It’s been too long I know. After having done more that 20 Trope related posts, it becomes kind of daunting to try to produce one that won’t be a re-hash of a previous one (or, you know, bad!).
As I was losing time on the TV Tropes wiki looking for some more character specific trope I found the Con Man, which lead me to The Con.
This gave me an idea to maybe explore Quest-types tropes to inspire an adventure.
Digging deeper, I found a real classic:
An assignment is received in The Teaser. A planning session is held (Avengers Assemble). Then comes The Caper or The Con, using a Master Of Disguise and an A Team Montage. The resolution is as close to end of The Tag as possible.
At about the 40-minute mark, there is a Pseudo Crisis.
The Impossible Mission trope is a perfect blueprint for a one evening RPG adventure. It basically is a Scene-based 5 room-dungeon. Plus, if well-designed, you can put in key motivators for each type of players you may have, making an enjoyable game for all.
Such adventure is basically set on the premise that the players will be given a mission to infiltrate a stronghold or organization that they aren’t supposed to defeat by brute force alone.
They then get to plan the mission as they see fit. Once there, they must retrieve something (maybe one of the Seven Whatevers) or someone. Alternatively, they may have to eliminate or just break something.
After, the characters get one last scene to high five each other and ponder on the impact of their mission on the overall campaign plot.
Let’s break it down a bit:
The Teaser
This scene can put into action NPCs that are related to the adventure’s main plot but aren’t key players. The players find themselves at the wrong place and/or at the wrong time and witness something happening. The NPCs, setting or props they interact with must have at least a tenuous link to the place/organization the characters will get to infiltrate later.
This is the perfect scene for the butt kickers to flex some muscles or for Psychodramatist/story tellers to explore the setting and interact with minor NPCs.
At the end of the scene, you must hand out the assignment for the PCs through the mouth of a patron/client NPC: infiltrate the organization responsible for the disturbance in the teaser and do whatever must be done.
Examples:
- The Characters stumble unto a slaver’s raid and learn that the Sheik’s favorite daughter was taken by that group. The PCs are implored to join the slavers, recover the daughter and bring back the (insert appropriate part of the anatomy) of the Slave lord.
- The characters are the special guests/guards/bystanders at the inauguration of a temple/museum/spaceship, a bunch of mooks crash in on the party to try to steal the Ankh of Eternity/Skull Jewel/Fluxitron Drive Crystal.
The Planning Session
This is exactly why brilliant tactician players play the game. Give the players some resources (Intelligence, contacts, gadgets, magic item list, money) and let them organize the mission as they see fit.
Make sure you provide the appropriate info in a way that won’t result in an adventure bottleneck (like an obligatory Knowledge check to find the stronghold).
In fact provide about 80% of the info necessary to plan the mission accordingly. The remaining 20% (i.e. 2-3 key info) should necessitate creativity and effort on the part of the players to obtain but should greatly increase chances of success. Missing those 20% doesn’t make the mission a failure, it only makes it harder to pull off.
Examples:
- Players find a map easily but by digging deeper in the archives, find another map that shows a secret door to the inner sanctum where lies the sought after object.
- A contact mentions the guard’s schedule, but an extra bribe makes him add that at every 3rd shift the lieutenant meets with all guards in the barracks for a 5 minute report, leaving the walls unattended.
The Mission
This is basically your average Dungeon/House/Space Station setting except you set up the opposition to be mostly circumvented, not taken by a frontal assault.
Depending on your inspiration, you can make this a one scene infiltration Role Playing encounter (Go in, try to fool everyone, grab/save/kill/break whatever and get out) or you can nest in an actual 5-room dungeon.
Each Players will take a roll that fits their preference best. The stealthy specialists will likely go for scouting or infiltration. The Story Tellers/Psychodramatists may go for the disguise and try to fool the NPCs. The Power Gamers will want to use their powers to make the party’s job easier and the Butt kickers will be itching for the crap to hit the fan.
Your brilliant planners will have a ball seeing their masterful plan come to fruition.
Examples:
- The assassin’s guild received a contract to kill the king. The characters must recover the contract before the guildmaster reviews it.
