These days, I’m leaning towards TTRPG systems where there’s a mission goal, stated up front, for every adventure.
D&D: The Road Goes Ever On
In D&D, the adventuring party often spends forever wandering around, trying to figure out what the goal even is. Especially in one-shots, this time spent can mean the adventure never finishes, because scheduling a second session with the same people turns out to be…impossible.
And, even in campaigns, it can lead to a lot of player frustration, when you just don’t know what to do. I’ve experienced both the player side of this and the Dungeon Master side of this, and neither is a particularly fun.
Sometimes, players even begin to fall into the mindset of “Let’s read the DM’s mind” and won’t do anything until they’re sure they’ve got it right. Or they’ll go round and round arguing about their course of action forever.
Mothership: Money, Money, Money
Outside of D&D, there are sci fi games where you’re just trying to make enough money to get by: what I like to call the “budget Alien” games. Mothership is the one I’ve been playing, but there’s also Orbital Blues, Death in Space, and many others.
The trouble is, players act differently when they just want money. In one of my games, the characters met an extraterrestrial no one had ever seen before. It should’ve been a big deal! But instead of exploring that, they just wanted to sneak past it to so they could loot its ship.
If you actually want your players to get involved in your story, they need different motivations.
What does it look like when you get the mission stated up front?
Star Trek: You Have Your Orders
Well, maybe you’re in a military organization, and the mission is literally a set of orders. The fits games like Stargate RPG, Star Trek Adventures, and Delta Green, all games that I’ve had a lot of fun running recently. (Though hierarchical organizations can cause their own problems, if players start thinking they can countermand what other players want to do. Lookin’ at you, Star Trek!)
Some of these games, in their published adventures, have an initial scene where the orders are given out. But for one-shots, I find that unnecessary. Post the orders somewhere, and you can start in medias res, already in the town/on the planet/etc.
Having orders doesn’t take all the surprise out of it, not at all! It’s always fun when something comes up that the orders don’t cover. When the team in the field has to make a difficult choice. When a walk in the park becomes a life-or-death struggle.
Vaesen: The Structure of Fairytales
In Vaesen, my current favorite of these types of games, you don’t have orders, per se, but your organization receives requests for help, and a team is sent out to provide it.
The objective always involves a Vaesen, or supernatural entity, in a world where such creatures can’t simply be shot and killed. Instead, their secret must be uncovered. The Vaesen are all different, as is their secret. So there’s variety, but there’s also structure. There’s always something new to learn.
And it’s not just playing the game that’s better. I also find writing such adventures is more fun, because there’s less ambiguity about what’s involved. You don’t have to invent a random hook and hope the players go for it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no creativity! While the Vaesen rulebook has lots of examples of the creatures, I’m also having fun inventing new Vaesen myself. I’ve taken from my own knowledge (yeti), from, yes, a Pirates of the Caribbean movie (Davy Jones), and even from Russian folklore (Finist the Falcon).
Less Frustration, More Fun
In my experience, players usually like knowing the goal, and only having to worry about exactly how to achieve it. The more I make that ambiguous, I’ve found, the more frustrated my players get. The clearer the mission is, the more fun they have. And that’s what it’s all about!
Weaponized Fluff 