I was using OneNote to organize my plot points, but I found I was still running around looking for rules that I should have thought of, and just plain coming up with bad railroading techniques to keep the players in line. They were not happy campers.

Just this week, I started planning my sessions using Masterplan, and it has the same Plot Point style of organization mentioned above. It has some if/than type connectors, but it’s mostly a set of individual encounters. It also tracks rules for different plot elements and all that good stuff. Mix this flow with the group that likes to drive the plot, a few random encounters and skill challenges, and I think I could make my table an interesting place to be! Mind you, I’m not endorsing, MP specificly by any means, it’s just the first one I’ve tried and it fits what I need. I do think these tools are great for this style of story telling though.

Cheers!

I’ve been running a Call of Cthulhu campaign and order of events problems have been some of the larger issues I have been dealing with. This is going to come in very handy when the campaign restarts later in the year.

I think this is probably one of my favourite pieces you’ve written. I’ve incorporated it into my new campaign planning, and plan on using it for my classes too:
http://bercilac.blogspot.com/2010/01/fudge-with-bells-on-it.html

Go get a look at my blog by the way, polyhedral.wordpress.com, it’s all fresh and new!

Ulmus

Like Shrek the Ogre, villains have layers, called flunkies, henchmen and minions. This people are connected to one another, and eventually, you can find your way to the Big Bad(tm) by following the right connections.

The way you track these connections is a chart with a small circle in the middle, labelled “Big Bad”. Then you have concentric circles on the chart, around the middle one, with each of these onion-like layers divided into (at least) two sections (but four works well) more than the closer one in. Put the flunkies, henchmen and minions together in such a way that such folks on the same ring are connected in logical fashion.

Plot elements can be placed into the onion as well.

TSR also had a chart that was an easy to build chase and plot flowchart in a DM’s supplement years ago that I’ve used off and on over the years.

I saw this and thought it might be something I’d stumbled on this morning in regards to game mapping: Why do so many fantasy games use maps that look like bearskin rugs? I think I have an answer, but that’s one for another article.

One tactic that I’ve used when PCs abandon the story, but I still want to cling to it, is that the story can chase the PCs. Just because they stopped fighting the BBEG, it doesn’t mean that some innocuous piece of treasure they looted can’t become suddenly important. Now they need to be tracked down. Even if they get rid of it, it could become a revenge thing.

As the story progressed, though, they decided… well, I don’t know what the thought process was, but the Chaotic Neutral PCs decided to trek to the other side of the continent, steal a ship, and become pirates. Story dead.

I’ll be trying another more-linear campaign this summer, though, and hopefully the players will agree in advance (as they have in recent years) to at least try and not do completely random things.

@Scott Martin: Yeah. Exactly! I think this isn’t new ground by any means, just a different way of terming the “Improv Gming” movement that seems to be gaining ground. Isolating the elements. Wow, that does get more into deep theory territory. If you go with a matrix and scenes like BryanB does, then I guess the connecting elements would be the lines or the grid. If we use Island Theory as the terminology, then I guess we could say that they are the currents or the prevailing winds, but ones that can be ignored or utilized by the way the players turn their sails.

“More time might be taken to research and prepare new things at the gaming table.” My thought behind this was that you might have to spend some more time looking things up while sitting at the table waiting to game. If you pull the BBEG’s island away from the island that the PCs are getting to and you want to fill it with something else, you might have to spend some time prepping that something else. What are its stats, items, powers, etc. The PCs would logically find some treasure here. Ok, time to roll on the treasure generation tables, etc.Depending on the system it might not take much, but it will take some time away from the game.

@Martin Rayla: Thanks! There is something about the idea of islands surrounded by water that makes it an easy image, for me at least, to grasp. High levels make it hard to run very linear games. That or whitewolf. Once you have a thieves guild, corporation or other similarly huge entity at your disposal, it gets hard to fit the PCs into narrowly focused categories. High level powers also make it hard to do linear games. They always provide unique solutions that fall just outside of the ways we plan for them in linear games. I’ve got a F.A.P. post about high level powers that is half finished.

My group just finished up a two-year D&D 3.x campaign (in which I was a player), and looking back on it I believe our GM took a very similar approach, especially once we passed 10th level and had a ton of power at our disposal. It worked very well, and it was perfectly suited to the kind of game he was running.

Isolating the elements would be fantastic. But I wouldn’t even know where to start. Like you said, that is “Deep Theory Land.”

I like the presentation of Island Prep above, particularly the pro/con breakdown. Could you explain drawback 4 a little more: More time might be taken to research and prepare new things at the gaming table.? I think I understand this drawback, but not why it ties to the Island style.

This “method” has worked wonders for me in my latest 4e game. It’s great for letting the players decide on the course of their adventures, as well as allowing me the freedom to incorporate elements that I like into the game.

Getting the players back onto the plot, in essence takes giving them “difficult” decisions. Recently my players were faced with splitting up the party. On top of this they were forced to defend a group of slaves, and then decide whether or not to ambush the slavers while only being at half strength. This tough decision was made by them to see out one plot point versus another. But it was their decision. This is one of the highlights of my games, where as the GM I see the players deciding on the course of the adventure willingly, not being “led by the nose”, so to speak.