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0. New Year, Old Business

Welcome to 2017! I hope every reader has had a happy and safe Holiday period and is now ready to face the New Year with gusto and confidence, recharged and re-energized. For the first time in, I think, eight or nine years, I took the Christmas/New Period off, completely. No thinking about future articles. No thinking about unfinished articles or series. No work on RPGs of any kind. It was great so long as I kept active doing something, but the itch to write grew stronger when time weighed on my hands. Which is another way of saying that I certainly feel all fired up and ready-to-go.

Though I did find it a little hard to get back into the routine that I had established in the latter part of 2016. I can’t say that I’m all the way there, yet – but, like an old comfortable shoe, that should change in a week or two, as I get back into the swing of things.

For the first few months of 2017 (at least), readers will notice a change here at Campaign Mastery – well, that’s the theory. I’m revisiting something that I’ve tried to do in the past – major articles or parts of a series once a week, on Thursdays, and “shorter” more ad-hoc articles on Mondays. Written using my usual techniques, mind, so they should still make sense and be fairly comprehensive within their subject matter.

In the past, this pattern has worked for a short while, and then floundered when an article wasn’t quite ready on time, or when something came up that took priority over the existing publishing schedule, or whatever. It’s certainly not set in stone!

One reason for that is that in December, Campaign Mastery very quietly celebrated it’s eighth anniversary. Which means that this coming December will be it’s ninth – that’s nine full years of publishing articles completed – and will start what is intended to be a year-long celebration culminating in the tenth anniversary. I have lots of plans for this, but they are all going to take a lot of time to execute – I’m talking months of extra work – so I’m trying to make room for it.

Not all that successfully, at least to judge from today’s article, a 21-section opus on creating plots. This is a subject that I’ll be writing about a number of times in early 2017, simply because I have a number of articles in mind on various aspects of the subject. And, like most of my articles, it started with a short, simple idea – so much so that I wasn’t sure it would be meaty enough to build an article around…

1. New Year, New Business

I used to pride myself on being able to build a plotline around just about anything. Not necessarily a good plotline, but a playable plotline nevertheless. From time to time, I would challenge myself by picking something at random or getting someone else to do so.

2. Take A Phone Book…

Take, for example, a phone book or directory. What could be done with that? Well, by inserting coded entries that someone else knew to watch for, you could pass vital intelligence – once a year – just by registering dummy corporations and setting up some sort of phone bank for all them. On the face of it, the flaws in that technique makes this not a very good plot – but it will be by the end of the process, I assure you! But I want to take readers through that process, step-by-step, so that means starting off from my first thought.

3. Function/Purpose

I reached that initial concept by looking at the selected foundation – a telephone directory – and analyzing its purpose, its function. In this case, it’s about associating specific information about an individual or business by name with numeric information (a phone number).

4. Adaption

Right away, codes and hidden messages leaped into mind (actually. its use as a cypher key leapt into mind but was immediately tossed aside because it wasn’t immediate enough, wasn’t dramatic enough, even though it’s more plausibly realistic). Why? because it’s a twist on the usual purpose of the phone book – a message with a “different” payload and intended recipient.

If we were talking about a vending machine, the purpose might be to dispense small quantities of snack foods, and pharmaceutical experimentation on unsuspecting subjects is the twist that comes most readily to mind.

If it was a packet of cigarettes, the first thought would be as a top-secret distribution mechanism for some life-saving serum back in the 40s, 50s, or 60s (when just about everyone at least tried smoking, and the cigarette companies worked very hard on getting members of the public to do so) without causing a mass panic. Why? Because, as the government never stops reminding us, they are bad for you, so why not a twist that makes them at least temporarily good for you at the same time? Perhaps there was good reason for the secrecy – an accidental release by a Russian Agent during the cold war, the US accepts the evidence from the Kremlin that release was accidental, but knows that if the truth is ever revealed, the public will go fully-paranoid and demand a nuclear retaliation for this “act of war”. Heck, even Congress couldn’t be told! Hmmm, that all holds together reasonably well – which brings me to the next stage of the process:

5. The Credibility Test

It’s easy to mess this up, to fall in love with your own ideas. The test isn’t to approve or reject ideas, it’s to pinpoint any and all flaws and weak points in your idea so that you can fix them.

