Dragna's Blog: Tension, Agency & Scaffolding the Werewolf Den

As a DM, I like it when my players surprise me.

Not “surprise” as in “going entirely off the rails,” mind you (though that can be fun in the right circumstances). No, I mean when players control the pace of the game - when they can poke and prod in different directions, and I just get to sit back and respond to what they’re doing. When I can react, instead of act.

Unfortunately, as my (homebrew campaign) players made their way down the road toward their latest destination - the fishing village of Ambler’s Cove - I felt as though their journey had been anything but. They’d had four or five encounters along the way, each time fueled more by me forcing them to react (e.g., due to combat) or by me asking them to act (e.g., due to an NPC waving them down).

It all felt stilted - inorganic - like my players were sitting on one of those haunted house rides and each time they entered a new area I would dress up in a new costume and go BOO and they would scream and maybe laugh and then we’d move onto the next room.

So I took a step back and tried to figure out what was going on - and how I could change it. After some brainstorming, I realized that there are, fundamentally, two ways to look at scenes: the players’ agency outside of the scene and the players’ agency within the scene.

Outside the scene, DMs have three basic options: (1) the scene has nothing to do with the players’ current goals (the scene is optional); (2) the scene hinders the players’ current goals (the scene is mandatory); and (3) the scene progresses the players’ goals (the scene is desirable).

Within the scene, DMs have three basic options: (1) the players have meaningful choices to make within the scene (the scene is nondeterministic - that is, there are multiple ways the scene might unfold, depending on the players’ choices); (2) the players don’t have meaningful choices to make within the scene (the scene is deterministic - that is, there’s only one way the scene might unfold); and (3) the players must find their own choices to make within the scene (the scene is emergent).

By combining these options, we get nine different types of scenes:

1. A nondeterministic optional scene, in which the scene is unrelated to the players’ goals and the players have meaningful choices to make within it. Call this a  “detour” scene. (For example, a delightful traveling merchant appears and invites the players to peruse his wares.) Detour scenes are high-agency, low-tension.
2. A nondeterministic mandatory scene, in which the scene hinders the players’ goals but the players have meaningful choices to make within it. Call this a “challenge” scene. (For example, the players are arrested and brought to trial, and have to find a way to defend themselves from the charges.) Challenge scenes are high-agency, high-tension.
3. A nondeterministic desirable scene, in which the scene progresses the players’ goals and the players have meaningful choices to make within it. Call this an “adventure” scene. (For example, the players are investigating a murder scene for clues.) Adventure scenes are high-agency, mid-tension.
4. A deterministic optional scene, in which the scene is unrelated to the players’ goals and the players don’t have meaningful choices to make within it. Call this a “distraction” scene. (For example, a troubadour begins telling a story on a market street.) Distraction scenes are mid-agency, low-tension.
5. A deterministic mandatory scene, in which the scene hinders the players’ goals and the players don’t have meaningful choices to make within it. Call this a “tax” scene. (For example, a noble begins lecturing the players on proper behavior.) Tax scenes are low-agency, low-tension.
6. A deterministic desirable scene, in which the scene progresses the players’ goals but the players don’t have meaningful choices to make within it. Call this a “gateway” scene. (For example, the players must speak with a particular guard to learn the location of a goblin hideout.) Gateway scenes are low-agency, low-tension.
7. An emergent optional scene, in which the players are ambivalent toward whether the scene occurs and must create that scene’s content themselves. Call this a “sandbox” scene. (For example, a traveling companion invites the players to share stories about themselves.) Sandbox scenes are high-agency, low-tension.
8. An emergent mandatory scene, in which the players don’t want the scene to happen but must create that scene’s content themselves. (This is oxymoronic, and exists only in theory.)
9. An emergent desirable scene, in which the players want the scene to happen and must create that scene’s content themselves. Call this a “garden” scene. (For example, a player tries to romance a traveling companion.) Garden scenes are high-agency, low-tension.

Plotting out my players’ journey in their most recent session, they’d encountered:

• an ambush on the road (a Challenge scene).
• an exposition dump by an NPC about their current quest (a Gateway scene)
• a plea by a tied-up troubadour to rescue him from some camping goblins (a Detour scene)
• a roleplay-focused camping sequence (a Sandbox scene)
• a pair of wyverns that forced them to hide (a Tax scene)
• an attack by some swamp creatures (a Challenge scene)

In other words, the sequence had been:

1. mandatory deterministic
2. desirable deterministic
3. optional nondeterministic
4. optional emergent
5. mandatory deterministic
6. mandatory nondeterministic

In other words: three out of six scenes had been mandatory. The fourth scene had no meaningful choices to make. The fifth scene was emergent (i.e., I had no content for them to explore). The sixth scene had meaningful choices, but was optional and didn’t actually progress anything they cared about.