- Some Eco terrorists put a Radioactive Sludge Bomb in a luxurious Private Space Resort. The Owners refuse to believe the threat is credible and refuse access to the PCs. They must kidnap and replace the Space PunkGrunge Metal band scheduled for a show that very night to be admitted.
The Crisis
You should plan for an unforseen event during the mission to throw a curveball at your smug brilliant planners. He he!
Have something totally unforeseen happen whose impact is inversely proportional to the preparation they put in the planning phase (i.e. poor planning = major Snafu).
Examples:
- Think ‘Raiders of the Lost Arc Rolling Boulder trap’.
- If they are trying to grab something/someone and leave have the ‘dungeon’ rearrange itself to block the planned exit.
- Have a 3rd party, maybe the mooks of the campaign’s Evil Overlord, stage a frontal assault at the exact moment when PCs are caught sneaking in the castle (or when a PC blows that apparently crucial Disguise vs Spot roll).
If you can’t think of anything, have ninjas attack!
(Ninjas always work!)
The Epilogue
After the mission, focus on the party’s story-tellers and Psychodramatist and develop how the mission played into the grander scheme of things. Did the characters make new allies or enemies? Has it change the overall situation of the storyline?
The Power Gamers will be sniffing at any recovered pieces of loot or Mac Guffins. Reward them generously.
If the plan worked well, have the interested NPCs (the quest givers) openly praise the PCs and comment on their brilliance and awesomeness (players NEVER tire of that, I promise you).
Chatty’s Example:
I played a 2 player D&D game one night a few years ago. Most of the group couldn’t show up but I was available and itching for a game.
So I set up an adventure where the 2 players (who were of the Anti Hero type) set up to infiltrate the vault of a Lawful Good God’s cathedral to recover a copy of the Sacred Codex (The players wanted some hidden info about a certain fallen angel they had taken in interest in lately).
So I set up a Lawful Good dungeon, complete with Guardians (Angels, Indentured Half-constructs Paladins and Golems) as well as initially traps. Said traps were initially benevolent (Suggestion enchantment traps that forced intruders to turn themselves in) but became more and more serious ones the deeper you got in the vault (Symbols of Death).
The players used their money to purchase a lot of magical items (Stones of Silence, Invisibility potions, Protection from Good potions, etc).
Then we played the whole dungeon (a 5 room one mostly) in real time (i.e. round per round).
They got their hands on the sacred Codex and made off with it.
It was, quite possibly, the most awesome home-brewed adventure I ever played.
Have you ever played such impossible mission games? How did it turn out?
I did have one impossible mission game that I ran back in the day… put the party up against a high-powered necromancer, a dracolich, and a death knight.
Oh, and they lost 3d10 HP every step they took toward the trio (who were 50 feet away.
It was a calculated campaign-ender. I was burnt out on DMing, but they wouldn’t let me take a break.
I was young, and dumb. Fortunately, they forgave me. They still bring it up at parties, tho!
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@Bob: Man are you stalking me? That’s possibly the fastest comment I ever got! 🙂
What you did wasn’t so much a mission impossible as another trope:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RocksFallEveryoneDies
Many – probably most – Shadowrun adventures work out using this format (and Shadowrun is one of my all time favourite 3 games). I highly recommend checking out the bargain bin of your local game store to pick up a Shadowrun adventure – converting mechanics and genres and such is trivial for an experienced GM, it’s thinking up plots that tends to be tricky (and most SR adventures come with maps, if that’s your bag).
The only thing it’s important to be careful about is “analysis paralysis” – if your players are taking ages to decide on their plan, it’s best to hurry them up. There’s lots of ways to do this (from spontaneous ninja attacks to some sort of hard real time limit), but I generally found the best way was to tell the players, “Look guys, I promise you we’re here to have fun. You won’t enjoy yourselves if you spend all night thinking of the perfect plan and have nothing go wrong, and I’m not here to punish you for overlooking some tiny detail. Just pick something plausible and we’ll run with it.”
Good comment Gazza. I agree completely that over planning kills a game dead… (and makes non planners snooze).
Shadowrun is one of those ‘Man I wish I could have found players to play game’ I read the 1st edition and a few novels but I never got to play in it…
Gazza
I have to disagree, in depth in character analysis sessions can be as fun as any other type of gaming session. One of the campaigns my old HS gaming group still talks about consisted of a series of 4 to 8 hour adventures where we never spent less than 2/3 of the time in the planning session. The main issue is that the planning session was pretty much straight role playing time.