In the case of the vending machine, the problem lies in tracking the effects of the pharmaceutical. Solve that by running a competition with the biggest prizewinners being the ones exposed to the new product – thereby giving them an incentive to provide their details to the company behind the snack-selling ‘front’.Beyond that, you need to think about why this method of testing would even be contemplated, let alone put into practice, compared with all the other ones available to a drug manufacturer. Lab tests of the chemistry, animal testing, even legitimate and properly-monitored human trials all have to be ruled out, or to have already been conducted with enough success to bring them to this point – and the potential benefits must be pretty significant, too, to both the company and the individual receiving the ‘treatment’. Tracking dosage can be built into the ‘contest’ rules by making it look like a marketing exercise – and that has the added benefit of being a superficially valid reason for the contest, an effective smokescreen.

In the case of our phone directory, the flaws are threefold. First, phone numbers are the logical place to encode information and those are assigned by the phone companies; my first-glance idea solves that by putting the encoding in the company names. Second, there’s the once-a-year nature of the method, and third, there’s the limited scope of the amount of code that can be delivered. And – an afterthought – fourth, it takes time and money to set up that many shell companies, and someone might notice and investigate.

All these problems except the once-a-year problem go away if you are the company subcontracted to produce the phone book. You can insert as many false entries as you want to, and even pretend that someone with authority ordered you to do so, like an obscure and secretive government intelligence agency, though that might pose additional risks, so save that for if someone asks questions and won’t be deflected.

You can even solve the once-a-year problem in the modern world of online telephone directories. Heck, you can even invent a non-existent 51st state (in the US) and list as many phone numbers as you want – and, because the code groups are so short, and only the intended recipient knows the intended sequence of names in which the numbers should be interrogated, the code would be practically impossible to break. And, because the phone numbers are not valid, anyone discovering one by accident and using it by mistake will get a “your call could not be completed, please recheck the number and dial again” message from the telephone carriers. You could even add to the credibility of the whole thing by calling your additional (fictitious) state “test” and claiming the whole data block is used for testing new display arrangements, new search protocols, and the security of the database.

What’s more, you can change the “hidden content” at will – names, addresses, and phone numbers – so you have a HUGE dump of information. You lose the cold-war relevance and immediacy, but solve all the practical problems with the idea – a trade-off that’s more than acceptable.

6. Correcting The Flaws

This is an excellent example of “Correcting The Flaws”. You can change who, you can change why, you can change how, you can even change what they are doing. In fact, you can change just about anything so long as you protect the original idea (or come up with an even better variation, and solve the flaws you identified.

7. Making it unique/A point of failure

In order to use this as a plot, you need some reasonable way for the whole dastardly plot to unravel when the “right” string gets pulled. You need a point of failure that hasn’t been anticipated, and that it is reasonable that the people behind whatever is going on would not have anticipated. Serendipity can work but is often viewed as the lazy way out. So is a turncoat spilling the beans, though you could use the latter by making the actual adventure about getting the prospective source out of wherever he is. But that can introduce new credibility problems in the case of our phone book example – this secret would be VERY highly classified, and the likelihood that anyone privy to that level of information becoming a defector is really, really slim.

The other thing that you need to do is make sure that this plotline is sufficiently original and unique. That’s not a problem in the case of our telephone book example – I’ve never heard of anything remotely like it, despite its now-obvious plausibility – so, to look at that, and a few other aspects of the process, we need a fresh example to work with. So lets take one of the most basic of all plots – boy meets girl.

7a. Boy-Meets-Girl with a twist

How can you make your plotline or story different from all the other ones that use the same basic model? Core concept or backdrop or characterization can all be your point of uniqueness – but just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean that it necessarily should be done.

But this is gaming, and things that for various reasons would never fly in Hollywood can be completely acceptable in a smaller audience market. Boy-meets-girl – on Mars. Boy-meets-girl – but one of them is an AI (that one’s been done). My initial thought: Boy meets girl – but one of them is a demon, and the two have to (literally) overcome heaven and hell to be together. This would be a story all about redemption and changing the unchangeable for someone you love – or trying to do so and failing. It almost writes itself – but Hollywood would never make the movie, the religious subtext is too controversial. That makes it perfect for gaming purposes because it’s something that can’t be done anywhere else (okay, maybe it would work in comics).

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you just need to decorate it differently – and maybe use it in a different terrain.

8. Connecting to your PCs

In a novel, or a movie that isn’t part of a franchise, it’s so easy – because your protagonist(s) are, by definition, the ones most suited to being in the heart of the plot.

For a TV show, or a movie franchise, you need to work with an established cast and somehow integrate them into the plotline. In a game, you need to connect your players with the plot.

