On plot and planning

I've been thinking a lot about plot and planning in my roleplaying games. I find that I occasionally (maybe even often) have difficulty with things bogging down in the middle of the story... the players don't have enough clues, but aren't quite looking in the right places to find the rest of the puzzle, or they're off on a tangent that's not going anywhere but they won't leave it alone.

In my recent issues with rules and dice, I've been reading over Theatrix again. I've read the book cover to cover three times and skimmed and reread parts of it countless times. The interesting thing about Theatrix is that it not only uses the idea of "your game is like a movie," but it goes a step further and brings in movie script-writing ideas for developing adventures. I think Theatrix is probably the closest I've seen to a "how to" manual for gamemastering.

It primarily borrows from Syd Field's The Screenwriter's Workbook. Field's Screenplay has been considered the "bible" of screenwriting for years, and the Workbook is a workshop format exploration of ideas in Screenplay, with some extensions to the Paradigm that aren't in that book.

The Paradigm is Field's way of structuring the three-act screenplay. Theatrix borrows it almost verbatim, even up to the point of reproducing copyrighted images of it. It's basically a little time-line of a three-act movie (almost all Hollywood movies have three acts), in which consist of setup, confrontation, and resolution. The first two acts end with "plot points" that "hook the story and spin it in a new direction". (There are a couple other items, but they aren't important to this discussion.) Here's a picture...

I've been reading the Workbook, and the Paradigm feels like a really useful tool for laying out the basics of the story. Now obviously we aren't planning out a roleplaying game in the same way we'd plot out a movie script... we don't control all the characters and the outcomes of the scenes. But I still think there are useful elements here. (As did the authors of Theatrix.)

Now here's the deal, and this is probably where a lot of us run into trouble planning. I know what Acts I & III look like. For superheroes, action-adventure and Buffy, it's very often the same pattern: Act I is, "Introduce the big-bad, or something that will lead to him." Act III is, "Confront the big-bad, for better or worse." My problem is, for one of the story threads I'm working on, I have no idea that happens in Act II.

This is where I find the Paradigm helpful... because I hadn't been thinking in these kinds of terms, I'd develop the setup and know more or less what I wanted the ending to look like. But it's the middle part that I've struggled with and thought I could wing in-game, "because the players are unpredictable anyway." But as the Paradigm points out, Act II is half of your movie, and I'm entering my game with the middle half virtually unplanned.

For the other story thread I'm working on, the Paradigm has really helped me plan Act II in more detail... the trail of clues is more solid and I've planned NPC's in better detail because I better understand the role they play in the story.

For the thread I'm having trouble with, the Paradigm points out where I need to spend more effort. Instead of glossing over the middle and planning to make it up on the fly (because pre-planning is difficult, and Field says that Act II is always the hardest to write), I focus on that big blank spot in my note card and how I'm going to fill it.

Obviously, I'm not advocating railroading or otherwise forcing the PC's down a path they don't want to go down. But for a roleplaying story to have drama, it needs to be supported by dramatic structure... which is what Field set out to do when he created the Paradigm. It's a structure, a framework, a way of thinking about the story and the elements required for a dramatic story.

(I'm thinking a lot how this fits into an on-going campaign, where Plot A and Plot B and Plot C are interwoven and don't fit nicely into a two-hour movie format. I think the ongoing campaign is more like a television series... each TV episode has its own three-act story arc, and then there are larger story arcs that span an entire season, or even multiple seasons. The question is, can I plan the season-long story arcs along this same three-act line? Or is a different structure more appropriate?)

BTW: Since my primary creative partner (my wife) is playing in my game, I can't bounce my plot ideas off of her. Anybody want to volunteer to be my superheroic cohort in crime and let me bounce my story ideas off of you?