Defining Classes of Plot
I’ve been working on these ones for a while now.
I created a plot generator with ability scores like a D&D character. The current scores I’m using (subject to change) to define a “plot” are: Condition, Complexity, Challenge, Difficulty, Relevance, and Influence.
Recently I came with some basic “classes” for plots, inspired by an assignment from my Business 1010 course that asked us to organize action items by importance and urgency: “urgent and important,” “important but not urgent,” “urgent but not important,” and “neither urgent nor important.”
I was looking for a solution to a problem of timing in missions: “how do you engage the players in the game’s NOW?”
Some players will motivate themselves while others require guidance. And sometimes an event demands the players’ immediate attention.
The four classes are as follows: Event, Quest, Affair, and Rumor.
Event: Urgent and Important
Quest: Important but Not Urgent
Affair: Urgent but Not Important
Rumor: Neither Urgent nor Important
In many ways, you could consider a combat encounter to be a kind of Event. It’s important because the characters’ lives are at risk, and it’s obviously urgent because if they don’t do something about it right now, they’ll die.
So, don’t knock the importance of combat in roleplaying. Just realize it’s only one way to engage the player characters. They need other stuff too.
I’m working on some other stuff too, that’s just all I have to write about at the moment. I’ll be back around later to add to it.
Discussion (9) ¬
I’d say Events are far more important than just encounters; they’re a big part of what can give a fantasy world a truly dynamic feel. Being presented with the opportunity to have done something but then missed it gives the world a certain sense of urgency and realism that isn’t necessarily present in a static world, no matter how well fleshed out it is.
You’ve done a great job of codifying and explaining in simple terms what I’ve tried to do in my own games. Affairs and Events are definitely things which should have the possibility of being missed, and the consequences of missing them should be at least moderately far reaching. Using your system here, i could codify my Alfheim game thusly:
Event: a tribe of goblins is planning an attack on an abandoned tower; this will happen whether the players show up to participate or not.
Quest: the party knows about things that their benefactor is looking for.
Affair: delivery of letter explaining affairs in Stull to the lumber company’s corporate offices
Rumor: information about locations which may or may not eventually become quest or even relevant.
Thanks! :)
RE: Events more than encounters
I couldn’t agree more. I was short on time, or I would have gone one for pages about each class. How many of each to use, how each type drives the game forward, what kinds of players prefer which types of plots.
I’m running a hexcrawl using Stars Without Number right now, so I’m motivated to figure a lot of this out ASAP!
Simple as it is, your classes also help explain and illuminate some of the failings of even the best video game RPGs; they fall short because they don’t cover all 4 event types or, if they try to, they do so poorly.
As much as I adore Morrowind, the most jarring element after long-play is the relatively static nature of the open world; nothing changes, because the game only covers Quests, Rumors and Quests that are disguised as Affairs. Given that the game has a calendar and tracks in-game days, it becomes more disappointing and noticeable that there are no “Events”.
On the other hand, you have a game like “Romancing SaGa”, which tries to cover all 4, but affairs and events are too well hidden (in no small part because of the lack of in-game calendar or a means of tracking the game’s event progression stat) and one ends up missing too much.
I enjoy Elona, but with the exception of the rather broken and unbalanced main quest-line, all of the “quests” are Affairs: you arrive in a location, can choose from a handful of irrelevant tasks which must be begun and then completed in fixed amount of time.
In tabletop settings, one doesn’t have to ‘hard code’ events, which is helpful. I think we’ve talked before about how one method I use is keep assets in stasis until players interact with them. Otherwise, you’d have take notes as to things like on which tuesday a person was captured and thrown into a dungeon cell, the elapsed time between said capture and the person’s discovery, if the person survived the ordeal while the players were not looking for them, etc. Easier to say, the prisoner has been there since a week before the players show up; if the players leave before finding the prisoner, then the prisoner has got some problems, but it’s a bridge one crosses when one gets there.
It does raise the question, though, in my Zenopus game whether Lemunda was a quest, an event or an affair. Or even just a rumor. Because in a way, she’s in a quantum state until the players decide to do something about it.
Ironically, so long as she and her quest are an unbroached topic, she is technically a rumor. Unless I make the dungeon more dynamic, she’s going to be there whenever she’s found because the dungeon key says she’s there. But if she’s there to be found, perhaps she’s a quest? There’s no urgency in finding someone you don’t know is there. The Thaumaturge is also always there, though he is far more a Quest than Lemunda, because he can either be dealt with not at the players leisure. once the players know that there’s a kidnapped girl, there’s urgency.
Finding her, then, without knowing she is in the caves, would make her an Affair, retroactively perhaps. Once rescued, she needs to be dealt with.
However, if the players are told she’s a prisoner of pirates in the caves, she becomes an event: the players need to find her because she may only be in that location for a short time or something bad might happen to her. Therefore, the holding of Lemunda by pirates in the cave is an event.
Sorry for the rambling, but this post has really got me thinking!
From one perspective, a plot becomes worth tracking if one or more players become invested in it — including the GM. What may be best however, is if you try to limit the number of plots to the number of players.
For example, it’s fine if you have three wallflowers and one player who’s interested in four different plot threads. But as a GM, it’s a bad idea to cultivate lots of plot threads that your players don’t know about.
In my Stars Without Number campaign, there’s the party’s mission: which is to locate replacement parts for an escape shuttle.
Last night, the campaign spontaneously developed a new plot, which is to contend with a group of mountain-based raiders called the Blood Stags, whom the party is convinced is trying to kill them.
The former is a quest, the latter is somewhere between an Event and an Affair: since the players decided after a few random encounters with raiders that there was a raider base nearby — and they successfully drove them off more than once — that the raiders must be seeking them out.
Whatever is going on, the players have made it urgent: whether it’s important has yet to be decided. ;)
Hey, I just thought of something while rereading your comments. A plot might have an “alignment” of being either static or dynamic. A static plot might be one that has a class and sticks to it — whereas a dynamic plot is one which can migrate between classes.
An example might be the kidnapped character you mentioned: she is a rumor until the characters take interest or randomly stumble across her. It could be like a switch that gets flipped — and honestly, ‘static’ or ‘dynamic’ plot alignment might used in DIVINATION. :O
Wouldn’t THAT be something to nail down!
Man, making divination something worth investing PC resources in instead of dumping off onto some NPC really would be a big deal!
Y’know, just for the hell of it, if my Half-Orc quasi-Paladin dies, I might try out a diviner as my next character in the 1st ed game I’m in.