Oct 20 2008
The Anatomy of a Plan
Yesterday, I started riffing on plans and their importance. But as Brickwall pointed out, not all plans are created equal, and there’s a good chance of failure. Here’s my take on how to keep it from flopping.
A good plan has several characteristics. One, it’s well-informed. The group has a good idea what they’re getting into, and what they don’t know for sure they can make educated guesses on. (This is, of course, from the player standpoint—if there’s no way they could know about the gibbering horror contained in Basement 3E, I’m not going to hold not knowing against them.) Of course, this might require a certain amount of information-hunting, but that’s half the fun, isn’t it? Two, it utilizes the group’s skills to the utmost; everyone has at least some role to play, and if there is a situation to which someone would be uniquely suited, that someone’s in the situation. Three, it involves some sort of contingency; possibly a backup version of the plan taking into account the most likely cause of failure, but if nothing else, a way to get out or otherwise break off before the situation goes beyond the point of no return.
Figuring my perspective alone wouldn’t be enough, I did what any good planner should do for such a situation—asked for help, from two of my muses.
The first gave me a set of questions he usually asks himself when making plans.
- Will it achieve the results I want?
- Is it reasonable?
- Is my IC knowledge separated from my OOC knowledge?
- How can it go wrong?
- Is it the easiest way?
Note: These questions are best asked before the plan or plan segment is proposed to the rest of the group; having a group hash out all these details in character can take ages, particularly in a text-based format.
The second went into slightly more detail.
Have a double-fallback: A, A-2, B. Your initial plan, which gets broken. A point to fall back on, reorganize, and go to the next plan. And then the next, which is at least as robustly planned as the original. The group needs not to go over-prepared on A. And then needs the ability to draw the line between “adapting A” and “regroup and switch to B”, and switch before “Adapted A” becomes pure improv. The change requires either telepathic player-group unity, or requires someone who can lay down the law and is able to make the transition from A to B, to be in charge and to use the authority properly.
Using any or all of these strategies can help to increase the likelihood of a plan’s eventual success. I personally recommend a synthesis of the above; start by coming up with the outline of a Plan A, fill it in with the information and finding the ways in which it involves all of the party, then quickly run it through the questions.
Oh, and one last thing: regardless of what strategy you use, make sure everyone knows what the objective is. Common sense, right? Not always.
Good luck, and happy planning!
You should definitely do a spot on separation of author/player and PC/character knowledge. Because there’s certainly times when it’s better for the story if you bend character a little.
Plans - imagine what fun you could have it the planning documents existed in the game world!
Picture this:
1. Evil overlord, evil plan. Evil overlord is organized and so keeps evil plan on paper in a golden file folder.
2. Golden file folder is filched by filchy type, who keeps the folder and tosses the papers.
3. Papers blow picturesquely into PC’s porridge one morning. (All or part, your choice. Few characters have abilities relating directly to collecting papers blowing around a field.)
4. PCs try to thwart evil plan using papers.
5. Mid-thwart, PCs realize that evil overlord has changed evil plan, possibly in response to losing their papers.
5a. As 5, but evil plan hasn’t actually changed, apparent change was due to widespread minion creativity or incompetence. (i.e. “Arrange the wagons in a checkerboard pattern? That’s insane - what if we’re attacked by stegosaurus riders? Rank and file everybody!”)
5b. As 5, but evil overlord is pedantic enough that evil plan can’t go forward until they retrieve their notes. Game proceeds as comedy of errors as the PCs tour Evil Land desperately trying to find evidence of evil plan, which went on hold during the procurement stage because no one can remember how many owlbears to order. Bonus fun if the kid in the funny hat who keeps trying to read over their shoulder is the evil overlord.
So much fun with a few pieces of paper!
Brick–which times? Most of the time, a lot of what I’ve seen has been more straining of suspension of disbelief than improvement of story.
Zomb: Awesome. Seriously awesome.
Murph: Welcome!
It depends; part of it is the mechanics, sure, but the way in which the game is run is just as important. I run in a system that apparently most people consider combat-heavy, but I have long droughts between fights, and I’ve been edging closer and closer to requiring a certain amount of contingencies on hand.
Besides, just because a group might not need to think ahead on battles doesn’t mean they’d do well at, say, the matchmaking example in yesterday’s post.