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I talked about running your 4e game based on situations and not story, and I was asked a good question: What does a good situation look like? Talking loosely, let’s define a situation as an event or circumstance without a pre-planned outcome. A situation doesn’t presume any answers; a DM presents it to the players with the ending unwritten. No matter how focused the situation starts, its ending is written by the players interacting with the elements of the situation.
To break it down further, a situation puts together many elements and lets the players create a scene from the elements in play. The difficulty is in creating quality situations — not every situation is not created equal, after all.
So what makes for a good situation?
Suggestive. Remember how I said that a situation has no predetermined ending? That doesn’t apply to the beginning at all. To get characters into the situation, we funnel them into a scenario that suggest a certain flow of events. Leading in this way hooks PCs immediately. It increases immersion by offering something immediately provocative to work with. More importantly, it gets them wondering “Where is this going to go?” which is what you want.
Picture: An orc walks into the tavern. He grabs a patron and drops him to the floor with a headbutt. He stomps, punches, and kicks his way through the tavern until he arrives at the party’s rogue. Coming face to face with her, he grunts “You’re the one I’ve been looking for!”
Ok, we’ve got a violent orc who needs something from the rogue. Is he looking for blood, maybe a stolen item? Right now, the rogue probably has a million questions, and we know that the situation is going to start with figuring out what the heck the orc does want. Hopefully, the rogue can do it fast.
Twisting. Quality situations start one way and then after the first “beat” become something else. It doesn’t have to be a 180 degree switch — our orc doesn’t have to become an orc of peace after the rogue asks, “What do you want?” — but you should be looking to take the situation somewhere the players didn’t anticipate it would go. The orc in our previous example could travel in multiple directions from his first assertion. Maybe the orc was looking for the rogue because he heard she was great at disarming traps and…don’t tell anyone…the orc’s brother got his foot caught in one (embarrassing!). Or maybe this orc seeks revenge for an orc that was killed as a minion several levels ago in the adventurer’s career.
Whatever the twist is, let it come out shortly after the situation starts, getting adventurers more and more interested in creating the scene.
Motivated Participants. We will take for granted that your PCs are motivated to take action on their own, and they have goals they pursue. But what about the characters you bring in? Do you understand what motivates your NPC and what he will do to get what he wants? This is vital to keeping your situation open and flexible to player input. When you understand what your NPC wants and needs, you can react to what your players do based on the guidance that motivation provides you.
Going back to our orc and his poor brother, we know that the orc wants to help his brother, and he is going to the rogue because of her skills but also because if goes to anyone else in the village, it will be a source of major humiliation. Also, the orc is cheap and sort of violent. He’ll low-ball the players at first, then maybe threaten, but any character who guesses at his need to keep this incident on the downlow gains the upper hand in negotiations.
There are a lot of places to go with this situation, but I would feel prepared to improvise as long as I knew what the orc wanted in the situation.
These are the major elements of a good situation. But now you may be wondering…how do I run my sessions like you propose? And what about my set pieces? Combats? More on that later, promise.
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A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
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I’m still waiting on the punch-line. An orc walks into a tavern, and…?
Anyway, my best friend in high school & college was a situational DM. He just loved putting us in strange situations and seeing what we’d do. It was all the more…organic?…knowing that there was no preset way of handling any one situation.
Heck, there was one situation that we “beat” by doing nothing at all. It was a test of Wisdom, and the wisest coarse of action was to sit still and sleep (well, my character slept, while the monk meditated).
Nice post. It’s good to see some on-the-fly dungeon mastery finally getting face time in the community. I’m about a 60% prep, 40% improv kind of DM. Looking forward to more.
For more on Situation-based play, might want to take a peak at the Adventure Burner. In BW terms, a situation is the driving force behind the entire campaign, something the players are interested in and the characters have to engage via adventure.
I love improvisational gameplay; the prospect of writing a story where the most important characters are acting in unanticipated ways is why I game.
I’ll experiment with employing this framework as I start introducing my PCs to some more NPCs. I did just attempt it by presenting them with a conflict in media res, but the party’s solution was to kill first one side, then the other. And while that certainly was a response to a situation, I’d have gotten the same result if I just said “You have some goblins, and some seawolves, and they all attack you.”
@EldritchFire my favorite part of doing “low-prep” GMing is that I don’t know what’s going to happen either! It get just as exciting for me as a GM.
@jonny_5 Appreciate it! I’ve got a lot more.
@Judd owned, bookmarked and signed by Mr. Crane himself at Pax East
Adventure Burner is quality stuff and something I probably need to recommend to all D&D players generally. Thanks for the reminder.
@EgoPoisoning The trick is to generate interesting results from what the players do. They kill each side? Maybe they get a reputation as untrustworthy and loose cannons from both sides. You can’t trust people with no allegiance, right? Everything the players do has consequences, and you keep things interesting by thinking about the long term and short term effects of everything they do.
You know, it’s funny you should mention that because it’s exactly what I had planned when I set up the encounter. Specifically, a third group in the wings (which has acrimonious ties with the militaristic goblin faction who was fighting, and is considered food for the other, monstrous one) observed how they handled things. I set the fight up so that the players had the chance to pass as members of the militaristic goblins and take those npcs on as allies, but doing so would cause the observers to assume they were allied with those goblins. However, that would have just opened up some options for dialogue and a chance to win some other new allies.
Since the players decided to do that just long enough to wipe out the beasts, then turn on their erstwhile allies, they’ve definitely made a poor impression on another important group in the city.
I just wanted to say thanks for this article and the previous one on the subject. It really helped me out this week for my game.
I used to be (probably still will until i get out of the habit) a big plot planner, and after reading your articles I knew something should change.
So this week two of my regulars couldn’t make it putting me in a bind with what to do because I planned a big combat encounter this week. So I just presented them instead with a situation, totally threw out my idea for the night and let them play with it.
I will say they had more fun they they usually do, they snuck into a fey lord’s tower (one I originally planned on having the showdown combat in), were discovered after some failed stealth checks but I played the lord a bit benevolently and let them talk there way out of it and gave them a small tutorial on what fey nobility expected in social interaction.
In the end the party left with thier lives a little lighter on wealth and more esperianced in the ways of fey lords
So thanks for the advice!