For all the neat tricks and methods of designing good adventures, the final judges of an adventure are the players: If they don’t enjoy it, it isn’t that good (or at least it requires a different kind of players). Therefore, it is a very good idea for the GM to get an early handle on the actual people participating in the game, to ensure that they enjoy playing as much as the GM enjoys designing and running the adventure.

The first thing to watch out for is what each player likes to do as part of the game. Most players fit one or more profiles, which gives a way of predicting what should exist at least to some degree in an adventure the player participates in. Some common player profiles include:

When a GM notices certain interests in his or her players, these should be noted for future reference; the above profiles come from such observations. These profiles can be checked before completing an adventure design. Did the two toy-buffs get a couple of chances to play with some new toys (keeping them or not)? Is there a sneaky plot twist for the story player to drool over? While entire adventures can be designed as profile bonanzas, flooding each player profile present in the group with opportunities to go crazy, it is often enough to include a few occasions for each player; one chance to shine per player every 3 or 4 hours of play or so will be more than enough for most!

Be aware that gamemasters also fall into such profiles! A GM might have a taste for drama, while another enjoys having builders and thinkers run things. This is an inherent risk of gamemastering, because it means some players may be pampered because of matching profiles, while others feel excluded and overlooked. A good GM makes sure during adventure design that each player gets as equal opportunity as possible! Even those that want things the GM doesn’t care about! Making a quick check-sheet to count the special occasions of each player (player, not profile; one player can fit several profiles, as noted below) lets the GM make sure that everyone gets attention on an equal basis. Note that in long campaigns, individual adventures may (or may not!) focus on individual players, with the explorer having a field day in one adventure and the drama player being the center of attention in another. This is okay, as long as everyone gets a chance to be the main event on a regular basis.

The profiles above are not hard-and-fast rules, simply good guidelines. Unique players are doubtlessly going to turn up in many places, and a bit of careful observation will allow a unique profile to be created for this need. Also, most players fit more than one profile, like the trainer-drama player or the hoarder-builder-explorer. This just means that the GM has more options for satisfying the player.

One profile not discussed above is the casual player. This person is usually present to just hang out and enjoy whatever the game contains. He will rarely take (or want to take) a lead role, preferring to support others and just enjoy the ride. Don’t try to force such a player into lead roles, just enjoy that someone does not demand a lot of personal attention. Give the player a few independent choices from time to time, and otherwise just let him do what he wants. Even if he doesn’t get special attention, he tends to enjoy the game if the rest do.

A special case of player ‘handling’ involves getting players settled into new worlds or situations. This is especially appropriate in two situations: When adding new players (including if everyone is new), and bringing old players into a new game world or a very different part of the old one (new continent, new culture, new circumstances, etc.). In such cases, even if their characters know how to act, the players may not. It then becomes the most noble task of the GM to let the players understand the world at least as well as their Player characters do.

For players with a lack of confidence, it can be especially tough. These may need some ‘parenting’ to truly get into the game. Theoretically, this is easy: Give the player more or less logical choices (“the wall is falling towards you. What do you do?”), and don’t trick the player into doing something stupid. If this sort of player gets severely punished for honest and serious choices (as opposed to deliberately acting like a moron), he or she will freeze up and be even less active in the future. Practically, it’s a bit harder, especially if the other players have all the confidence they need and are not too patient with the straggler. One solution is to include several minor tasks for which the nervous player’s character is better fitted than the others. This allows the player to do important things without needing excessive confidence. Of course, the goal is to increase the confidence needed to handle the situations, effectively encouraging the player to grow a bit more confident. Many such players start opening up by the third or fourth adventure, taking a stand right next to his or her peers.

When it is not a case of confidence problems, but rather of being thrust into unknown ‘territory’, there is no need for kid’s gloves. Instead, just keep things very basic and recognizable through the early adventure(s), and include the following:

• Non-lethal surprises that show important aspects of the world (getting beaten by someone they should learn to avoid, or having big tools malfunction in revealing ways).
• Plenty of small character knowledge nuggets (“no, back in the military you never heard of anyone with such clearance”).
• Recurring non-player characters, events and circumstances that portray important aspects of the world.
• An average of one major theme every two adventures, or one minor theme in every adventure.
• non-player characters to talk to about the world, even if it means asking questions that (to the characters) appear dumb.

