MUSHy Musings

I found today one of the best tools for RPG plotting that I've ever seen. I'd suggest you quickly follow that link and read the file before continuing. After that I'll explain why I think it's great.

Welcome back

So, the first thing to get off my chest is that I hate game plots. In the sense of written plots, I mean. I think everybody who's reading this has had the experience of being in a “plot on rails” game where the GM will tell her story, and damn you if you think you're going to have an impact!

It's these kinds of plots I hate.

On the other hand, I also grossly hate the kinds of “plots” which are supposedly going to automatically happen from people wandering around and doing things in a so-called “sandbox game”.

Plot is not an automatic emergent property of a narrative. Narratives can (and frequently do: just remember the last time your grandfather told you about that time he and his cousin climbed the hill and along the way they ate a watermelon which was purchased from that guy that used to go down the streets with the cart selling watermelons—Smythe was his name, he thinks, and the 'y' always bothered him because most people say 'Smith' and why would anybody choose to spell their name so weirdly – people had values before they decided they needed to be 'special' and 'unique' – ...) meander and mean nothing. “Sound and fury signifying nothing.” Hell, there's an entire literary movement based on this: surrealism. Surreal literature leaned heavily on automatic writing with minimal subsequent editing, thus tending toward incoherent, dreamlike stories that went nowhere.

This may be some people's cuppa. It is definitively not mine.

So what then?

Well, the essence of both the Spark Method I wrote about earlier and this “PlotField Diagram” is that you don't have a plot. But neither do you just have a random, incoherent, disconnected set of plot elements that people stumble over that you hope ends up being a satisfying narrative. By establishing factions, goals, ties, and agenda (Spark) or by diagramming similar concepts (these PlotField Diagrams) you ensure that something like a plot comes out ... and yet you also ensure that what comes out is the result of player action (or inaction).

This is what I love about the Spark Method, but ... wow! For larger stories it's still a better choice, but for small stories it was always a bit much, bookkeeping-wise. It's in this area of smaller stories that I think the diagrams will shine better than the Spark Method.