Three act sessions

I'm shifting campaign soon. My current campaign, Wave Rats, a sort of high-seas Into the Odd (punny name based on Maze Rats, originally an ItO hack), was stressing me out. I think I've figured out why, and what I'm doing about it - but also how I can plan sessions with this structure less stressfully in the future.

Wave Rats was supposed to be a sort of Caribbean West Marches - you'd pick a destination, sail there (with all the potential complications that raises) and do the thing you'd elected to do. Brilliant thinking, thought I, self-aggrandisingly: Sailing simplifies the hexcrawly travel bit of West Marches play (again, my players aren't the hardcore types that love tracking their iron rations by the half-pound, for which I am grateful). Further, and most importantly, islands are lovely discrete adventure sites. By zooming out a little, each island basically acts as a dungeon, with one dungeon turn equalling about 8 hours for travel by foot plus actions. This raises a lovely point about the fractal nature of the islands that have honest to goodness dungeons on them - maybe its the equivalent of going down a floor? Anyway, the players didn't have to worry about shooting for a random hex - they just sailed until they sighted land. Throw in some cunning encounter table design, and we're all good.

What I noticed, though, was that this actually upped the stress I was under as the GM. I think that part of this was that we settled into a routine with a core group always showing up to play, with the occasional guest, rather than a truly open table. With that in place, I felt bad offering the shallower, brutally episodic experience the West Marches is designed for. That might also be why the whole "you choose where to go and what to investigate based on snippets of info you've heard in passing" conceit never really took off; players didn't need to justify showing up by coming with a concrete plan, and there was no fear that, if x, y and z heard about the Black Gold, x might come back next week and lead a, b and c to steal it, leaving y and z high and dry. Again, don't think my players' temperaments are those of the original, ultra-competitive West Marches players, but I'm not complaining - I'm extremely grateful to have a core group that was willing to show up every week, despite the shallower experience. I think if that's the scheduling arrangement, I'd just rather run a more relaxed, more standard campaign.

It's that episodic nature that causes the stress, I've deduced. If you have an embargo on carrying over one adventure over two sessions (I broke that rule once or twice) then you have to keep up a punishing pace, especially if you run short sessions, which I have been. And delivering a complete adventure inside of two or three hours, when you don't know at the start of the session where the PCs are going to pick as their destination to within 100 nautical miles, that's pretty stressful. It feels, at least when you're in the driving seat, like you can't afford to put a foot wrong; a hair in either direction on the "how do I resolve this scene, roleplay in detail, or abstract out?" scale, and you can throw the session - or that's how it feels, at least.

So I'm moving to a more traditional campaign, taking whoever of the "core group" is willing to sign on. I'll be keeping the (small) open table group, because it's an excellent resource to have, and asking if anyone extra wants to show up each session, but on the understanding that they might not get a complete experience. It's a closed table with pretensions to being open, rather than an open table trying to be closed.

What lessons can we learn from this? Well, allow me to introduce you to the three act session, a formula for having a complete adventure experience in a single session. Like the three act screenplay, it consists of an expository act that establishes the facts, a second act in which complications are introduced and stakes are raised, and a final act in which the characters either succeed or fail (usually the former), and get a moment to wind down. Simple right? Well, it applies in specific ways when your characters are controlled by players taking actions, and your scenes are composed of the opportunities for choices.

What does that mean? Well, in the first act of a screenplay (focussing in on film - I know this structure gets used for everything - case in point...), for example, you're usually providing the audience with exposition, meaning information so they can understand what's going on in the story. In other words, so that if something happens, they don't go "Wait, who was that guy, and why did he do that, and what's the significance of that thing he did?" Self-contained sessions have a first act that does the same, but with the view to giving the players enough details that they can start taking informed actions to achieve goals, which also get set up in this phase, rather than just giving a frame of reference for things that happen around them. This is what clued me into this structure in the first place; I noticed that my sessions had this strange "getting up to speed" phase, where I'd throw details and scenes at the players, but without really creating any interesting decisions or gameplay. That really worried me, but the secret is that that's fine. If you're running a self-contained adventure, then you will, of necessity, have to devote a certain amount of time simply populating the overarching situation with enough details to give the players something to base their decisions on, and that means taking them along for the ride for the first section, until they can assume control.

An important note here, then, that this is specifically geared towards this kind of session, namely one where the players expect to be introduced to the conflict, engage with it, and resolve it by the end of play. Adventures or campaigns might follow a similar structure in larger strokes, but I don't think the analogy is exact; the players won't be having a good time if the first four or five sessions of your twenty-session campaign consist of exposition dumps with no interesting decision making for them to engage with, for instance. So don't take this formula to apply where it isn't meant to. Disclaimer over - on with the theory.

