We're continuing our way through Duet Sagas, our loose framework for conceptualizing and organizing a duet campaign, which, as a reminder, is a roleplaying campaign with just one player and one narrator. We've now reached adventures, which are really the heart of any roleplaying campaign. Adventures are where setting, story arcs, and characters all intersect into a narrative. There is a distinction between adventures and sessions. A session is the period of time you actually game, whether it's a few or many hours. An adventure might last a number of sessions or you might actually get through a few adventures in a single session. Really "adventure" is a nebulous term, but generally it refers to a single narrative that has a beginning and an end. It usually deal with a specific event, place, or plot. With that said, let's begin the discussion of adventures. This article will cover some broad considerations, the next one will delve into designing adventures, and the third one will cover the execution of adventures.

The Two Types of Adventures

There are two types of adventures: good ones and bad ones. Yes, that statement is a little trite, but it's true. The goal for every narrator is to deliver good adventures but, let's face it, we're all going to churn out more than a few duds. This is especially true if you're running an intense duet campaign with several sessions every week. It's a lot like a television show. If you're only producing six episodes a years, it's a lot easier to make all them high quality but if you have to do twenty-four then you're much more likely to have more than a few episodes that just don't work. Nevertheless, most players and narrators prefer more adventures, even though quality may be inconsistent. Thus the typical duet puts a lot of pressure on the narrator to maintain a high pace of adventure design. There are a few tricks that can help the narrator pull this off.

1. Go Green. Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle materials in your adventures. Only design what you need to design. Reuse the material you do design. Recycle material you can snag from other sources. Most RPGs have plenty of monsters, locations, NPCs, adventure ideas, and so forth. You don't need to create unique material when you can recycle and reuse. If you do take the time to design a monster or NPC, then make sure you get some mileage out of the effort. This may require some flexibility. Let's begin with a classic example. The PC is looking to hire/recruit a NPC to her cause. You take the time to design a NPC from scratch and introduce him to the PC. The PC dislikes the personality and doesn't hire the NPC. Yes, this is an ouch moment, but really you shouldn't draw up an NPC in total until you're sure the PC is going to like the personality. However, let's also look at the positive - your roleplaying generated a reaction. That's good. Sure it wasn't the reaction you likely wanted, but it was a reaction. We'll talk more about this in adventure execution but reactions, good or bad, are great. Apathy is far worse. Still, your NPC is dumped but all you have to do is change the name and personality, maybe with a few accompanying tweaks to the character's stats, and you should be able to salvage the situation. The less efficient course is to just draw up a new character, but time is valuable so don't waste it.

2. Manage Expectations. Don't play up an adventure before it begins. You might also mention that you've been a little rushed so you may have to stop and look up things in the rules books or some such excuse. Now don't do this all the time, but if you have an adventure that is wanting, then there's no harm in lowering the bar a little. I've said this before: expectations are what ruin adventures and campaigns. On the other hand, if you have a good adventure planned, then there's also no harm at hinting that it should be a fun session. So in other words, if you have quality play it up a little and if you have questionable material, lower expectations. Of course, sometimes you'll get it all reversed. You'll play up a good adventure that tanks or downplay an adventure that turns into one of the best adventures of all time. It happens; beware of expectations. Still you need to try to manage expectations.

3. End the Misery. If your adventure is boring the player or is just a disaster then end it. "Good news, the constables have solved the mystery and arrested the murderer!" Yes, that's anticlimactic but if an adventure has failed don't drag it out. Of course, you should first make a good-faith effort to try to save a bad adventure - add in some combat, change up the situation - but there is no shame in ending the misery of a bad adventure. Once again, time is valuable so don't waste it.

4. Cherish the Good. If you come up with a great idea for an adventure then take some time to develop it. With a duet you are likely churning out adventures but when a good idea comes either take some time off to develop it or run some other adventure while you take the time to flush your great out. Once again it's like television. Shows know when they get a really good script and they'll put more energy into that episode than other ones. It should be the same with your campaign; try to make every adventure work, but really try to make the good ideas work. Trust me, if you can deliver a really good adventure every four or five sessions, you will be considered brilliant by your player.

5. Go Back to Formula. In most duet campaigns there is a type of adventure that really works for that campaign. It's the sort of adventure that the player enjoys and fits the setting. A good duet campaign encompasses a wide range of adventures but there is always a default. So in a D&D campaign, it's the sacking of a dungeon. For a Star Wars campaign, it's battling the Empire. When you have a bad adventure, it's more often than not due to a few things. First, the adventure was sloppily designed or executed. In other words, you got lazy. Second, you might have been bold and tried something new. This is good, really good, and don't take the failure too seriously but you do need to get things back on track. Third, the player was just in a funk. Yes, sometimes good adventures are ruined by the player. This happens and it's best to just ignore it and try again. Of course, if the player scuttles a few sessions due to apathy or difficulty then there's a serious problem that warrants discussion and probably also a hiatus. However, when things go awry it is often a very good idea to go back to basics, which means that formula adventure and just aiming for solid fun. Getting a campaign back on track is tricky. Honestly, going back to formula might not work, especially if the formula has been used in most adventures. In that case you'd need to do the reverse, run a very different sort of adventure. Bad adventures are very dangerous to campaigns, but things can be salvaged; though it's just better to avoid bad adventures. That though is wishful thinking.

