Planning, Overplanning, and Underplanning

[firstfrost]

A couple of runs I've been in recently have run into one of the traditional player schisms, between "keep talking/figuring stuff out" and "time to start the action". The battle cry of the "action now!" people is "A bad plan now is better than no plan later", but often the choice is actually between a bad plan now and a good plan later. Not all attempts to figure something clever out are doomed to failure.

I'm willing to go with a half-assed plan into a combat. A better plan probably won't survive contact with the enemy anyway, and a party in combat often has bonus resources (karma points, one-shot items) that can be thrown in, in the even that things go badly. And, usually, even if the fight turns out not to be winnable, it can be fled from.

But the half-assed "Get 'em!" plan works a lot less well for other plots and conflicts. You can't just charge into a murder mystery and browbeat the first potential suspect to make them confess. Deciding a complicated moral conundrum quickly isn't likely to be satisfactory, and a hit-and-run persuasion will probably not win over the target.

I don't want to bore other players. But it ought to be acceptable to let the thinkers and the action types both have their fun, even if one of the types of fun is slower-moving than the other.

Comments

[dpolicar]

One approach is to have different types of runs. That is, have a couple of dedicated planning/research runs, where the action-now! players can opt out.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

We did that a couple of times in Oath, for things that were a Whole Big Pile Of Planning that could be separated out into an optional run, or for a research mechanic that could be abstracted into between-runs puttering, and it did work okay; the people who cared about something could spend a lot of time on it, and the people who cared less didn't have to. On the other hand, that does mean the people who care less get even less engaged with those particular decisions.

In this case I was thinking of smaller amounts, like, say, a murder mystery plot: spend X time figuring out who did it and why, spend Y time figuring out what the right thing to do about it is, spend Z time in action pouncing. That, you wouldn't really want to separate into different runs. :)

[tirinian.livejournal.com]

Heh. I think my favorite murder mystery in Comet was the one where poor Pho Sien went to Grandmother for help with X, and she jumped straight to Y with "ok, who do we frame?" :-)