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An Earworm is one of those songs that you can’t get out of your head. Often, the only cure is to expose yourself to “just enough” of another earworm!

For the last two months, I’ve been afflicted with a case of the far less-known Dreaded Plotworm.

This is when a plot idea that doesn’t quite fit what you had planned won’t let go, won’t be dismissed, but demands that you work it out.

It’s usually some idea that sounds really cool or interesting, and that holds some plausibility in campaign terms, but which isn’t completely compatible with the foreshadowing from the past, or the pacing of the current, or the plans for the future.

Despite not fitting, the attractiveness means that the idea won’t let go, it keeps coming to mind and distracting you.

The only way to get a Plotworm out of your head is to work it out, but therein lies the danger.

The first threat

Plotworms undermine your sense of the campaign’s history, because of this demand to ‘make them fit’. Past history and plans and assumptions get thrown out as necessary, turning the plotworm into a missed opportunity. “If character A had only said B instead of C, E (the plotworm) would fit” becomes “So character A says B, and that leads to E, which leads to F” – and because you are concentrating so hard on this hypothetical alternate reality, it’s not only easy to lose your grasp on what actually happened, it weakens your grasp on the reality of events even if you avoid this total dislocation.

A succession of plotworms can riddle your campaign with holes like wormholes through an apple.

The second threat

Having weakened your grasp of the reality of the campaign, Plotworms then offer up a more dire threat in the form of confirmation bias. When doing further planning for the campaign, the attractiveness of the idea can infiltrate your plans, undermining what you have in mind for the future.

This affects some GMs more than others, because the extent to which GMs plan out their future campaign beats I’m a planner, for the most part, unless I make an active effort not to be. Others are more instinctive, or only plan a session or two ahead, asking “Given everything that’s happened so far, what’s the most interesting thing that can happen this week?”

Unfortunately, this only leaves the latter more vulnerable to the first threat of the Plotworm.

The third threat

The third impact of a Plotworm is the least dangerous, in some respects, and the most dangerous in others. They are distracting, and (unlike an earworm) they can linger for ages. That’s like only being able to give your campaign 90, 80, 70% of the attention that you would normally devote to it.

Just about every GM will be able to relate to what that means, we’ve all been there on occasions when (for other reasons) we haven’t been able to lavish as much attention to our games as we would like. At best, the games simply don’t sparkle as much as usual, and everything feels rushed and half-baked; at worst, it can feel like you’re drowning in a sea of unpreparedness.

I’ve even known some GMs who – on such occasions – toss their usual campaign aside for a while in favor of some B-grade lighthearted alternate, or even abandoned it completely.

So plotworms can have a serious effect.

Mitigating Plotworms

If you can’t get rid of a plotworm until you’ve worked it out, the only option is to try and minimize the impact that it has. This is often more easily said than done.

There are three strategies that can be employed effectively. The first is to try and integrate what you have to do into the plotworm, enabling a brief return to 100% focus (or close to it); the second is to distract yourself with the immediate task; and the last is to compensate for the distraction by eating into whatever unallocated time you may have.

A fourth option is to try and dismiss the plotworm ASAP in hopes of mitigating the damage, and it’s common to attempt this solution for a while, with a hard deadline before switching to one of the other mitigation strategies.

A GM I know once proposed that you simply “not think about” the plotworm. This just doesn’t work at all. It’s like trying to think about ‘large desert animals with a prominent hump’ without thinking about Camels.

Plotworm Prep Integration

This involves manipulating the Plotworm. If, for example, the prep work that is required for your next game is a character, then start by thinking about how that character might become involved in the Plotworm (even if the conclusion is that they can’t or wouldn’t); this enables you to focus in on the character and get the prep done, despite the nagging and distracting presence of the plotworm.

Distraction

Focus your attention on something quick that can’t possibly have any relevance to the plotworm. It might be a strategy game, or a game of sodoku, or even a game of pick-up patience. Whatever it is, as soon as it has your full attention, switch to the necessary prep. The distraction acts as a short-term plotworm displacement, enabling you to get some of what you need to do done. As soon as you relax your focus, though, don’t be surprised if the plotworm returns.

More Time

This is bowing to the inevitable, or at least, it feels that way. If you’re lightly distracted by the plotworm (90% capacity), you need to allow about 10% more time to your prep. If the plotworm is a moderate distraction (80% focus), it’s about 25% extra. If you’re seriously distracted, up to double the normal prep time may be required, but 50% will usually suffice.

This requirement is so severe that it’s often not a viable option – but even a partial implementation yields dividends in terms of getting more done to a higher standard.

Eliminating the plotworm

The single best way to get a plotworm out of your head is to invest time and effort into another idea that is equally as “cool” / interesting – but you generally can’t come up with those on the spur of the moment. The best opportunity for doing so is to keep a list of unsolved plot problems and a game-time deadline for when they need to be solved. Posing questions of this nature and looking for a cool / interesting solution (even if it isn’t one that you ultimately use) is your best prospect for slaying the plotworm by starving it of creative appeal.

The more common solution is to work through the plotworm, solving the creative challenge of integrating it into the campaign.

Speed Of Solution

Some plotworms are easily overcome; a few minutes of idle speculation is enough to scratch the itch. Most are more pernicious, their lifespan being defined by the scale of the plot problems they pose.

