It came up over a few pints between myself and David the issue of how much planning do we put into running a roleplay game. David admits to being lazy and working on the fly. I plan a lot, and have loads of notes that may never see use, but exist anyway. So which way is best? Related to this we also considered the nature of a setting and whether or not you plan your setting and plot before or after characters are created.
Our realization. I plan TV series that assume a null hypothesis.
What does that mean? Ok I plaan long plots. In fact I have in mind multi season plot arcs. I find that most one shots I run for a game are often a test of the setting for the series. They are the 'pilot' episode, where the basic feeel of the setting and the game can be tried out, just like in the Fading Suns game I ran recently. That plot comes out of the back of the 2nd edition core book, but I have a whole chronicle planned to follow from it. What do I like about this way of planning? The ability to dip in. I can look at the events of the chronicle from the angle of any for off antagonist, and choose to play from any point along the timeline of the series. I can dip in and start from any point, and the players really have little or no clue to this. This is a sort of fail safe so that I can create a plot, and if the game falls apart and I restart with a new group I can play from a point I haad originally hope to gett to in the past.
Ok that seems fair. A person wants to get something out of the game they are running. I like to have the feeling that there are grrand plot arcs and that I can sample the plot at different points, since to me these represent different types of gameplay i.e. you begin at the very start of the plots and are a starting troupe of characters, or you begin at the half way of the plot and are an experienced group. The issues that each group deals with at those points in the plots are very different. Thus I have built in tiers of gameplay in my settings.
This gets us to the other point, that of the null hypothesis. David asked me why I plaan before character creation. I answered that I want to make the players feel like they are within in the setting, but that the setting doesn't just hinge upon them being. So that means events will occur in the setting whether or not the players are aware of them. Therefore it is up to the players to get involved in the plot. Of course some plot points I have left loose so that I can work the players in properly, or I have left entire areas open to incorporate the player ideas. So then David asked what happens to the setting with the players interacting, surely nothing? That I said is not correct. The fact is that setting will always result in the a change, and it is up to the players to interact with that mechanism of change. There is no status quo. The players are interacting with the setting at a point of upheaval in the setting, no matter how minor. This means if, for a new group of players we start at season 2 of the settting, it assumes that the events off season 1 have happened but that the players never interacted with it. Thus the null hypothesis. What happens to the setting if the players don't interact with it. This is because I also think about what reactions NPCs would have to the player interactions. I get behind the mind of the NPCs so that believable reactions can occur in responce to player actions.
Now I would say that there is merit in designing a chronicle simply about the info you get given on the player characters, or having a looser setting, or handing out to players pre-generated characters that fit in with your plot. After all these are just tools and guidelines.
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