Encounter Networking
Encounters exist in a network, with each encounter connected to at least one other encounter. The Hook must provide the players with a “jumping on” point into the encounter network. The players navigate through the encounter network and eventually come upon a special encounter called the Climax, which we will discuss in the next section.
The shape of the encounter network is important. You can link the encounters together one after the other, like beads on a string. We call this a linear adventure. This pattern needs to be used cautiously since it can easily lead to railroading, which is defined as:
…linear scenarios which are designed around the assumption that the PCs will make specific choices at specific points in order to reach the next part of the scenario. If the PCs don’t make those choices, then the GM has to railroad them in order to continue using the scenario as it was designed. (Alexander, 2015)
Why is railroading bad? Because it eliminates meaningful choices from your game and, as we saw in chapter 7, meaningful choices are at the heart of gameplay. Once you rob players of this agency, their engagement with your game will plummet.
Is every linear adventure also a railroad adventure? No! If you create a rich encounter with multiple ways of progressing to the next encounter, you can have a linear adventure while preserving player agency. Here’s an example. The players are seeking a missing relic and find themselves at a masquerade. Out of the dozens of people there, several know that a key clue can be found in the Great Library. The players interact with many NPCs using a variety of strategies, and eventually figure out they need to go to the library. Although progression from the masquerade to the library is linear, the open nature of the masquerade encounter gave the players many choices to make.
My own preference, however, is to link encounters together in a non-linear manner, which requires that most encounters lead to multiple other encounters. Old school dungeon maps supported this approach innately, with the dungeon rooms linked by corridors that branch, intersect, merge, and loop. This gives you an enormous number of ways to navigate the encounter network.
The same pattern can be applied to wilderness and settlement adventures. If the players are following a path through the forest, you can have it branch, merge, and loop, just like a dungeon corridor. If they are following a trail of clues in the city, that can branch as well, with some clues perhaps leading to dead ends.
The goal is to network your encounters together in a way that gives the players interesting decisions to make. You can certainly do this with a linear encounter network, but a non-linear network makes the job easier by baking choice into the structure of the adventure.