Hi, I’m a player making my own RPG on the Fitd system. After reading a lot of tips here, I don’t seem to have any other tips for Planning, so I’m going to share what I’ve learned.
This article is in Korean and has been translated from Japanese and Japanese to English, so sometimes awkward expressions and vocabulary are mixed. I hope that it will be useful.
(The example was created in fantasy because the rule I’m making is a fantasy Fitd system RPG, but it shouldn’t hurt to understand!)
Adventurers search for money, fame, and the number of adventurers chasing treasures and adventuring, and devise how to defeat enemies and acquire treasures. There is also a squeeze of plans for where to start and where to escape while looking at the map together. However, such preparations are taken care of by the PC in the player’s imagination, and the player does not thoroughly prepare a separate plan.
Some players may plan or consider it part of a session, and the first few times can be fun. But over time, such a concrete and detailed plan will feel like a nuisance. Take an adventure as an example of stealing the Lich’s Staff. Some players ask questions such as “Map of the Catacombs”, “Facilities of the Catacombs”, “The Lich’s minions patrolling the Catacombs”, “The patrolling monster’s rotation cycle” and more. The master needs to draw the “Catacombs map” and actually determine and answer the “number of minions or guard cycles”. Next, the player draws how to enter and escape based on the “Catacombs map” and specifies “how to deal with each enemy they encounter”.
There is no guarantee that the plan envisioned through such efforts is the best plan, and it is difficult to expect that the plan will be met if there are consecutive failures in dice roll. The master is tired of creating each piece of information. There will be different opinions on which plan is better for each person. Some players think it’s best to go through the front door(“If things go well, we won’t encounter monsters at all.”), while others think it’s best to go through the back door(“If we go through the back door, even in the worst case, monsters will appear only 3 times.”). Some players are just annoying to make plans(“LET’s JUST PLAY!”). It’s a completely uninteresting theme.
Choose a plan type and make details to prevent making uninteresting plans and dive straight into your adventure. What to do when a minotaur appears in the maze, what to do when a giant spider appears, and what is the original hand signal… Don’t worry about such details in advance. As mentioned earlier, such preparations are often not swept away at will, depending on what danger the master has taken as a result of dice roll.
Why are we planning? The reason we do adventure making is because it helps us make the first scene together. Usually during a session of other RPGs, the master alone plans the first scene and number of sessions. It is convenient for the player, but it is difficult for the master to think on his own, and even if the master has prepared hard, it is often far from what the player wants to do or what he wants to see. The player should start from a strange scene, and he can’t figure out what to do and go back and forth.
Planning an adventure is the first step for both master and player to agree on what scenes or sessions they want to do. Rather than worrying about whether the session will be fun, the master asks the player directly, and the player also tells the master what adventures they want to take. This allows the images of the session drawn by the master and the player to engage, allowing you to smoothly envision and proceed with the first scene. You can roughly imagine what kind of difficulties await. In a social plan, you probably won’t take down enemies at all.
If it’s an assault plan, the first scene will be the first fight with the enemy on Point of attack. Deception plan? The first scene is to deceive someone using a Method. For a social plan, you meet someone using Connection. If it’s a stealth plan, you will encounter a security on Entry point. If it’s a transport plan, the scene you hit in the face of the first hurdle of the Route will be the first scene.
So, don’t ignore the plan, and take advantage of it!
P.S 1 - I still cant understand what is occult plan and detail(Arcane power).