Roleplaying games are like the ultimate Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story. As you design your encounters, try to take some of the most plausible outcomes into account, and think about how those outcomes might affect the story later on.

After playing on and off for a while and taking turns as both player and DM, I came to a few general guidelines:

– Follow the just-enough principle – just enough backstory to link together your encounters, just enough combat to keep the game moving, just enough downtime (shopping, what have you) to provide breaks from the action. I now try to have a minimum of two encounters planned per session and will be trying a timer to make sure no one type of gameplay goes on for more than an hour. I think one of the recent minicasts suggested doing your RP as part of an encounter, which is a fantastic idea.

– Don’t houserule unless you know what you’re doing. The 4e rules have been extensively playtested, and just about every rule is there for a reason and makes sense in the context of the other rules. We learned the hard way to stop using rules like batching monster initiative (it stacks damage too much without giving PCs a chance to react) and to stop creating custom monsters for everything (often making combat too hard and forcing me to fudge the dice). Unless we identify rule that is consistently problematic in multiple sessions, we won’t houserule it.

– Don’t mess with the world unless you know what you are doing. I wanted to make my world very points-of-light. But, the dark age became so dark that there is virtually no economy. So, magic items are relatively rare as is some every-day equipment like plate armor. This had the unfortunate side effect of removing all motivation for the PCs to acquire treasure. There’s no where to spend it.

- Front load your good ideas. You will have more. My early sessions were all trying to build to some big reveal/encounter. I kept running what I considered “linking” encounters trying to build up to my good ones – until I realized we’d been doing nothing but RP and linking encounters for several sessions. The players weren’t being given the opportunity to change the world and make real things happen. When I looked at my notebook and realized I had about 100 ideas for encounters that I was really excited about it made me wonder what I was waiting for. Now, I’ll use my current best/favorite ideas every session. If I ever run out, I can fall back on standard encounters. I’ll try to have a world-changing adventure every time. While I’ll keep my backstory in mind as we play, I’ll never plan out more than a few sessions (or rather, only plan out 3-5 places in the sandbox).

anywho just relax and let whatever occurs happen you’ll find things will work out for themselves and you yourself will be entertained on where the players will take you!

-david
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http://www.d4d6d8d10d12d20.com – A Game Blog

Great advise from all who contributed to the comments. Thanks all.

Stories are awesome, but you shouldn’t lock yourself into a story so tightly you feel you need to start over to fix your campaign. And also don’t forget to have fun or add elements outside the story.

My current campaign is turning out a lot more better than I expected. I have been a DM from way back in the day. And skipped both 2nd and 3rd editions of the game and found myself picking up fourth edition cause that is what the shop had. And I have found it ideal for story driven campaigns. The system is so easy in flow that you can easily match players’ actions and spur of the moment brainstorms in a flash. I have had a grand time creating encounters that can be resolved through reason, combat, bluff, and a myriad of other ways. Plus the system works very well for my players. We all got back into gaming thanks to playing lots of board games so the tactical aspects of the combat works very well for us. They have all bought into the role playing with great eagerness and the game world is slowly unfolding for all us. I think for every hour we spend in a fight we spend 2-3 talking to NPC’s, exploring, or other RP activities.

I started with a small town on a backwards isle and an idea of what was out there. I didn’t layer it on very thickly and kept the details dim so it could build out in a graceful organic way. There were a few things I knew about the world that they still don’t know. And these facts will slowly be revealed in the 6th and 7th gaming sessions. But, also during the first 5 sessions they have learned a lot about the forces at play in this world through separate adventures. Not all the adventures were tied into the story at all. A couple were to give them hints of what the world used to be like, or to introduce aspects that lurk just out of their reach for flavor. They know they are up to their necks with a vague divine mission but not sure where it will go beyond a vague hint.

