This column is, of course, a continuation of my last two columns, Seven Paths to Systemless Roleplay and Seven Paths to Systemless Freeform Roleplay, Player’s Edition. This month’s column addresses how to create adventures that will work for this particular type of game.

In the discussion of last column, Brainstrain asked why you’d even want to run this type of game, as opposed to just running a mechanics-lite game such as Risus. The reason is that the experience is different, in a way that’s hard to describe unless you’ve played both. And part of it is that running freeform is only a part of creating this particular type of gaming experience: having everybody “on board” with the Seven Paths and the action movie experience is every bit as important as the lack of dice. As I mentioned before, there are other ways of playing freeform, but I’m not really qualified to write about them. “Seven Paths” style, however, creates a fast-moving, potentially intense one-shot that can serve as a palate cleanser between long-running campaigns or a memorable “fill-in” for days when you don’t have enough of your group together to play your regularly scheduled game.

The Main Thing: The main thing to remember here is that you’re essentially creating an action movie in which the PC’s are the stars. Keep that in mind, and you’ll be well on your way.

The Seven Paths

Path One: Fine but Few

It’s important to get your group right, and to handle group interactions correctly. You might want to watch The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for inspiration, as they’re all multiple hero group-style action movies (which versions? Honestly, whichever versions you and your players most enjoy. Roleplaying is, obviously, a subjective experience. Personally, I’m partial to Errol Flynn and the recent CGI TMNT). X-Men and the first Mortal Kombat film weren’t bad, either.

Your job when creating the adventure is to make sure it is one that fits well with a group of roughly equal player characters (things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Lord of the Rings don’t work so well here, because of the power differences between the main characters). Be sure to create opportunities for each PC to have awesome moments. When creating your villains, think of how they’ll relate to your PCs. It may be wise to have several sub-villains who are rough equals to the PCs, and whose abilities mirror, or at least interact with, those of the PCs.

Path Two: The Heart of the Story

It goes without saying that the story has to be about the player characters. I’m saying it anyway, because it is so important: NEVER have an NPC accomplish something if a PC can. This is good advice for any type of campaign, but abso-frakking-lutely vital here. In a freeform game, having the players sitting around listening to NPC-NPC conversations or worse, watching NPCs solve the major problems/accomplish the objectives/beat the villains of the game, is an even bigger violation of trust than it is in a standard game. I know I’m preaching, but this needs to be said again and again and again until every GM in every RPG in the world hears and understands.

Okay, off my soapbox and back on my meds…

On a related note, it’s a good idea to kill off NPC allies and mentors, especially mentors with powers, as soon as the players have learned what they need to know. This puts the focus more on the PCs and removes NPC “clutter” from the game. It also helps set the mood, because it shows that “the good guys don’t always make it.” That said, the players should still have plenty of options and power in the situation, so don’t make the death 100% assured. If the PCs stop the NPC deaths, good for them. But you still need to find a way to remove NPC influence from the game as much as possible.

Powerful NPCs aren’t really assets in these types of games, and if they stick around, they can easily step on the PCs’ moments. Would Luke Skywalker have been the big hero of Star Wars: A New Hope if Obi-Wan had stuck around in more than spirit? Seriously, a plucky kid with a gift for the Force or a full-fledged Jedi Knight? Luke would have surely faded by comparison.

That said, don’t kill NPCs just to angst things up or mess with your players. This is action movie style, not psychodrama, and the players should be experiencing the basic action movie thrill ride – adrenaline, danger, and triumph – not grief, stress, and depression. That’s a different game. Call of Cthulhu is in the dice-using section.

Path Three: Every One a Special Snowflake

I know, I know, the GM doesn’t typically write the characters into the adventure, but this isn’t a typical roleplaying situation. It is perfectly acceptable, and frankly, a good idea, to create premade PCs for your game, to help keep the players on the right track. This is doubly helpful if you end up pulling the game out unexpectedly, such as when half your gaming group fails to show on game night. In that case, the faster you can get going, the better off you are. However, the characters you create need to be ones that players will want to play, and need to have enough “wiggle room” in their writeups that players can make them their own. Here is an example of a premade PC from “Five Swords Against the Darkness,” a game I ran with my college gaming group when we had too few players to run our regular game.

Earth: Jack Duggan - A big man, maybe a former soldier, now a bouncer. He’s really solid, the kind of guy who puts up with a lot, but doesn’t budge. He’s a brawler, the kind of role they might get a pro wrestler to play in a movie. His style is power, but with skill – he knows how to take people off the ground so they can’t get the traction to resist him and how to best apply his strength.

