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With Starter Operations about to be released early next week, I thought this would be a good time to talk about one of the principles that shapes how I design A.R.C.H. missions.
They don’t have one predetermined solution.
That doesn’t mean the missions have no answers.
The historical anomaly is real. The events surrounding it have an underlying truth. The players are investigating a situation that exists within an established fictional world.
What isn’t predetermined is what the Protectors should do once they understand the situation.
Investigation Isn’t a Puzzle
I enjoy investigative games, but I don’t want an A.R.C.H. mission to become a puzzle where the players are trying to guess the answer I already have in mind.
The purpose of investigation is to understand what happened.
Once the players have gathered enough information, they should be able to make a decision based on what their characters know.
Sometimes that decision will be straightforward.
Sometimes it will involve competing considerations.
Sometimes the Protectors may have to choose between several imperfect options.
There doesn’t necessarily need to be one objectively correct response.
The Players Decide What Happens Next
This is where player agency becomes particularly important.
As a GM, I present the situation, the information available to the characters and the consequences that follow from their actions.
I don’t expect the players to find the solution I imagined when I wrote the mission.
If they come up with a different approach that makes sense within the established fiction, I let them pursue it.
They might negotiate where I expected them to intervene.
They might decide to preserve an altered historical event rather than restore the original timeline.
They might pursue a lead I hadn’t considered important.
They might even decide that the best response is to do nothing.
As long as their actions make sense within the established situation, those possibilities are part of the game.
The Fiction Still Has Constraints
Player agency doesn’t mean that anything is possible.
The established fiction still matters.
If the Protectors don’t have access to a particular piece of information, they can’t act on it simply because the players have worked it out.
If a historical figure would never agree to something under the circumstances established by the mission, the GM shouldn’t make them agree just because it would make the players’ plan easier.
And if the players take an action that would have consequences, those consequences still happen.
The GM’s role is not to protect a predetermined storyline. It is to maintain the integrity of the fictional situation and respond to what the players do.
The Mission Still Has Requirements
The established fiction isn’t the only constraint. Each A.R.C.H. mission also has its own objectives and those objectives shape what an effective resolution looks like.
For Anti-Assassination and Espionage missions, the underlying objective is to restore history, or bring it as close as possible to its original course.
If an important historical figure has been killed prematurely, the Protectors are generally expected to prevent that disruption. If a battle or other historical outcome has been changed through espionage, their task is generally to restore the original outcome.
The other two mission types are different.
Disturbance Incursion missions begin with a known disruption to history but restoring the original timeline is not necessarily the objective. The Protectors first need to understand what has changed and then determine the appropriate response.
Uncover the Invader missions are even more open-ended. The investigation may ultimately reveal an invader, human interference or no anomaly at all. There is no assumption from the outset that history needs to be restored.
These objectives don’t dictate exactly how the players must approach a mission. They provide the parameters within which the players make their decisions.
As a GM, I would allow players to pursue a completely different approach if they wanted to. But if they choose to ignore the requirements of the mission, I wouldn’t protect them from the consequences.
If the Protectors decide not to restore history when that is their objective, for example, that is their choice. But the resulting consequences are part of the game.
This is an important distinction for me. Player agency means that players are free to make their own choices. It doesn’t mean that the world has to accommodate those choices.
Different Groups, Different Answers
This is also why I don’t think there is necessarily one ideal way to run an A.R.C.H. mission.
The experience will depend on the campaign, the RPG system being used and the particular group around the table.
Different players will notice different clues, ask different questions and approach the same situation in completely different ways.
That is part of the appeal.
An A.R.C.H. mission can have the same underlying anomaly and still produce very different experiences at different tables.
For me, that is one of the reasons to keep the setting system-neutral in the first place. The mission provides the situation and the investigation, while the GM and players bring their own system, play style and decisions to it.
There Is Still a Consequence
The absence of a single right answer doesn’t mean that all answers are equally successful.
The Protectors’ decisions have consequences.
They might preserve history at a cost.
They might prevent one problem while creating another.
They might fail to stop an anomaly.
They might decide that an altered timeline is preferable to the one they were originally trying to restore.
The point isn’t for the GM to decide whether the players chose the “correct” answer.
The point is to let them make the decision and then see what happens.
For me, that’s ultimately what an A.R.C.H. mission is about.
The players investigate what happened. They decide what should be done. The world responds to their choice.
P.S. If you enjoy reading about my design philosophy, don’t forget to sign up to my newsletter at the Home Page so you can stay up to date with my work.
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