plotting
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Storyboard: Hint, hint
During the last several months of Final Fantasy XIV, my main character did the unthinkable: She went to work for her old mentor alongside the Garlean Empire. Everything she was doing outside of personal ventures, up to and including rejoining the mercenary company she had previously helped found, was based around collecting information. She had quite the dossier by the time she was finished, too, having flushed out a number of secrets regarding both Eorzea's defensive plans and the Ala Mhigan resistance. Not that anyone knew this because it simply never came up. Part of how I screwed this one up came down to both my choice of roleplaying groups and my own work-based schedule in the game. But another part of this was the simple fact that I didn't make it clear quickly enough just what she was up to. I dropped some hints here and there, but they were lost in a rush of other events, and as a result that whole subplot never got explored, which is a shame, especially because I like to think I'm usually pretty good at dropping hints and getting others to catch on. So as I reflect on what I did wrong, let's talk about how to do it right.
Storyboard: A group effort
Roleplaying is like many other activities in MMOs -- it can't be done alone. That means that no matter how much of an antisocial player you might be for the rest of the game, you'll need a number of other people to make any roleplaying work. By extension, any longer storylines and character development require people working together with some level of consistency. You can technically have a character's development take place without the same audience, of course, but it won't mean as much to the late arrivals. Put very simply, you want a coherent overarching sequence of events that you can point to for your characters. This is going to require some level of group coordination, and group RP events are a great excuse for roleplaying bonds to form anyway, so it's fully endorsed. For this week's Storyboard, we're going to take a look at running a group event in the smoothest way possible, ranging from a simple one-off night of adventure to a long guild-wide storyline that ends with time travel. (You know the story is really getting overwrought when the time travel makes things simpler, see.)
