Talk:A summary of the players' experiences

The nature of story

--Matts 17:21, 28 October 2006 (MDT)As a GM I'm having trouble with this game, I have to admit. I like my precious plot, and I think that the characters are all memorable and interesting, but I'm running into difficulty with the serial nature of things. I feel like there's no story; it's just the players wandering around getting jumped occasionally and finding something interesting out occasionally.

I think that I need to be giving more attention to 'adventures', in the sense that there needs to be defined mini-plots that drive the story. It's not enough to say, 'players, figure your own shit out'; I need to provide foils and plot hooks for the players to fill out, and I don't think I've been doing that well.

So, I'm thinking of giving the game a dramatic procedural overhaul; not in terms of changing the story or characters, but simply changing the way that the story works. I want each session, or each set of a few sessions at the very least, to have its own arc with a beginning, middle, and end, and mini-themes, and little dramas. I want these stories, taken as a group, to paint the larger picture.

That's not to say that a whole lot will change, but I'm probably gonna use the wiki as my tool for keeping notes as I try to figure this stuff out.

--BenofZongo 17:59, 28 October 2006 (MDT)meh, don't sweat it, it happens to everyone. Something I realized though, especially with the Falls storyline, is that even shorter, more mission-esque scenarios, designed to run 2-4 sessions a piece, still require plenty of backup planning: i say this because there were at least three times when the players in PA were like "nah, let's ditch/skip this falls thing, i don't really want to go/stay there". At each of these points, I realized that I didn't have a whole lot planned if the players just skipped my major plotline/mission for the next set of sessions, and that I'd basically be improvising until I figured things out again. As such, I think if you go the missions route, it's good to throw out a lot of lines, so to speak, so that it's likely the players will take to one of them. these can be character driven or more mission type thingys assigned by the GM, but I just think it's hard to really set a block of sessions up as a distinct, predefined "story", mostly because players can, occassionally, be so predictably unpredictable (a little tip of the hat to jason, there.)