One Definition for Scenario Structures
“Structure” is one of many terms that sees some competing, but also somewhat overlapping usage as a technical term in discussing RPG theory and advice on running the game. In this post, I invite you to sit back and allow me to engage in the well-reputed and famously effective practice of trying to resolve a problem of competing definitions with the creation of yet another competing definition.
I’m interested in doing this because there’s plenty more I want to talk about regarding a specific understanding of ttrpg structures, but those conversations will flow better if we put in this work to be somewhere near the same page. I will be defining the term “structure” here, then, specifically as it relates to creating a gameable model of a complex situation that the players must navigate through, with persistent and compounding consequences of their actions to this specific circumstance. So I’m talking more about “game structure”, as opposed to “narrative structure”, though perhaps more specifically about “scenario structure”, very much in the vein that the Alexandrian uses the term.
My Formal Definition
I would hazard to define scenario structures as a framework of techniques, tools and procedures, tied to some generic set of fictional circumstances, that tells:
- the GM what kind of information should to be prepared and/or conveyed to the players;
- the players what kind and scale of action is adequate to attempt for this set of fictional circumstances, and;
- the GM what set of informations, factors or mechanics they can employ to adjudicate, progress and resolve the proposed player actions.
This is a bit of a long definition, but the important part is that, for a set of fictional circumstances, structures guide these three points of the conversation: how the GM frames a broad fictional situation in smaller, actionable segments; what the players say to express their characters intents and actions in these segments; what the GM does to resolve these segments and push the fictional situation forward as a result of the (compounding) player choices.
If you’re conversant in TTRPG blog lingo, we might perhaps simply say that a scenario structure is a framework of techniques designed to help apply the ICI doctrine to a complex fictional situation – i.e. a collection of tools and techniques that helps direct play in such a way that it provides players with choices that are both informed and impactful for a given fictional context.
Let’s put this definition through its paces and see how it fares against a number of different structures and how variations on similar structures hit upon these three points to different effects.
By force of tradition, we should kick things off with the dungeon-crawl, that mysterious underground from which RPGs seemingly sprang forth.
The Dungeon-Crawl
This structure is famous and ubiquitous as the “Dungeon” half of “Dungeons and Dragons”. But in essence, it is a structure for exploring a hazardous, unfamiliar and relatively constrained location. It seems to be a strong basis for RPGs because it emphasizes letting the players cooperatively experience a surprising fictional space through any action they can describe, while providing risks that introduce meaningful stakes to the proceedings.
What information should the GM convey to players in the dungeon-crawl? Simple: they should convey the information about the place the PCs find themselves in, such that they can explore it – including information about any important and unusual objects, creatures or people they may find within. Knowing that this is the information the GM must convey, a number of techniques suggest themselves as a way of ensuring the GM is prepared for the task at hand: mapping the entire place and keying the notable contents of each room is an enduring favorite, but one might apply a method for spontaneously generating rooms and their contents, or find a series of lavish illustrations to define each space, among many other options (though these more unusual options may or may not be considered a dungeon-crawl depending on who you ask). What matters most is that there exist a series of connected spaces, and that in order to explore it the players propose actions contending with the contents of the space they find their characters in.
What kind of action is adequate for these fictional circumstances? Anything that relates to the moment-to-moment effort of exploring this space. In other words, the structure usually tries to place the concerns of the players with what is immediately in front of their characters. It is a structure that says “Here’s a closed door” and asks “are you trying to push it open, break it open, listen for what is on the other side, look through the keyhole? Or are you going somewhere else?”.
Crucially, any intended action that extends beyond the environment the characters are immediately faced with will be asked to be broken down into its most tangible physical steps – such that a player saying “I want to find my way down to the next level” will be answered with some variation of “Ok, but how are going about doing that, exactly?”. The limit isn’t so much on how much time the action takes up, but rather on whether it can be executed given the defined space and the information the player is established as having right then. “I want to dig a hole through this wall with my pickaxe” proposes an action that will occupy a lot of time, but that needn’t be broken up into repeating statements of “I want to swing my pickaxe at the wall”.
