Plot Advice
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The plot is going to take however long it takes. Two things to consider:
- make sure the people involved know the plot is continuing and hasn't petered out, or you will lose their interest;
- structure it to make sure they aren't plotlocked (i.e. make sure they can continue playing around the plot between its scenes).
If you do those two things and whatever you're running interests them, you don't really have an issue.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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I'm pretty sure that this is a far more vague answer than you were hoping for, but in my experience -- in plots or in fiction writing -- a story takes the time and space a story takes.
What you need to look for is not page count or the number of days it takes to resolve: It's reader/player engagement. As long as your players are happily pushing on and moving forwards, you're doing it right. If they start to slow down, get distracted, grind to a halt -- then you need to push the story onwards, whether by means of a new set of clues, something dramatic opening the next phase, or introducing new people.
It's very much a listen to your audience thing. And in that, not at all an easy thing because some players seem wildly excited and then suddenly lose drive without much warning. Other players start slow but stick with you until the end. A lot of them get distracted by something shiny elsewhere, and some turn up in the middle, asking if it's too late to join.
The ones you want to try the hardest to please are the quietly loyal ones -- who are often not the ones you'd think of first when you think of potential people to include. As it happens, the highly active, widely well known players are typically the ones who get the most offers, and you may easily find that the ones who are most grateful to participate are the ones whose names tend to be on the fringes. The ones with small children, the shy ones, the ones in odd timezones -- people who may be ready to bend over backward to be included in something that's set at a pace they can keep up with.
A large part of your decision about pacing making needs to revolve around that: Your player segment of choice. Some people have every night all week in EST. Some people have two nights a week, some are in Singapore or London, and some are online 24/7 but suffer from so much fatigue that a few poses a day are all they can manage. Which is your tribe?
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@Coin said in Plot Advice:
structure it to make sure they aren't plotlocked (i.e. make sure they can continue playing around the plot between its scenes).
On the back of this -- also make sure that your group composition is flexible. Don't have it depend on having every member of the group, or even a specific member of the group. That's where most scheduling falls apart. Just set it up so that you can take whoever can make it. The more people you try to lock down schedule-wise, the harder it's going to be to get everyone on the same page.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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I concur with this. Be flexible. There are a million reasons why the team composition would change between episodes, so roll with it.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@LittleLizard On top of what others have said, make sure there are provisions in place to keep the plot rolling even if the initial group of PCs are no longer present for it.
These days any plot that takes more than 2-3 weeks from beginning to finish has to account for this since you can't quite count on players sticking around in the game. Folks disappear.
If only Bob, Jane and Jane know about the artificial black hole your mad scientist is building underneath the city to destroy it and these three just stop logging on, but others are still interested, you need to have a way to engage them without logical inconsistencies or starting from scratch.
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@Ganymede said in Plot Advice:
I concur with this. Be flexible. There are a million reasons why the team composition would change between episodes, so roll with it.
It's not just possible that the team composition will change, it's highly plausible. Some players will lose interest in the plot, or in the game. Real life happens. Player base is fluid.
Make sure that the plot can be picked up late in the game by new people. Leave openings and bits that new people can contribute. Try to write your story in a way that encourages participants to talk to and include others. The more people are aware on some level that something is going down at the dark castle, the more people are on the potential list of recruits for the heroic army.
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I agree with most of that which has been said!
I often use breadcrumbs too. The plot takes as long as it does but breadcrumb scenes happen anywhere, anytime I need something to have happened that either was caused by the players' actions or was not prevented by them, or just happened. Those can involve random players and may never be picked up by them, or might.
The breadcrumbs draw new faces in, or bring the plot back to the attention of the player base, and make it clear that sometimes they have to act.
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