Now that we’ve covered the very basics of the Story First Approach and the 3-Act Structure, it’s time to start getting hands-on. We’re going to apply the techniques from those lessons. We’re going to write a session of play, starting with the story, and using the 3-act framework. What’s more, we’ll be doing it step-by-step. By the end of the lesson, you’ll have a session of play ready to take to your table next week.
Before we knuckle down, though, we need to define what we mean by “session” and talk about its anatomy. Play times vary from table to table (and system to system), so I’ll set down some basics first. In this introductory instruction, a “session” will be about three hours of playtime. Because of its ubiquity (and my own expertise with it), the assumed system is Dungeons and Dragons 5e. This is about average across my weekly tables.
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The anatomy of a session is made of encounters. The “encounter” is our atomic unit for building sessions, and there are many different kinds of them. Traditionally, people infer combat from the word encounter, but that is no longer the case in the modern era of RPGs. Nowadays, when we say encounter, we mean killing a few goblins, mincing through a dinner party, and everything in between. In a pragmatic way, an encounter is any situation in which the GM asks the players, “what do you do?”
So, here’s what we know: We’re going to write a three hour session. That session is going to be made up of encounters. We want to use our fresh techniques to write something fun and interesting.
Let’s get to it.
What story are we going to tell?
If you haven’t guessed by now, you may need to review the first couple lessons again, but we’re going to decide what story we’re telling, first. Remember, this needs to be a story, which means we’re going to explore some sort of change. Deciding you’d like to run a session in a strictly hierarchical city of giants is all well and good, but that’s not a story. That’s a setting.
Instead, we need a change that we will explore. In the strictly hierarchical city of giants, one hill giant wants to buck authority and gain access to a magical orb of knowledge, thereby elevating her beyond her lowly station. That’s the change we’re going to explore; a low-ranked person seeks a way to gain rank in society, and either succeeds or fails.
This is just an example I’ll be using throughout this piece, though. Really, it can be any story at all, provided there’s a change to explore. If you’re having trouble nailing down a story you’d like to tell, we recommend looking to the 36 Dramatic Situations for inspiration. Nearly every story ever told fits into one of those categories, and it really helps. As an aside, Chief and I consult this list at least once for every project we write.
Now that we have our plot, we need to decide what our climax will be. We have our protagonist, the hill giant, who is trying to gain this magical artifact. Gaining that artifact can be the climactic encounter, as it is the final step on the way to the story’s resolution. Remember, the climax isn’t the end. We’re going to have one more encounter after the climax which explores how life is different for our protagonist because of the result of the climax. To ensure the proper amount of drama, let’s make that climax a big fight with a tough enemy who is guarding the artifact. We’ll get to who they are and why they’re guarding it a bit later.
Okay, that sums up act three, so now let’s get act one set up. What’s vitally important here is that we establish exactly as much of the setting as we need, and no more. Who are our important characters? So far, it’s just the one hill giant, so we’ll name her Lucinda. Lucinda lives in the city of Grinth where a rigid caste system exists. Because she is a hill giant, she exists in the very bottom caste, and is relegated to a life of servitude and menial labor, just like her family before her. However, she wants more, and she knows how to get it: the Orb of Illumination. The Orb is a powerful magical artifact said to increase the intelligence and knowledge of any that possess it. By gaining that power, she can improve herself and become worthy of a higher caste.
Now that we have a setup, we’ll pin the introduction of our player characters into the first encounter (which we’ll build below). That puts act one in the “planned” bin, so we need to iron out the broad strokes of act two. Fortunately, when we’re building a single session of play, much of act two is determined by the individual encounters. We don’t have a lot of time for deep plot when we need to go from introduction to resolution in just three hours. So, when we plan for act two, we can simply say “a few encounters get the players to the climax” and call that done. We’ll get grittier on the details in the next step.
We have a change we want to see played out, a climax which marks it finally happening, a beginning setup that makes the change meaningful, and we know that the players are going to do some stuff along the way to make it happen. And that’s that: the story for our adventure is planned. Now it’s time to hit those story beats on the head.
Encounters make the story happen.
Encounters are the base unit we’re going to use to construct our session. As I said above, the types of encounters are pretty varied, which means we have a lot to play around with in order to get the action we need. The problem with this, though, is that they can also vary widely on how long they take. We’re shooting for a three hour adventure, so how many encounters is that?
There’s no right answer here, but these are the guidelines I use when building a session. A long encounter will take about an hour, and a short encounter will take about half an hour. These are time frames I have learned from playing and running D&D for years. I learned them through observation, and now apply them as a rule.
In practice, an hour is about the maximum amount of time a table of players can give their attention to a single encounter. When you pass that hour mark, players drift and the encounter becomes a slog. Conversely, half an hour is about the minimum amount of time for an encounter to feel important and be memorable. Frankly, if your encounter is less than half an hour, it really should be combined with another.
For our three hour session, let’s plan two long encounters and two short ones. That’s four encounters, which may seem a little light. However, these are players at a table, not professional actors. They will get sidetracked by jokes, phone calls, bathroom breaks, etc. Fitting these four encounters into a single three-hour session might even be a squeeze. It’s okay, we’ll plan for that.
Remember, the story comes first, and this is true when you’re planning your encounters, too. The most critical part of an encounter is not the action that happens in it, but the important takeaways which develop the story. These are what we need to have established. When you know what the takeaways are for an encounter, you can adjust the session at the table to account for the unexpected or to accommodate a shifting schedule. When sessions run too long, we need to cut content to make sure we get to the end of the story.
