With the Android source book most likely dropping in the next week. I thought I better get a move on with this series.
“Fundamentally, adventures are stories. An adventure shares many of the features of a novel, a movie, an issue of a comic, or an episode of a TV show. Comic series and serialized TV dramas are particularly good comparisons, because of the way individual adventures are limited in scope but blend together to create a larger narrative. If an adventure is a single issue or episode, a campaign is the series as a whole.” (The D&D Dungeon Masters Guide Chapter 3)
When I started this series of posts I hadn’t got to that part of the DMs Guide. But it confirms that I’m not completely crazy with my comparison and taking ideas from other forms of entertainment.
This post continues the high level approach to creating a campaign and the adventures that make it up. Future posts will look at the details. But for now we continue to steal, sorry stand on the shoulders of giants.
“The basic elements of good storytelling should guide you throughout this process, so your players experience the adventure as a story and not a disjointed series of encounters.” (The D&D Dungeon Masters Guide Chapter 3)
The One-Damn-Thing-After-Another structure based on as previously mentioned 1930’s serials like Buck Rogers is discussed by O’Neil briefly. It’s a simple structure that is basically a series of encounters between your party and some big bad. They keep trading blows until finally one side is victorious. And potentially could be seen as “a disjointed series of encounters.”
We have already seen in the Paranoia post on planning an adventure the use of The Three Act structure. In the Dungeon Masters Guide they use beginning,middle,end for telling a story. Which is basically the Three Act structure.
In the DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics we get presented with O’Neil’s Heavy-Duty, Industrial-Strength Structure for a Single-Issue Comic Book Story. Which happens to be the authors version of the Three Act structure that they developed over their many years in the comic book industry.
“Act 1
- The Hook
- Inciting incident
- Establish situation and conflict
Act 2
Develop and complicate situation
Act 3
The climax
Act 1
For my planning using the above structure the hook and inciting incident are combined into one. The inciting incident aka “the event that causes our party to react, that provides the danger or puzzle or task that galvanises our party into action.” (O’Neal) is how we get the story moving and entice our party.
Establishing the situation, conflict, and the McGuffin should all fall naturally within that inciting incident, and the opening scene setting.
But what is a McGuffin?
“A McGuffin is what the hero and villain are fighting over… The only thing that matters is that the plans, documents, secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters… it must be credible. If the conflict is over something inconsequential or silly, your hero is diminished…” (O’Neal)
Act 2
“take the story in a new direction. Something unexpected happens…” So in terms of the scenario or campaign, we are adding plot twists, complications, new situation(s).
Act 3
This is it the climax of the adventure. The player characters have solved the biggest problems, maybe even all of them. Defeated the threat, and restored order to the world. To paraphrase O’Neil. If this is the end of the story arc it could be the big finale, the final confrontation between the players and the big bad.
Denouement
For our purposes this ties up loose ends, has the heroes returning/delivering items, returning to base, shopping. And set up the next or future adventure.
So that’s a quick look at a basic structure to use for adventures.
In the comic book world there are basically two schools of thought on script development, full scripts and plot first aka “The Marvel Way of Plotting”. This is relevant to us planning our adventures because we have a similar choice. Our equivalent of the full script is the full adventure with all the details. Or we can go with the Marvel Way.
These posts I’m writing are starting at a macro level, and then zooming in to the micro. Which means because I am still at that macro level for this post I’m going to focus on the Marvel Way.
Stan Lee “With the Marvel style, I would give the artists the broad outlines of the story, and fill in the dialogue after the penciling was completed.”
Once I’m happy with the campaign planning, and the plots I’ve created. I can zoom in and do the detail. For me that detail is the equivalent of the drawing of the comic book, and the subsequent dialogue.
So what I’m proposing is that for each of the three acts a paragraph or two is written describing what is happening story wise.
Which means I haven’t gone into lots of detail, but I have a good overview
I do appreciate that so far that all this planning is for a linear medium. Where as the nature of an RPG is non-linear. Or it is if you don’t keep the players on the path and stop them wondering off. So I think that there is potential to learn from the video game industry on this front. I’ll have to look through my text books and hope that I can find stuff online.
But that will be for a future post. For now I’ll leave this here and keep an eye out for the postman and hope they are carrying a parcel for me.
I think the arrival of the Android universe source book Shadow of the Beanstalk for the Genesys RPG system is imminent.