Exchange of Realities

This week, I talked about why people liked long plots, what could go wrong with them and how to keep them going. As you’ve probably gathered from my other posts, I have a certain amount of practice in keeping plots going cleanly; it hasn’t always been perfect, but I’ve found ways to work it.

I’ve had most of the problems I detailed out. Material spliced in while I was trying to initiate my next plot? Check. Information overload? Check, and add to that at least one extremely forgetful player and two new members. Absurdly scaling power? Well, yeah. Exalted, ’nuff said. Trouble keeping the same plot from the beginning to the end of a sequence? It’s happened—I blame the players for most of it, though. But the nice thing about mistakes is that you learn from them.

I avoided the material splicing in two ways. One was the simple expedient of having plots grow from each other. So after a bit of what in retrospect seemed like horrendous filler, mostly done to test whether I could run a mystery with this group (the answer was technically no, though I succeeded later anyway), I started implementing the mid-plotline breaks. Zora captured Luath and Kiara. Finding Akhterim got the group working on looking for the summoner capable of bringing him in. Then while they were finding said summoner, Geri got himself put in charge of a city, and a massive backlash resulting from various factors resulted in his dream about the dread sword Anathema—and then the following evening they came to the realization that a friend of theirs—the one they’d left alone with Luath’s older sister, no less—was prone to being possessed by his prior incarnation, and after the brief panic rush in which they dealt with that, Geri’s need to figure out what this dream of his meant got him introduced to the Arthchwyl, which allowed me to set up two potential plots (neither of which has gotten too much use), before I took advantage of the timing of their retrieval of Anathema to kick off a political subplot that, while they’ve mostly been avoiding it, set up the party in which I revealed that… well, you get the idea. The other was occasionally sandboxing—which meant that, while the party and the lead-up to it probably technically counted as filler, it was the group’s filler, and technically could’ve been used to help the group’s plans if they’d remembered what their plans were.

The absurdly scaling power I dealt with by the simple expedient of finding things they hadn’t really thought about learning to do before. Yes, a group like this is devastating in a fight… but what would happen, I wondered, if I turned them loose on things like simple frame-ups, lost cities in need of rebuilding, or the dreaded Celestial politics? It did seem to make a difference. So too did taking advantage of an interest in character development; most of the group has at least someone in the NPC list that they at least get along well with. (And when the primary combat monkey can be kept entertained for weeks of downtime with a rather messy love triangle…)

My response to the information overload was to create a wiki. This was also partly because of the penchant of one of the players to get into side chats with everyone and everything; the rest of the group felt it unfair that he was sitting on most of the information, and I liked the silly things too much to want to give them up entirely. As a solution to the latter problem, the wiki failed miserably; hardly any of the information was shared, and most of what was shared went through a Telephone filter. For the former problem, it helped a bit—only the problem with the wiki was that I was doing pretty much all the work and not getting enough feedback, and after a while (and the acquisition of a job and this blog) it didn’t even seem to be worth putting up session summaries. They still use it for planning sometimes, though, so it’s not a complete failure, and the quick reference has helped out just about everyone at some point (including me). Maybe if I remember what free time is, I can start updating it again.