If you solve these problems quickly and easily, then what you have is an idea that you can choose to use or not; it might be just what you need!

If the idea poses a greater challenge, the plotworm can hang around for quite a while, and the idea is less likely to be of any value to you when you’re done with it; it’s far more of a monkey that you have to get off your back.

Depth Of Solution

Every idea also has a threshold of integration – a different target level of ‘solved’ that is enough to satisfy the nagging back-of-the-head sensation that this is a good idea that you can’t just ignore.

Some plotworms need only superficial examination to put them in their place – there may simply be too much water under the bridge for them to be viable.

Others appear to be potential solutions to problems that actually do need to be solved, or possibly better answers to a plot problem you’ve already solved – who is that masked villain that you dropped into the plot a couple of game sessions ago? You knew who you intended it to be at the time, but maybe it’s not too late to make it someone else completely…

Such plotworms need ‘solving’ to a far greater depth, which requires more time and attention, and may even require the keeping of written notes.

Scale Of Solution

It will obviously take a lot more time and attention to satisfy an idea for a campaign-sized subplot than it will to solve an idea for a specific single adventure. Similarly, it will take more effort to craft an adventure that can be inserted into the plot than it will to create a single encounter.

But there’s a secondary factor that needs to be taken into account in any such structure: an individual GM’s predilections. One may be more adept at coming up with encounters, another more skilled at crafting broad plot arcs, another more capable at crafting adventures – and they will usually adopt (consciously or otherwise) a campaign structure that plays to their strengths.

GMs can sometimes get themselves into trouble by assuming that they will have such facility at their disposal, leaving them vulnerable to the occasional failure of their natural gifts. But that’s a discussion for some other day.

I make no bones about being more adept at plot arcs than individual adventures; and more adept at adventures than I am at individual encounters. I’m a naturally big-picture person. This tends to give my campaigns an epic, sweeping quality even when that’s not my intention. That simply means that I have to invest disproportionate time and effort on the small scale in order to achieve results that live up to the grand visions that they are supposed to be a part of.

That simply means that a campaign-scale plot worm won’t take as much effort (in general) for me to resolve as an adventure-scale plotworm. It also means that I am more likely to come up with plotworms of that scale.

The implication is that each GM has a ‘weak spot’ – a point on the large-to-minute scale where the ideas are exactly the ‘right size’ to cause maximum difficulty and inconvenience. For me, that point is cool ideas for characters – these have to be scaled out to see how they impact on the campaign, long-term, perhaps requiring the insertion of additional unplanned adventures, and have to be scaled inwards to see how individual encounters will be affected.

All plotworms are not alike. Some ideas are potentially more useful than others, and some are definitely more difficult to resolve than others. The cost-benefit relationship in each particular case can be clear or very unclear, and it’s often worth indulging the plotworm until you can resolve at least that question.

After-plotworm Rehab

So, you’ve been afflicted with a plotworm and have finally resolved it. That plotworm is now either part of your future plans for the campaign or it has been set aside (maybe you can make use of it elsewhere). I’m at this stage, right now, having resolved the plotworm that’s been buzzing around in the back of my head for the last two months or so.

It is, perhaps, worth taking a moment to note that if the campaign in question – my Doctor Who – had been able to keep to its intended schedule that it would be too late to actually use the plotworm by the time the problems of doing so were solved. Time and patience can be the ultimate solution to any plotworm – but as solutions go, it’s by far the least desirable and efficient.

The next step has to be dispelling any confusion that has resulted from the plotworm. Treat the situation as if you had been away from the campaign for as long as the plotworm was active, and do whatever you would normally do to reacquaint yourself with the current picture, the big big picture, the relationship between the two, and where you intend to go from here.

If the plotworm occupied your thoughts for a day or less, the odds are that no rehab will be necessary; it was a cool idea but one that wouldn’t work out, and you’ve moved on.

If the plotworm occupied a week or so, you may need to read over any notes regarding the last session, any notes regarding past encounters that were relevant to the plotworm, and refresh your memory in terms of immediate and long-term plans. Spend a week doing that (if you can), but spend at least a day on it.

If the plotworm occupied more than a week, then the potential for long-term damage to your ‘sense of campaign’ goes way up, but the repairs don’t scale accordingly. In most cases, the same a’-week-if-you-can-but-at-least-a-day recipe is usually enough. Make room in your schedule for a second day in case you need it, though.

Graveyard Of Plotworms

Whenever you have a cool idea that just won’t work, write the basics of it down somewhere. You never know when you’ll need a cool idea!

Amongst the ideas lurking around in my graveyard at the moment are:

• Drow Civil War ‘progressives’ vs ‘conservatives’
• Crime gang who use chameleon-tech to change their faces after every robbery
• Hacking someone’s cyber implants

….and many more. If ever I find myself stuck for ideas, the graveyard is where I go. I maintain a similar graveyard for article ideas for Campaign Mastery.

Of course, it won’t have escaped the attention of my readers that I haven’t actually described the plotworm that I’ve been wrestling with. That’s because I still don’t know whether or not the idea can be used – because it interconnects several elements within the campaign, there are multiple opportunities to make it relevant, and I need to go through them all to see where – if anywhere – this cool idea can fit.

987… 988…

I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. Twelve to go!