The Gaming Outpost

  As I was writing that first column about playing solitaire two weeks ago, where we talked about how to Wait was an important strategic choice, I wrote something that gave me another idea.  Last week’s Togetherness was also based on things learned from playing solitaire.  I’ve actually learned quite a bit from playing solitaire over the years; I mentioned elsewhere a few lessons gleaned from the pastime, in Faith and Gaming:  Devil’s Game.  I’m apparently mentioning a few here now.  So we’ll note that we’re having a miniseries on lessons learned from playing solitaire.  It sort of brings back to mind a very early entry in this series, My North Wall, where we looked at mugs and furniture and a painting and drew from them ideas for games.  I said then that you can get your ideas from everywhere, and joked about how everything in my life is tax deductible as research expenses.  I’m back to finding ideas in the most mundane of places, the solitaire game that runs on my computer desktop.

  In the last paragraph of that previous article, Wait, I observed that it’s easy to get trapped into answering the question, what do we do if?  I said then that those were important questions to consider.  I’m back to that now:  the idea that it’s important to have the sort of alternatives which we generally call contingencies.

  I can’t imagine that I’ve written a hundred seven articles averaging about fifteen hundred words each, and never mentioned my brother Roy.  I suspect I have mentioned him; I just can’t think of when or where.  Roy is a mere few days less than two years younger than I, shared a room with me from the day he came home from the hospital until I went to college and then on weekends and summers until I got married, and always impressed me as one of the most intelligent people I have known.  (Convenient, that.)  I have only two memories of life before Roy, the clearer of those the moment I figured out how to climb out of my crib, the other an earlier instant of looking at things through its bars.  He, in addition to being quite bright, is also fond of witticisms.  He often mentions that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide all the people in the world into two kinds and those who don’t.  One I know he wrote himself, cleanliness is next to impossible, probably deserves a place on my office wall.  I have enjoyed his well-phrased insights.  One in particular, quite relevant to this topic, I liked so much that I placed it in the mouth of one of the characters in my (dare I say first) novel, Verse Three, Chapter One.  Confronted by the news that the original escape plan is being scrapped in favor of the contingency plan, high tech thief Tom Titus gets rather upset.  “It’s Plan B,” he’s told.  “It’s a good Plan B.”

  To this he replies, in my brother’s words, “There are no good Plan B’s.  If they were good, they’d be Plan A.”

  Tom is right; that is to say, Roy is right.  You always want to have your best plan in place.  Yet even perfect best plans can go awry, because the perfection of the plan cannot account for the imperfections in the situation.  Something can go wrong, not because it’s a bad plan, but because someone failed to execute part of it successfully, or people got out of rhythm with each other, or there was some unknown detail in the way, or something quite random interferes.  In the recent season of Monk, the captured criminal, a pilot who has murdered his wife and employed a double to impersonate her while they leave the country together, asks the detective if it is true that this was his first time on an airplane.  When this is affirmed, the villain observes, “One cannot plan for everything.”  The best plan is the right way to start.  It’s also important to have something else in mind, something you can do if what you’re doing doesn’t work.  Obviously, it’s not as good a plan as the one you’re following.  If it were, you’d be following the wrong plan.  But it is the plan that provides an answer to the question, what do we do if?–particularly if if is the good plan starts to fall apart.

  I suspect most of you are thinking of this in terms of player tactics; it’s another M. J. Young gamist tactics article.  Well, it is–but it also isn’t.  It’s also about scenario design.  When you’re building a scenario, you need to ask the same kinds of questions.  Here’s your starting point, and here’s your hook.  But what do you do if the players don’t take the bait?  Maybe you need another bit of bait, something that will lure them in the direction you want to head.  But then, what do you do if they see it and don’t want it, if they don’t want to go to the VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH or wherever it is you’re trying to lead them?  In that case, you might need some other adventure on hand, a contingency plan to keep the game from getting dull if the players don’t want to do the only interesting thing you’d devised.  So you set up something else to lead them somewhere else.  But what do you do if they don’t want to go anywhere?  You probably need to have at least a fundamental idea of what will happen if they stay here.

  You can sometimes make the bait so big it’s hard to imagine anyone not taking it.  There aren’t many players who when confronted with the world is going to end unless we stop it, and you’re the only person who can will say, the heck with the world; do you think I’m going to be the only person who dies so everyone else can live?  It’s not a good story, it’s not a fun challenge, it’s not even terribly realistic for the character to say that.  But what do you do if your players don’t want to do that?  Do you let the world be destroyed?  Do you bring the destruction closer, and then offer them another way to prevent it?  Even if you can’t imagine them not doing what you hope, have Plan B ready.  It won’t be a good Plan B–there are no good Plan B’s–but it will have to be something.

  So ask the question, and give yourself an answer.  In fact, give yourself multiple answers.  Plans C, D, and E can all be at least identified, if not prepared.  They’re not good, but having them in place can save a lot of aggravation, because you’re ready for the possibility that things won’t work the way you expected.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.