Form as creative limit
Creative limits are good, necessary even. And I find limits in form to be very useful when writing and designing adventures.
A story or adventure can take several different forms. Our current "standard", at least in the mainstream film and literature world, is the three act structure1. When you plan, prep and write, you shape the stuff that happens in the story into an order that fits within these three acts. That includes all their conventions and "necessary" story beats2.
But, the dominant view of three act good, everything else strange, aside, form as a limit is a good place to start a project.
The smallest form we have in ttrpgs is the encounter. Players meet some type of challenge in a set location. There might be fighting, puzzle solving, or social interactions in the encounter. After an encounter something has changed. The PCs have made an enemy or two, stopped a bad guy, learned something or maybe found a new thread to investigate. Encounters string together to form a single session of play and more than one session forms a campaign.
By way of their improvisational nature, the time it takes to play through a full campaign varies wildly. So for our purposes of using structure as creative limits, lets look at the more contained first two forms. The encounter and the session.
To build an encounter we need a location, a reason the PCs are there and something for them to do in that location. This will ideally be something that changes them, their view of the world, their knowledge or their relationships to other NPCs or PCs. Some resistance is also needed so that there is a challenge to overcome. This doesn't have to be enemies or monsters. A puzzle is a form of resistance. The same with something being hidden behind skill checks.
If we make an assumption about time here, we can say that an encounter takes around 30-45 minutes to play through. We can then stringing together five encounters to get a full play session of around 3 hours.
This five encounter form is the one-shot. A single story played over one session. And we can more easily limit how sprawling an adventure will be by outlining our one shot with these five encounters. Each with their own location, motivation for the PCs and challenge.
To build tension through the session, we can also try to increase the intensity or difficulty of each encounter. That will build towards a climax in the story in the next to last or last encounter.
Thinking about this structure is most useful for writing published adventures or planning for one shot sessions that should be around three hours. I've used this structure a lot and at the times when I haven't, the session went real long. Worst one was seven hours. Almost a full workday of playing. It was fun, but I had aimed for three hours.
Another form to limit yourself with is the presentation of an adventure. As I'm writing this the One Page Jam is going and that is a great form to use as a limitation. The adventure3 has to fit on one page. Story, maps, stat blocks; everything. Or two if you use the back of the page as well.
This is a great way to limit how big an adventure can get and a great challenge in economic writing to convey the adventure to a GM.
Using form like this is a great way to limit the overall shape an adventure can take without prescribing too much of what has to happen. The first encounter can be the setup where the players meet an NPC with a quest, or you can jump straight into the action with a quick summary. The final encounter can be an epic fight, or it can be the reunion of the PCs with an NPC they thought were lost. You know how many encounters you have, so the challenge is to make each of them as interesting as you can.
If form sounds interesting, then have I got some recommendations for you! Stephen Jeffreys Playwriting is a great book on writing in general, but has a lot of interesting things to say about structure and form as a limit. Same with Hanna Nicklins Writing for Games. She has several chapters on breaking out of the standard three act heroes journey and ways to use form-led design. And Matt Colvilles classic video on the five room dungeon.
And if you like what I write, maybe you would like one of my adventures? You can find them all here. Or you can join my free patreon to get my sporadic newsletter and first look at my upcoming setting guide.
I do believe that what most peddlers of the three act structure actually do is a four act structure in disguise. If the third plot point/midpoint has to change the story or ramp up the tension in a way the characters can't get back from, well then it's a four act story, baby!↩
My beef with beat sheets is a topic for another time.↩
Or full game as is the case with the One Page Jam.↩