The Ninth GM Inspiration: Outlining Techniques for Scenario Design

The Ninth GM Inspiration: Outlining Techniques for Scenario Design

This is a broader concept than it sounds like. Everyone is generally familiar with the concept of using an outline to prepare a text, and its a common way to organize when writing, especially fiction. My introduction to using outlining techniques to plot out a game scenario goes back to the 1980's when I was given a book titled "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," a book that still has many followers today for its useful perspective in drawing and design. I was born into a family of artists, but was a bit of a black sheep.....I was fine at art, but what I enjoyed doing was writing. My mother extrapolated (iirc) from the book to introduce the idea of round outlining to me as a way of organizing written concepts into stories. The idea must not have been from anywhere else as best I can tell, because while I can see it used all the time (especially in Youtube videos and on conspiracist's whiteboards!) Google itself seems to have no notion of what the hell I am talking about.

Round outlining is a lot like regular outlining for a story or body of text that requires organizing your thoughts, but it does so by drawing a bubble around your seed idea, and then drawing lines from that to extrapolations in other bubbles. So I could put, "An Endless Dungeon," as a seed idea, then from that I could draw a line to several other bubbles, each with another idea: Evil Wizard Did It; planar dungeon; the dungeon really does hold prisoners; It's infinite but there is a bottom; it's located in the plane of concordant opposition; etc.

Each of those bubbles could then have more lines drawn from them to other concepts. It could look like this, which is a simulacra of the "bubble" technique, but you get the idea

   Also a wizard the PCs once defeated          And an innocent woman!                  Amozatas the Jailer

                                                 \                               /                                                                 /    

   holds the most ancient and evil beings; Rovas the Red Dragon              The jailkeeper is at the bottom
                                                              \                                                                  /
                                                    its really a prison             its infinite but there is a bottom
                                                                      \                           /
                         planar dungeon-------------An Endless Dungeon----------evil wizard did it
                                      /                                          \                                                        \

                                     /                  Located in the Outlands (concordant opposition)      \ 

                Filled with Escher-like constructs                                     The evil wizard is Kurzhod the Mad  

                     /                                                                                                     \

      use weird maps!                                                                            He made it to lock away Amozatas!

And so it goes.

Over the years it became much easier to adapt this technique to a more conventional outline process simply because we all use word processors now, and that is not a good freeform medium for what I just tried to emulate above. It is however a great technique if you have a notebook handy and also trust your own handwriting. 

More on the use of this sort of concept in the next post....because there is in fact a very distinct and handy way that this technique is deployed for direct scenario design in current RPGs.