Vignettes: A Role-Playing Tool

Last role-playing post, I discussed the idea of bottleneck adventure design.  One of the tools I use built these adventures are vignettes.  These are small, relatively self-contained, set pieces.  The idea is to create interest experiences that are not necessarily tied to a specific story progression.  These are items floating within the balloon, ready to shape the path as needed.

One bottleneck moment in the last adventure was an escape into the sewer system.  After an initial encounter to get the party familiar with the sewer layout and dangers, the quest began to balloon.  An encounter with a large, intelligent rat gave the party options on how to proceed (ignore, kill, interact, follow, etc).  Their choice to follow the rat lead to a peaceful encounter with “the rat king,” a fight with skeletons, and a showdown with a necromancer. They avoided fighting the rat king, negated a battle with animated plant-matter and completely avoided a squad of searching guards.

All of these vignettes were setup such that I could arrange them in any order.  This let me gauge player interest and react to their actions.  Killing the rat in the first encounter would have sparked an angry response from the rat king.  It also might have led to an offer of alliance from the necromancer, who would have then seen the party as an enemy of his enemy.  The adventure might have become a more frantic escape, with the two sides doing battle around the party.  It would have had a definitely different feel.

Similarly, the squad of guards vignette was not used because it didn’t fit the tone.  Once the party met the rat king, their interactions led to him being with them throughout this balloon section.   The guards would have been better served against a party using a stealth approach.  Or as a third party to battle against groups of rats and skeletons. Because it was unused, the prep simply goes back into my pile of options, to be pulled out again later.

So now that you have an idea of what a vignette is, let us get down to how to construct one.  There are several components that you need: participants, setting, and goals.  The first is simple, who is in the scene?  Work out everyone that is present or might arrive during the vignette.  In the first encounter with our rat king from above, it was the king himself and a dozen or so extra large rats. I had basic combat stats for everyone there and had worked out potential treasure the participants were carrying.

Setting does not have to be an elaborately drawn map.   The style and feel of the space is far more important.  Note any important features and make sure you give them to your players.  You do not want to spring an attack out of door the party is unaware even excited.  For our example, the space was a large room caused by the collapsing of several tunnels.  The important note was open tunnels above the party, which allowed skeletons to attack in a later encounter.  Highlight the important and interesting, then leave the rest to the imagination.

Goals are the final piece.  Every participant in a vignette needs to have goals.  They need to be more than just “kill the PCs”.  Why are they trying to kill the players?  Robbery, food, revenge, etc. are good motivations for violence.  But violence doesn’t need to be the only goal.  It could be the a participant is merely caught in the cross fire, wanting only to escape.  In the case of our rat king, his goal was to get help fighting the necromancer.  He had no desire to fight the party, and only would if he was forced to.

After everything is in place, the key is to simply open the vignette to the players and see what happens.  Rarely will they do exactly what you expect.  But whatever they decide to do, you just play out the participants in whatever fashion best works toward fulfilling their goals.  The key is to keep vignettes light and flexible, making the best use of your prep time.  The final details will work themselves out in play.