At their core, adventure games are a series of difficult decisions the players must make with limited information, resources, and time. Whether you're designing an open-ended social adventure or a straight-up dungeon crawl, tough decisions are one of your best tools to inject drama, uncertainty, and challenge.
Tough decisions push players to thoughtfully manage they resources they're provided and engage with the details of your game world. Smart assessments lead your players to success with a minimum of loss, while poor assessments over time diminish your players' resources and ultimately lead to their demise.
- Why decisions are important for adventure design
- Types of decisions to include in your adventure
- Types of decisions to avoid
- When to present tough decisions
- Assignments
- Further reading
Including tough decisions in your adventure makes your players feel empowered, injects feelings of tension and challenge, and keep things unpredictable for the GM.
Players want to feel like they have power in your world and that the decisions they so carefully deliberate on have an impact. By presenting players with tough decisions, you give them an opportunity to take control of and feel responsible for their own destiny. If your players feel like nothing they do makes a difference, they'll disengage from your adventure or, worse, start acting out.
Weighing trade-offs under pressure is stressful. Tough decisions introduce tension and uncertainty into your adventure, which is exciting for players and GMs alike. You can make your adventure feel more or less challenging by modulating how many decisions your players face and the amount of information, resources, or time they have to make them.
In the Dungeon World roleplaying game, one of the GM's agenda items is "play to find out what happens." While this approach is useful regardless of game system, finding that fun can be difficult for many GMs, given that they know all of a prewritten adventure's surprises. By introducing tough decisions over which her players must deliberate, the GM can better share in a sense of uncertainty and excitement.
This lesson covers six different kinds of decisions you can present to your players:
- Mutually exclusive actions
- Risk versus reward
- Now versus later
- Resource trade
- Offense versus defense
- Dilemma
The best adventures present players with several different kinds of decisions. Some of the decisions described below overlap with one another or can be combined to create truly dramatic choices.
Present your players with a choice between two or more mutually exclusive actions. Your players can do X, Y, or Z, but they can't do them all. A choice between mutually exclusive actions challenges your players to weigh the value of each option in relation to their overall strategy, including each option's likely benefit if chosen and the opportunity cost for passing on a given option.
Example: Three sarcophagi rest in a hidden tomb, their cover stones hewn in the likeness of a knight, a priest, and a sorcerer respectively. Detect magic reveals that each sarcophagus contains powerful magic items, but occult sigils glow on the surface of each sarcophagus—a clear indicator that they are cursed. Your players possess only one scroll of remove curse, so only one sarcophagus can be opened safely. Which do they open?
Example: A pair of tiefling sisters, each the ruler of a warring province, have both asked that your players bring the oracle's crystal ball to them. Bringing the crystal ball to one of the sisters earns the undying favor of her province and access to its unique resources while arousing the lifelong ire of the other. To which sister will they bring the crystal ball?
Present your players with a choice between a low-risk path with modest rewards or a high-risk path with greater rewards. Such a decision challenges your players to assess whether the potential rewards warrant putting themselves in greater danger, or if it's best to play it safe for the time being.
Example: The upper floor of the dungeon, having been delved by numerous bands of adventurers, has largely been cleared of both traps and magic items, providing your players with a relatively safe path to their ultimate goal (albeit with less treasure). However, most adventurers have avoided the more perilous lower catacomb level. Major treasures await below, as do their fearsome undead guardians. Do your players dare descend?
Example: Midway through an adventure, your players learn that an enchanted heirloom ring is hidden in a vault nearby. While recovering the artifact is not required for your players to complete their quest, doing so can earn the favor of a powerful sorceress-queen. However, the dungeon contains numerous false trapped vaults, making any attempt to recover the ring dangerous. Do they seek the ring?
Present your players with a choice between a minor benefit now or a major benefit later. Alternatively, provide your players with a limited-use resource that can't be used later if it's used now. Such a decision challenges your players to balance short-term needs with long-term goals and forces them to continually assess how much farther they can push themselves without using up a resource for aid.
Example: After defeating the death knight, your players unearth a bone ring that absorbs the souls trapped by demiliches. Once per campaign, your players can offer the ring to a goddess in exchange for a blessing—the more souls rescued by your players from the demiliches, the greater the divine boon. However, finding and destroying a demilich is extremely treacherous, and if the ring-bearer is slain in the presence of a demilich, it steals back all of the souls contained within the ring. How many souls do they collect before claiming the divine boon?
Example: Your players' celestial patron bestows upon them a blessed mummified hand that can cure disease. Each time the power of the hand is invoked, one of its fingers curls. When all five fingers have curled into a fist, the hand crumbles to dust. Your players must carefully decide when to use this artifact while exploring a temple teeming with an ancient plague. How sick must someone get before the hand must be used?
Present your players with an opportunity to trade a resource useful for one pillar of play (exploration, social interaction, and combat) with a resource useful in another. A resource trade challenges your players to assess the areas in which they feel they're weakest and what they're willing to part with to shore up that weakness.
Example: A lone dungeoneer, hardened by her months delving Undermountain, offers to reveal to your players a secret shortcut through the dungeon if they trade to her a magic weapon she can use to defeat her rival. How valuable is a shortcut to them?
