#17: Dirty Words, Part 2: The Plot Thickens
by Travis S. Casey
September 21, 2001
Last time, I started talking about "dirty words" in gaming, with the first one being plot. If you haven't read that column yet, you might want to go do so.
Those two items – designing with multiple paths in mind, and expecting that things will go wrong – will go a long way towards keeping players from feeling like they're being led by the nose. The second long-term plot objection, that against change, is harder to overcome. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that you're never going to be able to change things significantly and keep all the players happy. With that in mind, let's look at some ways to at least maybe reduce the number of unhappy players.
When something changes for the worse, offer hope. Let me give an example to explain what I mean here. There's an old series of AD&D modules called the "Slave Lords" series, where the group finds out about a slaving organization, is supposed to track it back to where its heads are, and then confronts them. The way things are set up, though, the players will almost certainly lose the fight with the slave lords! Instead of simply being summarily killed, though, the characters are stripped of all their equipment and dumped deep into a cave system. They've been defeated, and have lost a lot – but they're still alive, and still have their wits, and the hope of maybe finding a way out.
The same sort of thing can apply on a larger scale. If a particular guild gets outlawed or is dissolved, there could be a possibility of clearing the guild's name, or of restarting it. If a village is burned down, there's a possibility of rebuilding. And so on.
Note, though, that the goal here is not to keep a steady state – if change is always reversed, then the possibility of real change doesn't exist, which will make long-term plots not feel meaningful. The possibility of putting things back gives hope, and gives those players who would like it to go back something to direct their energies towards – but it doesn't always have to come true. And note as well that hope doesn't have to be a complete restoration – it could just be moving to a state more like the old one, but not identical to it.
Give the players someone else to get angry with... even if it is a fictional character! As illogical as it may be, when an NPC does something to players in a game world, many players tend to get mad at the NPC, rather than at the gamemasters who control the NPCs. On the other side of things, when there's no character to blame, the gamemasters tend to get the blame. You can take advantage of this by having a few evil plotting NPCs around to blame things on.
The more established and better-developed a character is, the more real it will seem – and that makes it easier for players to focus on it instead of the gamemasters. And also, as an NPC becomes established, the players may begin to involve that NPC in the game themselves. A group may decide to try to hunt down an NPC baddie. Another group might want to help an NPC they've become somewhat attached to.
(Sometimes it can be odd what players will become attached to. I once ran a semi-silly Star Trek game, where there was an NPC navigator named Will. The running gag was that if anyone said "You may fire at will" on the bridge, somebody would pull out a phaser and shoot Will. That gag was pretty much the only use of the character. In one game, a team had been sent down to explore a planet that, unbeknownst to the players, had a secret Klingon base on it. I decided that the Klingons would kill one of the away team, and picked Will to be the NPC killed.
When the players heard that Will was dead, the room went silent. There was no more joking that session. Will may have just been a running gag, but the players had gotten attached to him, and they were angry at whoever had killed him. That was one time I was glad to have an NPC to take the blame...)
Credit where credit's due department: I first came across this advice/observation years ago, in Robert Plamondon's book Through Dungeons Deep: A Fantasy Gamer's Handbook. If you can find a copy, it's a very good book, with some excellent gamemastering advice.
Plotting for the Large Scale
An important thing to consider when making overall plots for a massively-multiplayer RPG is size. A plot needs to be able to involve lots of players – otherwise, it becomes somewhat of a waste. When you've got hundreds or thousands of players, you can't afford to spend a lot of time coming up with a plot that's just going to involve a handful of them.
The traditional solution to this is reusable plots – what many muds call quests. These involve one or a few players, but can be done over and over again, so that many players can experience them.
A better solution, though, in my opinion, is to try to think of plots where many players can be involved in the grand plot. There may be a lot of very similar subplots, but no two of them need to be absolutely identical. For example, take the "wizard wants to use orcs to take over" plot I described in the last column. As I pointed out there, over the life of the full plot, dozens or hundreds of players could become involved in it at various points. That plot gives rise to dozens of subplots, some of which I described. Some of these subplots would have to be individually set up, but some others could be generated in near-mechanical fashion; for example, when the orcs are going out and raiding for supplies, one could simply pick a random village and send out a group of orcs with a generic "loot and pillage" program to that village.
The key element here is reusing things. As Richard Bartle was just going over in his last article, custom-making each and every item in a game of any decent size is very inefficient. This applies to more than just simple objects, though – it also can be applied to plot elements.
For example, I've been on muds where there were a dozen or more inns scattered across the mud – and many of them had exactly one quest that you could hear about there. Those inns had been set up just for those quests. Why not have fewer inns, and have more than one quest that it's possible to hear about in each one? And, on many muds, it seemed like every new quest that was introduced also had a new, custom-built area. Why not put new quests in some of the existing areas?
Just as with making objects, modifying an existing thing, or reusing a standard template, can make plots easier to build. Of course, it's also possible to go too far towards this end – there are "random quest generators" that will come up with an assignment like this:
Person A is looking for adventurers to do something. You can find person A at place B. Person A tells anyone who asks that he/she wants C, and it can be found in place D (or with person E). Go there, get the item, bring it to person F, and person F will give reward G.
With a few lists to pick from you can generate a few hundred "different" quests this way – but they all feel pretty much the same. Instead of just picking random elements, though, the same sort of system could be intelligently used by a gamemaster, within the context of an existing plot. Consider this:
Colonel Gareth is looking for volunteers for a special assignment. It's been discovered that one of our couriers has been intercepted by the orcs, and an important scroll she was carrying is now in their hands. That scroll must not get back to the orc's headquarters. Evidence indicates that only one orc attacked the courier, and that the orc was injured. The orc will probably be taking this path. The volunteers are to intercept the orc, regain the scroll, and take it to the wizard Ylan. For this service, volunteers will earn a commendation from the colonel, and bonus pay.
This is the exact same sort of thing as the previous example – but instead of randomly filling in the blanks, I've chosen things to fill them in with that fit into the "wizard with orcish army" plot, and added a bit of extra background information. Placed in the context of a larger plot, this becomes meaningful – and the implementation can be at least semi-automated.
The Rise and Fall of the Common Plot
To close up the subject of plots, I'd like to say something about working multiple plots together. It's easy to focus on just one plot at a time, and not start a new one until the old one is finished – however, this tends to give a somewhat unnatural feel. A better way to do plots is to run multiple plots in parallel. While you're in the middle of one plot, you can start to dangle the first hinting threads of the next plot. Doing this makes things more entertaining for players in the long run – they can never be sure whether something they see that they can tell is unrelated to the current plot is just a random background thing, or whether it might be a clue to something else that's coming up. Ideally, with multiple gamemasters, you'd have many plots running in parallel, at various stages in themselves.
Think in terms of making a long cord out of a lot of small and medium pieces of string. You have to braid them together, weaving past each other, so that it becomes hard to tell where one ends and a new one begins. That's what plots should be like – in my ideal game, at least!
Well, I had more left in me on plots than I expected, so it looks like realism will have to start up next time. See you in two weeks!