The goal is to give the players more and more chances to recognize things and events, and then inserting more elaborate versions. It can be a good idea to make a sort of ‘learning score’, which contains what the players are expected to learn about in the first few adventures, until they have a good feel of the game world.

Progress

Apart from inter-personal dislikes among players (which is a topic impossible to cover in this book), there is nothing as corrosive to game enjoyment as getting stuck during the adventure. Having to work hard to find out what to do is part of the adventure, part of the challenge. But sometimes, players simply find themselves in a dead end, with no clue as to how to proceed. This is a progress breakdown. A couple of symptoms of progress breakdown include, but are not limited to:

• Needless and largely irrelevant arguments among players, sometimes concerning things with no relation to the game whatsoever.
• Players having the player characters randomly destroy things or harass non-player characters without a clear goal or motive (e.g. not to scare the non-player characters into something, or to attract attention, etc.).
• Players acting exceedingly selfish with their characters, stealing from and abusing non-player characters.
• Players having their characters use inappropriate levels of violence to get things done, especially if those things are not very important or clearly should not be handled through violence.
• Players randomly repeating futile attempts to get things done, hoping to get a lucky break by sheer accident.

These symptoms may occur without real progress breakdown, especially if the players are physically tired or just ‘in that mood’. But when they occur in players that shows signs of irritation or despair, the players are usually on the verge of giving up and just go rampant. Unless that is the purpose of the adventure, it is a problem, and it should be handled as quickly as possible.

One way to avoid many cases of progress breakdown is to have ‘redundant keys’, i.e. keys (see Structure, above) that may not be necessary. If the game is a murder investigation, several clues can lead to the same piece of evidence. If the players have been clever or their characters lucky, these clues will either not be there, or they will not be quite as helpful (“yeah, it looks like Hubert’s handwriting, but it is smudged from the moist air or rain getting in through the leaky window”). If, however, they have been having a lot of unexpected trouble (unexpected by the GM, not the players), the clue can be very valuable (“it seems to be a note from Hubert about the accountant, something about money missing from the vault in the office. It’s a bit damp from lying near the leaky window, but the text is still readable”). ‘Erasing’ a clue if players have been progressing too fast is called ‘pulling the key’. It can be done with just about anything; a door that will only be there if the players are behind schedule, a person that only knows the right things if necessary, etc. Of course, some may just take a bit longer to get, like a door clearly being there but somehow blocked, or the person having trouble remembering some details unless helped (or bribed). This allows the GM to intercept a progress that is moving either much too fast or much too slowly.

One rather important method to avoid total progress catastrophe is Plan B. This can be used if the player characters utterly destroy a chance to make an important bit of progress (like blowing up a bridge only to find they needed to get across it), or if they have such a lucky break that the entire adventure is going to be over before it even starts (blowing up the villain’s getaway car in a fit of inspired thoroughness). Plan B is simply an alternate route that the adventure can take, eventually lining up with where it would have gone without that little bit of player ‘creativity’. They may be forced to go to a nearby town and do a lot of clever dealing to get access to the only other bridge across the canyon, or the villain escapes into the woods rather than using the now missing car (this rewards the Player characters with a few extra clues and a head start on the villain, but does not destroy the plot entirely). Whether the GM wants to tell the players of this after the adventure (“I give you a clear and simple way to get from A to B and you blow it up, sweet Jesus you guys like bombs”) is a matter of taste; therefore, do it tastefully, and don’t mock or scold players, especially if they unexpectedly screwed up the villain’s plans!

Experienced gamemasters may note a few expected milestones in the adventure, to mark off what he or she expects the players to achieve. If the milestones are way off, progress ‘manipulation’ can be used to get things moving again. However, the main purpose of progress control is to avoid dead ends which give the players a bad attitude and ruin the fun. Players are going to go astray in entirely unexpected ways, constantly (gamemasters rarely need to make elaborate false clues; just let the players screw up things themselves!), and this is part of the fun. But when it no longer is fun, things should be nudged back on track as discreetly as possible; if the players, after the game, take the credit for their sudden comeback, the GM just earned a medal for discreet progress manipulation.