in at this point and I haven't given any good examples. Sorry about that. Let's start with some definitions. So the story or the campaign arc is the overarching narrative. It's the reason for the adventure, whatever it may be. It's the picture your Lego box will eventually make when they're all connected together. Scenes or scenarios are the individual situations or encounters that make up the overarching story. These are the individual Lego blocks I was talking about. And then the outcome is the result of the scenario that leads to the next scenario in the story.

These are the connectors between the scenes or Lego blocks. What I'm proposing to you is this. DMs. Focus on crafting the scenarios as building blocks for a bigger narrative and let the player character choices dictate the outcome of the scenario. This outcome plus the idea of an overarching story should guide you into what scenario to put in front of the PCs next. So here's the long-awaited example. The story is that the players have been hired to find out what's happening to caravans that periodically disappear along a particularly icy and frozen leg of their journey.

The first scenario could be a social encounter at the caravansary, where the caravans start the frozen leg of their journey. The second scenario is a group of flightless winter terror birds like axebeaks or diatrima or gastornes just looking for an easy meal as the party travels in the cold lands. The third scenario is a lone traveler who asks to share the party camp at night who turns out to be like a vampire.

And the fourth scenario is a caravan coming from the other direction that's being attacked by a weak young white dragon with a disease like coccitan filth so that it's enfeebled three. There's a quick one shot off the top of my head should take about three or four hours to complete. The full story though is that the young white dragon who's weakened by disease has been pushed out of its usual hunting ground by stronger competitors. It's going after caravans since it's been forced to claim a new area. That's it. That's the story. Those are the guardrails on your adventure to drop your scenarios into. You just need to have a few scenarios to hopefully bring the story to a conclusion. So scenario one that we defined, at the caravansary. The party's waiting for their contact when they encounter a group of mercenaries who at first want to help,

but quickly discover that they think they have exclusive rights to protect caravans coming in and out of this particular location. The party could fight with them or use social skills around the small settlement to discover the leader's been skimming off the top, or maybe even use diplomacy to get their own fake caravan to pose as bait for whatever's taking out the caravans further on down the road. Scenario two, the winter axe beaks are attacking birds. A very straightforward fight, all things considered. The birds are looking for an easy meal and use pack tactics to try to surround and divide the party. Maybe if the party has mercenaries, like they've befriended the mercenaries from inside the caravansary, you can adjust the number of axe beaks

or give them some sort of environmental advantage like camouflage or elevated terrain. If the party's on a caravan acting as bait, it can easily change from a fight scene to a chase scene with one character having to drive to keep the caravan upright while everyone, including the driver, has to work to keep the axe beaks from climbing on board. Third scenario was the Vampire Traveler. The vampire isn't stupid and doesn't immediately attack the party, it just wants to meet the PCs. It could result in an evening of interesting

conversation, an offer of turning one of the PCs undead, maybe a future ally down the road, or another plot hook, or yeah, okay, it could be another fight. If the mercenaries join the PCs, maybe one of them is a thrall to the vampire and is working towards some desired end. And then the fourth scenario was the boss fight. The weakened dragon is desperate for a warm meal. The encounter is complicated by needing to protect the caravan. You can add some caravan guards to act as red shirts who'll be the first to be attacked. Party either chases away or kills the dragon, maybe gets clues that the dragon is ill and with the right roles the PCs could even stop the fight or diplomacize with the dragon and bring someone to cure its disease. Now,

whether the white dragon would be interested in talking at all, and if it is willing to hold up its end of the bargain, up to you, DM. So, in this one story of a weakened young white dragon hunting in a new area, the scenarios could go bar brawl, axe beak attack, Soho encounter, boss fight, or riding caravan with mercenaries, axe beak chase scene, vampire fight, or riding caravan with mercenaries, axe beak chase scene, vampire fight,

healing the white dragon, or even negotiation, distracting the axe beaks with food, becoming vampires themselves, and then a white dragon social encounter. I think we DMs should just present the situations to the PCs, let them determine what to make of it, how to handle it, and importantly, how their characters want to resolve it. I've mentioned I'm running a pirate campaign because my players said they wanted to be buccaneers on the high seas. They started the campaign playing Pathfinder First Edition, and luckily Paizo has just the adventure path for it, Skull and Shackles. As written, the PCs start out being kidnapped. I think the archaic term is Shanghai'd since a boat is involved,

but I can't get a consensus whether that's a politically incorrect term in the 2020s, so I'm just going to stick with kidnapped. The adventure was meant to have certain scenes play out in a certain order to start the campaign before the players reach the sandbox stage, where they do and become any one of a dozen different types of pirates. The adventure path is built to unfold a certain way, but the first thing I did was to break down the different scenes and encounters as defined in the manual and lay out the Lego blocks of scenes in the order that they were written and prepared these scenes accordingly. My group is,

