Thinking Ahead

[subplotkudzu]

 I know I still owe myself a GURPS character, but prep work for yesterday's Hufflepuff & Ravenclaw gave plus some crises at work took up too much time. I have noodled around with it, making some attempt to merge the Techo and Kinetic templates from GURPS Supers under the "where No Man Has Gone Before" lens, but GURPS is always so damn intimidating because of the breadth of unique options making me afraid I'll miss something vital. 

This post isn't about that, however. I just want to share a campaign concept for my next prospectus, which is still some long time away (I already know that after I finish the current six month stint it's back to Emirikol and, quite probably, Old Lives, Old Civilizations). But after reading the disappointing Two O'Clock Eastern Wartime I wanted to steal the setting, but no aspect of the story: 

Gone To Soldiers, Every One: It's a hard time for WBG, the coastal Maine radio station, but in 1942 it's a hard time for everyone. All the men of combat age have joined the army and the station is struggling to get by with a staff of older men, teens and women. It's a hardship that is crushing some but letting others blossom, and the station owner is audaciously trying to expand its offerings to keep creditors at bay. News has to be broken, radio dramas written and performed, and the airtime filled. Lurking in the background are spies and saboteurs, gangsters and gunmen, and the every present threats of a country at war. 

I love the idea on a conceptual level, but I'm not sure I have enough to really fill a 6 -9 episode arc. Part of it is that it's just not a story that is usually told in an RPG. I have a strong suspicion that it will take no more than a session or so for it to turn into a nazi-agent hunting expedition with little to no radio content, just because that's a more standard adventure/mystery format. 

Has anyone had real luck with smaller, more personal stories of business and personal growth as the core of a campaign rather than the frosting on an adventure/mystery cake? And if not, why is it that such stories work so well for other serial fiction but are tackled so seldom in this one? 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I remember it fondly, but I suspect it was only possible because as a group we had invested so much in the campaign as a whole, and I had invested a downright neurotic amount of emotional energy in the character. And it *was* a solo session, without the whole group making jokes, having side conversations, or even just being there for me to feel self-conscious in front of.

It's not a question of right and wrong, it's a question of mental framework. The way you approach gaming is quite writerly, I think, which is why you find it almost impossible to *not* plot. :) I'm not sure how common this is.

Bec

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

'Writerly'; what an interesting word!

::B::

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

That sort of thing happens to my campaigns pretty routinely. In my last cycle, the Transhuman Space campaign spent many hours on personal lives of the characters, in between cases for their detective firm, and so did the high fantasy campaign (of course, it was intended as high fantasy soap opera, and its four players were all people who've written fiction). Even the Buffyverse campaign had a strong element of serial drama, largely focused on the characters' love lives.

On the other hand, I would say that I never plot. I come up with situations that will put the PCs under strain. Then I see what they do. The plot emerges from the players' choices.

The thing is, while my players are partly selected and partly self-selected, I've gone through a whole lot over the past couple of dozen campaigns—around three dozen—and almost all of them have done just fine with the character-driven, roleplaying-intensive, serial drama format. And this is without having solo sessions. I just take it for granted that everyone will get up and play the part. It does help that three of my current players took theater courses in college, and several others used to belong to a band; but the rest of us have learned not to be self-conscious, even with material that a lot of players seem to flinch from, such as explicit sexual content. In fact, when I ran a Middle-Earth campaign, I found it necessary to announce very early that we would play by Tolkienian decorum, with a fade to black from the first kiss to the birth of the first child.