Solving Plots, Turtling, and Summoning the Maelstrom

In the Cthulhupunk Strange School Play By Email game that I run, the extremes of our play styles are marked by Beth Creegan (nee Bartley) and Chris Murray. I have joked that, left to their own devices, Beth's PCs would solve the world's problems by noon on the first day of classes, while Chris's PCs would pile up so much trouble and angst that there'd be a smoking crater where the school was by the end of the day.

Solving Plots

Plots are there to be solved, really. Well, okay, some plots are there to unfold. And, in many cases, plots are there so that they can be solved / thwarted -- or not. But, in general, it's okay to solve a plot. That's what they're there for.

And, some players like solving plots. This is what they game for, and they're very good at it. But, this does create a certain tension. The player needs to be able to play the PC smart enough to be satisfied that he or she is covering all bases, taking all logical precautions, and using all logically available resources. The GM must make sure that the player can do all of this without solving the plot before it has a chance to unfold, as this is generally more fun for the player. However, certain ways of making sure that a PC's precautions will not work must be handled carefully. After all, how often can the legitimate authorities be mysteriously unable to handle something that falls within their purview? Also, too much foiling the PC's actions leads to an adversarial reaction between players and GM, and that is not always desirable.

For example, when four of the Strange School PCs were moving to confront a dangerous man, I knew that I would need to make sure that Beth's PC, Diane, would not be able to reach any of the adults that she would think to call. Beth was perfectly willing for me to make this ruling, but it was something I needed to take into account. This is the same issue that Brian Rogers had in the Hogwarts game, where the students were responsible enough to try to hand off the obviously big problems to the obviously more capable adults. It was also an issue for Naomi Rivkis in the Altclair game, where my PC, Justin, had a large circle of highly competent people with whom he kept in regular contact and whom he consulted when he had problems they might reasonably be expected to help him with.

Diane is one of two PCs Beth created when we realized that Colleen wasn't viable as her sole and primary PC. It became clear that there were too many plot arcs where I was thinking, "I need to make sure that Colleen doesn't interact with this."

If everyone were playing the way Beth was playing Colleen, it would be a sign to me that I needed to change the way I am running the game. But, the general play style is to play up the teenaged aspect of the characters. They are not rational adults, they make mistakes which their players generally know full well are often dumb mistakes, they are sometimes careless, and they are passionate about the things that most teenagers are passionate about. In contrast, Colleen is both rational and, despite appearances, an adult; she avoids mistakes; she is never careless; and she has no interest in most of the things that teenagers want.

Diane, despite being ready to call for help, is still viable as a PC. She isn't as capable as Colleen of defending herself against all threats, natural and supernatural. She isn't as comfortable with who she is as Colleen is. There are many more things I can do with Diane in the current setting. That said, I often look up and see that I need to figure out what to do next in ways that I just don't for Reijn or Jess or S'kei or Trygve or Almos.

Summoning the Maelstrom

So, I want my PC in a fight at breakfast, then doing detention during first period, where she runs into school bullies and is forced to pay them off, and then at lunch, I want her falling in love and sneaking out of class to have sex, but catching her boyfriend with someone else just before dinner, and...

Okay. That's enough plot for an entire semester right there. And, if a single player insists on going at that pace, while the other players are trying to go at a more measured pace, either they will spend a lot of time waiting for the lone player to catch up, or the player will forever be months behind everyone else.

There's more leeway in a play by email game -- to a point. This is especially true if the slower paced thread is getting more posts than the other threads. But, I still maintain that in-game time is very useful as a way of building an arc. I think development over time, in-game as well as real time, is part of what makes characters cool.

On the night after the first day of the parental visits, Chris's PC, S'kei, and Billy, an NPC, decided to break into Mr. Mallenbrandt's office. There, they discovered a genealogical chart showing that none of the men on the mother's side of Reijn's family had lived to see their 17th birthday. S'kei immediately brought this to his best friend, Reijn. In the scene that followed, Reijn ran out into the night, in wolf shape, and Myles ended the move saying, "Reijn-wolf runs but cannot escape. Who can escape themselves?" This was a good line to end the scene on, and end it we did.

But, we might not have. Before that closing line, the three of us discussed options. Reijn was, technically, leaving to look for Mr. Mallenbrandt, and I asked, given that the current game day had already lasted three months, if Myles minded if Mr. Mallenbrandt simply was not findable until the next day (it being after Campus Midnight, anyway). Myles was fine with that. He and Chris considered having S'kei catch up with wolf-Reijn, and possibly a scene involving falls through the ice and dramatic rescues, possibly simply having S'kei have to talk Reijn back into human shape, and possibly one or both boys winding up in the infirmary with a cold. I'm glad things didn't go in those directions, although I suspect if they had, the writing would have been fine, and the resulting scene would have worked.

But, from a GM's perspective, at least one other player was waiting for time to move forward so that she could interact with the Reijn's plot arc, which was clearly a major arc for the entire campaign. And, really, there had been sufficient sturm und drang for one game day.

I recently created a timeline showing real world dates for Special School game events. I knew that the four hour Halloween dance had taken four months of real time to play out. I was surprised to see that the three days when parents visited took five full months.

Looking at this, as the pbem neared the end of the first semester, I decided to move time forward more aggressively. We're still seeing how this will work out. But, just as Andrew Zorowitz was amused to see how the GMs of our still-in-progress Dark of the Moon gradually came around to accept a particular suggestion, so I am amused, and relieved, to see that Myles has gone from not particularly caring how long it takes for game time to progress to agreeing that it does indeed need to move faster.

ADDENDUM: That last is incorrect. Checking archives, Myles was always fine with time moving faster.