Curveballs
Planning your game around the chaos of dice & players
Ready your most puerile jokes, we’re going to have a conversation about balls.
I’m talking about the curveballs that every player throws to every Storyteller at some time or another. When someone pulls an unexpected plan out of their hat, it’s surprising. Sometimes, it makes me freeze or stumble. And that’s okay. Role-playing is collaborative, which means that my players will come up with ideas and add their own spin to my story. The dice are going to throw their own curveballs, too. An unexpected natural twenty or critical failure can shake things up in a way that no one planned or foresaw.
Those sudden shifts in fortune and the blend of ideas from the Storyteller and players is what makes RPGs so fun and exciting! But the unexpected isn’t always easy to handle. It can slow your game down as you struggle to respond, and causes players and Storytellers alike to stress when the curveball makes things go awry.
I don’t hit all of the curveballs thrown at me, but I’ve developed a system so that I’m batting… uh, most of them. I don’t know baseball well enough for this analogy. And I’ve seen some attempts to hit these curveballs that just end up being foul balls.
Baseball…? I’m just going to drop the analogy here, before I mangle it too badly, and discuss some pitfalls that seem to help deal with unexpected turns but actually just make things worse.
One tactic I’ve seen is Storytellers entirely giving up on planning. “I can’t predict what the players are going to do, so I’m not going to plan anything!” If you can just wing it with a vague idea and a handful of notes, then you’re a better Storyteller than I am… But so far, I’ve never seen anyone go full-on seat-of-the-pants and carry their game all the way from beginning to a happy ending.
When you don’t plan for anything, then everything becomes unexpected. You don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know what the players are doing, and they don’t know what the hell is going on. You have to wing every scene and — for me at least — that’s a hell of a lot of stress. It’s just too many balls in the air. The Storyteller has their hands full simply trying to spin out their own plot and often can’t handle anything that the players contribute.
Games that I’ve played in — and run — this way usually end up a total mess and often collapse. I really don’t remember those games fondly, and neither do my players.
On the other end of the spectrum is when a Storyteller attempts to take total control of the game so that there are no curveballs. Either the Storyteller just doesn’t let the players do anything at all outside of their vision of the game, or when the players do manage something unexpected, the Storyteller just ignores it or blows it off.
I’ve got to say that it’s not much fun when the plot just charges merrily on without you, continuing along its pre-set course no matter what I do or what ideas I come up with. Sure, the Storyteller may have prevented their players from throwing the plot off course — but in the process, they’ve stolen all the players’ agency. That’s just no fun. The reason that I role-play is because I want decision-making power in my entertainment, the ability to come up with my own dialogue instead of the pre-set options of a video game, and to exercise more critical thinking than a board game allows.
Somewhere between the two extremes is a balance point that will be slightly different for each Storyteller and gaming group. Here’s the one that I found that works to keep me from stressing out over the unexpected, but without denying my players’ agency.
I outline my games. A lot. You don’t have to write up three full drafts of your entire game if you don’t want, or don’t have the time. That’s how I work because I’m obsessive and the craft of RPGs is important to me — but an outline gives you a foundation to work from. I use NPCs to model the reactions that I’m hoping to evoke, and take advantage of carrots to encourage the party to engage with my plot.
As long as the players are following my outline because they want to or because I’ve successfully lured them that way with the right carrots, then this method is pretty easy. They’re doing what I hoped they would and I don’t have to react to anything unexpected.
But if the players do come up with something I didn’t think of, then I don’t have to worry about my outline. It’s still sitting there, waiting for me. I can devote my full attention and energy to fielding my players’ ideas. I’m not tied up just trying to juggle the balls of my own plot — like I would if I didn’t plan at all — and I’m actually engaging with the players’ ideas instead of ignoring them to stick rigidly to my plan.
Take the most recent chapter of my current game. My outline goes basically something like this:
- Track poachers back to camp and do battle.
- Return to base. The elders ask the party to investigate a recent assassination.
- Examine crime scene & speak to witnesses. Three prime witnesses/informants, each with their own scene.
- Point the finger at the suspect and search for her when she disappears.
- Intercept the assassin before she can reach her next target and defeat her.
This is a very boiled-down summary of the scenes that I planned for the game. My actual notes for the chapter above are about fourteen pages long, with names, descriptions, and scene setting — the whole nine yards. But you can get a picture of how I have the investigation set up.
If my players follow this course, and choose to do what I had planned, then my job is easy enough. I just follow my notes and my plot unfolds according to my design. (I really feel like I need a slow turn-around in a throne when I say that.)
But did my players go through the investigation the way I outlined? Not even close! Here’s what they did instead:
- Track poachers back to camp and do battle. Yay!
- Capture poacher and interrogate him. Not planned, but fine. I decided to have the poacher drop a hint about the big baddie, mentioning him by name for the first time in the campaign. The player group asked some other questions about the assassin — who had been helping the poachers sneak past sentries to capture and kill the court’s endangered tiger population — and I just kind of fielded them on the fly, trying to explain the partnership between poachers and assassin.
- Return to court, but instead of the elders asking the party to investigate the assassination, the party reported what they learned from their interrogation and took up the investigation on their own initiative. That is so much better!
- Examine the crime scene and totally blow all of the rolls to find even a speck of evidence. Luckily, I didn’t place any evidence there that they couldn’t proceed without.
- They moved on to asking around, but only actually talked to one of my prime witnesses and informants. The scenes that I had with the other two people… I just dropped them. My players didn’t need them.
- And then they talked to some other people that I didn’t plan on, so I just answered their questions as best I could in character for NPCs that I hadn’t particularly developed. That went fine.
- They didn’t uncover any very concrete clues, but the party did end up searching the suspect’s house. I wasn’t planning on them investigating her home, so everything they found I made up on the spot. I was able to devote a fair deal of attention to it, because I had the rest planned and it left me plenty of bandwidth for ad-libbing, feeding their paranoia with more circumstantial evidence.
- That was finally enough to send them looking for her — just as I planned in the first place.
- But because they still had nothing but circumstantial evidence, they engaged her in conversation and tried to catch her in a lie or get her to expose herself. The whole verbal duel was off the cuff, but it went great and the party finally got her to slip up. Just a little, but it was enough.
- Boom. Now it’s time for the endgame of this particular section of the story.
So for this chapter, sometimes the players did what I had outlined — and sometimes they threw me curveballs. But because my outline was solid and planned out well ahead of time, my hands weren’t full juggling my own plot. I could devote myself one hundred percent to their ideas.
In the end, you can’t always predict what your players will do. You can’t predict what the dice will do, either. But with the right carrots, you can make sure that the players are at least close to your plot — and with a solid outline, you can save most of your energy for engaging with their creative ideas.