Notice that I left a great deal of his history, personality, and even details like his appearance and race completely open. I had originally thought of him as an African-American former drill seargent from the inner city, but I didn’t hardwire that into his description, and I’m glad I didn’t: the player pictured him as a massive wall of a man, proud of his Scottish heritage, who dreamed of opening his own restaurant, which would serve a mix of Southern and Scottish foods. You should also take care that each of the major villains are as colorful as the player characters. They should be descriptively striking (visually striking in movie terms, but in an RPG, anything you can describe in a striking way, such as a sound or smell, works), memorable, and basically follow the same guidelines as player characters (see Seven Paths to Systemless Freeform Roleplay, Player’s Edition.).

Mooks are a good way to make the players feel confident in their PCs’ abilities, just as they are in traditional RPGs. They don’t need to be memorable, and, in my opinion, are actually more effective when they are faceless, interchangable, and replacable.

Path Four: The Path of Partial Success The Mentor

Before you create the mentor, it’s important to go back and reread Path Two: The Heart of the Story.

Part of the GM’s job is to keep the game moving along quickly (see Path Six), and one extremely useful tool, at least toward the beginning of the adventure, is to have a mentor who will help push the PCs in the right direction and can help guide them through their transition into superhumans (See Path Four).

Of course, this mentor should never overshadow the PCs. Nobody should ever ask “why doesn’t this guy just take out the bad guys if he knows so much?” Perhaps, like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, the mentor is too old and frail to win out. Perhaps the PCs have powers, but the mentor has none, just wisdom and knowledge. Maybe some twist of fate or destiny prevents it; Lancelot, for all his skill and glory, could not pursue the Grail because of his adultery with Guenevere, but Galahad, Percival, and Bors could, though none were as mighty as he. The reason is less important than the fact: it must be clear that the mentor has no chance of solving the problem or defeating the villains, and that only the PCs can do it.

Actually, speaking of movies, Master Splinter from TMNT is a perfect example. He’s certainly a mentor, and he has skills, but he’s just too old to be running around fighting monsters and ninja.

Path Five: It’s Just a Flesh Wound Power UP!

Typically the PCs will have powers of some sort, whether genre-convention wire-fu, cybernetics, vampire/anti-vampire magic, or whatever. Often it is in-genre (and fun) for the PCs to begin as ordinary people and rapidly increase in power/discover their powers over the course of the game (which, if I haven’t beaten you over the head with it enough yet, should approximate the scope of an action movie).

The best way to handle this is to have the increase occur incrementally, with powers increasing between major “encounters” (combats, chases, etc – action scenes), with new powers appearing on a somewhat as-needed basis during the action scenes, and through “training montages” involving the PCs and their mentor.

It’s important to set up a natural progression of powers, because a sudden, but completely logical power increase that occurs at a pivotal moment in an action scene (especially one that is spurred on by the player “pushing” the PC’s limits) can potentially lead to a Crowning Moment of Awesome. But if it’s handled poorly or isn’t properly foreshadowed, it can just feel fake, like a cop-out.

Path Six: Alacrity! Celerity! Rapidity!

In order to keep the speed up, you need to make sure that A) you have the adventure ready to move quickly to the next step or phase and B) the players understand where things are going, so they can have their characters react accordingly. You should also try to be flexible, and have a few “options” available, things that can go a couple of different ways and still work, so that you won’t be caught totally flat-footed when the players do something that you didn’t anticipate.

Path Seven: “The Rule of Cool,” and Then Some

I know I’ve covered this one before, but it’s important to create opportunities for the PCs to look cool. It’s also good to have the villains (at least the “named” ones) have a few “awesome” moments as well, just so the players will have a sense that they’re up against worthy opponents.

This is something of an odd situation, in that the players have to wear several hats: they are the audience, and thus need to be “shown” things about the PCs and named villains – mainly, that the villains are villainous and the relative power levels of each. But, of course, the players are also “playing” the stars of the show . . . and helping to write it. This isn’t unique to these types of freeform games, but the compressed time, fast pace, and lack of dice or objective mechanics brings this situation into clearer view. The GM will have to think about how to best fit these factors into the adventure, and run with them during the course of the game.

Closing Thoughts

Next month, my column will include an annotated writeup of “Five Swords Against the Darkness,” a freeform game I ran with my college gaming group. It was quite successful, and everyone had quite a lot of fun. The funny thing is, I’d written it some time before, without a specific gaming group in mind, but I had my laptop with me, and could show everyone the writeup, we played it. I’ll annotate the original writeup to include what happened in the course of the game, as best as I can remember it.