Sometimes that’s easy to do, sometimes you have to be indirect about it. You could add an element of potentially unrequited love (heightening the tragic content if the quest is to ultimately end in failure) by having an NPC demon fall for a PC and attempt to reinvent themselves for them (hang on, this is sounding a lot like some of the plots from Buffy and Charmed – maybe Hollywood would do it, after all!) That leaves the PC in total control of his role in the story while still involving them – up to their neck. But the story becomes far more dramatic if there are tender feelings (or more) on both sides of this unlikely match, so it might be better to make them both NPCs and to cast the PC in the role of the arbiter or enabler to whom they turn for help in dealing with the resulting challenges being thrown at the ‘happy couple’. Because the PCs are all going to be different, the best choice will vary from one game to another. But you need someone who isn’t a complete fatalist, and who is a bit of a romantic, to really make this plot work.

It would work for me as the player of a PC because my profile is both of those things. I always tend to hope for the best (while preparing for the alternative) and have definite romantic inclinations – I can look at a relationship (and have in the past) and predict with confidence that it will never work out, even while doing everything I can to make it a success, even at personal cost. And my only regret will be that I wasn’t able to do enough to make it a success-against-all-odds.

Others may be more pragmatic, or more half-hearted, or more unwilling to put themselves out over such an improbable long-shot; that’s their prerogative, but it means that no matter what the inclinations of a character under their control might be, they won’t be the perfect target of such a plotline.

The better you know both your players and their characters, the more effectively you can connect them to a plot. And, if your understanding in either of these areas is lacking, the more you can learn by analyzing their choices of reaction to such a plot. The trick in the latter case is sometimes to separate the player from the character and correctly attribute the reactions. But that’s a subject for some other time.

9. Subthemes and side-plots

A really good plot will involve everyone in some way – in the case of an RPG adventure, that means all the PCs, not just the one that is the focus. Everyone should have some reason to react and interact with the plotline beyond simply being there. One character might have no personal feelings on the subject and even care less about it – but the couple and that PC have a mutual antagonist, inclining him to be “on their side” despite his personal lack of empathy for the situation – that introduces a subtheme of “the enemy of my enemy”. A romantic might be disposed to be supportive. A strongly religious person would have strong objections, as would anyone who is more practical than romantic in inclination. A character with feelings for the target might be jealous, and even motivated to doing things they normally wouldn’t countenance. There’s a strong vein of “redemption” as a theme for the adventure, which might tie in with other characters and their own needs for redemption. Various characters might recall and even decide to do something about their own estranged relationships as the focal one strikes rockier ground.

If you haven’t already covered everyone (or perhaps even if you have), you can also look to give them subplots and side-plots to explore aspects of the situation. That religious character might need to confront articles of their faith – specifically, can anyone be redeemed? What of someone who is so ideologically opposed that they commit acts that directly contradict their usual policies.

10. Resolution

Before you can begin to plot the specifics of your adventure, the other thing that you need to think about is the resolution of the storyline. These come in four major categories.

10a. Consequences

What are the consequences of success? What are the consequences of failure? Which of these are mutually incompatible, and hence will leave the GM with an either-or choice in the advent of a partial or limited success?

10b. Ramifications

What are the ramifications of the question being raised at all? In the case of our boy-meets-girl plot, the very fact that a Demon can fall in love with a mortal and even attempt to change their nature is front-page headline news in terms of the campaign background, shedding light on who and what Demons are and why they behave the way they do. Simply being involved may make the PCs new friends – and new enemies, catalyzing further plotlines.

In the case of the “Telephone Directory” plot, the are a raft of security questions that arise over who is permitted to offer an internet service, and how you can stop them. A draconian over-reaction is certainly a possibility, and (if one judges by past history) even a probability. That would have ramifications.

I have a deep and abiding love of plotlines and conundrums built around the engagement of the legal mechanics of society and super-heroics. Superheroes routinely violate legal protocols, for example, which could cause every crime to be thrown out of court because the criminals rights were violated. There’s the whole question of secret identities, in the legal sense – it doesn’t matter what law you make about this, I can get a plotline out of it (All this, of course, is a subdivision within the whole “I can get a plotline out of almost anything” attitude). But my players don’t share that love, and non-weekly play isn’t conducive to such plotlines (Non-fortnightly even less so), so I rarely get to scratch that itch.

In the original Champions campaign, I got four adventures out of a law protecting secret identities – one putting the nature of sanctioned vigilantism under the spotlight, leading to the law itself, one in which testimony was thrown out as potentially tainted by the PC’s anonymity, and two in which a hero and a villain, respectively, were hoist upon the petard of the law, leading to it being changed.

Eventually, I might get the chance at a fifth, exploiting the loopholes and/or flaws and/or ramifications of the revised law – and there are all of those things present. It’s a situation in which there are no perfect solutions.

