I’d like to talk today about
planning an adventure. The most important rule to remember when designing an
adventure is: However long you think it should
take to complete, it will take twice as long.
I’m writing this before my group
plays it, but I’d like to use an upcoming encounter in my current campaign as
an example. I’ll update the end of this post after they’ve played for an
accurate time stamp.
For reference, the group just
helped a man fight off a mystical creature attacking the town. He appears to them
as a greyish winged man and is a member of the city’s military force called
“The Night Guard”.
“The Wounded Night Guardsmen
thanks the party for saving him. He is new to this form (and reverts to a
normal, pale Human appearance) and thus was not as helpful as he should have
been. He explains a little bit about the Night Guard, but admits he hasn't been
a member long enough to have memorized their full history. He will foot the
bill to the Night Guard Meeting Hall, so long as the party doesn't mind him stopping
by the Market District first.”
This single paragraph of text
does a few things: 1) It gives the players an option to learn more about the
Night Guard if the wish, and they will likely be curious given his appearance.
2) It confirms to them that he is a Vampire, if they weren’t sure yet. 3) It
shows the group that the town is fairly generous, as by this point multiple
people will have offered to pay the transportation costs around town. 4) It
points them toward the city’s defenders, who will help them in an upcoming
battle. 5) And it gives the party an excuse to go shopping, even though they
are kind of in a hurry.
Looking at the paragraph I often
think to myself “I need more content for this adventure.” Then I have to remind
myself that this small block of text will take the group 30 minutes and set up
two other encounters.
Just the discussion with this
guy will end up taking them much longer than it would take me, but that isn’t a
bad thing. I like that my players are thorough and spend a lot of time
planning. It is a little disappointing when the adventure takes longer than I
want, but it means that I have to plan less for each session. It also is very
satisfying to see the players “in character” without a lot of prodding by me.
With each adventure I try
something different. This is both fun and helps me learn what my players like
best. For this one I’m putting a lot of planning into the NPCs and businesses
in town, but I’m letting the players dictate the adventure. They have to
prepare the town for an invading force, but that is a fair amount of time in
the future. Everything they do in the next session (and maybe the one after
that) is really up to them.
So the adventure I have written
(a mere 2 days before it needs to be done) should take about 2 hours of
gameplay if it was a party of 5 of me. I also know that it will at least fill a
4 hour session with my group, both because they don’t all play like me (thank
god) and because roleplaying takes extra time. And of course they are now at
the Paragon Tier which means combat takes longer should it arise.
And now for a rundown of how
long it actually took to play. The sample encounter above ended up taking less
than 5 minutes to finish. I was a bit surprised. Of course, another encounter
that I expected to be over quickly took well over 20 minutes. The session as a
whole only took 2 hours before we stopped for the night, but we had a
scheduling conflict.