Example: A lawful mummy that shares puzzle hints with your players wears a powerful talisman that can protect them from a legendary monster at the heart of the dungeon. The mummy is unwilling to part with the talisman. Your players can choose to destroy the mummy and steal the talisman, at the cost of all future clues they might use to solve puzzles. Do they feel confident enough in their puzzle-solving ability to steal the talisman?
Present your players with a choice between an offensive resource, such as magic weapons and wands, or a defensive resource, such as armor or potions. Alternatively, you might present your players with the option between a boon for themselves or a debility for their enemies (including other teams of players delving the same dungeon at another table).
Such a decision challenges your players to assess their current standing: are they in a position to strike a decisive blow against a vulnerable foe, or is it in their best interest to play conservatively and bolster their own abilities?
Example: Your players discover an altar atop which rests two magic items: a sword of sharpness and a mantle of spell resistance. The party's magic-user identifies a curse placed on the altar: if one magic item is taken, the other is destroyed, dissolving into a pile of residuum. Do your players bolster their attack power or their magic defense?
Example: Having rescued their leader from the clutches of a black dragon, your players earn a single favor from a band of half-elf mercenaries. The half-elves offer your players a choice between one of the following: help reinforce the defenses of the players' sanctuary, or preemptively attack an enemy stronghold. Do your players feel confident enough in their sanctuary's defenses to bring the fight to the enemy?
Force your players to give up something valuable as punishment for falling victim to a monster or trap, making a social blunder with an important NPC, or giving the incorrect solution to a puzzle. A dilemma challenges your players to assess what resource they can most afford to lose.
Example: Stone blocks etched with necromantic runes slam shut, sealing your players inside a cursed tomb. The players will die of thirst within the tomb unless they sacrifice one powerful magic item to the wraith queen that waits for their demise. What do they give up?
Example: Captured by the royal guard, your players are forced to face the Empress. She will cast your players into her dungeon unless they implicate one of two helpful NPCs in an alleged transgression against the Empire—doing so results in the betrayed NPC becoming a rival. If your players refuse to implicate anyone, a difficult fight with the imperial guard breaks out. How deeply do your players value their alliances?
Not all decisions make for an engaging adventure. Three kinds of decisions—meaningless decisions, obvious decisions, blind decisions—are best avoided as they undermine your players' sense of agency and fail to produce drama at the table.
Sometimes, you don’t mean for a decision to fall into one of these three categories, but your players perceive it as such because you haven’t communicated the trade-offs or stakes clearly enough.
A meaningless decision is one that has no impact on the adventure. No matter what your players choose, they'll always end up with the same outcome. Meaningless decisions send a message to your players that nothing they do makes a difference, which makes them less invested in your adventure.
An adventure that presents no decisions or meaningless decisions is said to "railroad" the players.
Example: Your players happen across two shrines: one hewn in the likeness of a radiant angel, the other carved to depict a demon shrouded in embers. Your players have a single enchanted vigil candle they may use to pray at one of the shrines, and they'll likely expect the boon to be thematic to the shrine at which they pray. Regardless of the shrine your players choose to pray at, however, they receive the same boon.
An obvious decision has an effect on the adventure, but one option is so much more attractive than the others that it's not much of a choice from your players' perspective. Any drama surrounding decision-making evaporates when your players are faced with an obvious choice, as there isn't much to discuss.
Example: Having had her rod of rulership returned to her, a mummy queen offers your players a choice between two wishes: be healed of all hit point damage, or be healed of all hit point damage, diseases, and curses.
The opposite of an obvious decision. A blind decision has an effect on the adventure, but your players have absolutely no hint as to the possible outcomes of their choice. Since there's nothing for your players to deliberate, blind decisions lack tension—your players may as well roll a die to determine their course of action.
Example: The catacomb passageway comes to an end at two identical portals filled with swirling gray mist. The dungeon contains no clues as to each portal's destination, and none of your players have access to divination spells that could reveal the safe portal.
A typical adventure provides numerous opportunities for you to present your players with a tough decision, including:
- When a player is struck by a powerful monster attack
- When a player defeats a powerful monster
- When a player falls victim to a trap or hazard
- When a player circumvents a trap or hazard
- When a player suffers the effect of a curse or disease
- When a player solves a puzzle (correctly or incorrectly)
- When a player pleases (or crosses) an NPC
- When a player arrives at a fantastic (or perilous) location for the first time
- When a player unleashes the power of a magical artifact
- When a player communes with supernatural powers (lawful and chaotic)
- When a player dies (or escapes death)
Keep in mind that not all decisions are punishing like a dilemma. As the examples in the previous sections show, you might also present your players with choices between different kinds of rewards when they overcome the challenges in your adventure.
Flip through one of your favorite short RPG adventures and try to identify the tough decisions that adventure's author presents to the players.
If a decision seems meaningless, obvious, or blind, jot down some brief notes on how you might improve the decision if you were the adventure's author.
Using your adventure theme or mood board as a guide, come up with ideas for one tough decision of each type discussed in this lesson that you might include in your module:
- Mutually exclusive actions
- Risk versus reward
- Now versus later
- Resource trade
- Offense versus defense
- Dilemma
- Game Design Concepts by Ian Schreiber
- Players Making Decisions by Zack Hiwiller