Since I didn't really have anything useful to blog about today, I'll write a bit about roleplaying. As usual, if I bore you, you might feel like hugging a dinosaur instead of reading my blather. Actually, hugging dinosaurs is recommended anyway, on account of dinosaurs and hugs both being awesome inventions.
I hereby proclaim myself the king of random links, incidentally.
Lately I've been noticing a lull in my planning things. Those who have seen me work in the roleplaying-happy mode have probably noticed that I spit out a handful of ideas every week, write down a few random settings, hooks, characters, plots, or stories - mostly as part of an ongoing campaign or chronicle, but sometimes just loose ideas that I might incorporate in a game sometime in the future.
However, most of the games I've been running for the past month or so, excepting the AE-campaign over New Years', have been more or less entirely improvised. Adding to that, some of the best games have been entirely improvised, like the last session of Berlin, or the whole Mutant: The Mutationing storyline. This has made me awfully insecure when I plan things, because I feel as though a lot of the time my planning doesn't really amount to anything. And, when I sit down to plan something out, I find that I can't really think of anything because I'm getting used to thinking on my feet - complicated 13-step plots just don't come as naturally anymore.
I've been thinking I should probably do things more the Berlin way, letting stories grow out organically - basically playing and seeing where the story ends up, just writing down new setting details and NPCs on the fly. The problem with this is, I rather enjoy having a master plan which is good to fall back on, plus, I can't really work on my favouritest hobby of all times without players if I'm to improvise all the time. So I don't really know - people tend to say my improvising usually turns out better than my planning. Does this mean I should plan less?
I also have some difficulties figuring out how to plan things up ahead; I want to give players as much freedom as possible, but obviously the only way I can maximize freedom is by not planning at all, or nearly nothing at all. Locations and people generally require people to actually visit them, which needless to say is nearly impossible to plan out without enforcing things. Usually there's no problem with, say, "The treasure map leads to Mount Dumb", but it becomes boring very quick if there's only one route to Mount Dumb, giving no choice whatsoever about how to get there. Or so I think, at least. The solution here is obviously to plan a lot, which can be fun but also frustrating.
Events are highly different, because they can be thrown in when the action stalls - things like "Your girlfriend bursts in, crying 'Max is dead!'" or "Suddenly, the assassins sent by Xiao Bong leap towards you!" The problem with events, though, is that they usually don't happen in a vacuum. I can't really plan the above events out without having some reason for the characters to be involved with Max or Xiao Bong. That is where plans get really tricky - core characters like that are part of the setting, and the setting doesn't really come alive until the characters have interacted with it. Hence, I can plan a setting but I can't plan for it to live, and a setting that doesn't feel coherent or relevant just won't work.
In conclusion, then, I think location-based games (like most fantasy games and games with a tactical element) are handled easily - for more freedom, plan more options. This is fine, and I rather enjoy it usually - but few games are entirely location-based, unless they're vanilla dungeons. NPCs can work this way, too, but they tend to become very flat if they're just part of a plans-web; they simply need an element of personality, and if you try to dodge stereotypes and make NPCs unpredictable (which makes them feel more real), the problem is it becomes very hard to plan them. Thug #3 just attacks you. Ariel Hanna Seraphina Hummerstungerdoppelbergsson might on a whim decide she likes you if you snap a comment which suits her personality. Big difference in the theoretics behind those two characters there.
I suppose the solution with events could be to plan a bunch of events that seem to hang together coherently, and then prune them away as they become irrelevant. It's sad, but it's much easier to cut things out on the fly than add them on the fly. And, well - planning things definitely keeps them from becoming completely stupidly sucky, even if it's no guarantee for a great game.
Back to the writing board then, I suppose.
4 kommentarer:
Indeed a dilemma.
But I disagree with the ones who say that your improvised games are better than your planned ones - you're a master improvisor, that is true, but there's no campaign you've made that is bad, planned or no. Of course they vary in quality, but I see no large difference between improvised and planned games.
I can't really comment on this. What I can say is that it's more fun to watch when you've planned, because that always makes you so enthusiastically cute ^_^
Word from the middle ground man: Isn't there some kind of middle ground?
But I think I have repeated that comment a few times already ^^
Maby I'm wrong... Maby there isn't.
But my gut tells me there should be some kind of way to limit planning in such a way that it gives room for player creativity and improvisation.
For example: plan the summit of mount dumb but not the rout to it.
Hm, I agree with loverboy up there. Balance, as always. There should be points that are virtually unavoidable, at least, or have only two options, and those can be planned. That's actually pretty much how I write; around solid events, I think we talked about that before. But it often feels to me as if my improvised writings are better than the planned too, a problem that I agonize over on a daily basis, so I don't know. I don't know if creativity can be controlled.
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