@ Michael: I guess it depends on what players feel like. I myself get bored to death by prolonged planning session. I’m a High-Level goal oriented person, not a detail oriented one… that’s why I would side with Gazza were I a player. As a DM, I accelerate the pace if I see players starting to grow bored.
Alternatively, if part of the group is having a blast and the others aren’t I have Ninjas burst in on the bored players.
But if your group were in character and were having a blast the whole time… nothing else counts much.
Gazza – “analysis paralysis” pretty much describes the last session we had with our group!! Everybody wanted to argue about whether or not we were going to do something and how we were going to do it… and I just wanted to do SOMETHING!! ANYTHING!! I mean, my character is kinda impatient, but I was even more impatient. ;p
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I played in a Bubble Gum Crisis campaign that was pretty much all mission impossible style missions. The best was the first adventure. It was a high stakes extraction mission (We were trying to save the estranged grand daughter of the leader of one of the Chinese Triads) and most of the characters didn’t know or trust each other. We spent 4 hours working together in big and small groups as well as one on one with the GM planning the extraction attempt. We ended up with at least four different factions between 6 players, each of which had a part to play in the main plan plus at least one or more fall back plans that we intended to run solo if there was a mole. One of the players wasn’t interested in the genre, so he had privately asked the GM to let him be the bad guy since he was already there but wasn’t interested in staying in the campaign. He slipped up in a manner that tipped several of us off that there was a mole, but not so that we knew who the mole was. Each of us had at least two other players/characters we suspected of being the mole, but we weren’t sure who was the bad guy until the very end. Actually, through out the campaign, there was always the lingering question of if any one party member might be working against a particular mission. It created some nice tension, but was never disruptive.
Yeah, our planning sessions were never just us sitting around the table talking and looking at maps. It was always our characters going out and doing what we needed to prepare. Planning and information gathering went fairly well hand in hand in that campaign. It was also the big source of intra-party role playing, which is usually my favorite sort as a DM and a player. Among other things, we are an Amber group, so we have a long tradition of splitting our time half and half between intra- and exo-party challenges. It also helps that the core of my old gaming group was very very good at leaving conflicts where they belonged. Grudges stayed on the side of the table where they formed, and between the characters who formed them.
I should probably clarify: I wasn’t suggesting that the GM should give the players 5 real time minutes after meeting with Mr Johnston before they hit the ground running (though that’s my bad; the way I phrased it certainly could be taken that way). I was more getting at when you can see that some players are just going round and round, “Hmm, but what if they have X – we’d better consider that” long after they have a viable plan already sorted. Basically I think it’s the GM’s job to step in if things have stalled. If the players are having fun discussing things, then by all means let them continue of course.
Oh, and Michael: Amber is also one of my all time favourite games. Though sadly, like Chatty and Shadowrun, it is one that I have very rarely been able to actually play.
Gazza- Amber’s the system of choice for about half of our GMs when they are supposed to run something but er… failed to do any prep work. If the players are reasonably familiar with the game, it usually runs itself.
That may be the greatest photo ever. Where-oh-where did it come from?
I have unbelievably nefarious Players, and am loath to try this kind of adventure. The few times I’ve tried it, either I spend most of the night improving (which was fun, if a little stressful), or everybody died.
Not so much fun.
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@TCDM: Lol. Google Image for Impossible Mission. It’s on the 1st page of choices. As for the hardness of playing such a mission… it really depends on how wacky your players are… and if they don’t mind dying/getting captured so much, well it is supposed to be an Impossible mission… (nah… it should just feel like the show, not be unattainable)
Great trope! I’ve always thought this plus this equals gaming goodness!
@Geek’s Dream Girl- Just think of how your GM must have felt! During the extended player planning sessions it seems like the GM tends to be taken out of the fun, except for the occasional weird questions like “Where can we get forty gallons of contact poison?” or “Can my familiar make a perform check to pantomime a status report?”
I tend to draw the line after about 45min to an hour of planning.