In the Patreon Discord, I’ve recently talked a bit about what I’ve started to consider the three pillars of good storytelling: premise (what makes you start reading), tension (what makes you turn the page), and resonance (what makes you read the next chapter). But D&D isn’t just a story - it’s also (and, I would argue, mostly) a game.

In an older devblog, I talked about the pillars of good gameplay:

• a default loss state and an idealized victory state;
• a fair set-up allowing perfect victory on the first try if the player is good/smart/fast enough;
• an iterative and cumulative game state; and
• a set of multiple tools and/or strategies with meaningful choices between them.

Let’s call these stakes, fairness, depth, and optionality, respectively. For the sake of simplicity, we can further consolidate these into a single pillar called “agency”: the players have meaningful choices, and these meaningful choices can lead to their desired outcomes.

So that brings us to our five pillars of TTRPGs: premise, tension, resonance, and agency. Put another way, a good TTRPG campaign: has an eye-grabbing premise, enough tension to keep things unpredictable, enough resonance to make the players care about what happens next, and enough agency to challenge and engage the players.

Now, not all of these pillars are relevant to our scene types. Any scene can have a good premise or strong resonance. But when we get down to our last two pillars - tension and agency - we can see that the scenes we choose have an outsized impact on the presence of these pillars in our sessions. For example:

• Making a scene mandatory significantly increases tension in that session, but decreases player agency.
• Making a scene optional increases player agency in that session, but decreases tension.
• Making a scene desirable has no impact on player agency or tension in that session.
• Making a scene deterministic decreases player agency and tension in that session.
• Making a scene nondeterministic increases player agency and tension in that session.
• Making a scene emergent increases player agency in that session, but decreases tension.

You can see that there are often tradeoffs here between tension and agency. Applying this to my travel session:

• The first scene was mandatory (++tension, -agency) nondeterministic (+tension, +agency).
• The second scene was desirable (no effect) deterministic (-agency, -tension).
• The third scene was optional (+agency, -tension) nondeterministic (+tension, +agency).
• The fourth scene was optional (+agency, -tension) emergent (+agency, -tension).
• The fifth scene was mandatory (++tension, -agency) deterministic (-agency, -tension)
• The sixth scene was mandatory (++tension, -agency) nondeterministic (+agency, +tension)

Summing it all together, the overall session had:

• a total tension “score” of 4 and an average tension “score” of 0.67
• a total agency “score” of 1 and an average agency “score” of 0.17

In other words, this was a session with lots of tension, and not much agency - more like a story than like a game.

(this is obviously not a rigorous or valid mathematical process in the slightest and i would not recommend using it on any regular basis, but I think it helps illustrate the point)

Let’s compare this to the current travel sequence from Tser Pool to Vallaki in Reloaded:

• The Skeletal Rider. This scene is optional (+agency, -tension) emergent (+agency, -tension).
• The Watchtower. This scene is optional (+agency, -tension) nondeterministic (+agency, +tension).
• The Revenant. This scene is mandatory (++tension, -agency) nondeterministic (+agency, +tension).
• Morgantha’s Cart. This scene is optional (+agency, -tension) nondeterministic (+agency, +tension).
• Ireena’s Memory. This scene is optional (+agency, -tension) deterministic (-agency, -tension).
• Wolf Attack. This scene is mandatory (++tension, -agency) nondeterministic (+agency, +tension).

Summing it up, a hypothetical session featuring these scenes has:

• a total tension “score” of 1 and an average tension “score” of 0.67
• a total agency “score” of 4 and an average agency “score” of 0.67

In other words, this was a session with lots of agency and not much tension - more like a game than like a story.

Now, D&D is both a game and a story - but when you get right down to it, it’s a game first, story second. (Otherwise, they’d be called “listeners,” not “players.”) While, in general, you want a session that has both high tension and high agency, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with having an interlude session (like a travel sequence) that’s got more agency and little tension, so long as your players are fine with it. Especially in situations where your players know they can’t fail, the game becomes, quite literally, about the journey and not the destination.

Into the Werewolf Den

As luck would have it, shortly after I first coined this scene taxonomy, I started work on the players’ infiltration of the werewolf den in Arc M: The Den of Wolves in Reloaded. However, I faced a problem: unlike most other arcs I’d worked on, I really had nothing from RAW to work with, and nothing in particular I already wanted to add. The Den was, functionally, a blank slate.

So, I started designing from the bottom-up, figuring out what kinds of scenes I wanted to include and in what sequence. Because passage from one room to the next makes for an easy narrative transition, I assigned each room within the den a scene.

The Den’s structure is as follows:

• The players begin at the Cave Mouth/Guard Post.
• From here, the cavern splits into two passageways: one leading right to the Underground Spring (a dead end), and one leading left to the Wolf Den.
• From the Wolf Den, the cave continues on into the Deep Caves.
• The Deep Caves connect to Kiril’s Cave and the Shrine of Mother Night.

