John P. Jones writes:

> But that overarching plot, the long term goals, relationships with outside
> forces, the evolution -- that's what made DS9 and B5 so great to watch and
> get involved with.  I much prefer an ongoing campaign as a player and gm and
> as a viewer, to a episodic structured designed primarily to maintain the
> status quo.

Oh yes - the overarching preplanned plot works wonderfullly in media
where the author gets to control all the characters and all the
universe.  But to use Babylon 5 as an example.... what if JMS didn't
have control over his characters, and Delenn had decided that becoming
half-human was too risky?  Or what if she had decided to become
Empress of All Minbar instead of forming a new Grey Council?  Then his
beautiful pre-planned overarching story arc would have fallen to bits.
I'm not saying that long term goals and ongoing relationships with the
outside world are a bad thing.

I think I misstated myself somewhat.  Think of the original TNG, where
there was a rough status quo but the characters did gradually change
and develop.  Or perhaps a better example would be something like The
Practice or LA Law, where the action is about half episodic and about
half ongoing plot lines.  I'd be surprised if the writers for LA Law
had an extensive plan for where the series were going to go; I
suspect, instead, that they planned a couple episodes at a time, at
most, and put their characters into interesting situations to see what
would happen. 

It's also very difficult to maintain a status quo in a realistic game
world, unless you're working with Traveller or the like, where the
characters can just flit off to the next star system.  In more
realistic games, the characters become famous or infamous, the
brothers and uncles of the villains they defeated come back to bother
them, and as they amass power they become more and more of a target.

I'm not advocating the status-quo nature of sitcoms as a Good Thing, I
guess is what I'm getting at.  But I am advocating the sitcom-writer's
job as a good model for what GMs do: you take a bunch of characters,
with some backstory and some relationships.  You think of a situation
that would be dramatic, or tense, or funny, and you give them things
to interact with that wind up putting them in that situation.  The
events of the plot (and I think this might be the most important part)
are less important than the situations they're in and their reactions
to them - if you take care of those, the plot looks after itself.
Perhaps you draw in elements from their backstory, or perhaps you
introduce something new and significant to their backstory.  But you
aren't planning the whole series out from start to finish.

> One thing that the TV model suggests that too infrequently in a RPG is the
> idea of subplots.  A lot of this depends upon the players, but it is
> something GMs need to try to foster as well.  The real fun is when a
> character's interests in two parallel plotlines conflict with each other.

I ran an extensive Vampire campaign this way - I knew who the main
NPCs were, I knew what they wanted and what would happen if the PCs
didn't meddle.  Every other session or so I would introduce a new
thread.  It was one of the easiest games I ever ran, once it got off
the ground: I knew what about 15 major NPCs were doing, and I kept
track of their plans.  When the PCs interacted with one of the NPC's
plans, directly or indirectly, I changed the NPCs' plans accordingly.
After a while I wasn't running the game so much as reacting to what
the PCs did.  

That game had a very "real" feel, mainly because encounters were
intentionally *not* balanced, because (as in real life) the ends of
the stories were often left hanging, and because rather than dealing
with good and evil, the characters were dealing with expedient,
self-interested, or destructive in the long term.  The intentional
imbalance added an edge to the game, too: characters who found
themselves in combat were never sure if they were going to mop the
floor with a few human assistants or get creamed by taking on a 5th
generation elder Brujah with backup firepower.

> In my experience, if one single thing can add volumes to the enjoyment value
> of a game, it's the use of a really well developed villain, a nemesis for
> players.  the real problem with episodic structure is that the enemies are
> always different, and the players have no time to develop an interesting
> relationship with their opposite number.

Or, as in the Vampire game, where the villains were not cut-and-dried:
the Brujah elder, the "bad guy," who's the only one with the power to
keep the Sabbat out of the city; the Ventrue Prince, the "good guy,"
who owes so much to so many people that she's too busy repaying favors
to do anything about much else; the Brujah elder's brother, who's
looking for any weakness so that he can step in and take power -
unless his brother wants it.  It was a nasty, complicated situation,
and there were no truly good guys.  In the end, they wound up putting
the Brujah elder on the throne, because it was his condition for
unleashing his power, but they didn't feel good about it - he was the
least of several evils.  

It was a very good game, but when it was over we played some
angst-free blood and thunder fantasy where all the good guys wore
shiny plate armor or white robes.

Charlton

-- 
                          |  O winter wind, when wilt thou blow
Charlton Wilbur           |  That the sweet rain down may rain?
cwilbur@polar.bowdoin.edu |  Christ! that my love were in my arms
                          |  And I in my bed again.  --Anon


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