In his 1987 book, Role-Playing
Mastery, Gary Gygax (famed founder of Dungeons and Dragons) discusses what
makes a good role-playing adventure—which, surprisingly, is the same thing that
makes a good novel or story. Foremost for Gygax is a plot that contains a
central mystery that gives a group of characters (each with his or her own motivations)
something to solve, search, and discover. Every story in virtually every genre
can be boiled down to a few basic plots, since the point of a story is to
delight and amaze the reader, and to frustrate and challenge the characters. To
illustrate this, Gygax took a single plot, called “The Disappearing Dwarf” and
adapted it to numerous genre-specific scenarios, as seen below:
