Overcoming Indecisive Storytelling On Google Wave

I’m a DM who has always has a story to tell. I don’t tend to run games unless I have a solid concept and some kind of plot in mind, with some NPCs and such in it. I tend to be a pretty story-heavy DM. One of my worst enemies isn’t having no plot ideas (which does happen to me, but is fairly easy to overcome). No, my worst problem is having too many ideas. So when the PCs arrive at something, I struggle to decide what happens then. I think of so many possibilities, depending on who the PCs are, what they’ve done lately, who they’ve met lately, and other factors. I get overwhelmed by all the stuff I’ve got in the toolbox that I can’t decide which piece to pull out. I like them all too much.

But lately I thought of a pretty good idea for solving that problem.

As I said before I’m going to run a game over Google Wave using my homebrew NAA D6 system and a homebrew sci-fantasy world I’ve been cooking up for this game. One of the important things about the world is factions. The PCs will have to deal with a lot of warring factions, perhaps having to change allegiances along the way to survive (or not, and battling instead to maintain their loyalty rather than to ditch it), particularly since “the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy” is in full force between many of the factions. So one of the main things I had to think about when designing scenarios was what faction does what, where. Who do the PCs meet, when do they do it? The factions are not interchangeable – going with one over the other would drastically change how things play out, so it’s a big decision for me which faction gets screen-time where and when.

So I decided not to make that decision most of the time.

I’m using this polling gadget to help me with these decisions a lot. Basically, in many upcoming instances, the PCs will unwittingly be choosing what faction ends up being where by use of these polls. This will also be used for certain NPCs. Let’s say for example that the PCs are in a fort that is under siege. As they enter the fort for the first time, blinded by flashes and explosions, they will only just so be able to make out their enemy, and I’ll spring a poll asking them what the enemy looks like. Such a poll is probably going to be fairly obvious – “lizard-like beings armed with shotguns” would of course be the Sorian option, and so on. The PCs have a concrete choice there of what enemy they will face and they can make a reasonably informed decision if they know the setting.

Other polls will be much more vague. For example, that poll there. Of course, in the game proper it’ll be a bit more interesting (the blue would probably be “blue with black markings”). Those colors in vehicles DO mean something to me as I have the outcomes of each choice written down. Other polls could work the same way from different vague details. These could be type and color of dress on a woman the PCs see in the distance, or the weapon being held by a certain commander, or other vague details. The PCs won’t know what they mean. I do, and this helps me a lot in choosing from different scenarios I have planned, and it gives the PCs a decent bit of narrative force nonetheless. There should be a roughly equal amount of “obvious” and “vague” polls so the PCs will have a lot of concrete choices where they say “this happens” and know what the choice is.

I’m not sure what I’d do in the event of a tie. I’d probably pick the options players are divided on and roll on Random Lee Twenty, my current dice roller of choice for google wave, to assigning a number to each choice and letting fate decide.

If you want to do the same stuff in your google wave games, just click the puzzle piece icon and put the URL of the polling gadget above. This will add an editable poll to any blip you are editing in a wave. You should also definitely invite Random Lee to your waves too, it’s a really good and fast (and simple!) dice rolling tool with a lot of options.

It’s good to play by wave~