What factors and mechanics should the GM take into consideration in adjudicating the results of the players intended actions? A general sense of narrating the obvious, trivial and unchallenged results of the players proposed actions is an important but often merely implicit first aspect, validating the ways in which the PCs are changing or moving through the space. It is also not unusual for the prep to include information on specific things that happen if the players interact with it in a particular way: “If you pull this lever in area A, this door in area B opens”.
But a myriad other considerations and points of focus may be added. Perhaps a system for determining whether some other creature wandering the dungeon has come to where the PCs are? Or one for checking what resources the PCs are consuming as they explore the space? Maybe you’ve furnished the place with enough traps that you’re just waiting for the players to inadvertently poke around with the wrong thing? Specifics vary, but the heart of the matter is to have the environment and its denizens respond to the PCs rummaging around in it.
Cool. Let’s analyze initiative-based combat structures next.
Initiative-based Combat
This structure is geared towards adjudicating violent confrontations in fine detail, in blow-by-blow granularity or close to it. It is not the only possible solution for dealing with such situations, but it is traditional and prevalent in the hobby.
What information should the GM convey to the players? Well, the immediate environment the PCs are in is again important, but not so much in its minute details. The space will now be evaluated more in its tactical considerations, in terms of how much space it offers for the participants of the combat to maneuver and position themselves, and what major features may present an advantage or a hazard. A map with a grid to facilitate visualizing distances is common practice for this purpose – a map with different needs from the dungeon map. Unlike the dungeon-crawl, though, this information is much more secondary for this structure; at the extreme limit, the physical space could be completely abstracted away, playing out like classic veideo-game JRPG battle systems, where the environment is just a flavorful backdrop that doesn’t meaningfully interfere with the fight.
The central piece of information the GM should have for this structure, then, is almost always about who is fighting the PCs, particularly in what they can do to harm the PCs and to avoid harm to themselves (asking why the creatures are fighting the PCs is, often, surprisingly irrelevant, but for some games it would be crucial). Complex mechanical information that describes each participants’ combat prowess is a classic tool for conveying and adjudicating this, imported from our wargaming ancestors.
What kind of action should the players attempt in these circumstances? It is very common for systems to have a very exhaustive set of mechanics to cover this aspect of the game, tying back to the mechanical information on combat prowess, such that most actions attempted in the framework of combat are readily translated into resolution mechanics. This seems to endure because it is a form of mediating the conflicting desires of the players’ characters and their opposition in such a way that one doesn’t immediately trump the other, consequently injecting more uncertainty, risk and tension to the actions players propose.
Fundamentally, though, this structure is very time-bound, and gives each player a turn that encompasses a specific interval of time with which to act – one that usually covers no more than a few seconds. Statements of intent, then, can mostly only be made for things that can fit into that time frame, even if they don't fit or aren't limited to a set of mechanical rules. Unlike the dungeon-crawl, if a proposed action covers a larger extension of time, it likely will need to be broken down into repeating statements reaffirming the intent to keep committing to it round after round – to say nothing of the fact that there are likely other creatures around trying to disrupt that action. It is a structure that asks “What are you doing right now to deal with your opponents?”, and that will keep asking that question until the violent engagement is over.
How should the GM adjudicate the results of the players’ stated actions? Again, the system mechanics will often supply a large number of variables that function as a proxy for the evolving combat. More significantly, the information the GM prepared on what the opposition is capable of is again employed here, since the NPCs will themselves be given a constrained turn in which they can take their own actions. Thus, the initiative round naturally encodes moments where the GM, taking responsibility for the opposition’s choices, gets to react to all that the players have done so far.
One more example!
Justin Alexander’s Party Structure
Let’s take a look at the Alexandrian’s structure for dealing with big social events.
What information should the GM prepare for the players? Justin asks for a location, but only as a very sketched out series of broad, interconnected spaces – the interactable objects in them are generally not worthy of mention in the prep. He also asks for a list of notable NPCs attending the function, a list of conversation topics that NPCs will likely be discussing, and a timeline of events that are expected to happen, to mark the passage of time. Note that the information is now much more focused on social interactions as opposed to physical exploration or object interactions. Mixing and matching the NPCs, conversation topics and locations serves as a quick way of establishing the smaller scenes that will make up the scenario.
