Story 101: Planning v Plotting
In TTRPGs (eg Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Pathfinder, etc), we use the term railroading. Railroading is when players are directly pushed in one direction, for the sake of the prepared story – they are making choices, but those choices are just deciding how quickly they go in the one direction. There isn’t much scope for branching out, exploring the world, or surprising each other. It isn’t collaborative.
Does this look like someone with a plan?
Ruffy as the Storyteller in Tattletales, Sydney Fringe 2022
Why do game masters railroad? Sometimes it’s because we created a very impressing Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG) and we really want to use them. Sometimes, we’ve spent hours crafting a gripping, surprising and emotionally moving story arc that relies on particular steps being taken. And sometimes, heck, we just know how stories should work.
In all narrative writing – whether for games, short stories, novels, plays, screenplays – we can become reliant on traditional story structure. Storytelling is a sacred past-time, and it comes with a lot of pressure. In order to guarantee our audience a memorable and poignant experience, we do a lot of brain work – dig out Joseph Campbell’s Hero with A Thousand Faces or Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots, stare at our diagrams of Freytag’s Pyramid – and we trust that the formulae work. It’s planning.
But real surprise comes from plotting.
How does it work?
In running TTRPGs, I don’t plan an entire story before the first playthrough. There are too many variables I can’t account for: my players and their characters; the distractions and impulses they’ll feel on the day; or any brilliant ideas that might come from their improvising on backstory and the world around them. Railroading from the beginning would rob the players (and myself) of the play component of the experience. Because storytelling should be collaborative.
“Acting is a collaboration...”
As actors, we’re often told “Don’t play the end of the scene at the beginning”. Yes, Macbeth’s going to kill the King. We all know that. But he doesn’t. He might have a thousand other options available to him at any time. It’s my job as an actor to explore those other options (or at least acknowledge their existence), and allow those explorations to add weight to the final decision of action. Acting is a collaboration between the performers, the directors, the designers, the technical crew, and the playwright (dead or alive), in how to create the most effective and poignant story.
What are the benefits of plotting over planning?
In Plotting, we find a few key things that need to happen, but we also take note of the offers made to us by the characters and their world. We let ourselves get side-tracked on tangents. We let the characters and their unique thinking shape the story. We let them create plans, and then we work out what the consequences of those plans (successful or not) would be. This doesn’t just work for games, either – George R.R. Martin has repeatedly cited plotting as his strategy for the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Do you think a “planned” story would tread Ned Stark like that?
Can you still use your Big Bad Evil Guy? Of course – they’re affected by your characters’ actions, just like everything else is. Can you still have a gripping, surprising and emotionally engaging story? Even more so, because it evolves organically, and triumph or defeat are linked to the characters’ ideas and their chances of success. It’s entirely fresh, unique and organic. The stakes are real, and grow as the story progresses.
And that is how a story should work.
How do you shape a story? Are you a Planner or a Plotter?