I’ll admit something about gaming – as much as I plan my novels to obsessive detail (down to POV for each scene) before I write them, I can be a bit of a pantser when it comes to running my games. Actually, I’m a lot of a pantser.
I have a couple of reasons for this. Primarily I have had the privilege of gaming with and running for some really great groups in my day. These are folks who define the concept of making their own gravy. I could quite literally sit down at the table and say “It’s a post-apocalyptic game, you’re all survivors from a hospital, go!” and we would have four or five good hours of game-play. But having great players who get into character and have lots of interplay at the table has its downsides too – specifically, they tend to go off on tangents, chase leads I never intended as significant, and generally go any direction that I hadn’t particularly planned for them to go.
So I started looking at things differently. I started making a list of things I wanted to happen, both over the course of the campaign and from game session to game session. For a Pulp Adventure game, this might look like:
- Players get attacked by dinosaurs.
- Players find crashed plane (German equipment?)
- Players find primitive tribe. (Enslaved? Need help?)
- Nazis Riding Dinosaurs!
In the book Save the Cat (which is about script-writing and a great resource) – Blake Snyder calls these the “Set Pieces” – the beats that drive the story forward. For me it’s more like a grocery list of things I have to include. I don’t worry about how to get from one to the other; I just keep track of what’s next and let the players give the direction of the story. If it’s a game that requires more organized encounter planning (like 4th edition D&D) I put down some possible encounters on cards and mix-n-match to make an appropriate encounter for the situation as it arises.
Obviously, this runs counter to everything I do in novel writing, but at the same time, it takes advantage of the creative power I have around my table. If the players try to get the plane working again I’m just as ready for what happens next as if they decide to ride the dinosaurs a la Valley of Gwangi. So, Gamer-writers (and writer-gamers) any differences between how you work on your fiction versus how you craft a game session?