What scale of action can players propose for their characters? In this structure, there isn’t as much of a need for an immediatist, step by step description of how they go about every interaction. It is fine for players to express an intent that will cover a much longer period of fictional time – whereas trying to cover every move round-by-round, a few seconds at a time, in the manner of initiative-based combat, would likely be very tedious. Players can, of course, hone in on specific moments for some purposes: maybe for a serious conversation with a significant NPC it would be right to establish the scene in detail and play out the approach in a moment-to-moment fashion, role-playing every word said or close to it. But one could just as easily take a more zoomed out approach for certain actions: “I want to find the the way down to the lower levels” should be a perfectly valid statement of intent here, which doesn’t require describing the moment-to-moment “how” of it in the same way that it does in the dungeon-crawl.
And how does the GM adjudicate the result of the players actions? Again, as with the dungeon-crawl, a lot of latitude is given to just follow the logical consequences of the PCs actions. The prep Justin suggests is also clearly intended to be a jumping off point to respond to the players as the scenario progresses: fleshing out the NPCs should serve to inform what their reactions to the PCs’ antics would be; the timeline of party events offers an ordered list of new developments to throw the players’ way whenever needed. The framework of conversation topics could easily respond to player input, also: if a PC makes some sort of a scene during the event, a GM could easily slot that as a new topic of conversation the NPCs might be discussing.
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Hopefully these examples show how my definition applies to structures. Before I end this post, let me just make a few final observations.
Observation 1: defining the components of a structure
So, one of the things we establish with this definition is that structures are a collection of techniques, tools and procedures. Each of these three components of a structure could probably get its own full-blown definition, but for now let’s give some examples to make clear what I mean by each one of these components; with the understanding, also, that I don’t intend to suggest that there is or should be a formal definition of these words as applied to RPG theory in these terms. Do not expect me to stick to these definitions in the future.
By tools I mean things like random tables, resolution mechanics, NPC templates, and so forth. Formats for organizing or encoding information and/or probabilities that can be leveraged for our games.
By techniques I mean different ways of leveraging the available tools or lack thereof. If a random table is a tool for creating random encounters, rolling on it during the session and pre-rolling on it and generating the random encounters in advance are two different techniques you can employ with it. Adjudicating actions based on the GMs “common-sense” is likewise a technique.
By procedures I (and others) mean an order of operations that guide players through a certain sequence of commands, which may include tools and techniques. Rolling for initiative, then tabulating the results, then following that order in sequence for the duration of an encounter – that is a procedure.
Observation 2: abstracting toward useful categories
Calling a scenario structure a framework of techniques, tools and procedures seems to imply that each combination of techniques, tools and procedures defines a different structure. In reality, though, things we normally identify as scenario structures have a lot of variation within them: there are two very distinct schools of handling hexcrawls, for instance, and initiative-based combat can take any number of forms.
So scenario structures – really all game structures – are an abstraction. We identify the similarities between a number of distinct frameworks of techniques, tools and procedures that apply to some set of fictional circumstances, and call those by the same name, identifying a structure, in generic terms. If we were to really pry each individual set of scenario structures apart by keeping track of every single component they do or don’t employ, and when, and how, we might find that no two GMs ever really use the same structure. Of course, at that point, we have gone past the point of where the concept of game structures is useful. So we should indeed do what we humans do best and sort structures into contextual categories we can meaningfully discuss.
For instance: we recognize that creating impromptu encounters in a dungeon-crawl through a series of encounter tables, an overloaded encounter die or an adversary roster does lead to different experiences at the table, so we can discuss the merits of each as different structures, but we also recognize that the basic conversational pattern of the “dungeon-crawl” remains the same no matter which of those techniques we do or don’t use to create impromptu encounters, so we can label them all together and move on from there whenever we want to talk about the dungeon-crawl structure in general. There are infinite variations on the dungeon-crawl scenario structure, and at times we may wish to discuss them as different structures, and sometimes we’ll lump them all together to differentiate them from the hexcrawls - and we might lump all the “-crawls” together to differentiate them from the investigation structures too.
Observation 3: the ties between structures and scenarios
Structures are usually tied to scenarios, but scenarios aren’t tied to structures. Any number of structures might be applied to any particular situation in a game’s fiction, though not all are applicable for every situation. There is no one right structure to use at any given moment – but there are certainly wrong structures to apply to some situations if a GM is looking to achieve a certain effect.
