I should probably be asleep, but I'm on a roll. And I finished a Jolt an hour ago or so. And I had the better part of a pot of strong coffee. :D
Every now and then, usually on rpg.net, someone asks how it is possible for a GM to run a game without a plot. I've typed up a nice response in the past, but rpg.net's search just isn't what it used to be, and I can't find it anymore. So, I'm typing it up here, both as something I can point prospective players at, and as something I can cut-and-pasted into future threads.
One more note: under the heading of Credit Where Credit is Due, none of this is anything I've come up with myself. Most of it is learned from games like Sorcerer. Check it out. It's good stuff.First off, this is just a general approach. It's going to vary, sometimes wildly, depending on the game. The way I run Sorcerer is going to differ from the way I run Dogs in the Vineyard, which differs from Primetime Adventures, etc, etc. But it should give you a pretty good general idea of how I approach running a game.
I don't come to a game with a preconceived notion of what player characters are going to try to accomplish, what scenes will come up, and how things will end. In short, I don't have a plot. I have a situation. The plot is what the protagonists (aka: player characters) do about it.
Typically, I'll come up with a set of key NPCs, and plot out their relationships -- who works for who, who's nailing who, blood relations, friendships, enmities, etc -- in a relationship map. The player characters will enter the situation at some point on that map (and not necessarily the same one). What they do from there is up to them. Of course, I don't just set the players adrift and stare at them expectantly, waiting for them to create a plot. There's more to it, but I'll get to that in a moment.
Depending on the game that's being run, I may also ask each player to come up with a
kicker for their character, as part of character creation. The kicker is something that is happening to the character
now, some event, some discovery, something that forces them to make a meaningful decision, something that sets the character in motion. Often, I'll tie this kicker into the relationship map, changing the map if need be. Sometimes, the kicker is so cool I'll toss my map aside and run with the kicker.
From this point forward, plot is what the player characters (aka: protagonists) do. This doesn't mean I just sit there passively. I'll be throwing events,
bangs at the characters throughout. The key difference between a bang and a kicker is that while a kicker is created by the player, the GM creates the bangs. So I throw these bangs at them, events that drive the action, that keep things moving.
This is critical: I don't know what the players are going to do with these bangs, what choices they will make. This isn't railroading, driving characters down a certain path. In fact, I'll typically reject a bang if I've got a good idea of what the player is going to do with it.
And that's the core of it. There's some other fiddly bits I could get into, such as creating characters together as a group, scene framing, etc. But I'll leave those for other posts.
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