I’ve been thinking a lot about the shapes of stories, especially as IF and video game narrative designers have been mapping them for years. What does good narrative design look like in a tabletop adventure? Here are some qualities I look for:

• Interesting premise, choices, and consequences
• Space for me to add my own stuff if I want to
• Easy to parse! The writing should make me feel supported but not overload me with every possible outcome.

Unlike a video game, a TTRPG is an open system, not a closed one. At any point a GM can just decide to go off-book and do something else. But the information we write for them still needs to be useful throughout. They might need to pick the book back up for an encounter or stat block, or they might want to return the campaign back to its pre-written rails. However they use our adventure, we need to make sure the GM feels supported through any reasonable outcome of the problems we told them to lay at the feet of their players.

I define a reasonable outcome as something I can expect players acting in good faith to try when presented with a situation. Anticipating most reasonable outcomes can be tricky, because it means you need your finger on the pulse of what all kinds of players like to do, not just the ones at your table. When in doubt, lean on the major mechanics and tools your system makes available to players. Draw Steel has extensive combat and negotiation mechanics, for example, so negotiating or fighting with almost any NPC feels like they could be reasonable outcomes in a Draw Steel adventure. But negotiating for their hand in marriage when the adventure’s about freeing kidnapped children— kind of unreasonable! A GM is on their own with that one.

The Diamond

This image is from Jay Taylor-Laird’s 2016 talk called “The Shapes in Your Story,” the slides of which are a great read! Taylor-Laird mentions there are two really good opportunities for using the Diamond:

• When you want to give your players two different ways of interpreting the same event.
• When you want your players to choose between “the right road” and “the hard road.”

There are a few use cases I want to extrapolate from this.

No Becomes Eventually

Let’s say there’s a dragon terrorizing the countryside. You send an NPC to ask your players to slay the dragon, but they don’t bite down on the hook right away. Maybe they don’t realize it’s time-sensitive, or maybe they have more important stuff to do. Maybe they just want to see what happens if they don’t slay the dragon immediately. For this choice to be meaningful, there’s got to be a consequence for that.

Okay, so it doesn’t exactly look like a diamond anymore, but the shape is still similar. “The dragon razes another village” changes the world state in a way that is meaningful, although you still need to define that meaning. Maybe a favorite NPC was in the village. Maybe the reward is smaller because less people can pool their money. Maybe the dragon gains power with every soul it eats, and it’s MUCH stronger when the characters finally confront it.

You can branch the left side of this decision tree as many times as you want:

Why Do We Do This?

When I first started writing adventures, I got a great piece of advice: when writing a story hook, always consider what would happen if the players just say no. If it wouldn’t impact them (outside of losing out on a few g’s by not accepting the job), rewrite the hook.

We want the world to feel lived-in, like it can breathe on its own without player intervention. We also want the players to feel like their choices matter. One game I like that does this very well is Blades in the Dark, which visualizes the world state as a series of countdowns, known as Clocks (these are circles, not diamonds). When players take (or don’t take) certain actions, clocks tick down. When a Clock hits zero, something big happens.

In our Dragon example above, maybe the Dragon has a clock of 5. After 5 times the heroes refuse the call to adventure, the dragon has decimated the countryside. She’s grown so powerful that the heroes’ very existence is a threat to her. Instead of waiting to be confronted, the dragon seeks out the heroes herself.

Big Choice At The End

It’s no secret that I love Dragon Age: Origins. In this CRPG, you’re tasked with building an army by recruiting 4 major factions: the Dalish Elves, the Circle Mages, the Dwarves of Orzammar, and the soldiers of Redcliffe. In each of these four quests, you discover a problem right away. Dalish Elves are being hunted by monsters. The Mages are revolting. Redcliffe is overrun with demons. The dwarves are in the middle of a major political upset.

By the end of each quest, the player has to make a choice that’s typically binary or trinary: break the werewolf curse (and anger the elves) or slaughter them and save the elves. Side with the progressive but cutthroat Paragon or the decorous, conservative one in the Dwarven conflict. The result gives the player a satisfying end cutscene to resolve the quest based on their choice, and then the faction they sided with joins their army.

Since the major choice lies at the end, there’s not a lot of opportunity for branch creep. When you plug these quests back into the main storyline, you see that the world-state changes are mainly cosmetic. Some lines of dialogue in the quest area change, and at the end of the game when you call on the factions of your army, it’s either one or the other: elves or werewolves, dwarves or…more racist dwarves.

If you have read my work this setup might look familiar! This is exactly the structure I used to write The Workshop Watches:

The post-quest lift on The Workshop Watches is potentially much larger than the lift on the Dragon Age quests. You either get paid, or you get a brand-new NPC (a shield guardian, no less!) that your GM now has to balance encounters around. But that’s the benefit of designing for an open system — our brains can produce way more output with way less instruction than a computer. Make sure the lift is fun and rewarding (like adding a charming NPC), and it won’t feel much like work at all.

Linking a bunch of these together, like Dragon Age does, can be classified as the Branch and Bottleneck format (as defined by Sam Kabo Ashwell). Choices allow players to branch towards different outcomes, but the narrative always brings it back to the central thread. These outcomes may change the world state in ways that come up much later.

Conclusion

Shaping a story, mapping when information is delivered and what its relationship to player choice may be, is a crucial skill for anyone who wants to design their own campaign. If you’re just writing it for the 3-6 other freaks at your table, you have a lot of leeway. But if you ever want to publish something, it’s important to communicate these shapes effectively and find the right balance between ambiguity and specificity.

This is maybe like 25% of the blog post I wanted to write, but this is already long as hell. If this is useful for some people, I might keep doing these. I’d love to talk about more patterns from the sources listed in this article, as well as storylets and even perhaps the most esoteric narrative pattern of all (The Tringe). If you’re interested, let me know.

If you’re looking for a fun exercise, try coming up with more examples of these patterns from campaigns you’ve run in the past. Take one and write your own quest outline with them.

References:

Game Narrative Summit 2016 | https://media.gdcvault.com/gdc2016/Presentations/TaylorLaird_Jay_The_Shapes_In.pdf

Sam Cabo Ashwell Standard Patterns in Choice Based Games: https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-patterns-in-choice-based-games/