Oct 03 2009
Impractical Applications, Week 68 (The Scene That Never Was)
Earlier this week, I talked about the problems with getting too hung up on planning a particular scene for the future. It shouldn’t surprise you that that’s personal experience. No matter how hard you try, sometimes a scene just isn’t going to happen.
Not long after my plot was thrown into (yet more) chaos by its primary antagonist succeeding in a plan I wasn’t expecting him to and capturing one of the major NPCs, one of the pseudo-NPCs run by my then-assistant, attempting to follow up on his backstory, tried to convince the characters to go into what was functionally enemy territory, ostensibly in order to research the antagonist in question, and I got an idea. Said antagonist, Jalil, whom some of you may remember from his use as my manipulation exemplar, was an urbane, socially adept mastermind whose powers let him fit in and make himself part of the social network just about anywhere. And I’d been looking forward to seeing what they’d do if presented with a situation in which high-powered fighting was not only not the answer but probably counterproductive.
So I scrawled together a scene in which, during a library raid, they would run into him. Between the fact that he was probably possessing someone and therefore wouldn’t die, the fact that even if he did die that’d leave their friend in more trouble than she’d started in, and the fact that, well, if it came to a fight and someone else popped in, guess whose side they’d be on—well, let’s just say I found the sequence actually coming to combat highly questionable. So I planned. I came up with excuses to get both parties to the right place, I went over particularly notable bits of dialogue….
…and they went and offended a really powerful NPC and got themselves shunted out to the other side of the world. Literally. So much for that plan.
On the other hand, the nice thing about Jalil was that he could be anywhere, and I’d already envisioned him as having infiltrated (in yet another persona) a group that my PCs were likely to ask for help. So I thought about this for a bit, consulted with my assistant, and then set things up—only now, he was in a slightly more tenuous position, the point of contact was a dim sum restaurant, and while there were fewer surrounding beings of power to make a fight less desirable, they were also individually tougher. This time, it got beat out by a plot twist involving Jalil’s twin progeny (who were themselves considerably older than the PCs and a lot less subtle than their father), one that had mostly been set off by my assistant.
Live and learn.
For me, the moral of the story was to avoid planning scenes. Instead, I’ve been focusing on planning schemes—I take a character, give her an objective, take another character, give him an objective, see how those objectives interfere or complement each other, then start adding more people with more objectives. The chaos will be intense.
PS: Comments are back on!