10c. Parachutes

It doesn’t matter how much you think you players will love a plotline, there are no guarantees until you actually start play. Again, the better you know both players and characters, the better you can anticipate and stack the cards in your favor. Worse still is the situation in which the players have already done everything they can think of about a situation and it wasn’t enough, and are now getting tired of the frustration. And then, there’s the situation in which the players make all the right moves but luck turns against them.

In all these circumstances, you will want to think about a parachute – a way to get out of a plot as quickly and painlessly as possible, wrapping things up in a nice, neat bow. And, potentially, a lesser parachute to get them past any particular challenge that they can’t solve – preferably without simply handing them the solution on a platter.

In fact, it’s entirely possible to write a plot that consists of nothing more than the introductory sequence and the desired resolution and a whole raft of parachutes. I don’t recommend it – it places maximum flexibility and responsibility before and on the players, and maximum stress on the GM’s ability to Improv – but it can be done.

10d. Measures of satisfaction

For any given adventure, there should always be at least two possible resolutions, and sometimes anything in-between is also a possibility. Normally, on most things, I am a strictly neutral GM, neither favoring nor hindering the PCs unreasonably, and letting the dice fall where they may; in most campaigns, though, I yield that neutrality to protect the lives of the PCs if the players are still enjoying playing the character and I still have plotlines that require that character. Losing a PC is traumatic at the campaign scale – another subject for another day – and not something that I do lightly, and definitely not something that I do without as much advance planning as possible.

The other factor that can cause me to yield my position of neutrality is anticipated player satisfaction over one resolution vs the alternative. I have no problem with the PCs losing if it merely sets the stage for a big comeback in a follow-up adventure. Similarly, I have no problem with the PCs solving a problem with which I had hoped to bedevil them for some time to come.

But, when one outcome is clearly going to be less satisfying to the players in the long-term, taking into account any subsequent come-back, I become very quietly partisan. Sometimes that means heaping complications on their shoulders (preventing too easy a victory) even if they have thought of something I had overlooked, sometimes it means shading the odds in their favor.

My goal is always to make sure that I am telling a story that the players enjoy being a part of, and a participant in. Every other consideration is subordinate to that goal.

So, for example, when my players encountered Mortus (better known to them as a variant Thanos), even though there was an easy way to resolve the encounter but not the long-term problem that the character represented, when they thought of the solution to the long-term problem, I was fine with them pre-empting a far-distant plotline (in terms of my campaign plan) to put their solution into place. Having done so, I then simply had to find a way to parachute the character out of the campaign so that he didn’t provide an easy resolution to other challenges that lay in the players’ future, in other words to park him until I needed him again. If I had been unable to think of a way to do so, I would have delayed their success, making the current problems too difficult for them to solve (they were already at a higher level of complexity than anything they had faced before or since) – but, once I had my parachute, the priority goal of giving the players the maximum hard-earned satisfaction possible took control.

There were occasions in the preceding Zenith-3 campaign when problems that they should have solved quickly and easily lingered because the players hadn’t yet found the right question to ask. Short- and medium-term low levels of frustration only yielded a greater degree of satisfaction when those problems were ultimately resolved.

No campaign plan survives contact with the players unscathed. The purpose of such plans is not for you, the GM, to get your literary rocks off, it’s a planning tool to facilitate the goal. For that reason, you invest the minimum possible time into such planning – just enough for it to fulfill its purpose, no more – so that no plotline ever seduces you so much that you become incapable of an objective assessment of likely player satisfaction.

11. A Second Credibility Test

We’ve added a lot of material to the basic outline since our initial credibility test, so with that final architectural block at the metaphoric plot construction site, it’s time for a second one before things get cemented in place. This works exactly the same as the first, but ultimately will be far more detailed in content and in the changes that get made at this. the 11th hour of plot design. This is also when any basic research needed should be done.

For example, if you had decided in the phone directory plot to go with the “get the turncoat out of danger” option because it provides a more action-oriented plot with more opportunities for the various players to participate, this is where you have to address the credibility problem raised earlier. The background and motivation for the source’s change-of-heart need to be rock-solid, and (at the very least) to motivate the PCs to be sympathetic toward him. You will want to test their ability to keep him alive to the maximum, and that requires their very best efforts – something that won’t happen if they are doing it all dispassionately, “by the numbers”. Especially since, for reasons of credibility, you will need to present the NPC “warts and all” in the course of the adventure.

