I have spent a lot of time—I ran weekly or biweekly game sessions—this past year as the Game Master (GM) for my group’s Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) games. I had no prior experience as a GM for any other game, having only been a player in other people’s Dungeons & Dragons games. But I wanted to play L5R and no one else knew at all how to play it, so I stepped up to the challenge. The learning experience has gotten me to grow into multiple styles of campaign design.

Railroad

I began my career with little understanding of the game mechanics and even less understanding of how to GM. Heck, growing up with D&D, I had no idea why a player would ever choose to make a character as boring or useless as a political “courtier”. And yet a third of the possible character classes were courtiers. So I turned to online modules, ready-made campaign sessions with a detailed guide of how to get from the beginning to the end.

The design in simple: the GM drop the players into a scenario where they have a clear objective to complete and a single given way to complete it, a way that is chock-full of carefully planned obstacles and baddies. It is essentially a level and the players have to play through it to beat it.

Many tabletop gamers like to trash the railroad model, so much so that calling a GM’s decisions “railroading” is considered an insult. It is true that this style leaves little room for players to interact with the world their players live in but it does have its place. If players want to just figure out the GM’s puzzle and see how his story unfolds, not unlike a novel or level-based video game, then the railroad is definitely a viable option. But my players and I wanted the characters to have more control over their decisions in such a complex setting like L5R, so my style steadily evolved as I began to write my own scenarios.

Choose Your Own Adventure

If railroading is like a novel, my designs began to feel like the book series we all enjoyed as a child. Instead of with predetermined milestones with carefully choreographed paths to reach those milestones, my stories had different major choices players could make throughout the scenario that would create a different conclusion. It would fake giving player characters (PCs) free will when their actions were designed long beforehand. The design broke from a single path to a tree with an ever-increasing number of branches as I became more ambitious.

Like I hoped, the new model brought a higher level of choice and complexity to the campaign. But it also brought a host of new challenges.

Choice triggers were pretty obvious. A character or event would feel a bit artificial as it would conveniently appear and provide players with an alternative option.

It was time consuming. I mean really time consuming. The campaign notes end up about as long as the Choose Your Own Adventure books but players will only go through a quarter of it given the path they proceed. Plus the GM ends up having to backtrack to make sure everything is still consistent with previous choices.

It is impossible to account for every possible outcome. If the GM allows PCs to make their own life decisions in the game, they will take it. They will stray from the path, no matter how many he builds. The GM thinks the players would avoid calling out an entire clan, the most sinister clan in Rokugan, in front of the Emperor but that is their first move. And if the GM were depending on his hours of planning to run the campaign, he is suddenly dumbfounded.

Improvised Questing

Eventually after having enough experience with the campaign setting, I made a radical change to how I wrote the story. There was no way players were going to be immersed in the story, I thought, if the events and encounters felt designed and deliberate. Interactions with the world should make sense with canon, not be a product of the party size and composition. So, I entirely stopped worrying about HOW the PCs were going to solve their mission.

Let me explain. The PCs still have an objective they wish to complete and so the GM thinks of some possible ways the party could do so and maybe some ways they could get entangled by the interests of a third party along the way (getting sidetracked is often more fun than going through the main questline). So some milestones come up, maybe an important individual PCs need to talk to or an item that gives PCs crucial information. But the GM only focus on the details of the milestone or fleshing out the important characters. For the rest, he relies on his knowledge of the setting and potential motivations of potential individuals to improv anyone the PCs wish to meet. Eventually, the party will get enough scraps of information and get pointed in enough directions to find their way to where they want to go.

Needless to say, there is a knowledge barrier to implementing this method. Potential GMs have to know the setting enough and be confident enough with their ability to think on their feet to make a dynamic story. Otherwise, every miscellaneous interaction will just feel like a talk with “generic guard 1” and there is no way they could help the party. How difficult it is to confidently understand a setting depends strongly on the game. For a generic fantasy setting like D&D, it can be okay to pull something ridiculous and strange and for it to still be plausible. For an extensive canon like L5R, there is a bit more learning involved to avoid breaking the setting.

At this point in my career, I think I can successfully pull off the improv. And good thing too. I find this to be the ideal way to game master for my campaign. All of the interactions are organic and players find themselves in a lot of eccentric, superfluous interactions that I wouldn’t bother writing into a planned encounter. If successfully executed, every session feels like an exciting adventure involving a band of colorful characters. And it saves me a lot of time planning for situations that will never occur.

I have a feeling that I will be sticking with improvised questing for a long time. Or maybe within a few months, I will move onto another form of game mastering. If I do decide to change my campaign design, I will make sure to update!

Update 2/5/15: It turns out that many GMs more experienced than me also believe that “improved questing” is the way to go for a worthwhile gaming experience. The Alexandrian blog has an incredible in-depth series of guides on how to pull of this form of GMing called Gamemastery 101. Check it out if you want a better understanding of the mindsets and strategies involved in creating this form of storytelling.