[Serenity] The Value of Preparation

[Clay]

This past Saturday I took over as the game master for my group's Serenity game.  The previous game master had been stretched a bit thin between work and home, and it was starting to show in the game.  Since I'm not immune to being stretched too thin, I decided that the safest course was to go overboard on the preparation.  To that end I created The Adventure Designer, a series of forms that if completely filled out would ensure that I had fleshed everything out sufficiently.

After reading in the book and playing the first two sessions, it was clear to me that the experience system was nearly identical to The Shadow of Yesterday.  To make the game rewarding to the players, that meant that I should also prep it about like I would prep The Shadow of Yesterday.  In fact, if you look at the Adventure Designer forms you'll notice that the character notes section uses TSOY terms instead of Serenity terms.  Probably a bias because as much as I like Serenity and I'm enjoying our game, I'd rather be running TSOY.

I'm happy to say that my anal-retentive preparation (I'll try to post filled-out forms in a day or so) worked out really well.  I was able to inflict three simultaneous, inertwined conflicts on the players at once, giving them more than enough to keep them occupied and surprising all of them with the chaos that ensued.  I simultaneously had an important passenger disappear, the pilot and first mate chased by an angry mob, and a veteran experience a very violent, very deadly flashback.  More importantly, everybody seemed to have an excellent time.

Again, the preparation was key to making this all happen.  I didn't stick strictly to the script, and I knew that I wouldn't be.  Players do stuff that I don't anticipate.  For instance, I found that one of the characters had taken Traumatic Flashbacks as a major complication instead of the minor that I had in my notes.  Sadly I found this out at the game table.  Fortunately for me, because I had my outline, I was instantly able to figure out where his crucial scenes were, and where I could inflict flashbacks for best effect.

[Tommi Brander]

The link has an extra " in the end, so it doesn't work.

I am generally suspicious about heavy preparing, but I'll take a look.

[Clay]

Tommi,

The correct link is http://www.obrienscafe.com/adventuredesigner.html, without unwanted quotes. 

I'm in agreement that over-prepping a session with inflexible scenes is a bad idea.  I'd have been up a creek without a paddle if I'd done that.  What was important for me was that each of the key scenes listed the salient points that were important to that scene.  There was room for additional scenes if they were necessary (for instance, a scene dealing with the law turned out to be necessary because of how my players went with it), and what happened in a scene wasn't rigidly scripted.  For instance, I knew that the pilot and first mate were going to get chased out of town by an angry mob.  I didn't know that the ship's doctor was going to be watching them come up the hill, but when he did it made the perfect opportunity for a flashback.

Having these key scenes mapped out was important for keeping these things on track and providing the opportunities for my players to advance their characters.

[khelek]

I have flip flopped many times on prep myself. I recent got out a a year+ vampire game. Whihc I prepered for signifcantly. Sort of what you were doing. Each week I would prepare 3 to 4 scenes that may or may not get played. The scenes were just set ups, and conflict initators, with no expectation of where they would go next or how they would solve it. the next week I would write the next scene of that series.

I had about 9 different plot lines running thoughout the game (an enormous number for me) and some scenes would sit on the shelf for 4 to 6 weeks before they got play. and it took both my imagination and that of my players to figure out how things ran together, but it worked amzingly well.

BUT!

I think it worked great because the players did not drive the story. They were very content to let me drive the action, pacing, and conflict.

So now that that game is done, I am going back and planning to run both a series of Dogs (in the Vineyard) games and a Burning Wheel game. Whihc will be all about player driven conflict. I fell very storngly that player driven conflict makes for more intense games.

Many weeks I would leave my game and be really down on how it turned out because they players did not jump on somehting and drive it. Then I realized I was preping sooo much that they were just in the "revelation watching" mode, and were afraid of messing up the story!

Back "in the Day" I played with no prep at all, this worked great too (though my storylines would get to complex, way to complex). One of my players would always _Appoligize_ (I quote: "Sorry for pissing in your fruitloops" for doing something on his own initiative! I lost track of the time sI told him to keep it up!


So prep / no prep both work greta but I think both that milage will very, and that it depends on what the characters extect.

I am really excited about short prep character driven conflict in my upcoming games!

[Tommi Brander]

How can I use the .odt file?

Assuming there are no great surprises there, did you prepare all those scenes (in the adventure worksheet), and how many were used?

[Kai_lord]

How can I use the .odt file?

It's a open document text file, readable with OpenOffice.

[Clay]

Tommy,

The .odt file is an OpenDocument Text file.  It's used by OpenOffice.org, my word processor of choice.  There's no great need to use that file unless you wanted to modify any of the pages to suit your own needs and you want to pour it back into a PDF file.  The pages there are just raw imports of the .txt files, so  you can always open those and modify them to suit your needs.

I didn't prep 20 scenes.  In fact I only prepped six scenes, which was enough to keep everyone occupied for a solid night of gaming.  We ran to six hours, including dinner, table chatter and stopping to watch the start of a magnificent cat fight in my family room (the cats were summarily ejected, since it's hard for an imaginary fight to compete with a real one for entertainment value).

The sheets I wound up using were the Player Index, Adventure Worksheet, NPC Index, Key Scene Worksheet and Adventure Checklist.  Map Index and Rumor Index never showed up, and probably wouldn't tend to in a character driven game like Serenity or The Shadow of Yesterday.  I kept them because at some point I'm probably going to use this for Traveller or Call of Cthulhu, where those things do need to get used.

The one major weakness I found in this system was that I don't have an NPC sheet.  I'm not sure that it makes sense to have one either, because every system records its NPCs in a different way.  I just wrote up the NPCs in OpenOffice and printed them out, with the index number hand-written next to them.

[Tommi Brander]

Were all the 6 scenes used?
Did you anticipate where the game would be going, and prepare using that as the guideline? Or were the scenes easily portable?

IOW, how did you make sure the scenes would be relevant?



Oh, and my name is spelled Tommi, with an i. A crazy Finnish tradition.

[Clay]

Sorry about the misspelling Tommi.  A crazy American tradition: sloppy writing habits.

All six scenes were used.  Some other scenes were improvised based on directions that the players took.  I was fairly confident that I would be able to hit all of these scenes.  The nature of the evening's adventure leant itself to a linear story line, and that story line played directly to the keys of the characters.  Each scene was a lot less about what I wanted to do and a whole lot more about hitting those keys. 

I want to try to introduce some non-linearity into my next session, so that there are multiple directions the players can take.  The prep system should lend itself fairly well to doing that.

[Clay]

Just to wrap this up so that it can be a useful resource for others, I've put up my completed planning sheets at http://www.obrienscafe.com/adventuredesigner.html.  You can see that I keep things pretty general, and the planning doesn't go beyond what I can control.  That's how I avoid the perils of over-preparation.

[Clay]

If anybody wants a summary of how actual play worked out as compared to the prep, I've finally posted that on my web site: http://www.obrienscafe.com/serenity/safepassage.html.  If you don't want it, it's still there, but you can probably save some time and skip reading it.