RAW, the Den contains the following encounters: two werewolves lurk at the Guard Post; an old werewolf named Skennis sits with nine wolves in the Wolf Den; two adult werewolves and a young werewolf rest in the Deep Caves; and an additional werewolf (Zuleika, Emil Toranescu’s mate/wife) is in the Shrine of Mother Night, which also contains some imprisoned children.

As you might imagine, the RAW Den is a bit of a slaughterfest - the players enter a new room, some (were)wolves attack them, the players kill them, the players move on. Not only was this absolutely at odds with the tenor I wanted to create in the Den (a stealthy infiltration/heist while Kiril and the pack are away), it also conflicted with the narrative I was developing (in which Kiril had seized power and ruled the pack with an iron fist, embittering several of his packmates, including his wife, Bianca).

So I started from an absolute blank slate: ignoring the existing encounters (but incorporating their characters wherever possible), how should the players’ first foray into the Den unfold? Here’s what I came up with:

• I knew that the scene with Zuleika had to set up Emil’s role in the heist. Zuleika wasn’t an antagonist to the players, so she couldn’t fight them here. That meant the Shrine of Mother Night had to basically end in only one way: Zuleika asks the players to rescue Emil in exchange for the Holy Symbol and Ilya’s freedom; as such, it’s deterministic. This scene is helping the players to advance their goals, rather than hindering them, so it’s desirable. That made it a desirable deterministic scene, or a gateway scene.
• I still wanted a climax of sorts, however - some kind of action to get the adrenaline pumping. I knew I wanted to bring in Bianca, Kiril’s mate, again after the players’ first encounter with her incognito at Lake Baratok. So I figured that the players’ return through the Deep Caves would involve some sort of conflict with Bianca, such that the players have to convince her not to summon Kiril and the pack back to the Den. This scene hinders the players’ efforts to proceed and it has multiple possible outcomes, so it’s a mandatory nondeterministic scene - a challenge scene.
• I wanted Skennis to serve as a sentry of some kind, but one that the players could bypass peacefully if they were clever or kind. He would still be blocking the party’s progress (making him mandatory), but there would be multiple ways the scene could end, all the way from failure to multiple degrees of success. That was another mandatory nondeterministic scene, or challenge scene.
• The underground spring was a dead-end and an alternate branch, which meant it was an optional scene by default. I figured it might be fun to put something in the pool that the players could interact with of their own volition - kind of a creepy way to develop the atmosphere of tension while still letting the scene breathe and unfold organically. That meant it had to be an optional nondeterministic scene, or detour scene.
• I didn’t want the entrance to the Den itself to have any guards (otherwise the players would almost certainly try to fight their way through, destroying the atmosphere of tension I wanted to build up). Instead, I decided to have Ezmerelda prompt the players for a discussion about stationing guards outside the cave and otherwise preparing to delve inside. From there, the players would have to decide which way to proceed in the cave - down the left branch (toward Skennis) or down the right branch (toward the spring). Altogether, this was a desirable nondeterministic, or adventure scene.
• The Deep Caves area, by virtue of the need to sneak and the multiple possible areas to explore, would naturally be a desirable nondeterministic adventure scene.
• Regardless of the players’ interactions with Bianca and Skennis, once they’d gotten all the info they needed from Zuleika and Ilya, I decided to finish things off by having Kiril and the pack return to the den, forcing the players to escape without being caught.

Factoring in the encounter with Bianca at Lake Baratok (optional + nondeterministic) and the campfire tales with Ezmerelda in the Svalich Woods (optional + nondeterministic), this meant the overall progression of the arc would look like this:

1. Lake Baratok (Detour)
2. Campfire Tales (Detour)
3. Cave Mouth (Adventure)
4. Underground Spring (Detour) / Wolf Den (Challenge)
5. Deep Caves (Adventure)
6. Meeting Zuleika (Gateway)
7. Bianca’s Challenge (Challenge)
8. Kiril’s Return (Challenge)

You can see how the tension increases throughout the arc, starting low, spiking as we approach and enter the cave, decreasing to a midpoint as the players delve deeper into the cave, and then hitting a maximum right at the end. That’s pretty much the exact kind of cinematic progression we’re looking for - and, importantly, save for the players’ interrogation of Ilya and Zuleika, player agency stays high the whole time. (And even that is primarily player-driven, both because the players are seeking it out and because the players are the ones asking the questions.)

This arc was a great test-run for this new, more formalized approach to structuring arcs and scaffolding the scenes within them. I’m excited to experimenting more with it in Arc N: Argynvost’s Beacon (another blank-slate arc for me to explore) and, especially, in Arc Q: Ravenloft Heist (which has so many different angles and paths to develop that I’m salivating at working with it).

In the meantime, though, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how I’ve approached this arc, as well as any questions you might have about how to apply this tension/agency framework. Hope this blog has been helpful to you, and I look forward to reading your comments!