Our group had analysis paralysis in our last two campaigns [Shadowrun and a D&D political game]. Part of the pitch for this game is that they won’t be penalized if they just do something– if they do a 3 minute plan and go, it’ll work basically as well as planning for a much longer time.
One way I make that work is to let them plan the mission, but tell them I’ll roll a d10 for “how well the off screen stuff works”, if they’re depending on anyone else. Because I make the roll after they’ve planned [or while they’re in mid mission], it encourages them to with a less complete plan. After all, if it comes up 10, then I’ll adlib the offscreen prep going particularly well, but if it comes up a 1 then the jig’s up, no matter how much time is spent planning.
@Greenvesper: Thanks man! A Divine Mission impossible… that could be a great concept.
@ScottM: I take your 1d10 “$#it in the fan” roll is a house rule that was developed because of Analysis Paralysis… I’m not too hot about the concept (but I get where it comes from) unless a roll of one still makes the planning partly usefull… otherwise, I’d always say ‘we bash in the front door and kill everyone” all the time.
Brilliant post Chatty!
This is a trope (god that is a weird word) that I have used scores of times without putting much thought to the formula. I start all new games at 1st level, but I hate the typical low level adventures, so I put one or two really bad ass villains, and most experience points are gained by completing character objectives, coming up with awesome ideas, and saving NPCs. All of my players are deep thinkers so this just works well with my group.
And even better! PC’s don’t need to fight the standard (insert low level monster here) raiding the village, garbage.
-Rip
Ripper X’s last blog post..Exposition & Advanced Character Developement
I’m not too hot about the concept (but I get where it comes from) unless a roll of one still makes the planning partly usefull… otherwise, I’d always say ‘we bash in the front door and kill everyone” all the time.
Yes, planning is still useful, no matter what number comes up. Really, they’re always taking on stuff way over their weight class and winning because they enjoy good planning and tactics. Mostly, the “disaster roll” is to push the game from strategy to tactics when planning strategy gets boring.
I can’t believe how awesome that Mouse:Impossible picture is!
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Phil,
The rule of cool states that interesting actions should never be punished; just the opposite, in fact. Extend this to plans: Elaborate and crazy plans are fun and should work well enough due to that.
So, if you can break the door and start killing people or make an elaborate ploy involving disguises, stealth, assassinations and such, which is more interesting? (YMMV)
Tommi’s last blog post..Game design =/= rpg design
@Tommy: I totally agree, in fact in my mind, the Impossible Mission basic setting is that the frontal assault would be lethal to players.
@Yax: The Mouse Impossible 3.5 Adventure Game, coming out from Chatty’s Imprint in 2009!
@Rip: Yup, trope is a weird word indeed. You are right that such an adventure model is great for making low level PCs feel competent. In fact I’d combine this with Tommi’s Rule of Cool reminder and allow crazy cool plan to overcompensate for low level d20 skills.
@ScottM: Okay then your d10 basically defines the intensity of the Crisis scene. Way cool.
Tommi-
This is very hard to pull off, something that I’d hesitate to do unless I knew my party very very well, but I’m thinking that the rule of cool will allow for letting an elaborate and cool plan fail, so long as it does so in a spectacular and cool manner. The best DM I’ve ever played with has done that twice in the last 15 years. Some of the others have tried, with varying degrees of success.
I think I would adjust it to say that elaborate and crazy plans shouldn’t fizzle, though they shouldn’t always succeed either. And when they fail, they should fail in interesting manners.
Michael: Good point. Agreed. (Personally I put dice or player decisions on the position to decide which way a plan goes.)
Tommi’s last blog post..Game design =/= rpg design
I think one of my favorite adventures starting out I think as a Mission Impossible session. It was an interesting situation as I was playing an on the wall CN/NE character, in a good party(It worked out, as our final goal was saving the world from evil, and although my character was evil, he wouldn’t have had as much fun if everyone else was the same as him)
We were giving a mission to infiltrate a castle and kill the king. We were given directions and told that a few people were paid of and the kitchen doors would be open. These orders came from a slaver, who enslaved all the PCs btw. My character didn’t trust him, but was willing to murder someone to get free.
Turns out the DM planned very little of the castle, at it threw him for a loop when we broke in through a third story balcony.