One of things I've really noticed is the difference between a good plot and a good story - especially when it comes to roleplaying games or, heck, a television series. Sometimes what might be realistic or interesting story-wise can end your plot threads and provide too much closure.
If you want to play a game indefinitely then closing off your options is a bad idea. Sometimes you can find that you've painted yourself into a corner plot-wise and the next bit is either going to be very dull or very strange.
Normally the issue revolves around conflict. Perhaps the main conflict has become resolved or, worse, isn't really resolvable. Maybe you can introduce a new conflict but that could change what people were looking for and reduce the fun factor of the game. Or you might just not be able to think up anything interesting for the campaign anymore.
It hasn't come up with me much but it has a couple times. What about you? Ever had the plot wind down due to poor choices or just the plot resolving itself too soon?
Escape, Escape, Escape!
ReplyDeleteAlways let some lesser "boss" or relative or someone with a connection to the BBG escape. In fact, over the course of the campaign, lots of bad guys should escape. People(including players) run away all the time!
This offers a multitude of options later on. BBG's son takes up his mantel, some lesser adviser was working on raising his own undead army behind his master's back etc.
Second, maybe even more importantly, is player background. Besides any campaign, players should have goals. Let them make up whatever they want, it's their world too after all. While our campaign has an over-arching story, many of the players have their own agendas. Our fighter is trying to save his soul from a deal with the devil, our alchemist is in search of a mythical "ruby eyed emerald grasshopper," the list goes on.
Jeez, great topic. I think I'll write something about this tomorrow!
Lesser 'boss' tales are always great because you instantly have a history between the players and the enemy and that's worth a lot with keeping players interested.
DeleteAs for player goals, those can be a godsend so long as all the player characters' don't have goals that send them off in competing directions for too long. I've dug myself into that hole before.
I actually have plans to use a lesser "boss," and it was in my mind from the beginning of the campaign. In one game I ran, the cult leader was killed (as I had anticipated) and the other cultists were killed or captured. The cult leader had a 12 year old daughter that the PCs knew about but never met. Years later she'll be all grown up and hankering for revenge.
DeleteIs this a game I should know about? :p
DeleteYou probably do, though you didn't play in this one. I was reluctant to say because of spoilers, but it's The Terror Out of Time, the first game in my Dcotor Who/Call of Cthulhu campaign. One nice thing about that campaign is that it's easy to skip around in time, so I don't have to wait quite so long for her to grow up.
DeleteOh, the girl's mother was co-leader of the cult. She ended up surviving, but she was rendered unconscious and captured. She's been locked up in an insane asylum (Bedlam, in fact), but she might not stay locked up forever...
Now I'm intrigued. I gotta admit that the Doctor Who continuous episodic format is an interesting one to use on the play-by-post but it certainly does have its benefits story-wise.
DeleteYes, there are so many possibilities to interlink the stories. For instance, The Terror Out of Time took place in 1930, on the very day that the discovery of Pluto was announced. The next adventure, The Ninth Planet, took place on Pluto. There are also common themes that run through the stories in this "season," which is one thing I've taken more from the new series than the classic one. I've been laying down foreshadowing throughout the stories that won't become apparent until later ones, and I have plans for some characters to be recurring, though they will often be much older when encountered again. There are also family connections that go way back. Robert MacCrimmon is a distant descendant of Jamie MacCrimmon, one of the Second Doctor's companions, and Major Natalia Orlova is a relative of a certain NKVD agent I once played in one of your games (descended from her brother Yuri).
DeleteI love the idea of a series of episodic games, especially ones that take awhile like on a play by post.
DeleteThanks! It has been working out rather well. Each episode lasts 1-4 months (usually 3 on average), so you can still feel that you're making progress, and it ensures that the game keeps moving steadily. The cliffhangers at the end of each episode have worked out very well, particularly the one at the end of Episode 3 of The Terror Out of Time (which thanks to player actions was different - and much cooler - than the cliffhanger I had originally planned). The first two adventures each had four episodes and took about a year each to play.
DeleteThe Time Lord and his companions continue from adventure to adventure. Everybody else plays someone local to the time and place where the adventure takes place. Companions can leave (or die, though it hasn't happened yet), and local characters can become companions. If a local character survives, there's still the possibility of him or her returning in a future adventure. In the meantime, the same players will sometimes continue in the next adventure by playing a new character.
If you're interested, there's still room in The Shadow Over Dunwich, the third adventure, which should be starting in a couple of weeks or so. It should be more to your liking than The Ninth Planet and closer to traditional Call of Cthulhu. This one is set in 1985 in Dunwich, England.
I think this is a technique which is good in moderation but shouldn't be overused.
ReplyDeleteIn particular, if the players cotton on that you're doing this then their motivation to tackle any local BBEGs is going to be severely dented because they know that no matter how much whack-a-mole they play, they'll never get to the end of the Cult of Wotsit plotline. (On top of that, it'd get samey to have the players have to defeat the BBG, then the Son of the BBG, then the Bride of the Son of the BBG, then the Secretary of the Bride of the Son of the BBG...)
There must be something going on in the world which doesn't revolve around that one BBG. Maybe there's another BBG out there who's nothing to do with the old one and has an entirely different strategy. Maybe there's something the PCs can pro-actively do and accomplish which has nothing to do with stomping down villains all the time. I 100% agree that looking to player background and player goals is what's called for here - if at least one of the PCs doesn't have any adventure-worthy ambitions and desires of their own, then something went badly wrong at character gen.
If you can look at a campaign world and genuinely not see anything new you can do with it then yeah, it's probably time to can it, but you shouldn't underestimate how much crazy stuff can come tumbling out of the cracks if you pick the world up and give it a shake.
(This, incidentally, is why I think "let's simulate a setting"-type campaign setups lend themselves more to open-ended play than "let's tell a story"-type setups: stories are hardwired to end, worlds aren't.)
You have a good point there. Playing a game revolving around "let's play a game set after the collapse of the Roman Empire" is going to be different than "Let's a play a game about a SWAT team dealing with a cocaine baron's conspiracy".
DeleteI don't necessarily agree that stories have to end. I imagine individual campaigns within a setting as chapters, each with it's own buildup and climax that can then be used to spread out in different directions, depending on what the players want to do. The story only ends when a player wants to retire a character and start over. That character then becomes a part of the world at large, adding even more content for players to feel connected to.
DeleteI do agree that worlds need to be open and dynamic. Our game currently consists of three separate parties running around the same world doing very different things. Their actions can have indirect (sometimes direct) consequences for the other groups.
Bah, im starting to ramble!
Matt, I think we're talking about different uses of the term "story". (In one of their occasional outbreaks of usefulness the RPG theorists at the Forge termed them "story before" and "story later".)
DeleteIf you're planning a story ahead of time ("story before"), which is what I think the discussion has mainly been about so far, then consideration of the ending is going to either be explicitly or implicitly a part of your considerations. What you seem to be talking about there is what the Forge call "story later" - where you don't plan ahead of time how long a character's going to run for and when they are going to retire, but once you've retired them you can look back and piece together a narrative of their careers in retrospect.
Speaking of definitions, I'm talking about the Climax here more than the Ending as I'm not talking about the Epilogue but rather the BIG moments. No game HAS to have a recognisable ending but every game has its climaxes.
DeleteHaving just wrote that line, I now remember why I didn't call this a series on climaxes. It would turn the article into a series on double entendres.