Writing Plots by Two Dans

RPGs are about telling a story - the DM/GM/what have you sets out the plot, and the players make the PCs (literally the characters inside the story) respond to it. Now, not every game you run or play in needs to be as complicated and involved as War and Peace, your story can be as simple as "the orcs want to kill everyone and you have to stop them." It works, it's simple, but the same ol', same ol' gets boring after a while. So after doing the simple for a bit, maybe you want to tell bigger, more complicated stories. Stories like you see in movies or TV series, or read in books. How do the professionals who make those things come up with the stories? Well, imagination, which you're going to have to come up with on your own, but at least you can use the structures they use to make it easier for yourself.

Before I really get into this, let me point you at some articles by The Angry GM wherein he talked about narrative structure. You should read them as well, they're very informative. They can be found here, here, and over here.

For those of you who read through all of that, welcome back! For those of you who didn't, you're missing out, but I do have to admit Mr Angry is a wordy fellow, far worse than I am.

I have two resources that I use when creating a dungeon, or adventure, or campaign. Yeah, you could probably craft an encounter based on these story structures, but really, you want to keep the encounter brief and to the point - here is the goal, here is what is opposing the PCs, and here are the gains from succeeding and the punishments for failure. Even dungeons need to be very large for you to start worrying about using these structures in their creation, as usually you get only parts of these in your average size dungeon. But it's your world (assuming you are the game master), do what you will with it.

The first is a popular one with Hollywood script writers, the 7-Point Story Structure. Here is the author Dan Wells, who likes using it in his books, teaching it to a class:

The second is by none other than Mr Dan Harmon, of Rick & Morty and Harmonquest fame, a structure he calls the Story Circle. Read about it here, and watch a video about it here:

But even after all of that, do you HAVE to follow these structures, either the two I've provided or any that Mr Angry talked about? Of course not. Here's Dan Harmon breaking his own Story Circle in an episode of Rick & Morty, and still coming out with a good story:

See? As long as the end product is good (in the case of RPGs, read "good" as "fun for the party and the game master"), it doesn't matter how you got there. All of the above are just tools to help you out when you need them, and even when you use them, you can turn things around by modifying those tools when you need to.