Have you ever planned the entire adventure/campaign, with your players?

[William]

I had a thought on campaign planning.

1.) Designing scenarios so that player choices are meaningful but the plot coherent is a common theme of GMing advice. Similarly, players often deride "railroading" GMs but also those that lack detail or guidance, depending on personality.

2.) "Fixing" scenarios grown out-of-plan (the players missed clues, the players saw the clues but made an unanticipated but sensible idea) is a common request for assistance.

3.) Levels of violence and the potential of character death are thorny issues.

Have you ever attempted to get around this set of problems by sitting down with your players for, say, several hours or even for a considerable planning period beforehand, plotting out an entire adventure or campaign and then proceeding to RP the plot thus written in broad strokes? How well did it work?

Did you give up suspense entirely, or did you try things like placeholder plot elements? ("Okay, and in this battle we'll have dramatically infinite mooks, and one of the team dies. The first PC that's reduced to negative hit points has taken a mortal wound, and decides to trigger the Displacement Bomb inside the sealed subspace. Write up the climax speech your character would give if it turns out to be them. They'll be replaced next session by, what don't we have, let's have whoever gets killed write up a speedster.")

[rust]

I always plan both the setting and the campaign together with the players,
although we do not discuss the details of the adventures.

For example, our next campaign, starting later today, will have an indepen-
dence movement theme.
The players know that their characters will be civilians without military back-
ground who will be forced to join the resistance movement in order to avoid
arrest and execution.

The first adventure will be the flight from the planet's capital city, with the
characters as the escort for some leaders of the resistance movement who
decided to "go to the mountains" (literally). This will become a "Long March"
over several hundred kilometers through unexplored forest wilderness, with
the government forces doing their very best to find and arrest or kill the re-
bels.

The second adventure will give the survivors of the group (if any) the task
to steal first some valuables and then a starship in order to leave the planet
to buy weapons and equipment and hire some mercenaries as instructors for
the rebels.

The third adventure will be the attempt to smuggle the gear and the mercs
onto the planet and to turn the refugees in the mountains into a rebel army
able to begin a guerilla war against the government forces.

From there on the campaign will either have developed some life of its own
and continue, or it will end there.

This is what we have planned together, and all the players know. The details
are left to me, and I will do my best to surprise the players by creating some
interesting and challenging unexpected twists.

[whswhs]

In a word, no. That whole approach would be utterly foreign to my style of gaming.

For quite a few years now, I've been running finite length campaigns, typically two years of monthly sessions. Much of the time, I manage to get to a climactic final session that resolves the key conflicts of the campaign. But I don't do this by planning out the plot in advance and inducing the PCs to take the necessary steps to enact it. When I run a session or a campaign, the plot is emergent: the choices the players make determine what the plot is.

I like to think that my settings, my player characters, and my scenarios are all complicated enough so that trying to sit down and figure out what's going to happen would not be workable. The easiest way to determine what's going to happen is to actually play it out!

Bill Stoddard

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I like to think that my settings, my player characters, and my scenarios are all complicated enough so that trying to sit down and figure out what's going to happen would not be workable. The easiest way to determine what's going to happen is to actually play it out!

What he said. There's an old military proverb that no plan survives contact with the enemy, with a related aphorism from a gamer along the lines of "Our plans don't survive contact with us!" Nicely sums up the futility of enforcing a specific plot if you've got interesting, creative players.

My campaign planning involves coming up with geography (not just physical: cultural, psychological, moral, etc.), NPCs who are likely to become important (including their plans and motivations), and a general idea of what the PCs want to get up to (save the world, go down mean streets but be not mean themselves, survive another day at the office, etc.). In short, I come up with a box of things for the PCs to interact with so I can let them loose in it and see what happens. I don't mind nudging things in a particular direction (if, say, I've got a lovely map of a spectacular castle, it'll work out that the PCs are going to end up there sooner or later), but I don't want to push overall results. If the PCs actions and outcomes were to be in some way predetermined, even as a consequence of the players' prior input, what would be the point of playing?

[EarthStone]

Originally Posted by whswhs

... I've been running finite length campaigns, typically two years of monthly sessions.

Yeah, I tried that too.

I planned a campaign that I thought would last two years... We're three years into it with at least another two years to go... maybe even three or four. No plan survives contact with the enemy indeed.

[moldymaltquaffer]

Plan?

Like others have said, I worldbuild, then let the players loose. The players tell the stories, I just manage the setting (and throw an occassional monkeywrench into the works).

[whswhs]

As for

Originally Posted by William

1.) Designing scenarios so that player choices are meaningful but the plot coherent is a common theme of GMing advice. Similarly, players often deride "railroading" GMs but also those that lack detail or guidance, depending on personality

,

the classic structure for a plot is

The protagonists encounter a disturbance of their previous equilibrium;
They attempt to return to equilibrium by taking action;
The action does not put things back in balance, but makes the disturbance greater, or reveals that it was greater than they supposed [complication];
Return to step two and repeat;
Eventually, the situation is revealed fully enough so that the players can confront the real conflict [climax];
The conflict is resolved and a new equilibrium is attained [denouement].

Now, if the PCs are purposeful, you can expect them to do step two. And if you've come up with the right sort of situation to confront them with, it won't immediately solve the problem, and may in fact make things worse. But as they continue to act, they'll expand their knowledge of the situation, and eventually figure out how to do something useful. And there you have a basic plot. Trying to figure out what specific acts will produce the desired result is an unproductive effort; the trick is to get PCs who have a purpose behind their actions.

Bill Stoddard

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by William

Have you ever attempted to get around this set of problems by sitting down with your players for, say, several hours or even for a considerable planning period beforehand, plotting out an entire adventure or campaign and then proceeding to RP the plot thus written in broad strokes?

Never. And now that it is suggested, the idea has about as much appeal as two football teams planning out a game before playing it. There might be a point if there were an audience, otherwise it seems difficult and tedious and bound to spoil the enjoyment of the subsequent game whether it worked or failed.

For me it is as whswhs says: plot is emergent. Writing a story is suggesting a question such as "what would happen is a conscientious prince were told by his father's ghost that his uncle the king was a murderer and usurper" and presenting a glib answer. Playing an RPG is asking such a question and then saying "let's find out". Once the conclusion is known, the game is done.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

For me it is as whswhs says: plot is emergent. Writing a story is suggesting a question such as "what would happen is a conscientious prince were told by his father's ghost that his uncle the king was a murderer and usurper" and presenting a glib answer.

Well, not quite. Writing a story is often contriving to put your own brain into a state where it can play the roles of the different protagonists, so that the author is in effect a whole group of gamers in one person. Even Ayn Rand, who believed absolutely in the importance of plotting out every scene in advance and knowing ahead of time the whole structure of a novel, supposedly admitted that one of her characters, the Wet Nurse, created a larger role for himself as she wrote about him . . . and, to be blunt, his story is the most moving thing in her entire body of fiction. The better the writer is, the less glib their answers are. Or as the old joke says, "Writing is easy. You sit at the typewriter and open a vein."

Bill Stoddard

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, not quite.

Of course not. A monograph on protagonist, antagonist, steadfast fathomable characters with core motivations, core conflict, crucible, steadily rising conflict, theme, premise, conclusion, development from pole to pole, etc. etc. would have been off topic. A glib summary was all that was called for.