Re: Re: where's the Scenario?

From: donald_at_...
Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2007 13:53:47 GMT


In message <440538.85527.qm_at_...> Jane Williams writes:  

>> Certainly stories which are about the actions of
>> specific
>> heros are rarely suitable for conversion.
>
>Would you believe I've had more than one person asking
>about using "Captured" as a scenario? Of all the
>impossible stories to use... you get just one diceroll
>going a different way from how I wrote it, almost
>anywhere in it, and you either get no crisis to solve,
>or Kallyr dead five minutes into the plot.

Most of your Kallyr stories are like that. There's usually at least one point which relies on one side fumbling while the opposition criticals.

>I can see how little bits of it might be useable, but
>there is no way that the main plot could work as a
>scenario. Unless of course more experienced
>scenario-writers would like to tell me how? There is
>no such thing as "impossible", there is only "10W10
>resistance"... go on, someone beat it!

I can sort of see how to do it. First off you drop Kallyr and her party. They are replaced by the PCs one of who should be wanted by the Lunars. They have the problem of rescuing a prisoner from the Lunars. Next is the difficult bit - getting the PC captured during the rescue without railroading the player. Especially as the opposition is at best barely competant. After that you just need a motive for the PC to play along for a while rather than busting out straight away.

>> The most useful scenarios are the ones like Cattle
>> Raiding
>> in BA. A clear objective suitable for most PCs with
>> limited ways of achieving it.
>
>(nods) That one's good. Nice and generic, you can set
>it in just about any clan, clear objective, and gives
>a great description of typical clan life. The only
>problem I can see is that some PCs won't have any
>natural place in it.

As it's written that's true. However any PC who doesn't want to go raiding probably has a good reason to oppose the raid. Maybe an aunt has married into the clan being raided. Or they are trying to negotiate a trade deal with the clan.

>Whe I adapt scenarios for my group, one of the first
>things I do is look at what abilities are required to
>solve it - or rather, to be able to progress - and
>then make sure I have an NPC to hand with those
>abilities. Then if the PCs don't have them, or the PC
>who does is away, or if they simply fail horribly,
>there's another route through. Of course, I give the
>NPC a bit more than just "required ability 10W", I'll
>hand them a relationship and another more obvious
>ability as a disguise, but that's the plan.

True but if the abilities required are a really bad fit for the group it becomes the NPCs story. Or the scenario becomes how to get the people who've got the required abilities to do the job for us.

>Links with major story arc are a separate problem
>anyway. Are you and your group happy with the idea
>that by the end of the scenario, the major story arc
>may have veered away from "future history"? If not,
>and a lot of people aren't, then you end up with the
>PCs having no effect on the events that are taking up
>most of their attention. And they're meant to be the
>Heros, not spectators, so this is all wrong. What I'm
>trying to aim at in Swords is that major events, where
>they interact with them, occur as planned, but
>*because* of the PCs' actions. Or, if that fails,
>*despite* their actions, with NPCs stepping in, and
>making it quite clear what they think about having to
>do so. I don't like the second approach, but it's what
>the players wanted. So far, I haven't had to use it.
>
>Actually writing a general-use scenario to allow for
>this sort of thing sounds like very hard work.
>Possible, but hard work. About all you could do that I
>can see is write out what is planned to happen without
>the PCs, explaining which NPC does what, and then let
>the GM decide which NPCs can have PC substitutes. But
>you'd absolutely have to give the GM every bit of
>information about what's being done and why, and how
>different NPCs interrelate, and why this one plan has
>been chosen above other possibilities - once you have
>PC substitutes, another plan may make more sense.
>Still, you'd have to do all that working out anyway,
>to be sure the Grand Plan you were going to describe
>as background actually made sense. This just means you
>have to write it down in coherent English rather than
>back-of-an-envelope scribbles.

I can see how it could be done, with a lot of work. But I'm not convinced the end result would be worth it. You still end up with a one off plot reliant on a group of characters with specific skills. Any other group are either going to ignore the plot or trash it completely. So an entire book becomes a single useful paragraph setting out the problem the PCs have to solve.

-- 
Donald Oddy
http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/

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