Meanwhile, a throw away boss in the first adventure has managed to survive through his own luck, player error, and cunning to become a figure they loath. I mean these guys really hate him. And now he has his own mysterious subplot taking shape. At times the players are more obsessed with finding him then the main storyline. And this has all been made up and slowly evolved as the sessions marched on. That is something you could never plan sitting at your writing desk on day zero of creating your campaign. Some things need to be allowed to grow on their own. And I think that is a good plan overall. Too much planning or plotting and you find yourself in a painted corner down the line.

One aspect of encounter building I have really gotten into is changing the expectations. Many see an encounter as a single fight. I see it as a series of events or locations. The players much leverage their resources through a space of time. You can create arcs of action that break the mold in terms of what they are expecting. But, one thing to remember is not all encounters need be tied directly to your main story. Subplots are wonderful things and it can be a fun shock to players that the quest they were pursuing is actually a red herring or aiding an enemy they didn’t even know existed. But, also don’t be afraid to have an encounter/adventure that is just cool and random at times. Some oddity found in the back hills while they trek to another plot point. Look at TV shows that have a long plot thread. Not every episode is about the plot. Some are about the characters and others are like the monster episodes of the X-Files. Something to sprinkle a bit of flavor and fun into the mix.

There was a couple things I decided to change after the fact. But, I did through the story itself. I recently realized that the home town the players came from really had too much going for it in terms of races they could use. As the campaign has developed I decided I wanted races to be tied to certain origin points in the game. Luckily the origin of the small village was pretty unique. And I had created a smaller village of outcasts on the other side that has become the player’s home base after they got banished from their true home in a much earlier session. Needing to correct the mistake of too many races living in that town. I am weaving a plot into the main one where the down is basically doomed and will lead to a big showdown for the players to destroy the evil that is slowly rising there, but it will be too late and the village they know will die in the process. And this was all done by tying together separate elements and events and adding some hints in the last session. So it is never too late to make drastic changes if you can look at your world and player events that have taken place and use that to make it seem like you had it planned all along. And yeah, it will all be the accidental villain’s fault. Now they will really hate that guy and the great thing is that the players made him up for the most part.

I’ve found myself wanting to think bigger and bigger. I started with some ideas for the next adventure and how the party might discover it (giving a couple of different options). Since I was inspired, I started thinking about a bigger picture beyond that… and that’s where I am right now. After reading your post, I think I’m better off stopping here. I know roughly what the next adventure is going to be like (with a couple of different directions it could go), and that’s probably enough for now. I might drop a few little foreshadowing hints here and there that point toward bigger things down the line, but I’ll try to keep them light and offhand rather than big and ominous – because the campaign might go in unanticipated directions!

Have a heroic tier plot arc, with its own villain. Then have a paragon tier motif or theme (but not a plot arc), and some way to link the two. Then have an epic tier motif or theme, with a way to link it to both.

If you get to level 7 or 8 and everyone is still jazzed with the campaign, then that’s the signal for you to start considering dropping hints and clues as to what will be going on in later tiers.

For example, in a defunct (because I moved away) 3.5 campaign, levels 1 to 7 were strongly focused on a massive goblinoid invasion with sprinklings of fiendish cultists.

At level 8, the PCs were going to start encountering half-dragon goblinoids and learn that dragons were the masterminds behind the invasion.

At even later levels, the PCs would have learned that the tainted dragons were allied with the fiends in trying to raise one of their own to godhood, and that the goblinoid invasion was a ruse for their attempts to recover an artifact that they needed.

Each of those story segments could stand alone, and if the campaign petered out at any stage, I could have left the unused plots unmentioned. No need to seed level 1 with talk of a pact between dragons and fiends.

I was panicking partway through my 4e game, since I’d only built the world immediately around the PCs’ village. But as I looked, I realized that I had enough to last them through paragon and even epic tier without venturing too far from where they’d started. They were sideplots that had developed more or less naturally. I won’t get to explore them since we’ve all graduated and scattered to the four winds, but it did make me realize that I don’t have to worry about that kind of thing ahead of time.