To Be Resolved

Breaking Bad Habits - Turning a Plot into a Situation

Playtest Update - First Rules Drafted, Adventure WIP

I finished up "U0" of the RPG playtest rules this past week! Very excited, I think I can run a baseline or first-level adventure with what is now down on paper. The process of converting these conversational posts into a self-consistent set of rules has been fun, it's flexing a different part of my brain than usual.

I'm now working on the adventure that I've mentioned a few times as a sample scenario that would fit within our setting and intended gameplay themes. I wrote this adventure, The Pharoah of Philippi, last year to introduce some of my friends to Old Gods of Appalachia. It was already set in 2024 rather than the baseline setting of pre-WWII Appalachia, so it was a light lift for the setting we are targeting! The heavier lift that I've been ruminating on this week is how to whip it into something a little more NSR-shaped.

Starting Point

I originally wrote the adventure using the sort of basic pacing and chassis of The Luthier's Folly, an adventure in the OGoA book, but I wrote it to be fairly linear so that we could play through it in a session or two. I had a handful of scenes that were rigid in order and structure and basically only allowed as much freedom as the options I had enumerated on the page. So how do we take the good tidbits and flavor and make it open-ended?

Point 1: Rebalance the Timeline

The original adventure basically takes place over the course of 24 hours. The adventure pitch was:

This worked for a railroady one-shot because characters were generated against the premise; they would have a reason to already be there, and then the first scene opens with the party members as the only people at one of the breakout sessions. To be uncharitable to myself: amateur hour!

Our game is intended to be a little more open-world sandboxy, so this adventure would be pitched to the players as a hook by Granny at their Support Group meeting. This then puts a different ball in the courts of the players. How far is Davis from their home base? If they've already gone through character creation at a Session 0, how would their characters get to Davis? How would they involve themselves with the conference, as volunteers? Guests? Workers at the conference center? We can write in some default options if players are at a loss but that seems like a fun prompt off the bat.

I'm talking through this because if the characters are coming in from out of town, then the GM needs to have more information about the local area in case players decide to stake out the town, or come into town early and start exploring! So the first step I took to relax the adventure was make a better calendar for the overall weekend. Now, instead of a 24 hour railroad, we have a sequence of events that will transpire in the Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Overnight in the local area between Thursday and Sunday. That is, the events will transpire if the players don't intervene! Part of my model for this is to emulate the structure of "Myths" in Mythic Bastionland - the players are presented with escalating stakes as the adventure wears on and the expectation is for them to exercise agency and experience the consequences.

The other part of this is that the GM now knows odd things that the NPCs are experiencing if the players decide to, say, skip all of the breakout sessions so that they can loiter downtown. My goal is to make sure that the world feels like it exists outside the vision cone of the player characters.

Point 2: Encode More Randomness and Encounters

This adventure was originally drafted for Cypher, which is paced by GM Intrusions, a mechanic that allows the GM to introduce complications and escalate stakes in exchange for the metacurrency of XP. We have a procedure designed to maintain pacing, so rather than improvising intrusions we can put together some encounter tables and setback tables that are triggered by player actions.

Point 3: Redesign NPCs

NPCs in Cypher are intentionally very simple - they are assigned a base Level, which corresponds to the task difficulty of interacting with them. I haven't come up with a grand unified theory of NPC design for our system here yet, so I will have to work through this in parallel with development of our encounter tables.

Point 4: Exercise All Time Scales

Our playtest rules have four scales of abstracted time. In descending duration, they are Travel, Exploration, Investigation, and Encounter. When I used to run OGoA more frequently, I did not have solid procedures for breaking up time, and the scene-based design of the adventure reflected this. The multi-day nature of the adventure will help naturally exercise Travel and Exploration, but I am looking to expand the scope of the climactic "scene". The original adventure reaches its fever pitch in a surreal one-room church house with a basement; I'd like to expand the scope here and make this location into more of a traditional dungeon to see how our Investigation procedure functions.

Zooming Out

I'm optimistic! My friends get home from some business travel in early September and they've very patiently let me try out a bunch of systems over the last couple of years. I'll be whipping this into shape over the next week or so and should have some more substantial updates soon.

Let me know what you would do to restructure a railroad into a more open scenario, am I missing any obvious steps?