[piosenniel]

While it’s nice to have a game plan for your RPG, it is more of a guideline than a fiat. When you subscribe to an outline too closely, it becomes as if you are backfilling in the story with your posts. You are writing your characters, in other words, to conform to the storyline, and not letting the storyline develop in a natural way from the way each player plays their character.

Sometimes it is fun to throw a twist into the game and let the other players react to it, without discussing all the ins and outs of it.

For example:

Vanwe is weak and tied up. And in a location where the Rangers could find her if they looked thoroughly. Why can’t one of them ‘find’ her? Can you effect a rescue of sorts and let Naiore and her Henchmen react to the rescue in a way which is in character for Naiore and her baddies. The rangers probably can’t take Vanwe far – since she is in a weakened state. Let Naiore have the opportunity to snatch her back.

This would spice the game up – all the writers would write independently in a sense. Someone would take the lead for the rangers and start it off, give each other enough room to hook into the situation, without wrapping the details of the action in each scene up so thoroughly. Throw hooks out to each other that another writer can latch onto with their character and take the action from there.

This is just an example of writing in a little more free-style form, and still accomplishing a goal; i.e., in this part of the Game – Naiore would at the end, have Vanwe, but the Rangers would have made her work a little harder for her prey.

As a group, you should, however, work in the way that is most comfortable for you.

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On another note, it is best to concern yourself with the development of your own character and how he/she is going to react in a particular scene that is taking place. Unless another writer is stepping over the boundaries you have defined as comfortable for your own character, it is best if you simply have your character take in what the other character is doing and write your own character’s action with it in mind.

In other words – your character doesn’t know what is going on in the mind of the other character or what potentials the writer has set up for him/her – your character only knows what is seen, heard, etc of the other character, either from present or past direct experience or things that other characters have told him/her.