Real World Considerations

Adventures and sessions are limited in large part by real world considerations. For example, my wife and I primarily roleplay during the evenings after the kids are off to bed. That means we start at 8 and usually go no later than 9:30, mainly due to fatigue from work, parenting, and all those other real world considerations. 90 minutes isn't a lot of time. It doesn't help that we're tired often by this point. Clearly you have to adjust your adventure design to reflect situations like this. So one thing I've been doing is trying to begin adventures with combat. I might need to move the plot forward from the last adventure or simply use a cold opening that involves some appropriate action. The reason for this is that combat requires a little more mental energy than roleplaying. It's best to do this earlier because if we get to combat later then fatigue will be a problem. You simply need to adjust. Sometimes one of us might be too tired to game so we'll just watch a movie. You need to be able to communicate honestly. We've found it's better to just put roleplaying off a day or two then to try to make a brave effort to soldier on while tired or irritable.

Real world considerations are perhaps the most definitive issue in the success or failure of a campaign. It's something that's not discussed as much as it should be. If you only have 90 minutes, you have to lower expectations of what you can get through. That's not a problem if you can game several times a week, but if this is all you can do in a month due to work and other demands on your time then you're in a sorry place, but that's the place you're in. So when you approach adventures you need to keep all this in mind. If your player is really getting hammered with bad news in the real world, then you might want to consider making your adventures a little lighter in tone and substance. If you don't have much time to design adventures then go green, maybe even use a module (though I actually think modules are more work for narrators than designing their own adventures). If your player is about to enter a very busy time at work, then now might not be the time to go though the Mega Dungeon of Doom or start the Incredibly Complex Machination of the Evil Duke adventures.

So here are some things to ask yourself before designing or running adventures:

1. Can We Finish This? It takes a patient player/narrator team to run through a very complex and detailed adventure. Let's say you want to run the Mega Dungeon or Doom and figure you'd need 100 hours to get through it. However, you can only game 2 hours a week. Do you really want to spend a year on this? If the answer is yes then have at it, but otherwise reconsider. It's the same with epic quests. So you need to recover the 12 Lost Artifacts to Stop the 7 Ancient Evils from threatening the 3 Worlds of Destiny. Great campaign…if you're willing to commit the rest of your life to finishing it. Maybe instead you just make it 3 artifacts to destroy 1 ancient evil threatening 1 world. This you might be able to finish in a lifetime if you have a particularly busy life.

2. Am I In The Mood? Don't run an adventure if you aren't in the mood or if your player isn't in the mood. Don't take it as an insult if a player doesn't want to game; it's alright and it's not about you. It's not the end of the world and it's just better to wait till everyone is in the proper mood. This can become an issue when the campaign had moved into a particularly gritty period and the player might not have the energy to deal with that, especially if the real world is proving gritty enough. Roleplaying is escapism. That's why we love it so much; it's our chance to get away from the limitations and constraints of the world. You need as narrator to be cognizant of your player's mood and limits.

3. Acknowledge the Real World Related to all this is that the real world will impact your campaigns. 9/11 for example did influence campaigns. It struck a little close to home for some people; narrators had to adjust their campaigns for a few months. Election years mean narrators might need to avoid issues that spark political debates out-of-character. I know, I know - some narrators believe it is their duty to make their players think, educate them about issues, and so on. I don't. Don't make your players uncomfortable to just make a point. Yes, moral issues are great in roleplaying, in fact I prefer moral issues over tactical ones, but that's about making players grapple with decisions not making judgments.

4. Everyone Has Limits This is important. Don't design an adventure that your player will either not enjoy or can't handle. Players have limits. Some are cleverer than others, some are more determined, but at the end of the day with a duet - you have the player you have. You should challenge the player, you should push the player a little, but don't require them to have to do things they are really incapable of doing. The reverse of this is that as a narrator you have limits too and while you should try to remove those limits they are still there. Ask yourself: what can't I do? For instance, if plotting out a complicated mystery is beyond your abilities, then maybe you should avoid trying to design your own original mysteries. This doesn't mean you don't try from time to time to push yourself but don't set you or your player up for failure. I have found that when you want to do something very different it's best to talk to the player about it beforehand. This can actually be a lot of fun as a one-off adventure where you do something really different, but everyone has to be on board.

Hopefully, this article has gotten you thinking about some of the things that need to be in your mind before you even start to design an adventure. It's all this sort of stuff that makes adventure design an art not a science. With a group, you can be somewhat formulaic with how you approach adventures and enjoy great success, but with duets it can be a lot trickier to hit the specific mark that is your player. That's not to say you still don't follow the structure and narrative formulas, just that you have to factor in a lot of considerations that you don't with a group. The social dynamic in groups really gives the narrator a lot of latitude that isn't always there with duets. I know I sometimes make it sound like players are really difficult with narrators in duets. It's not that at all. It's just that you need to be cognizant of more factors to get the most out of the duet roleplaying experience.