Providing Choices to your Players [revisit]

I was weeding through the comments posted a couple of days ago (I had a big influx of visitors thanks to Twitter) and a post that I had made back in 2006 came up – Improving Your Storytelling – Provide Choices – the comment was from Leet_Master_Ace:

Could you provide an example? I’m guilty of the “steering” game to some extent. I tell the PCs “You can go wherever you like, except I don’t have stuff prepared for every location open to you.”

Any tips?

I won’t rewrite the whole post here but the general idea is that you don’t want to create a situation where your players feel they’re being forced to do something which seems easy enough on the surface but in the thick of the session might not be so easy. To avoid this I suggest taking a flow-chart approach to the design of the encounter – the 5 Room Dungeon Model that Johnn Four wrote about a while ago over at Roleplaying Tips is a prime example of just such an idea.

In a nutshell you create a framework for what you want the party to do, in this case you have five rooms/encounters you want the party to adventure through:

Room One: Entrance and Guardian
Room Two: Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge
Room Three: Trick or Setback
Room Four: Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict
Room Five: Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist

Now on the initial look this sure feels like a railroad situation as I have five items that I want the party to encounter is a specific order – now take a second look and see if you can see where I’m coming from.

Can you see it?

There’s nothing there that says you have to have the five elements lined up one behind the other. There’s nothing there that says you can’t have something take place between these different elements.

What Johnn did was provide a framework, not a road map, in fact you can use the framework for a non-dungeon environment as well.

Here’s a quick example that centers around a role-play situation.

Room One – The party enters a local pub and settles in. Shortly after their meal arrives some of the patrons start to get a bit rowdy and eventually a brawl breaks out (yes it’s a bit cliche but hey, it works).

Room Two – The local law enforcement shows up and brings things under control. The party has to try and talk their way out – no steel, no magic, just their ability to use their wit and tongues. As I mentioned some time ago with rolling for search checks don’t reach for the dice here, make them role-play it out.

Room Three – Following the investigation after the fight the party will be in one of two positions, they’re either in jail awaiting the trial or they talked their way out but they’re not off the hook as they still need to appear in court to testify to what they saw.

The “room” here is one of two – the cell and those inmates the party needs to interact with and the stories they’ll tell about how no one every gets off if Judge Jacob gets your case. The other is the entire town as the party moves about and finds themselves being trailed constantly, the looks of “we know you started it and got off,” and even the possibility of a law enforcement officer harassing them as time passes.

The point is to keep the players off-guard, make them think that whether they are innocent or not, were involved or not, they have a real possibility of being punished for just being in the location of the fight.

Room Four – The courtroom, yes actually role-play out the court scene. Need some help? Just flip on the television and watch an episode or two of Law & Order and you’ll be able to handle it. Remember, the players have to role-play this not roll-play – have some fun, get into character.

What you need to understand is that the results of the case just don’t matter. Remember we’re not looking to force the party’s hands, but we do have a specific goal in mind on the other side. If you want the players to “win” the case then let them, if you want them to lose, find a way to trump their arguments and beat them (however I would recommend the former not the latter).

Room Five – Now here’s the reward, a hook to the next adventure. If the party is found guilty they can complete the adventure instead of serving time (and boring everyone).

If the party is found not-guilty or prove themselves to be fine upstanding citizens by testifying truthfully (or at least appear to) well, “we hope you can help us out here, we need someone of your find standing to . . . .”

I hope that helps – the trick is to set a framework you can hang your story on and not write a script you have to follow.

As always I welcome your thoughts and comments.

May your dice roll well.