The Die Is Cast: Interchangeable Scenes (RPG All)

James Bond, SPECTRE

There are moments in any RPG narrative where the heroes have has A Moment, whatever that moment may have been, and now need to transition from the Moment to wherever else in the narrative they need to be right now. Maybe they just overheard the bad guys explaining their plan and now need to get the hell out of there, as happens in SPECTRE. Maybe they need to get from their current location to a more useful location, say because somebody in the party died and they need to get to the temple for a resurrection or raise dead.

Maybe this, maybe that, maybe the other thing, but the point is they were Here, and now they need to be There. Right Now. 

Often this involves a chase scene, a dramatic interpersonal showdown, or something that, as Director, you may not have planned for - hence this post.

Many RPG campaigns, no matter the setting, explicitly plan for this moment. Horror on the Orient Express is designed so the ending scenario of the campaign is a race to [LOCATION HIDDEN] to prevent horrible things from happening to the world. Nights Black Agents has Extended Heat chases for exactly the same reason, always linking the agents to the ongoing threat whether they happen to be in Lisbon or Bern this week. 

However, you can't always plan for these moments. Players are unpredictable. They may invent the most peculiar moments and make them the Moment, for no better reason than it seemed like a good idea at the time. Then you, as Master of Ceremonies or whatever shiny hat you're wearing this week, have to pull a scene out of your capacious crevice. 

Or it may be that the players haven't invented a Moment at all, but instead they're stuck in a holding pattern waiting for a Moment that may never come. 

 Waiting for Godot, Harold Pinter (Sir Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian McKellen)

What to do in moments like this? Or even Moments like this?

Cheat.

The great thing about many RPG systems, and I'm going to use Dungeons and Dragons as an example, is that the crunchier they are, the easier it is to cheat, since most of the narrative depends on die rolls. It's not exactly scripted, but it's easy to manipulate a situation so that it appears scripted because everything ultimately depends on whether or not a particular die roll hits a particular difficulty.

That means you can create interchangeable scenes. You take a prewritten sequence, slot it into the narrative, and boom! Instant plot, that looks as if it was made from scratch.

So in any given chase scene, for instance, it almost doesn't matter who's doing the chasing or where the action is taking place. What matters are the DCs scattered along the path, because the DCs determine whether a particular moment goes one way or the other. 

This is more difficult to pull off in player-facing systems where the emphasis isn't so much on hitting a particular number as it is leveraging a particular situation. In those circumstances the GM really does need to know what is going on in that specific scene, rather that rely on a set of generics to help them out of an awkward situation.

However, even then it can be done. Consider Night's Black Agents, with its various Thrilling scenes - chase scenes, infiltration, digital intrusion, and so on. These scenes ultimately depend on the agent hitting a particular sequence of difficulty numbers in more or less the right order. That means it doesn't matter who's the active party and who the subject, or where the scene is taking place. What matters is the sequence of difficulty numbers that the agents have to cope with.

Let's say this is Dungeons and Dragons, Ravenloft, using the Mordent setting.

Mordent is a ghost-ridden coastal community, vaguely Georgian in terms of technology and social mores. There are no cities; the biggest community is about the size of Whitby, Yorkshire. There's vast stretches of lonely moorland, isolated hamlets, spooky mansions on the hill, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are chewing chunks out of the scenery, that sort of thing.

So how shall we cheat?

To begin with, on that description we already know that most if not all scenes will take place in a moderately civilized but not urban area. This isn't Tolkein's Middle Earth; you won't find ancient dragons sitting on vast hoards of stolen dwarvish gold down some mountain hole or other. Nor is this Jack the Ripper's fog-shrouded London town, with sinister threats lurking down every dark alley - and there are more dark alleys than there are hot dinners. 

On the other hand, a coach racing down a lonely road trying to outrun a half-dozen highwaymen sounds perfectly in keeping with the aesthetic. Or a skiff out at sea trying to beat the storm and get back to harbor before being driven up on the rocks. 

So any DM wanting to organize a transition chase scene could assume that the available chase options are:

• Small village (one-horse town).
• Large community (more than one street and horse, but not a metropolis).
• Open civilized countryside (ie. something with a road in it, but houses/inns are few and far between).
• Open countryside (no road, probably a few treacherous bogs or a Hound of the Bonkervilles lurking down an abandoned tin mine shaft).
• Coastline, shallow water.

You could get more complicated than that if you wanted to, but that should cover most options. 

Then you go through each line item, assign half a dozen obstacles or chase moments (is that a fallen tree trunk blocking the road ahead? What's the Jump DC?) and you're more than halfway there. 

So if the players manage to antagonize, say, a bunch of hellhounds and have to run for their lives, you already have most of the work prepped ahead of time. Or if they're at sea and need to beat that storm back to shore, bingo! One coastline shallow water chase coming up.

Exactly the same works for systems like Night's Black Agents. In fact it's easier, because the players announce ahead of time that they want, say, Thrilling Digital Intrusion scenes by giving their agents 8 pool points or more in Digital Intrusion. Knowing this, you can set aside a couple of Digital Intrusion sequences knowing full well it won't matter whether this sequence is meant for the casino in Monaco or the military base in Germany. Then, when the player announces they want to make a Digital Intrusion, you can slip one of your pre-prepared sequences in  and it will look as though the player's improvised moment is part of the narrative.

Systems like Dungeons and Dragons, which rely heavily on crunch, are particularly easy to manipulate this way because everything those systems do rely on one Difficulty Number or another. Social Interaction is a set of Difficulty Numbers, Stealth is a set of Difficulty Numbers, everything can be reduced to a set of DCs - and it doesn't matter who's making the roll or why, because what matters is someone will have to make a roll eventually.  

This, in a nutshell, is the difference between a player-facing system and a more traditional RPG. A player-facing RPG relies more on the player than it does the game mechanics; a traditional RPG relies on the mechanics rather than the player. Point being, if the game relies on mechanics then as DM you can manipulate the mechanics to make your life easier. Sometimes this can involve outright bullshit, like fudging die rolls behind a screen to produce one result or another, and that kind of thing is always a bad idea. 

But sometimes it can involve using the existing mechanics to your advantage, to save yourself work.

Let's say the players suddenly take it into their heads to interrogate the Master of the Guild of Bakers. God alone knows why. Maybe they want to know how he makes those delicious scones. Doesn't matter. What matters is whether the Master (or whoever the heroes have to talk to before they can get to the Master) is Friendly, Indifferent or Hostile, because that will determine their initial reaction to the heroes. 

Then that NPC will have character traits - ideals, bonds, flaws - which can be manipulated (through die rolls) to change their original rating of, say, Hostile, to Indifferent. At which point, having played the NPC like a Stradivarius, the PC then makes ... you guessed it ... a die roll to determine the outcome.

What this means is, it doesn't matter whether the Master is some critical path character who the heroes have to talk to in order to unravel the plot, or just some random nutbar who the PCs happened to take an interest in this week. Centaur or Goblin, doesn't matter. Alignment doesn't matter. Stats don't matter. 

You could just work up half a dozen profiles with Ideals, Bonds, Flaws and starting Interpersonal rating - Friendly, Indifferent, Hostile - and it will not matter whether you use a particular profile on the sinister vampire lord Strahd Von Whosavitch or Bingo the Wonder Dog. 

But it will look as though you planned it all along. 

That's it for this week! Enjoy.