In fact, it would be ideal if there was some history of the NPC being a known enemy of the PCs. Establishing his bonafides in this way in advance – even if there are adventures that have no other big-picture (metagame) purpose – buys him credibility in his position that can’t be obtained any other way. And it adds an element of both sides needing to overlook past animosities, always a great source of good roleplaying.

12. Big Bang or Many Little Bangs?

You have one final decision to make before you can execute final plot creation – dole this plotline out as a series of subplots and encounters in many adventures, or have it all happen in one big plotline? Or a third choice, using subplots to foreshadow the main plot?

For example, there might be those adventures to establish the NPC as a villain; an adventure in which things go pear-shaped because the other side had better intelligence; and perhaps even an adventure somewhere in the middle in which mutual interests forces the PCs and NPC to set aside their animosity, showing the character as not being all dark and evil, and giving the GM the chance to establish his motivation for eventually becoming a turncoat (this should be in the middle so that the character can re-establish his villainous bonafides afterwards).

These adventures don’t just buy credibility, they buy shared history and player engagement when the real plotline rolls around.

13. Refining The Plot

So critical is this decision that when you have made it, you should turn right around and go back to step 1, reexamining everything in light of how best to execute it. If you are going to make the NPC the focus of several prior adventures, for example, it becomes important to establish his capabilities and past history, and to ensure that this doesn’t produce any credibility gaps. In fact, you may need to go through the entire process a number of times, refining the plot and trying variations, before achieving a satisfactory result. Fortunately, it’s fairly quick!

13a. Spotlight Issues

One of the things that you definitely want to look at in the course of this refinement is the balance of the spotlight on the various PCs involved. I talked about that, and about introducing unrelated subplots purely to share the spotlight around a little more evenly, in late 2016, so I won’t go into it here in great detail – consult Ordinary Lives In Paranormal Space and Time, Ordinary Life in an RPG, and Paving Over Plot Holes: A Masterclass in Adventure Creation for information on the subject, and Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which is Your RPG Campaign? for some of the fundamental concepts (which should have been included in the list of links at the end of the “plot holes” article).

13b. Linking and Conflicting Plot Threads

The other thing to specifically look at – and this may need to be done some time in advance – is how to tie other campaign plot threads into this plotline, and whether or not there is a conflict with any of them. For example, you might need this spy-turning-traitor to be the architect of the system for information smuggling that is the background focus of this plotline so that he knows enough about it to spill all the beans, but realize that having him do anything more would violate the premise of a planned future adventure by compromising his former intelligence service too much. That leaves you with two choices: revise that future plotline to incorporate the consequences of this one, or add a final act to this one in which, having stilt the beans on the Telephone Directory (and put the cat amongst the pigeons), a double agent from his former service kills him (protecting the future adventure at the price of compromising the satisfaction levels of this one).

I would choose between these by first trying to employ option (a), revising the future adventure; but if I couldn’t find a way to do so that didn’t excessively weaken its credibility, I would reluctantly choose option (b) – but then boost the satisfaction levels some way back to where they would have been by enabling the PCs to kill or capture the assassin. A minor flunky, he knows very little of value – certainly nowhere near as much as the now-deceased spy-master – and therefore poses far less danger to that future adventure.

In fact, I specifically aim to make this easier by having the different plots involving “villainous agency X” listed as a discrete plot thread so that it becomes obvious that a future adventure will rest on the resolution of this one. You may spend most of your time and effort pruning and shaping the tree in front of you, but being able to easily step back and see the shape of the neighboring trees can be invaluable to keeping one eye on the bigger picture.

14. Creativity Is A Muscle

Well, not literally, but certainly figuratively – the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. As I’ve commented before in any number of articles, I create campaigns and adventure concepts that I know I will never get to play simply for the exercising of my creativity (and for the pleasure I get out of it). Usually, these get thrown away, or filed away for future use when I need something on short notice (a lesson I’ve learned the hard way – ALWAYS have a campaign on-tap, however unfinished it might be). Since starting Campaign Mastery, I’ve gotten in the habit of sharing these from time to time – for example, in Yesterday Once More: A pulp time-travel Campaign.

There’s no better way to get better at writing and executing adventures than by doing it. There’s no better way to get better at Improv than to start small (limiting the damage you can do) and doing it regularly. And there’s no better way to become more creative than being creative. Treat this approach as an exercise in creativity, even if the adventures you come up with have no relevance to your current campaigns.

Look around you, once a week or once a day, pick an object or an advert on TV or a random page from a sourcebook or reference book and build a plot around something you find. Don’t spend a lot of time; ten minutes, say, at most. Save the results (and index them) – you never know when one will come in handy – and in 6 months or a year, look back at the earliest ones and marvel at how far you’ve come.