@Apos said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
Having thought a little bit more about what tools might be extremely useful for organizing plots, it occurred to me that a lot of the common issues facing staff and non-staff storytellers aren't really all that dissimilar from a design perspective as version control, like in coding. The games usually aim to have one big central continuity and story state, so characters can interact with one another, but there can be any number of contributors each starting their own branch with a story that potentially forks it off when things become mutually contradictory.
So it seems like we could use the same principles in creating overview tools that would let any storyteller have a much, much easier time of seeing what all story elements are currently in play in plots (and would present potential collisions/contradictions), what all is being decided, and just when a plot is being resolved and could be merged/pulled back into the overall plot of the game. So not unlike what @surreality was thinking about with wikis, but for my case, would just be using django to create a hierarchy tool with the current existing plots, sorted by their different plot category elements, whether they are resolved or ongoing, who's running them/who is participating, and whether any elements need resolution due to conflicts with other plots. Hell, could even automate it with categories for plot elements, like in a wod game if someone put in a plot that was involving the police or an antagonist group, the tool would just check what other ones currently were ongoing, to see if there would be potential story conflicts. Just things to make communication between storyrunners a lot easier and simpler.
This sounds very interesting in principle. I can see the overall gist of using a version control paradigm but I have a harder time seeing how to efficiently break up a plotline in a way to make it easy for players to branch and merge without a lot of manual management. Could you give some example of how this could work, in practice?
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Griatch