[Burning Passion] Step By Step Scenario Building

[otspiii]

I'm writing a rulebook for a system I'm calling Burning Passion.  Its purpose is to emulate the weird, creative, neurotically-technical, but somehow at the same time completely over the top and ridiculous competitive flow of battle in shounen manga.  A big part of the system is inspired by the Raise/See mechanic in Dogs in the Vineyard, but the game's mood and goals are highly Director's-stance Gamist with about a half-and-half Fortune/Drama resolution system.  The hope is that it will encourage players to go buck wild with creative and wordy descriptions, while making daring and unusual strategic choices rewarded without letting them be game-breaking.

That's not really what this post is about, though.  I'll probably be back to talk about how all that works once I've gotten some playtesting under my belt, in the appropriate forum.  Everyone's out of town until January, though, so that won't be for a short while.

A big part of the game is modularity, with a lot of advice on what each customization will change in the way the game will be played.  I want part of this to be a pair of step-by-step Scenario and Session-building guides that walk the GM through all the important things they should be thinking about when they design a setting/plot/challenge.  A bunch of this will be pretty standard questions like "What is the political/economic/religious configuration of the setting?" that pretty much every setting-generic rulebook has and that I honestly probably don't even need to instruct the GM to think about.  I also want to guide the GM into thinking about more deep-seated RP Theory-style questions, like considering distribution of credibility and avoiding incoherence.

What questions do all of you think would help encourage a novice GM to build coherent and healthy Scenarios and Sessions?  A Scenario in this context is more or less the overarching plot/the setting/anything else that stretches across more or less the whole story-line, while a Session is a single sit-down worth of gameplay.

I'd like to emphasize that I'm trying to guide rather than hand down RP-Theory Laws from above.  The moment you start using jargon and "the correct way is THIS"-style declarations it unleashes the raging neckbeard anti-intellectualism hidden in a lot of the gaming community.  I want to ask the GM questions that will naturally lead them to a reasonable and well thought out running-style.