Any individual fictional situation is not tied to any specific structure, but specific structures are usually tied to a specific type of fictional situation (that’s the scenario in scenario structure, after all) – even if that type can be quite broad, in practice (like initiative-based combat being used to cover all sorts of violent disputes turn by turn, from fistfights to shoot-outs). This is a great property of structures, because it means they can be flexibly employed to a whole host of similar situations, providing enough scaffolding to make a solid play space that accrues consequences of individual actions to an ongoing challenge, but still allowing the specifics of each situation to come to the fore.
However broadly or narrowly we define scenario structure, the point of them is that we create and adapt them to serve different needs that arise as we try to simulate and gamify all manner of fictional situations. People can (and do) come up with new structures for their games all the time. Nick Whelan came up with a new scenario structure when he proposed Flux Space to better handle the shortcomings he saw in exploring mazes through classic dungeon-crawling. Identifying the concept of a scenario structure, Justin Alexander challenged himself and his readers to come up with more structures. Many games create new structures tied to their mechanics or themes, such as the score structure in Blades in the Dark. The point is that we sometimes find that the collections of tools, techniques and procedures we have at our disposal don’t adequately cover a fictional situation in the way we would like, and at that point we may decide to find new ways of covering them.
This is why scenario structures are so exciting as a concept for running RPGs for me: they provide a gameable mental model to help us keep track of the fiction. Marcia B. puts it more succinctly:
Structure makes things more interesting because it contextualizes our decision-making. It makes playing more fun. [Wizards HATE Her! How to Play D&D for Free, Part 1: Structures & Routines]
And, significantly, calling attention to these structures puts into focus how hard it can be to make the game function when you don’t have a solid structure for the scenario you’re running. Which prompts the search for new structures we can use to broaden the scope of our games. (Alternatively, it can also highlight which scenarios we are capable of dealing with in exciting ways without recourse to structures.)
Observation 4: structures and the GM role
Last comment to finish out these first remarks on what game structures are. It is obvious that this formulation leans heavily on a traditional GM/player divide, which doesn’t exist for all RPGs. But I also believe that the inner workings of structures – guiding players so they are on the same page about how the fiction is being framed in the conversation and what statements are relevant to make about it at any given moment – is not limited to RPGs with a GM/player divide.
GMless games (or a ground table game) might have less of a need for structures, since they tend to put the process of negotiating the fiction in the center stage of the conversation, but I expect they have structures of some kind of their own. Sometimes they will be clearly laid out in the game text, as is the case with games like Microscope, but it is likely that individual groups also develop their own unspoken structures. I can’t speak on this with any authority, though, as my experience with GMless games is limited.
Here’s the real question, though: is the concept of game structures useful for GMless games, or for games with different GM/player divides? If it is, then maybe the first step in making this definition more useful might be simply to understand that whenever we’re talking about the “GM” in the definition, that applies to either the players who are most actively donning the “GM mantle” at the time, or to the portion of the players whose overall decision-making is most informed by a GM-like mindset. But again, I’m spitballing here – the GMless/ GMfull game crowd will decide whether this concept does anything for them or not. Same goes for Solo games, and LARPs, and so on.
Summing Up
The understanding of scenario structures I’m most interested in discussing is the one where they are collections of tools, procedures and techniques, related to different kinds of fictional situations, that are used to help GMs prepare and organize information to dole out to the players, which in turn creates decision points in which they must make choices, and which offer forms to track the impact these choices have on the ongoing fiction.
We group these bundles of tools, procedures and techniques together into different structure categories according to our needs, context and preferences. They’re abstract concepts which are useful for gesturing at and communicating similar practices to each other, but where two people can easily find they don’t share core assumptions when examining them in detail.
As a GM practice, they’re also at their most useful when they apply specifically enough to a particular kind of situation where it highlights the particular factors that impact this situation the most, but are not so specific as to require coming up with a new structure for every new complex scenario the GM wants to tackle. Knowing about them, ideally, is a way of expanding our personal library of options when designing and running scenarios (big or small) and encounters in our games.