RPG Talk: The Problem with Mega-Adventures

As I am currently in the middle of a longer published adventure for Torg Eternity, I have had cause to think about mega-adventures (which will be defined here as scenarios packaged as a fairly big book and require multiple sessions to complete, let's say more than 5; some games call them campaigns). I contrast this with short adventures which can be played in one or two sessions, and continuous play, which is something a GM can run without published adventures, by the seat of their pants, essentially.

Many games produce and sell mega-adventures, layout out an epic track for your characters to follow. And there's the rub. FOLLOW. While your published single-chapter story could end any way your players wanted, there's more pressure on a mega-adventure to stay on track. If any single chapter derails the story, the rest of the book (which may not have been cheap, especially in this market) because either useless or more difficult to adapt. Mega-adventures essentially encourage you to RAILROAD your players (a role-playing sin) into achieving certain outcomes so that the adventure can continue as scripted.

Now, I use a lot of published material (it saves time, at the very least), but I tend to change a lot of things to cater to my players' characters, their personalities, the subplots they want to pursue, etc. And in connecting various adventures together, I have to address how they fit together and how they impact (or set up) one another. That's easy to do with a single-chapter story (I often set things up but prep no finale), but not so easy with much longer. The changes you bring or that your players bring (because you want to allow a certain amount of derailing) can be dangerous to the larger plot unless you know it backwards and forwards. What if they kill or convert an NPC who later is scripted to return? You didn't realize it and allowed it to happen. Or you did, but you don't want to be on that railroad, and the script makes no allowances for it (like no way to check on the body)? This is the curse of the mega-adventure.

Don't even get me started on the "plot point" route that suggests should drop smaller adventures between chapters because after all, there isn't enough XP up for grabs in any given chapter to really take you to the level required for the later chapters. D&D "campaigns" often had this logistical problem WITHOUT advising dropped-in adventures. Now you REALLY lose track of the endgame. A similar thing happens when we deal with "meta-plots" and the game's standard campaign evolves over time. But whoops, what if the PCs do something that make the changes brought forward in future products completely contradictory?

We could always wish for better-written/structured mega-adventures. I've been made aware recently of Torg Eternity's cousin, The Dark Eye, adding little chess icons next to NPCs in its published materials. And so, a King is a character that will return in other publications (do not kill); a Rook is the same, but for that single adventure (protect before the finale); a Knight is a recurring NPC that can easily be replaced with a similar one (a recurring contact, higher-up or mid-tier villain); the rest are Pawns. This is certainly more useful than the usual distinction between Mooks and Rated characters (like Wild Cards in Savage Worlds) and tells you where difficult deviations could occur on your "track". I like this a lot, but it doesn't solve the railroading problem. Rather, it reinforces it.

But is it possible for published mega-adventures to cover every eventuality? The best ones do indeed make the attempt, but the realities of publication make it so spending page real estate on outcomes that might not happen is costly and, from a certain perspective, wasteful. I recently cut an entire "town on fire while you skirmish with the enemy" sequence because the players cleverly prevented the attack. Or rather, I wanted them to prevent it, but in case they didn't, I had to prep the sequence. In a published scenario, that's a few pages. In a GM's life, it's a couple hours. Either way, you can see why railroading has an allure.

So what can we do about it? One of the things we CAN do, is make sure the FINAL chapter is as open-ended as any single-chapter adventure. Scenario writers will usually be rather definitive about outcomes, especially if they've created a track to follow over the course of many episodes. You should be as flexible as possible. Second, do the King/Rook/Knight/Pawn exercise yourself. This is easiest with adventures you have in pdf format, as you can more easily search character names to see if they indeed return later (and whether that's entirely necessary). Third, you can treat those mega-adventures like you do adventure anthologies; it just requires you stretch out the deadlines. Say you just saved a city from an attack (Chapter 1), you might not get the clues or resources required to track down those responsible right away. Eventually, the GM could decide to do Chapter 2 as a sequel, or even skip to Chapter 4. These adventures are part of a series, but are no longer a serial. What about Chapter 3? Well, file the numbers off (give it a different villain or end goal) and you can use it as its own thing, divorced from the mega-adventure's plot. Or skip it entirely - you're probably not going to run EVERY adventure in an anthology either, and that was probably the same price.

And obviously: If the players change something, and that's more work for you, well, them's the breaks. Those surprises are what role-playing is all about, and they have the best chance of being what you remember long after the campaign is over.