I say this with all the love in the world, unconventional in the way they handle a lot of problems. So these Lego blocks got shifted around more than a few times until they eventually got their own ship. This sets up the sandbox, and I said go, and they were off to the high seas to make their fortunes. And again, please know that I say this from a place of love. My players and their fun mean everything to me, and I'll do anything I have to,

whatever I need to do to make sure they are having fun. That being said, they are without a doubt the worst pirates I have ever seen. They are the nicest, friendliest, most gregarious and giving pirates in the history of Galarian. Oh, we killed a couple of your sailors? I'm so sorry. Here's some gold in compensation,

and since you're just hardworking fishermen, we're not going to take anything out of your hold. What? They're coming out of encounters poorer than when they started. If they keep up this life of piracy, they're going to have to get in-game jobs to support their pirate habit. Yo-ho, yo-ho, a nine-to-five job for me. But that's how they want to pirate. They want to be supportive of the local economy and gain reputations as, uh,

what's the opposite of notorious? Respectable? Sure, why not? I'm starting to turn the campaign more towards pirate hunting instead of being pirates themselves. Also, there's an anti-slavery bent they could take the campaign, or they could sail around looking for work. In the campaign as written, the 15th or 16th encounter is supposed to be an opportunity to seize a base of operations. I moved that up to the second encounter, because I knew if I didn't give them some kind of sponsor and backing, they're going to die destitute at the hand of mutineers by about month three. I have an overarching plan for the entire campaign, loosely based on the adventure path as written. Those are my guardrails, but the soft and squishy connections are being rewritten and redesigned on a session-by-session basis. If I had forced

their hands to the original plan, the adventure path I had for the campaign, they would have needed to commit crimes like kidnapping and robbery and extortion in order to make ends meet. Now, instead of figuring out ahead of time that the party will likely capture and ransom the fat, soft, dandy captain of the ship, Elton Bida, now just craft the scenario of coming upon the ship in open waters and letting them decide how they want to proceed. They're getting a rep of being nice pirates. Not quite privateers yet because they haven't actually hunted other pirates, but I'm sure that's coming. To sum up the episode, being a dungeon master is all about giving everyone at the table the best time you can with the tools and tricks you have in your arsenal. One of the best tools you have is the ability to adjust scenario

connections and be prepared to adjust the game world based on the choices the PCs make. The reason DMs should build their campaigns in terms of scenes and scenarios and let the PCs decide the outcome of each is it gives you flexibility as a DM. It's easy to pre-build these individual scenes rather than entire character arcs. You can have a map and a one-page description in your DM notebook and you are ready to go. Plus, players are not going to do what you think they will. In the story I presented about the Frozen Caravan, what if the PCs decided to go searching for a cave instead of staying on the road? Since you've thought of this in terms of scenarios instead of pre-writing the entire arc,

you can adjust your adventure on the fly with just a little additional effort. And that's the drawback of this method. It is additional effort overall because you need to be able to improvise what happens next and connect it to your next Lego block, whatever that block is and whichever block you choose. Your campaign becomes quite improvisational and it can lose some cohesiveness because of it. However, I think if you use the story to set the boundaries and put scenarios in front of the players, then adjust those scenarios based on the outcomes of the PCs, that the way they steer the entire story, it gives the ultimate freedom to PCs. It makes them feel

like they are guiding the story, making a difference in the world, and I bet you and your players would have fun doing it. Do you have any feedback for me? Send it to feedback at taking20podcast.com or send me a message on social media. Tune in next week when we'll talk about what DMs can do when the players spoil their plans. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Mugs. I hate when I drop a full mug on the floor. It becomes one big coffee break. This has been episode 177, continuing the Back to Basics series with focuses on scenes. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2023. References to game system content are copyright their

respective publishers.