Jhereg42

A couple new additions: "They finally shut down the alarms in the basement area after the virus hit, and now ALL the servers are off-line. Great." "But they're installing an anti-virus update, which = another chance to slip in more of my surveillance software. Ahhhh, bugs producing bugs." If we go by the present conspiracy theory, and I am going to because the idea of a conspiracy theory about a game about conspiracy theories just tickles my funny bone, it looks like all of the "alarms" are gone now. They are insisting on a few more minor tweeks before giving it a green light?

I ran into a lot of problems similar to this when I first started GMing, and over the years I managed to learn that the issue of ignored storylines was my fault in how I prepped the campaign, not my player's fault for doing there thing. Keep in mind, I have a good 5 person group that has been gaming solidly together for close to 8 years. First, when starting a campaign I discovered that players almost ALWAYS go off the beaten path. In one campaign they took an interest in a little girl I had put in there for scenery, so there was nothing on her. Because of their interest, though, I made up a whole story for her when I was back to my prep work. In the starwars game I'm in now, the PCs rescued a slave girl (again, in there as scenery) while trying to rescue the sister of one of their associates and took an interest in her. Now Ketherin (name made up on the spot because there was no info on her) is a sniper and the romantic interest of another PC. My favoite case, though was the case of Tormar Darkheart. Tormar was a CE Mage in Planescape that totally wrecked the campaign merely by being a chaotic evil, stubborn, greedy little POS. Funny thing is, even as he backstabbed the players and betrayed them to the evil bastard that was the main baddy in our campaign, we were all laughing because not even the player saw it ending up that way. We wrote it off as a "this time the bad guys won" campaign and made another set of characters that we then put into the same setting a few years later. Tormar was now a nasty NPC who was the new party's problem. At that point I realized that the first few sessions of a game were a piss poor time to introduce a complicated plot. Instead, I started making up a "3 session outline" where I slapped together some very targetted (morally), but somewhat random and isolated (Storywise) adventures that allow both the GM and the players to decide where their characters are now, and where they want them to go. After I have a better feel for the game, I start working in earnest and get my serious campaign rolling. By that time I'll have a better feel for what the players want out of the game, as well as what I want to explore as far as the theme. It's not as time consuming as it sounds, either. It's actually less intensive because you start making your prep work more modular as a result of the design.