Pacing dramatic arcs
Players are wonderful creatures: imaginative, creative, ingenious, and frustrating. When you’re slowly building a plot arc, dropping breadcrumbs and foreshadowing, players are great at putting the pieces together and leaping ahead!
That’s good news. And I love gaming with smart people. When players go for the jugular of a plot or emotional arc that I’m running, then it tells me that they’re both interested and motivated. And I want my players to participate.
But sometimes they jump way ahead to something that I’m not quite ready to roll out. Oh, crap! I need to pace that arc out a little, and now I have to react fast. But the last thing I want to do is stonewall my players or shoot them down when they’re being dynamic and interacting with my story. I don’t want to put the brakes on — I just need a detour.
In my current game, the spirit called Ren is both a comic and tragic NPC. He’s broken and he has lost something, so he’s sad — and he’s also quirky. The players are beginning to suspect that Ren might be missing a part of himself. More specifically, they think that a long-dead demon lord was killed, and part of his soul — the teeny tiny good piece of it — might be Ren.
Ren is an important character in my story and my players will find out if they were right about him or if there’s something else going on… But not yet. After the group discussed the fall of the demon lord and began to wonder if Ren was a surviving fragment of his spirit, they returned home and one of my players — the one whose character is romantically interested in Ren — told him about their suspicions.
That’s a wonderful role-playing bomb to drop on an NPC. Ren reacted, of course, devastated at the thought that he might be a shard of a dead demon lord, and denied it all. That couldn’t be what he had lost, and what he has been searching out. He refused to think that he could be looking for the rest of his demon spirit — because he doesn’t want to want that! It was sad enough to get some teary eyes in the group.
But it’s going to be a long time before the rest of Ren’s story comes up in the main plot and I want to save some of this for later. So I turned on the quirky. Ren told a story about how another spirit stole his pants and maybe he was just looking for pants, then made some awkward-yet-innocent comments about his romantic interest.
Ren’s odd, so if things get a little too dramatic too quickly, I can divert everyone into something weird or comical. It’s a bit of a temporary solution, but it works.
Another player in this campaign came up with a backstory where his father died before he was born, but his mother won’t talk to him about it. He knows almost nothing about his dad, and his character has related anger issues that he’s slowly been working through. He’s ready to talk to his mom after the recent events of the game, where he clashed with the evil group who killed his father.
I’m not ready to close that particular story box, though. Luckily, the clash involved a spiritual trap that almost broke the PCs minds. Well, lucky for me. Because without me having to do anything, the player group is wondering what his mother must have gone through… She’s just a human with no spiritual defenses. If she ran into what they did, it’s a miracle that she’s not utterly insane.
I’ve got more to the dead dad story arc down the road, and I’m not ready for a big heart-to-heart talk yet. But now I’ve got this new angle — PTSD. The character’s mother has been through hell, it seems. And while the PC already knew that she had suffered some trauma, now he’s run into it himself, and has an idea just what kind of pain she faced.
So before we get to the part where my player’s character finds out all about his dad, I’m going to pace that arc out by giving him an intermediate one where he gets to work on his relationship with his mother.
I’ve got a main plot and a handful of sub-plots all running through this campaign, and I try to pace them close together. Sometimes players jump the gun a little bit because they’re smart and excited. And that’s okay! Even if my players knew exactly what Ren’s deal is, or what happened to the other character’s dad, they still have to do something about it. It doesn’t mean the game’s over.
But if I can manage the pacing of the arc a little, that’s even better. Don’t shut your players down. Instead, look for some corner of the drama that hasn’t been explored yet, and take a detour along the scenic route. It pads out the plot arc, but it also gives the players more to role-play with. And that’s what we’re all here to do.