The "getting up to speed" section - the first act - is, I think, why people often advise you to open your sessions with a "bang", or alternatively, in medias res. I don't think that this cuts straight to the action by cutting out the exposition section, as it may appear to. What I think this technique actually does is disguise the exposition, or give the players something fun to do while they absorb it. E.g.: Grabshank the orc cackles wildly, ordering his men to redouble their attack. "You haven't caught me yet, and you never will!" he screeches as he ducks behind cover and out of sight. Imagine these were the first two sentences of the session (okay, so not the best setup to Grabshank, but it's functional). We already know, just from these two, that there's a bad guy, he's a persistent enemy of the PCs whom they've tried to capture before, that he has a penchant for sneaky escapes, that he's a leader with men under his command, etc etc. But the scene itself is about fighting orcs, so we're also immediately given something to do, rather than just waiting around to be brought up to speed. In other words, the first act is still there, doing its thing, it's just been given a spoonful of action-sugar to help the exposition-medicine go down.

As a side note, investigation adventures also work well as regards the exposition act, since they build in learning the facts of the situation as an activity - crime scene investigation, for instance. Similarly, heist narratives can do this with casing the joint, and potentially with the planning phase of the heist as well - although note that it may be better to include heist prep in act two, since a) it can include interesting complications that force the PCs to adjust their plan, and b) the actual execution of the heist itself, once all planned precisely and so on, may not be sufficient to provide a satisfying act two on its own.

So, the second act is usually called the "rising action" of the story, but it might as well be called the "most of the stuff happens" section. One thing happens after another, and because this is an adventure, the stakes are raised and the action intensifies after each. So there's not much to say structurally here, other than some advice on what it's good to try to include.

First, if you can, include breaks. It's well documented that, at least with stories, be they filmic or whatever, it's better to have a lull in between each intensifying action scene or other high-stakes scene. This helps the audience reset and regain some energy, and process the previous scene's outcome - otherwise the consequences of each scene aren't given time to land, and the whole thing starts to resemble one of those anime faceoffs where each opponent takes it in turns to one up the other, and you swiftly lose all context ("You hit me with your super-mega attack, but just you wait for my super-mega-ultra attack!"). This isn't absolutely essential at the tabletop, but, if nothing else, it helps give you the GM a breather if you have some low-stakes scenes, just occasionally.

The other thing is the upset. Rarely do second acts in film end with the protagonists having come out of a conflict at the top of their game, having systematically eliminated each problem that stood before them, and ready to take on the final obstacle. (Contrast this with a video game structure, where you eliminate each obstacle, power up, and then take on the final boss when that's the only thing left to do.) More often, in narrative media, you see the protagonists at their lowest ebb on the way into act three. Among other things, this avoids deflating the stakes for the climactic confrontation, or whatever it may be, by avoiding the appearance that the protagonist is following a procedure, the natural conclusion of which is that they successfully solve the final problem. Hence you often see characters being stripped of much of their agency just prior to the final resolution, often by the villain (if there is a villain) forcing a conflict - think any of the Sam Raimi Spiderman movies, in which the villain captures Mary Jane to force a confrontation with Spiderman. Or the Death Star threatening the rebel home base, forcing a last-ditch suicide mission. Or the Agents capturing Morpheus in the first Matrix movie (or Neo being forced to flee or fight subsequently to that). All of these are cases where the stakes are raised by denuding the protagonist of their agency, giving them something they have to respond to.

I don't recommend this.

The reason is, it's very difficult to pull off raising the stakes in an rpg adventure by taking away player agency. It's tough for Neo to go spring Morpheus, or for Luke to suit up and go on a suicide mission, but it's easy for the players to take a decision on behalf of their characters, especially if there's no real alternative. If the climax is forced on the players, if they don't get to approach it as they want, it feels like their choices prior to this moment don't matter - they were always fated to confront the villain in this particular way, the way you, the GM, planned, and they're just going through the motions. Railroading, basically.

So I suggest a slight variation: Rather than forcing a final confrontation to up the stakes, introduce an important complication to the final confrontation. So, rather than "Oh no, [bad guy] has kidnapped Mary Jane, you better go rescue her!", make it so that you get to Octavius' lab or Oscorp tower, ready to fight this year's supervillain, going with whatever plan the players have cooked up, and then reveal that Mary Jane is a hostage. Now the players have to split their attention between the Dr Evil PhD and saving MJ from being lowered into the shark tank, adapting their original plan on the fly - better not hit those explosive barrels in the crossfire! The stakes are raised, but the scene is also made more complex, meaning the players can't just execute seamlessly - they have to replan just a little bit. In other words, you introduce interesting choices, the building blocks of a good roleplaying experience, into a final scene that otherwise might largely be done on autopilot.

And then a rest. The final act in a screenplay involves some time to relax and think about the consequences of everything you've gone through. I'm really bad at incorporating this, personally, but you should. And not just sitting chatting with the players - have some time in character to appreciate what you've gone through. This could be just mulling things over, but more effective is talking to NPCs, seeing how their lives have been affected - not just their take on the events, but people who have no idea what happened, and are just getting on with their lives. Take a little bit of the magic of that scene in Return of the King where the hobbits are shown together, the only people who have any idea what actually happened, and the only ones who understand what it was like. Or just, you know, have a barbeque like in every Fast and Furious movie.

God I have such basic taste in films.