Coloring Inside the Lines: How Limitations Can Improve Your Adventure Ideas

Adventure writing is often viewed as a free-form creative exercise where the “sky’s the limit”. The fantasy genre, with its emphasis on magic, can especially leave the adventure ideas open to pretty much anything our minds can imagine. Science fiction isn’t as open-ended, since it’s supposed to be at least theoretically scientifically plausible (or at least feel like it is), but even here, the adventure-writer’s options are legion, as they are with any other genre, from modern horror to steampunk to superheros.

You would think that such openness would be liberation, allowing our many ideas to flow effortlessly and for some writers, it is. But for others of us (including myself), this sense of infinite possibility actually causes us to freeze up. There are simply too many choices and our ideas run dry. How do we get around this?

There is a surprising answer: limit our choices. It seems counter-intuitive. Yet, by placing limitations–rules, if you like–on your adventure-to-be, you restrict yourself to a more limited set of choices, something you can handle more easily. The trick here is to strike a balance: too many rules and you can make your adventure feel stiff, shallow, or trite; too few and it can become unfocused and leave players wondering what they should do next.

How do you know you’ve got the right amount? I’ve found that applying rules one-by-one, I’ll reach a point where my ideas start flowing. That’s the point to stop restricting and start brainstorming. Some rules are already set for us, even if we don’t think of them that way. The first restriction we usually have to take into account is the genre we’re playing in. Unless you’re in a homebrew or cross-over game, you’re not going to want to place magical wards in your Traveller game.

Another common restriction is setting, whether you’re using your own or a published one. The worlds has some established rules, rising from how the setting “works”. Does magic come from ley lines and the further you are from them, the weaker magic is? Then you know you can’t place a magically dense area far from ley lines, unless you have a good explanation about how it can exist. Does your SF game contain alien technology? If not, then any seemingly Clarke’s Law MacGuffins* are going have to have rational explanations that fit in with the available technology of the setting.

Can you see the plot ideas developing here? With the SF idea, for example, the PCs find a piece of technology that seems way to advanced to exist. Intrigued, they track the item back to its source or set out to find someone who can analyze and explain it. Along the way, they’re shadowed by the company that created the item and want to get it back because either a) it doesn’t actually work or b) they’ve developed some proprietary new technology and don’t want anyone else getting their hands on it before they’ve developed and introduced it to the market. Or it’s a military secret and they can’t risk the PCs putting it into the wrong hands… You could probably take this adventure from here.

That’s the idea behind setting rules. You’ll want to be careful about not violating the rules of your setting without a good reason. It’s okay to look like you’re violating the rules, as long as you have an explanation that makes sense within the game setting. One note: you don’t have to give the PCs the explanation right away; make them work for it. That’s where your adventure comes from.You just need to make sure you actually have one and that your PCs can eventually find out what it is.

If setting rules aren’t enough to get the creative juices flowing, you can establish rules for this one adventure. Perhaps all the PCs are trapped in a single room for the entire adventure. This idea leads to questions:

* Why this room?
* Where is the room located?
* Why are they trapped?
* Who put them there?
* What conditions do the PCs have to fulfill to get released?

By the time you’ve answered these questions, you’ve created your adventure.

By selectively applying limitations or rules to an adventure-to-be, you can actually increase your creativity and your ideas. Take one rule at a time and explore it’s implications, thinking about the questions it raises and answering those questions. This can lead to many interesting adventures you would never have thought of otherwise.

[This article is an excerpt from rpgGM.com’s upcoming product The Adventure Creation Handbook.]

*Clarke’s Law, posited by SF writer Arthur C. Clarke, states “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  A MacGuffin is a plot element that drives the action of a story.