Now, we need to make sure we have the important takeaways for each encounter planned as we jot them down. The characters are starting outside a small town with Lucinda. The story ends with Lucinda getting the orb. What story beats will get us from one to the other? Well, we know right at the start that the party needs to get to Grinth, so there’s one encounter. We also know that the orb is clearly important in Grinth, and is probably well protected. Lucinda’s going to need some help from people who actually live there, such as her family. Let’s make convincing her family to help a second encounter.
Here’s our framework:
- Act I
- Short Encounter – Introducing Lucinda
- Act II
- Long Encounter – Getting into Grinth
- Short Encounter – Convincing Lucinda’s Family
- Act III
- Long Encounter – Getting the Orb
- Epilogue
Notice that I’ve filled in exactly which story beats we need to hit in each encounter. This information didn’t come out of nowhere, this is a direct result of getting from our setup to our resolution. Let’s step through them, briefly.
First, we introduce the players to Lucinda. This is the call to action for the player characters to grab a hold of the hook of her story. A local town (of no real consequence, so its details are vague and unimportant) hires the heroes to rid them of a hill giant who has been eating their cows. However, when the players confront the hill giant, she is sad and despondent, and seems uninterested in fighting. After a short fight, Lucinda sits down and gives up, encouraging the players to ask her what’s wrong. She bawls, giving her sob story about her miserable life. She knows of a way to fix it, though! She needs to get that orb. The adventure is on!
Now it’s act two, and we need to setup for the climax. First, we need to get all of the characters (including the players) into Grinth. This is a sneaky-exploration encounter that may involve a quick fight if things go poorly. Beyond getting the characters into the city, this encounter serves another purpose: making the stakes clear. This encounter informs everyone that Grinth is dangerous for the players and for upstart hill giants. Lucinda is worried about sneaking the characters in past the guards. But she’s not very bright (hence needing the orb), and well out of her comfort zone, so she fumbles her conversation with the guard. The players will need to think fast, or deal with an angry giant guard.
Now that we’re in the city, it’s easier to get around, but not without risks. The orb is tucked away inside an archive building which will have more guards than the players and Lucinda can comfortably handle. Fear not! Lucinda’s father works as a cleaner in the archive building and can probably get Lucinda and the party in. However, he’ll need convincing before he helps. Lucinda lives with her parents, a wizened grandparent, and a younger sister. So, Lucinda invites the party to dinner, Setting up an interesting social encounter. The party and Lucinda must convince her family that she deserves their help.
This is our “flexible” encounter, meaning that we can cut it if we’re pressed for time. And by now, we should know how much time is left in the session. The key takeaways from the encounter are the father’s assistance getting into the archive and the family’s approval of Lucinda’s bold plan. Both of these can be communicated with a very brief exposition by Lucinda, if necessary.
Alright, act three; the big finale. With her father’s help, the party and Lucinda manage to get into the building via an unguarded backdoor. There are several tense minutes as the characters sneak through the giant hallways following directions given by Lucinda’s father. Finally, they make it, but oh no! A pair of stone giants are consulting the orb, and are not at all pleased to see the party! An epic combat ensues as the players fight one giant while Lucinda handles the other. Depending on the level of the characters, other guards can be added to make the fight challenging.
This encounter has two possible outcomes for Lucinda: success or failure. Failure, for the purposes of our story, means her death, whether in this combat, or later as punishment for such a heinous crime. For the players, her failure doesn’t necessarily mean they die. They may choose to escape before the wroth of Grinth comes down on them. If successful, the orb grants Lucinda intelligence and knowledge. She will help the players escape the city. Moving up in the ranks will take some time, but she’s confident that she can do it. In fact, she’s already thought of three different ways! This is the epilogue of our adventure, and it is important. If you have time, the players can talk to Lucinda about her plans. Or, if you’re out of time, give a short exposition and move on.
That puts our story in the “playable” category, though there are things we can do to make sure it’s tight.
It seems thin, but that’s the whole point.
We now have a playable module that an experienced GM could take to a table and run. Yes, this is a skeleton of the content in a written and published module, but there are two reasons for that. First, we haven’t filled in any stat blocks, skill check DCs, box texts, etc. These are the very final steps which are taken before an adventure is ready for publishing. These are also what turn our “playable by an experienced GM” adventure into a publishable one that can be run by anyone.
Second, most published adventures have a lot of ancillary fluff that inflates the page count without contributing to the story in a meaningful way. In our example, we don’t need to know anything about the deep history of Grinth. We don’t need to know anything about the deep history of Lucinda and her family. What we need is the here-and-now of both situations. The background for this adventure is exactly two sentences:
“The city of Grinth is populated entirely by giants and organized in a strict caste system with hill giants at the very bottom. The hill giant Lucinda is dissatisfied with her place in the caste system and wants help getting an artifact which will allow her to break free of it.”
That’s it. That’s all we need as an introduction to the adventure for the GM. Everything the players need to know will be told to them over the course of the story while they’re playing. Extensive background lore serving no practical function hurts everything about the session. GM prep is more difficult if they have to sift chaff. Play is tiresome when lore is shoehorned into the session. It’s contrived, obvious, and wastes everyone’s time.
And here is the module that resulted from the process in this article. This adventure is written for D&D5e, and I inserted the mechanical rules in the encounters I outlined above. The whole thing is 4.5 pages (plus a title page, an appendix of statblocks, and a page of legal licensing), yet everything you need for three hours of play is right there. Take a look, try it out, and tell me how it goes!
As always, I encourage you to send your questions, comments, and hate mail to our GMW Academy mail box: academy@legendarypants.net
