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[bryant]

WISH 66 is about plotting (and, tangentially, the necessity of same):

GMs can spend hours designing an adventure and have their players take off in an entirely unexpected direction. How does a GM handle this—try and steer the players back to the designed plot, or hang back and see where the adventure goes? How does a player handle this? Stay on target or go with the flow?

I’m inclined to disagree with the context of the question. “How does a GM handle this?” Well, which GM?

The No Myth meme currently prevalent over at the Forge rejects preplotting altogether; a No Myth GM doesn’t know anything about the world other than what the players have seen. A failed task resolution check doesn’t mean the players have failed, it means there’s an additional obstacle in the way of reaching whatever objective the players have chosen. And that’s a reasonable approach.

But it’s not reasonable to say (as some Forge denizens do) that it’s the only proper approach. Some GMs spend days designing, not the adventure, but the world. In Brad’s Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, he had the entire world mapped out and spent a lot of time figuring out the actions of the NPCs between sessions. There wasn’t a designed plot, per se; there were NPCs with desires who acted on those desires. The PCs could act and react as they wished.

I don’t believe in a single approach; I believe in behaving as appropriate for the playgroup.

My preferences? I don’t preplot very heavily, so I tend to ad lib when players go off on a tangent. There are more of them than there are of me, after all. As a player, I like free-form stuff because I like the feeling that there’s a whole world out there. Strongly directed plots only bug me insofar as it makes me feel like the world only exists as far as the PCs can see.

Strong genre games can overcome that feeling, perhaps because a strong genre also engenders a feeling of a world outside the limits of a PCs perception. Pulp comes to mind, of course.

Comments

[head58.livejournal.com]

I sat down last night to do some prep for Saturday's game. Ali then said to me "why do you bother? You know we're going to do something unexpected anyway and ruin all your planning." With that, I shut down my laptop. She was right of course.

I know this world inside and out. I know the Bad Guy's motives and agenda, his secret plans within plans and who the traitors are, and how most NPCs in the world will react to X, Y and Z. What do I need to plan for the specific session for? I think there needs to be something to put the players into motion, but then I can just sit back and watch it all play out. It feels less like I'm "in charge" as a GM, and that's how I like it.

One related thing I'm doing in this week's game: I've told a player to come up with 4 super-spy type gadgets his character has, but not tell me what they are. I'm planning a series of deathtraps and security measures he has to get around, but don't know how they might be countered by those devices. The whole thing could unravel around me, but I'm relying on the unexpected player factor to add excitement to the scene.

[skylion.livejournal.com]

Case in point. I have several adventures mapped out. A few plot points come from pre-published adventures, some are developed to parallel the characters backgrounds and/or motivations. This last gameday we mostly sat around and just RP'ed, with nary a need for a dice roll or difficulty resolution. Everyone enjoyed it and had a great time, but I handed out very little rewards. We are playing Classic Deadlands. Laura, playing a chinese martial artist is looking for her missing son. She made a contact that was less than conversational, and managed to get some info from the encounter due to good role-playing and a decent overawe roll. Jayson plays the Mad Scientist, and managed to befriend a fellow mad and get some contacts made as well. The other two players just horsed around and rp'ed well in any encounter. The result: One white chip each. I saw all thier encounters as the beginning of a trail to much larger things. All of that last game amounted to going with the players flow. I got my Gm/Marshal rocks going by just playing NPC's. I am a big ham, so this made my day.
Long and short. You can let the players know that they can go off and do thier thing, but what you have planned for them, planned being operative here, with give them greater rewards in term of experience points/bounty what have ya'. It may seem punative, but, in our case, it lead the posse down the road to the adventure I had planned. That was longish.