A mystery involves A: The mystery itself, which is unknown to the players at the start. B: Players uncovering the mystery. and C: Players dealing with the (often violent) consequences.

I’ve found if I know my mystery itself (A), I can let my players tell me how they uncover it (B) and solve it (C). Anything they try either works, or fails with a side effect that points them at another option or two. All that can be made up on the fly, with most of the heavy lifting done by the players. The GM just controls the pacing.

You don’t want everything they do to work as intended, but you do want to reward any good idea and keep the game moving. If the players are stumped, an NPC can kick in the door, guns blazing, who leaves a few clues to get the players back on track.

To go all out in adventure prep, I borrow a page I picked up from West End’s old Star Wars RPG, and write out an introductory “script”. The publisher would tack a page or two of scene-setting narrative and dialogue onto the front of each adventure for the players to read in-character, like a move script.

To be quite frank, those canned adventure scripts stunk big time, but it was because the authors just couldn’t plan for who would be starring in their adventures. When you’re writing generic dialogue for “Rebel 1” and “Rebel 2”, it’s nigh impossible to come up with worthwhile snappy banter, much less create any emotional investment in the characters.

On the other hand, if you’ve any talent for writing, preparing an introductory script for your own group of PCs can be a powerful tool. It provides free license to railroad the plot just long enough to get things going. I’ve never met a player who minded my puppeteer-ing her character for a couple of pages of action-packed prologue where she got to do cool stuff and spout personally tailored quips while the world exploded around her. I suspect that’s largely because my players know as soon as we hit that cliff-hanger moment where the script trails off in ellipses, I have no emotional investment in what they do next; they’re truly in charge of writing the rest of the story. There’s just no hemming and hawing about, “What’ll we do today?” because they’re already rocking and rolling.

@Razjah – That is one of the key reasons I find myself going back to dungeon crawlers like D&D time and again. The amount of investment prior to game play can be minimal and it comes out fun. I’ve seen a lot of players get into pregens like you describe. People can discover the character as they play them, without being as worried about bringing out the elements of the character they so lovingly crafted. Without that sense of attachment to how a character should be portrayed the story tends to flow more freely. I bet the wizard’s player had fun “being the meat shield”, even though they might not have built a character that fulfilled that role.

@Scott Martin – Doing this with an established group is definitely a lot easier. Especially when you are in the middle of other game events that provide some structure. I have to admit that I do this a lot more than I would like with my group. Many of their adventures are piece-mailed together on the fly.

@evil – I’ve never done the create the whole game as a GM like you describe, but I have done it as a player. Two buddies and I were on a couple of day trail hike and decided to play a very story based game on the fly. Two d10s (dice I love) and a clear box to “roll” them in and we were set. The rest was all in our heads. I’d second your suggestion. Having to push yourself like that breaks boundaries that you set for yourself. It is like the first time skydiving; falling afterwards never seems like such a big deal.

@ggodo – How did you react to it being moved into another world? Players always do the unexpected, and I tend to wonder if there isn’t, in published adventures, a sense of “punishing” the characters when they do something unexpected like that. I.e. the artifact explodes, the players are trapped, etc. I notice that GMs with improv adventures tend to go with the unexpected and run with players’ odd actions like this, continuing the adventure in a different way instead of causing a detrimental effect to get them back on track.

@Nephlm – What system are you running this in? Unrelated, the question mechanic reminds me a lot of the way characters are made in Dread. Questions define certain events that occur, but the players’ answers define their characters.

@Rafe – Thanks Rafe! I agree that “Players build their characters classes, skills, and special powers based on what they want to do in the game.” is definitely a key note of this article. I may have to turn that into a separate article on its own. I’ve not played Burning Wheel yet, but I know it supports this type of game well. I just got into reading Mouse Guard the comics and may have to pick up the RPG to play with some friends who also like the comics.

As an aside, this is one of the most fundamental, utterly important things a GM can recognize:

Players build their characters classes, skills, and special powers based on what they want to do in the game.

GMs, learn this. If a player has an ability or weird idiosyncrosy, they want to see it in play at the table.

Well written, John! Great article.

In addition to the things you’ve mentioned I have found the following useful:

* Kicker – One question that has to be answered for each character is ‘what just happened that can’t be ignored?’ Thus the game starts in motion with stuff the character cares about.

* Quests – In my game there is a certain economy that allows the players to define quests. When they accomplish the quests they get xp. Thus the players telegraph this is what I want to do, this is what I think is cool.

Those two things and crunch lite system and you don’t have to do much more work as a GM then the players have to do.

In answer to the closing question, I was once challenged to do this with zero prep work. I had one ten sided die, two sheets of paper, two pencils, and two players. We created the game from scratch as we went, and it worked wonderfully once we got over a couple of bumps. In that case, the game was all about player reactions to situations that I made up on the fly. I’d suggest everyone try it at least once in their GM career, just to test their own abilities.

One player could not roll higher than a 10 and the other players decided that using him (a wizard) as a meat shield and as bait was a good idea because he couldn’t hurt the monsters anyway. They also got surprisingly in character having a tiny paragraph describing racial and class stereotypes.

That’s why I always keep a copy of Explosions & Escapes with me. It’s only 3 pages and characters can be made in just a few minutes.

(http://dominowriting.com/ExplosionsAndEscapes.doc)