STF

Planning A Sim

Matt Evans

Part of: STF Academy Textbook / GM Course

So you have a story idea, a mission, a problem for the crew to overcome. Now what do you do?

You sit down and plan it out. Whether it’s a point by point outline or something more involved. It is important you do it.

So why plan? Role-playing is a collaborative effort, and the crew is going to have a lot of ideas that surprise you, which is going to pull the sim in directions you not only didn’t intend, but couldn’t even foresee. Think of your plan as an itinerary or a road map for a road trip. A guide to get from beginning to end.

Now, once you’ve started on the road trip, you can – and should – be ready to take road detours; to stop at places you didn’t know about but can see from the highway, like, say, a roadside diner. This is the crew taking your sim in different direction but you are still heading to wherever it is your going.

The second reason for an outline is that it helps you evaluate where you are. This way, you can track your progress, and see what parts of the crew need more attention than others – or perhaps some nudging to keep them from holding back the rest of the crew.

It lets you identify weak spots before you start. If you map out a rough outline in advance, you can see things like – oh, the science department has nothing to do the entire mission and you can come up with something.

It tides you over while you’re at a loss for ideas. I quite often get stuck and wonder, oh where was I going with this? I can then go back and read my outline and find where I am or get inspiration.

You might try to divide things up into acts, sometimes three, sometimes four, or more. What this does is it gives you a few milestones along the way. That way, you can reassess where you and the crew are at each act break.

Remember, there’s anywhere from 12-20 crew members on the ship; there’s only one of you. The only tool in your box you have to deal with that – other than brute force – is the ability to plan ahead. (Crews do NOT enjoy the brute force approach.) You want to be at least two steps ahead of the crew.

And most importantly, it gives you a sense of accomplishment as you move through each act.

Often when writing, an author will use what they call a ‘throughline’. That is a single sentence put as a question and applied to the book and/or each chapter they are writing. The question asks what needs to be done and aids the author in the construction of his writing. You can apply this to a sim or even down to the individual acts in the sim and it can tell you as you move through through the sim when that act, or sim, is completed. In short, it defines the objective. For instance:

Can the crew stop the self destruct that the malfunctioning computer initiated?

Can the crew find the cure to the plague sweeping the colony on Draxis IV?

In the Academy sims tend to last about three months, on regular ships most average six to nine months. That doesn’t mean you should let your sim meander along for years. Presenting a journey too long and arduous can make the players bored and/or frustrated long before they reach the end. Those obstacles mentioned earlier, the ones you throw in the path of your crew to keep things interesting: make sure they’re surmountable. Learn from experienced GMs:

“Never try to outline every movement that will take place within a sim. It is extremely important to allow the players to have some flexibility within the sim; people will undoubtedly come up with ideas that the GM would never think of, and it’s important to keep that in mind as much as possible. By the same token, though, it’s equally important to not let the players run away with the sim by grandstanding, et al. If one person tries to run away with the sim on his own by doing something that’s next to impossible, then the GM needs to put the skids to that so that solving a sim can be a team effort.”

“It was my first official sim. I planned the whole thing out, from beginning to end. I had every event worked out. I was very inflexible as the sim progressed, not having experience with running a sim. The result: The crew lost interest, and I had to narrate the end just to get the darn thing over with! That was my bad GM experience.”

“Keep notes. My goodness, keep notes. Yes, the sim can be of any amount of detail but as you progress through it you may introduce NE’s and describe them in a post. Write them down so next time you will remember that NL Mueller has a monocle and is bald and has a German accent, is portly and precise. I can guarantee you that a month down the line when you come back to needing him you will be thankful for that note. Do that with NE’s and with small notations that you insert in your plot that are important and will play on later. Memory is great. IF you write it down.”

“Keep the individual characters on your ship in mind as you go along. Become a collaborator! When the crew feels like you’re interested in their characters, all sorts of interesting possibilities for character and sim development can emerge.”


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